We're a little over an hour away from this week's Omri Ceren Show, courtesy of One Jerusalem Radio. This week's episode - to which you can tune in live via either the main show page or the episode page - will revolve around Obama's ongoing diplomatic broadside against Israel. Since it's already paying dividends in the form of maximalist Palestinian demands backed by riotous Palestinian violence, we might as well discuss the overwhelming evidence that it was obviously premeditated and blisteringly hypocritical. That it will also set the peace process back by boxing in Abbas - again - is probably also worth mentioning. As always the decision-making process is as important as the decision, since apparently the people advising the President are either being ignored out of pique or being listened to out of ignorance.

On the TOCS technical/housekeeping side: I'm slowly getting caught up on remastering old episodes and working through old interviews. I've eliminated much of the choppiness from the first month of episodes, which you can now revisit here. The full 38 minute interview with Larry Greenfield, highlights of which aired last week, is now available on the One Jerusalem Audio page. Look out in the coming weeks for more reedited old episodes and more full versions of past interviews.

Anyway, today's official blurb:

Omri covers the Obama administration's diplomatic broadside against Israel. From Biden's initial "condemnation" over a minor mishap to Clinton's aggressive tirade against Netanyahu - to President Obama's personal orders to do both - the last week has brought the US-Israeli special relationship to the breaking point. Meanwhile anti-Israel partisans have unleashed a flurry of articles insisting that the US should scale back its support for Israel, some adopting almost classically antisemitic terms. Dan Diker calls in to provide an insider perspective on how the Israeli government is working to repair the crisis and minimize its damage.

All in all this hasn't been the best week the US-Israeli special relationship. But at least the crisis wasn't all totally predictable during the campaign!

References:
* Double Standards And Non-Standards [Omri Ceren Show]
* The Crisis [Halevi / TNR]
* Compare And Contrast: Israeli And Syrian "Insults" To Clinton [MR]
* Maybe Obama Deserved That Nobel Peace Prize After All [MR]
* Confirmed: US-Israeli Alliance Plummets Into "Historic Crisis," Obama Triggers Worst Relations Since Carter [MR]

Related Mere Rhetoric Categories:
* The Omri Ceren Show
* Jewish Politics
* Anti-Israel Diplomacy

Mere Rhetoric, April 10, 2008:

2010 will eventually roll around and newspapers will be publishing ledes like "some analysts suggest that the Obama White House is facing the most significant crisis in American-Israeli relations in decades." In a desperate attempt to absolve themselves of their own pretentious complicity in the international ostracism of the Jewish State, the 75 percent of American Jews who voted for Obama will join the rest of the left in scapegoating Israel.

Washington Post, March 13, 2010:

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton rebuked Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Friday about the state of the U.S.-Israeli relationship, demanding that Israel take immediate steps to show it is interested in renewing efforts to achieve a Middle East peace agreement. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley described the nearly 45-minute phone conversation in unusually undiplomatic terms, signaling that the close allies are facing their deepest crisis in two decades after the embarrassment suffered by Vice President Biden this week when Israel announced during his visit that it plans to build 1,600 housing units in a disputed area of Jerusalem.

As for the "pro-Israel" Jewish groups who are, along with gleeful anti-Israel partisans and thuggish former Arafat advisers, piling on the Jewish State - this propaganda from the Israel Policy Forum landed in my inbox as a press release last week. It gushes about how the US is becoming an "honest and credible mediator," which is strange since Clinton first acknowledged that East Jerusalem construction would continue under the freeze and then claimed to be "insulted" when East Jerusalem construction continued under the freeze. Not very honest or credible! The press release also declared "to the Israelis, we can communicate that moving forward with this East Jerusalem construction at this time would be considered an affront to the United States." Which means that in addition to being moronic, these idiots are also imperious pricks.

JStreet, of course, is exactly where you'd expect them to be. The group pioneered using manufactured media stunts to damage Israel, so it'd be churlish of them not to lend a hand here. They shamelessly lied about being snubbed by politicians on a trip to Israel, used the fabricated incident to whip up anti-Israel sentiment and then set up a dedicated webpage to gloat about the results. After the damage had been done they admitted that the whole thing was a huge mix-up on their part. How's that for "expanding the notion of pro-Israel"?

By the way, this post and the last one really aren't meant to be "I told you so" posts. Exactly the opposite. Everyone knew that this was how things would play out. Obama was obviously going to detonate the US-Israeli alliance because his advisers believe that it's in the US's interest to detonate the US-Israeli alliance. Anti-Israel Jewish groups like the IPF and JStreet were obviously going to side with Israel's opponents because they always side with Israel's opponents.

It was equally obvious that ostensibly pro-Israel Democratic voters would slide from "Obama will be pro-Israel" to "it's Israel's fault that Obama is anti-Israel." What else were they going to do? Admit that they desperately latched onto the National Jewish Democratic Council's smears and lies as pretexts for voting Democratic? Acknowledge that they willfully deceived themselves on the basis of the dumbest arguments because they wanted to guilelessly vote how they always vote? If they had that kind of intellectual honesty they wouldn't be in this position.

References and related after the jump...

Mere Rhetoric, October 18, 2008:

Memo to ostensibly pro-Israel Obama supporters: circa 2010 there are going to be headlines about the "severe crisis in US-Israel relations." You're not going to be able to say that you didn't know.

Reuters, March 15, 2010:

Israeli envoy sees "historic crisis" with U.S.:report - Israel and the United States are in a "crisis of historic proportions" over a settlement dispute that has brought relations to a 35-year low, Israel's ambassador to Washington was quoted on Monday as saying.

The Washington Post writeup about Clinton's over the top condemnation also included the line "the close allies are facing their deepest crisis in two decades." But the headline wasn't as on point and elegant as with the Reuters story, so that's what you got.

The idea is nonetheless the same throughout. Netanyahu had announced a temporary construction freeze that excluded East Jerusalem. Clinton had described the freeze as an "unprecedented" concession. Then Israel announced new construction within that framework.

But sensing the opportunity to pick a public fight with Israel, Obama personally ordered Biden to "condemn" the Jewish State. Clinton followed up by insisting that the US had been "insulted." For their part the Palestinians tweaked their ever-expanding construction halt demands, setting up Israel to take the blame for failed proximity talks. All over a neighborhood that borders two other Jewish neighborhoods and that had never, ever been controversial before.

Coincidentally - and just in time - there are a flurry of articles being published with different reasons why the US-Israeli relationship should be abandoned. This morning's is from Mark Perry, who "reports" how Israelis are getting American boys and girls killed. His FP article fails to note his previous job as an Arafat adviser, though that detail did seem salient to Laura Rozen. Also seemingly salient: "There seems to be more in the ether in recent days suggesting a diverging of perceived U.S. and Israeli interests in the region." Yes, there do seem to be that.

The really obnoxious thing? We're supposed to pretend that this policy is a reluctant recourse by an otherwise pro-Israel administration. Or that journalists are slowly discovering and objectively describing the situation. Come on now.

References and related after the jump...

We're a couple hours away from today's episode of One Jerusalem Radio's Omri Ceren Show. With Mitchell and Biden on the ground the show is going to be extremely diplomacy-heavy, making allowances for the time needed to cover this-week-in-Iranian-warmongering. You can tune in live via the show page or the episode page starting at 6:30pm PST, and as always I'll have the chatroom and the phone lines open for questions and comments.

There are functionally two full interviews this week. Larry Greenfield, Claremont Institute Fellow and Executive Director of The Reagan Legacy Foundation, comes on as a special guest to talk about "Israel's Increasingly Dangerous Neighborhood," the enormous writeup he just completed on the recent Jerusalem Conference. Given his role in conservative and Jewish politics - the Obama campaign banned surrogates from debating him when he was head of the California RJC and then NJDC moron Aaron Kayek targeted him in one of the dumbest attacks I've ever read - that comes up too.

Today's Diker segment goes for almost 20 minutes, which is what you'd expect given that the show topic is diplomacy and he's among Israel's top diplomacy analysts. One of the money lines from the beginning of the conversation: "we haven't seen this type of sympathy by an American administration... really since Carter, and even the Carter administration was somewhat more measured in its approach." Cf. the rest of the Israeli political world, where that exact conclusion is on its way to becoming conventional wisdom. You'll want to stay till the end where he evaluates whether Obama will actually succeed in detonating the US-Israel alliance. Tough to say, tough to say.

Official show blurb:

Omri interviews Larry Greenfield, Claremont Institute Fellow and Executive Director of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. They discuss Greenfield's recent missile defense talk at the 7th Annual Jerusalem Conference, the political climate in Israel and within American Jewry, and the future of the US conservative movement. Dan Diker also joins the show, talking about Israel's recent public and state-to-state diplomacy in the context of the Iranian threat. In between Omri runs down the week's news on global terrorism, Middle East geopolitics, and the left's Big Government push in the United States.

I'm also in the process of going over all the old shows and reediting them to make them listenable (or at least to remove cracks and pops - any unlistenable content will, alas, stay the way it is). More on that in the next week or so. In the meantime, see you in a bit.

References:
* Jerusalem's Misgivings with Larry Greenfield [TOCS]
* Israel's Increasingly Dangerous Neighborhood [Larry Greenfield]
* Obama Campaign Demands Ban On Republican Jewish Group, Escalates Thuggish Intimidation [MR]
* NJDC Tool Aaron Keyak Helpfully Illustrates How Liberal Activists Sneeringly Cocoon Themselves In Asinine Arguments And Dishonest Smears [MR]
* Politics: Not afraid to speak her mind [JPost]
* Israeli Officials: Hey, Do You Think That Maybe Obama's Going To Detonate The US-Israel Relationship? [MR]

Related Mere Rhetoric Categories:
* The Omri Ceren Show
* Anti-Israel Diplomacy
* Jewish Politics

The concrete and significant Israeli moves on settlements have all been in the direction of unreciprocated concessions. When Netanyahu announced his temporary freeze it was hailed by Clinton as an "unprecedented." Since that praise naturally sent the Palestinians into fits the Obama administration promptly backtracked. It also totally failed to deliver on its promise of international support for the freeze, a nice additional bait-and-switch. Instead the UN condemned Israel for not going far enough.

All that left Netanyahu feeling that there's nothing he can do to avoid US and international disapprobation, which is not where you want someone when you're asking them to take "risks for peace." An Israeli Prime Minister contemplating territorial concessions needs to know that he can count on international security assurances should things go wrong. So one of Biden's two goals for his trip was to give Netanyahu some much-delayed recognition and support.

Then a couple of Israeli officials from the government's most junior coalition partner made a symbolic announcement about East Jerusalem construction. Netanyahu didn't know about it. Biden's response - nonetheless - was to humiliate the Israeli Prime Minister, keeping Netanyahu and his wife waiting 90 minutes into dinner and then issuing an unprecedented condemnation. Netanyahu found out about the statement during dinner.

That treatment precisely mirrors what happened on Netanyahu's November trip to DC, when Obama dragged him around the carpet before approving a Monday meeting. The White House kept the Israelis in limbo until the night before, continuously creating new and changing prerequisites. The next day Obama arrived late, highlighting the priority he places on the US-Israeli alliance. Netanyahu offered to make additional concessions to the Palestinians anyway. Obama's response was to emphasize that East Jerusalem is not Israeli and to link Palestinian terrorism to Israeli construction in Jerusalem's Gilo neighborhood. That last part was so stupid that lefty Jeffrey Goldberg accused the President of inventing issues and excusing Palestinian violence.

So say what you will about Biden's ham-fisted diplomacy. In this rare instance he's merely following the party line. First the insult - language, per the WaPo, that is "rarely used in diplomatic terms when criticizing the behavior of close allies" - and now the fallout:

No word on whether those contracts included replacements for the thousand or so computers they lost last year. Or the 235 night vision scopes they misplaced. Or the $116,349 international harvester truck they can't find. Maybe this is why they can't seem to muster the necessary resources to put even one percent of "known or suspected terrorists" on the no-fly list.

Your tax dollars at work:

Even when awarding contracts to companies without competitive bidding, federal agencies are supposed to follow certain rules and guidelines. But that has not been the case at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which gave out $3.4 billion in non-competitive contracts last year. The inspector general for DHS found that officials often failed to do sufficient research and document decisions when awarding these types of contracts. Consequently, DHS is at risk of wasting taxpayer dollars if work is given to businesses that aren't the most suitable.

Here's an article about how Napolitano ditched a hearing by the House Committee on Homeland Security, where she was scheduled to answer tough questions about the Christmas Day terrorist attack. PA Democrat Rep Chris Carney on the incident: "I am very dismayed that the secretary herself isn't here. I mean, it's probably fair to ask, 'Where the hell is Secretary Napolitano?'"

And here's a post about how she doesn't think that illegal immigration is "a crime per se." Both of which fit the tone she took during her confirmation hearings, when the words "terror" nor "vulnerability" were both excluded. Because we needed to get away from the "politics of fear."

And to think, some people doubt the Obama administration's seriousness when it comes to protecting our borders from terrorists.

References and related after the jump...

Each week, in a contest for the week's best post, the members of the Watchers Council nominate one of their own posts and a second from outside the Council for consideration by other council members. This week's submissions span foreign policy, domestic policy, and have a healthy dose of media criticism. There are also a couple posts on antisemitism and Judaism, an appropriate theme given how the world's favorite aid recipients have taken to destroying certain Arab products for being just too Jewy.

To better help you cope with the onslaught of lefty weasel pseudo-sophistication - from "engagement will work" to "giving terrorists civil liberties will make them like us" - here is a slow loris getting tickled. Watch the video, read the posts, watch the video again to cheer up, and then head over to the Mere Rhetoric Facebook page and sound off about the posts you liked best:

Have at it...

Each week, in a contest for the week's best post, the members of the Watchers Council nominate one of their own posts and a second from outside the Council for consideration by other council members. This week's nominations run the gamut across liberalism in comic books, liberalism in government, and liberalism in anti-Israel circles. Two submissions - mine and the non-Council submission from the Colossus Of Rhodey - even dealt with liberalism in academia. Which is to say: there's a theme.

As preparation for poring over the nominations - and they really are quite good - here is a playground of baby pandas. Watch it, read the entries, and then head over to the Mere Rhetoric Facebook page and post which ones you'd choose.

And now you're ready...

Via TIME, an uncommonly clever spot from the National Republican Senatorial Committee. It's not an on-point debunking of the the fake economic reality that Obama apparently inhabits. But as a way of explaining the brazen corruption behind the stimulus, it's not totally ineffective:

High point: "most ethical Congress evuh" voice-over. Missing: any mention of the time when Reid chided angry citizens for not electing more pork-seeking, vote-trading Senators. It came after he bought votes on health care so it's not directly applicable, but I would've wanted to see it just as a gesture. Anything to better to highlight what a monumental prick this guy is:

Far from embracing calls for bipartisanship now that Republicans have a 41st senator, Harry Reid is acting as though he has nothing to lose and is taking down Republicans at every turn. The majority leader opened the Senate on Tuesday with a caustic floor speech accusing Republicans of undermining national security because they had filibustered a series of high-level national security nominations... His tirade, in which he blamed Republicans for blocking homeland security nominations while terrorists plotted domestic attacks, came a day after he told a Las Vegas talk show host that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has to "get over" his 2008 presidential loss... Another aide said Democrats were motivated by Obama calling out Republicans in his State of the Union address for playing partisan politics.

You'd think Reid would be a little more circumspect, given what a confused, confirmed moron he is. But it's probably nothing a few more "evil mongers" smears can't paper over. Almost difficult to understand how the Senate atmosphere became so poisoned.

References and related after the jump...

References:
* Madison Avenue Loses To Silicon Valley In Stimulus Political Ad Race [TIME]
* Obama Now Just Making Up Economic Theories To Justify Stimulus Success [MR]
* Reid: Didn't Make a Deal? SUCKER [Ace]
* Harry Reid comes out swinging at Republicans [Politico]
* EXCLUSIVE! Harry Reid challenging Nancy Pelosi for the title of World's Dumbest Bag Of Hammers [Transsylvania Phoenix]
* Harry Reid: Town-hall protesters are "evil-mongers" [Hot Air]

Related Mere Rhetoric Categories:
* American Politics
* Democratic Politics
* Republican Politics

Each week, in a contest for the week's best post, the members of the Watchers Council nominate one of their own posts and a second from outside the Council for consideration by other council members. The writeup for this week's batch of posts, I think, really shows off the Council's diversity. "A touch of vodka." How quaint:

Sit back while enjoying your personal potion and read the wonderful articles that have been passed on to us by the Watcher's Council. Upon reading what I consider to be some of the most egregious and fact finding exposes of weasels in your midst make note of each article and pass them on to your friends. Or better yet, pass on my prescription for warming up on this blustery winter day and point them directly to this article here! Whatever path you take, enjoy. As always, the Watcher's Council wishes you a warm winter wonderland. Make sure to come back and visit us on Friday for the results of this weeks contest!

My submission was last week's post about Israel's Apache fleet, where it looks like Obama might be blocking helicopter upgrades and eroding the Jewish State's Qualitative Military Edge. On the same subject, you should check out the first segment from yesterday's episode of One Jerusalem Radio's Omri Ceren Show. I got a couple of tips after I posted the initial story, and things are a little less straightforward than they might otherwise be. Still deeply suspicious. But not as straightforward.

In any case, here are this week's submissions. Feel free to sound of find on the Facebook entry for this post: which do you think should win?

They don't know much. But they're very certain that they're super-keen and that conservatives are stupid teabaggers so shut up that's why:

While many graduates of American colleges cannot answer basic civics questions, a higher education does make their opinions more liberal on controversial social issues,... The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, an independent group with a tradition-minded view of issues... found that people who had attained at least a bachelor's degree were more likely than Americans whose formal education ended with a high-school diploma to take a liberal stance on certain controversial social issues... in general, college does not bring students up to a high level of civics knowledge.

Combine this with overconfidence studies - the ones showing that today's students are more self-confident with less justification than ever before - and you understand why Rock The Vote is the perfect crystallization of young liberal political engagement. You get plucked off the street with - almost by definition - no background in what you'll be voting on. But since you're passionate and involved - motivated - presumably the vague things you really want to be true will magically get transformed into actual facts.

Listen. We've known for decades that you need a certain general awareness of what you're trying to learn - a certain amount of metaknowledge - before you can develop a sense for whether you're learning it. And the only way you get that general sense is by sitting down and just learning stuff. Otherwise you think you're learning when you're actually not, nurturing a growing sense of "illusory superiority" until you end up extolling the brilliance of Andrew Sullivan in the HuffPo comments section.

Backing up: take Rumsfeld's three categories. Known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. The starting situation when you're learning something new is a bunch of unknown unknowns. You don't know what you're looking for and you won't recognize it if you accidentally see it. Learning is getting to known knowns by passing through known unknowns. The trick is that there's a certain point where you've learned enough stuff that you get a sense for what's out there, what you're trying to learn, what you have to do to learn it, etc. Many of the unknown unknowns become known unknowns.

Each week, in a contest for the week's best post, the members of the Watchers Council nominate one of their own posts and a second from outside the Council for consideration by other council members. This week's nominations got posted in the aftermath of the Illinois primary, where "anemic turnout" produced a Mark Kirk nomination on the GOP side. It's somewhat heartening that Kirk, for all that he's a RINO's RICO, is now talking and acting like Scott Brown. Only a year ago the Obama model of utopian populism - plus the scapegoating it relies on when promises fall short - was the model to be emulated.

It'd be even more heartening if Kirk actually thought like Scott Brown, but there's only so much you can ask of Illinois politicians. Lets start with not holding knives to girlfriends' throats and go from there. Baby steps. In the meantime, here are the nominations. Feel free to sound off under this post on the Facebook page about which ones you'd vote for.

Council Submissions

* Mere Rhetoric - Yahoo Wipes "Ariel, Israel" Off The Map, Replaces It With "Jenin, Palestinian Occupied Territories"
* Rhymes With Right - But If She Wanted An Abortion, It Would Have Been No Big Deal
* Soccer Dad - The goldstone rumor mill
* Bookworm Room-Leftist tactics to scare the uninformed about America's religious freedoms *UPDATED*
* Wolf Howling - The Three Stooges Meet Al Qaeda In Undiegate
* The Colossus of Rhodey - The Colonel's Tiger
* Right Truth - GOP: You blew it!
* The Glittering Eye - The Really Hard Choices We're Avoiding
* Joshuapundit - The Valley Of Decision : Iran Crosses The Nuclear Threshold
* American Digest - Last Light
* The Provaocateur - Dr. Chacko to Afghanistan?

Non-Council Submissions

* Submitted By: The Watcher - Pamela Geller @ Big Government - Obama Recruiting Radicals in High Schools
* Submitted By: Mere Rhetoric - Smart Politics - 'Professor' Obama? President's State of the Union Address Notches 4th Lowest Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Score Since FDR
* Submitted By: Rhymes With Right - SCOTUSblog - Ending Racial Preferences
* Submitted By: Soccer Dad - Daled Amos - The Middle East: The New York Times hasn't learned its lesson and now it's teaching it
* Submitted By: Wolf Howling - Plumb Bob Blog - A New Political Term: Debt Reduction
* Submitted By: Bookworm Room - Commentary Contentions - When the Telling Starts
* Submitted By: The Colossus of Rhodey - City Journal - The Grasping Hand
* Submitted By: Right Truth - Atlas Shrugs - From Himmler with Love: "His Eminence, the Grand Mufti, In Remembrance"
* Submitted By: The Glittering Eye - KeithHennessey.com - The President's Bigger Budget
* Submitted By: Joshuapundit - American Thinker / Randall Hoven - The Lost Decade
* Submitted By: American Digest - Cobb - King Solomon's Mines
* Submitted By: The Provocateur - Dick Morris at Newsmax - Behind Obama's Phony Deficit Numbers

References:
* The Black and White of Being "Scott Brown" [Watcher Of Weasels]
* Dem candidate in IL has record of domestic violence [Hot Air]
* Mere Rhetoric Facebook Page [Official Site]

Related Mere Rhetoric Categories:
* American Politics
* Democratic Politics
* Republican Politics

I'm genuinely surprised. Given the previous oratorical heights to which our Vulcan Pericles had soared, I really expected more. Oh well:

Text of Obama's Address has a readability score for an average 8th grader - two grades lower than George W. Bush's Addresses and the historical average for modern presidents... A Smart Politics analysis of nearly 70 oral State of the Union Addresses since the mid-1930s finds the text of Obama's speech on Wednesday evening to have one of the lowest scores on the Flesch-Kincaid readability test ever recorded by a U.S. President. The Flesch-Kincaid test is designed to assess the readability level of written text, with a formula that translates the score to a U.S. grade level...

Obama's Flesch-Kincaid grade level score of 8.8 for his first State of the Union Address was the fourth lowest score since FDR's first Address in 1934... As such, the speech by 'the professor' stands in contrast to his predecessor, 'the cowboy,' George W. Bush... Bush averaged a Flesch-Kincaid score of 10.4 across his seven State of the Union Addresses - or nearly two full grades higher than Obama's speech. Bush's speeches also averaged 2.4 more words per sentence than Obama, at 19.0.

All drafts of all Presidential speeches are timestamped and archived. So some day we'll know whether the phrase "Americans are morons, use smaller words" was an actual margin note or whether it remained implicit. Even the critics who specifically question Obama's literary stylings - critics whose controversial theories are not exactly undermined by the mind-numbing shallowness of the SOTU - don't think that he reads at a junior high level. He just believes we do.

You'll be glad to know that CBS News concluded that "Obama's speech leveraged his strengths," which apparently include "his personal charm and integrity" but not a willingness to speak to Americans like adults. At least Ambinder waited until after the speech to announce that it had been awesome. USA Today knew even beforehand that the simplistic, mawkish crapfest would be rhetorical gold:

Given the choice between indulging in anti-corporate demagoguery or cutting bloated government bureaucracies, Oregon voters have chosen to go the California route. Presumably they looked at Sacramento, saw how well everything is going, and say "yup, that's exactly what we want." Just look how proud they are of their cheap, resentful demonization:

Oregon voters bucked decades of anti-tax and anti-Salem sentiment Tuesday, raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy to prevent further erosion of public schools and other state services... Measure 66 raises taxes on households with taxable income above $250,000, and Measure 67 sets higher minimum taxes on corporations and increases the tax rate on upper-level profits. The results triggered waves of relief from educators and legislative leaders, who were facing an estimated $727 million shortfall in the current two-year budget if the measures failed...

Tuesday's strong support also validated a strategy by Democratic lawmakers to single out the rich and corporations for targeted tax increases. Campaign ads by supporters highlighted banks and credit card companies and showed images of well-dressed people stepping off private jets... "They did a great job of pounding, 'It's only $10,'" said Bob Tiernan, chairman of the state Republican Party. "We got swamped by the union money."

Washington state Democrats are already planning to model their tax-increase campaign on the Oregon strategy. I'm honestly surprised it took them this long to come to a consensus. Obama has spent the last few months "blasting banks," though there's no word yet on whether he's back to threatening law-abiding bankers with pitchfork-wielding mobs.

I'm not sure if they had any ads about "fat cat bankers" - the eloquent phrase so beloved by our modern-day Pericles - but they did have eyeroll inducing stills of "rich people" holding up glasses of champagne in front of their ostensibly private pool tables. It's like what a high school student would create if they were tasked with caricaturing "the wealthy," which would be funny minus the part where the campaign is moving entire regions of the country:

I for one am glad that Obama told the GOP to stop scaring Americans with the prospect of Democratic wealth confiscation. Much better to go with 1980's stock photography of jet-setting bankers, champagne-swilling philanderers, and big-haired trophy wives. That's the path toward reasoned public deliberation.

References and related after the jump...

Each week, in a contest for the week's best post, the members of the Watchers Council nominate one of their own posts and a second from outside the Council for consideration by other council members. This week's nominations got posted just as the Scott Brown victory was sinking in, giving me an excuse to embed the best Daily Show clip ever since the last best Daily Show clip ever. This is the one from the night before the election and if you haven't seen it yet, by all means enjoy. This week's nominations are right afterward.

Council Submissions

* American Digest - Bring. It. On.
* Bookworm Room - A perfect statement about the balance of power between government, citizens and business
* Joshuapundit - Pat Robertson, The Devil And Me
* Rhymes With Right - Getting It Right On Palin
* The Glittering Eye - The Triumph
* Right Truth - Here Come the Orphans
* Soccer Dad - Rachel's tomb and the protection of jewish holy sites
* Mere Rhetoric - Government Labor Protections And Welfare Policies Keeping French Youths Jobless, Alienated
* The Colossus of Rhodey - Harry Reid, "light-skinned" and "Avatar"
* The Provocateur - Some Thoughts on Dr. Chacko's Dismissal
* Wolf Howling - Wailing & Lamentations

Non-Council Submissions

* Submitted By: American Digest - Sippican Cottage - Quincy Market (Election Day)
* Submitted By: Bookworm Room - A New Conservative Lesbian - Obama's 'Enabling Act' trial balloon
* Submitted By: Joshuapundit - Seraphic Secrets - Haiti: No One But the Israelis Has Come to Help
* Submitted By: Rhymes With Right - Volokh Conspiracy - The Supreme Court's Cult of Celebrity
* Submitted By: The Glittering Eye - The Coast Guard Compass - Guardians Report In: HS1 Larry Berman
* Submitted By: Right Truth - Fore-Left - The Ties That Bind - Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal
* Submitted By: Soccer Dad - The Muqata - Israel's emergency response
* Submitted By: Mere Rhetoric - Danger Room - Visualizing the Underwear Bomber's Online Life
* Submitted By: The Colossus of Rhodey - Common Sense Political Thought - My health care anecdata
* Submitted By: The Provocateur - American Spectator - The Scott Heard Round the World
* Submitted By: Wolf Howling - YouTube - Martin Luther King "I have a dream"

References:
* Scott Brown's Boston Tea Party, Twenty Ten! [Watcher Of Weasels]

Related Mere Rhetoric Categories:
* American Politics
* Democratic Politics
* Republican Politics

It wasn't just the total equipment breakdown, though counting on "unusable" phones to connect airports and military agencies is probably a bad idea. Stimulus money was supposed to be used to improve transportation and security infrastructure, but apparently we just ran out. Nonetheless, stuff is stuff and we can always buy new stuff. No biggie.

The real treat here is the way that no one at any level had any clue what they were doing. It ended up being a confused on-board flight attendant who alerted the pilots that something had gone dangerously wrong. It's almost as if large government bureaucracies, insulated as they are from competition and confident in their longevity, have no reason to stay sharp. Almost:

The FAA acknowledged last month that controllers and managers had been slow to react after the pilots went out of radio contact. Among the new details in the documents:

* The special phone line that connects the FAA's Minneapolis Center to the Domestic Events Network (DEN), which alerts the military and law enforcement agencies about aviation security emergencies, had numerous problems... the communication equipment "does not operate adequately in a consistent manner." ... it suffers from loud feedback and clicking noises that render it "unusable." The FAA said the DEN should have been notified within five to 10 minutes, but they were not called for more than an hour.

* Because of apparent mix-ups, controllers never tried to radio the pilots on the last radio frequency they had spoken on, according to the preliminary NTSB report. As a result, the pilots may never have heard controllers frantically trying to reach them.

* At least initially, the controllers did not attempt to reach the pilots on a radio frequency reserved for emergencies, the NTSB said. The pilots said they were monitoring the frequency.

Even if the equipment had been working perfectly, it was staffed by people who didn't think to call security or to ping the airplane on the last frequency. I know that this long ago became a cliche, but I really can't wait until the government takes over health care. All those sociological and organizational studies about how static bureaucracies atrophy - obviously just conservative scaremongering. Plus liberals mean well, so shut up.

References:
* Flight attendant caught wayward pilots unaware [AP]
* NTSB fills in details on errant Northwest flight [USA Today]

Related Mere Rhetoric Categories:
* American Politics
* Economy
* Health Care

The punchline here - not included in the article - is that "savings" are a perennial anti-death penalty talking point. Housing a death row inmate in California costs the state three times more than housing a normal inmate, much of the extra burden coming from perks. Now some people might be inclined to view that travesty as a justification for reducing the privileges rather than the number of death row inmates. Those people obviously lack the subtle insight of California lawmakers:

In October in Orange County, Calif., Billy Joe Johnson, who had just been convicted of murder as a hit man for a white supremacist gang, begged the judge and jury, in all sincerity, to sentence him to death. Johnson knew that those on California's death row get individual cells and better telephone access, nicer contact-visit arrangements, and more personal-property privileges than ordinary inmates... Johnson was so eager to be put on death row that he tried to confess to two murders that no one yet knew about.

Now the disincentive that's supposed to prevent people from asking for the death penalty is - not to put too fine a point on it - death. But California has managed to execute a grand total of 13 out of almost current 700 death row prisoners since 1977. Compare that to the possibility of a prisoner like this getting killed in race-related violence over a lifetime, and those are pretty attractive odds.

And then there are the perks to consider. Individual cells and personal-property privileges? That's a new direction! I'd have to check, but I bet it's probably easier to find somewhere to smoke on death row than it is in Burbank, CA. Actually I don't have to check. Next up from the Sacramento nannie : soda.

Anyway, relative luxury for death row inmates but no more mammogram subsidies for women between 40 and 50. This state is magical.

References:
* News of the Weird: California's Death Row: Bigger cells, better privacy, more stuff, and almost no chance of being executed! [LAT]
* Smoking Ban in Burbank, CA
* UPDATE 1-Calif. lawmaker plans hearings on soda-obesity link [Reuters]
* Death Panel in California Ends Mammogram Subsidies for Women Between 40 and 50 [Ace]

Related Mere Rhetoric Categories:
* American Politics
* Democratic Politics
* Law

No of course that's not true. How does that even sound right to him? Is he really that contemptuous of people who disagree with him, that he thinks headlines about the "worst scientific scandal of our generation" are based on a few emails from 1999? Should the dissonance have engendered at least enough self-doubt to go and actually read the emails? And if he doesn't the have time - being a celebrity is hard - shouldn't he at least have enough self-awareness to avoid making easily disproven factual claims?

Apparently not. From the Slate interview they've got plastered all over their frontpage:

Q: How damaging to your argument was the disclosure of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University?

[Gore]: To paraphrase Shakespeare, it's sound and fury signifying nothing. I haven't read all the e-mails, but the most recent one is more than 10 years old. These private exchanges between these scientists do not in any way cause any question about the scientific consensus. But the noise machine built by the climate deniers often seizes on what they can blow out of proportion, so they've thought this is a bigger deal than it is.

It's awful bold of him to deride skeptics for having a "noise machine" when the CRU emailers bragged about the "publicity machine" they use to "shout messages." It almost has the feel of rank hypocrisy. Not that actual details seem to matter much. Later in the interview, in response to a question about "fair and open debate," he echoed the scientific conensus talking point. That's an tactic argument scholars might refer to as "begging the question." The rest of us would probably call it "being a condescending prick."

But let's ignore all that, because argumentative tactics and rhetorical tropes are hard to unpack. Much easier: point out flat out untruths. The emails obviously don't stop in 1999. They actually go right up to Nov. 12 of this year. The last one is from Peter Thorne, a British government official who wanted advice from Phil Jones about how to push climate legislation. Nov. 6 emails with Tom Wigley dealt with discrepancies in proxy data that needed to be smoothed out. Oct 28 emails with Graham Haughton had Jones berated Haughton for a colleague who publishes climate skeptics in her journal.

Now there are a number of issues in Climategate. There's the manipulation of the public sphere, where taxpayer funds - which these scientists seem to think are theirs by right - were used to study and target citizens. There's the specter of flat out bad data hidden by artificial adjustments, something that seems increasingly likely. There's the anti-scientific bullying of colleagues and politicization of peer review. And these emails deal with all of them. And they're from the last few weeks.

Some of you might remember friend-of-the-blog Larry Greenfield from the election, when the Obama campaign banned surrogates from debating him after he wiped the floor with the first few opponents. Others might recall him as the target of arguably the single dumbest smear in the history of the National Jewish Democratic Council - an impressive accomplishment given that the entire organization, to say nothing of NJDC Press Secretary Aaron Keyak, has the collective argumentative coherence and rhetorical acumen of a senile baboon.

In any case Larry now serves as a fellow at the Claremont Institute where, among sundry other responsibilities, he hosts their podcast BEDROCK With Larry Greenfield. Like the Institute itself, BEDROCK deals with the intersection of political philosophy, public discourse, and legislation.

He and I just wrapped up a series of interviews, with topics ranging from academia and conservative theory to Obama and anti-Israel diplomacy. Part I is now online, covering the conservative blogosphere, legacy journalism, and even a little bit about Mere Rhetoric. There are also extended digressions into a couple of specific controversies, and also a section on rhetorical theory. I'll post a reminder when the next sections - American domestic policy, the Jewish community, foreign policy, Middle East diplomacy, etc - get uploaded.

References:
* Obama Campaign Demands Ban On Republican Jewish Group, Escalates Thuggish Intimidation [MR]
* NJDC Tool Aaron Keyak Helpfully Illustrates How Liberal Activists Sneeringly Cocoon Themselves In Asinine Arguments And Dishonest Smears [MR]
* Democrats Outraged Over Jewish-Issues Poll Questions That Are... Umm... Demonstrably True [MR]
* NJDC: Biden Is Pro-Israel Because... Umm... Err... Because He Just Is OK? [MR]
* Bedrock: Omri Ceren Interview, Part 1 [Red County]

Related Mere Rhetoric Categories:
* American Politics
* Democratic Politics
* Jewish Politics

Democratic theory 101: there is a scientific sphere and a public sphere, and the two are by design separate and unequal. Scientists are supposed to produce grist for the deliberative mill, answering the objective questions "what's going on" and "how certain are we that we're right?" Then the public uses that information as part of a much messier debate over risk: "given the costs of action vs. the impact of inaction, how certain do we want scientists to be on this issue before we pass new legislation?" That's the deal modern democracies have with scientific institutions.

It's not the most empowering position for scientists to be in - they'd probably prefer to issue decrees directly - but that's why we compensate them with tens of trillions in public money. It's also not a perfect system, though it works well enough to balance nuclear meltdowns vs. necessary power production, epidemics vs. costly mass immunizations, and so on.

And it only works as long as scientists refrain from actively manipulating the public on legislative issues, either by working journalists or by pressuring lawmakers. The leaked emails and files from the Climatic Research Unit, at the UK's University of East Anglia, show that's exactly what AGW partisans have been doing. There has been a widespread and systematic breakdown in how climate researchers relate to the public that funds them and the media outlets that report on them.

This is a distinct issue from internal academic questions about shoddy research or contaminated peer review. Other posts have dealt with the damage that's been to scientific practice. I should probably add that I think the "hide the decline" email is overblown, with the caveats that they lied about grafting real temps for years and that the true scandal is how they actually don't know anything. Separately, there are credible legal accusations being raised.

In any case, what hasn't been unpacked is how the AGW crowd systematically undermined public debate by framing their media messages to provoke unjustifiable anxiety (a "certainty" issue), manipulating media institutions to untenably emphasize or deemphasize findings (a "what's going on" issue), and punishing scientists who strayed from the party line in media appearances. Climatologists could be model researchers and their shilling for prosperity-killing agreements and treaties would still be wildly inappropriate. That's not the deal we have with these people.

If these emails came from the other side, lefty magazines and academic journals would be screaming about the catastrophic erosion of contemporary democratic institutions. And they'd be right.

Each week, the members of the Watchers Council nominate one of their own posts and a second from outside the Council for consideration by other council members in a contest for the week's best post. Last week's submissions - helpfully rounded up by Council member Joshuapundit under the title "He's Bowing And Scrapin', We're All Watching Palin..." - set up a week of insane but not entirely unpredictable unhinged leftwing venom.

Just to sum up where the liberal catechism now stands, updated through last week: (1) it is vitally important to be concerned about the "hearts and minds" of Muslims who would have us abandon measures like drone attacks, where we kill terrorists (2) it is "cowardly" to be concerned about the "hearts and minds" of Muslims who welcome bringing KSM to NYC, a move jihadists are gleefully anticipating and (3) what's actually "dangerous" and worthy of non-cowardly fear - per the campaign brownshirts who became Obama's Organizing for America - is Palin's book tour.

Your intellectual and moral superiors at work.

Not coincidentally, the winners from last week's nominations revolved around this theme of deeply revelatory liberal incoherence. Bookworm Room had the top post, unpacking of how our super-keen Vulcan can be having so much trouble. The runner up was The Razor with a post about the ignorance of the Obama administration. Those are where you'll want to start, and all of the posts - listed after the jump - are worth taking a look at.

Each week, the members of the Watchers Council nominate one of their own posts and a second from outside the Council for consideration by other council members in a contest for the week's best post. With a new list coming out in a few hours, it's probably about time for me to post last week's nominated posts. That's the kind of tight ship we run here at MR HQ.

Why do these posts always go up at the last minute, even though they're basically cut and paste jobs plus a little commentary? Tough question. Without getting into too many details the answer involves a "happy hour," a "patio" and "how it's always 70 degrees in LA." There's also a bunch of stuff having to do with side projects and daily travel blogging and assorted other rent-targeted activities, rent being an unfortunate monthly necessity that if you could see your way to defraying I would be much obliged.

Anyway, here are last week's nominations from the Watchers Council and beyond. For the record, Joshuapundit's meticulously written post ended up squeaking past my own "liberals seem to have a lot invested in glittery displays of sham erudition" nit-picking, so if you're pressed for time that's the place to start.

Council Submissions
* Mere Rhetoric - Agitprop-Funding NEA Chief: "Barack Obama Is The Most Powerful Writer Since Julius Caesar
* The Glittering Eye - Triage
* Rhymes With Right - Just A Reminder - Hasan Not The First
* Bookworm Room - Watch the Democratic dominoes fall
* The Provocateur - Dr. Chacko Comes to Lahey
* The Colossus of Rhodey - The problem with Islamic terrorism and the Left
* The Razor - Suburban Perspective on Rural America
* Right Truth - A Small Nation
* Joshuapundit - Death By A Thousand Cuts

Honorable Mentions
* Okie On The Lam - Nanny Nancy Pelosi Shoving 1990-Page Health Care Up Our Collective Wazzoo!
* Tel-Chai Nation - Turkey's Erdogan continues with his bigotry

Non-Council Submissions
* Submitted By: The Watcher - Selwyn Duke/American Thinker - Jihad and America, the land that cried sheep
* Submitted By: The Glittering Eye - Tigerhawk - The myth of American heroism
* Submitted By: Rhymes With Right - Red County - Tragedy At Ft. Hood
* Submitted By: Bookworm Room - Villainous Company - Obama doesn't "get" the military he commands
* Submitted By: The Provocateur - WSJ Blog - Doctor: I Was Fired for Fighting Hospital's Ties to Medtronic
* Submitted By: The Colossus of Rhodey - The Scientist - Promises, Promises
* Submitted By: Right Truth - Right, Wing-Nut - A Nation, Hi-Jacked
* Submitted By: The Razor - MG Hoft - Wash U Shuts Down Freedom Memorial
* Submitted By: Mere Rhetoric - Danger Room - Is This China's Anti-Satellite Laser Weapon Site?
* Submitted By: Joshuapundit - Ron Radosh/Hot Air - The Nation, Jihad and General Casey

References:
* Watcher of Weasels » Watcher's Council Nominations, Veteran's Day Edition [Watcher Of Weasels]

Related Mere Rhetoric Categories:
* American Politics Coverage
* Democratic Politics Coverage
* Republican Politics Coverage

The elegant thing about Turkey's slide from the West is how starkly it juxtaposes liberal pseudo-sophistication with conservative warnings. On one side you have Obama's ephemeral charisma, where Turkey was the first Muslim country he visited as part of his global Presidential apology tour. At a minimum that should have made Ankara more rather than less inclined to lean toward the US and NATO.

On the other side you have the hard geopolitical realities being created by Obama's supine foreign policy, where a soon-to-be-nuclear Iran is pushing back US allies and installing proxies across Asia and South America. If Obama's critics are right then the prospect of regional Shiite hegemony will force states to accommodate the Islamic Republic, cut whatever deals they can, and try to exist within the Iranian orbit.

Interesting debate:

Relations between Turkey and Iran appear to be getting closer and those ties are raising concerns among some of Turkey's Western allies... Turkish President Abdullah Gul said... his country is keen to bolster relations with neighboring Iran. Increasing closeness between Turkish leaders and Iran, and Turkey's quest for better ties in the broader Muslim world, have fueled concerns in the West that this key U.S. ally is... is turning its back on the West to embrace Islamist regimes to the East - a vast region that extends from the Middle East to the Balkans, the Caucasus and Central Asia.

Obama's obsequious engagement can't even provide diplomatic wiggle room, where both sides would put on a show of agreement for public consumption:

The growing number of disagreements over global and regional affairs between Turkey and the United States signals a "bumpy road" to Washington, D.C., for Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in early December. The deterioration in ties between the two allies was obvious during Philip Gordon's trip to Ankara last week. At a press conference held here, the assistant secretary for the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs hinted that "there were more points of disagreement than of agreement with Turkey."

This is after Turkey banned Israel from US/NATO air exercises as a way of nixing the drills completely, the immediate and predictable withdrawal of the US and Italy being a feature rather than a bug. If they had just been targeting Israel they wouldn't have followed up two days later with joint Turkish-Syrian military maneuvers. That stunt, plus the 10 Turkish ministers they sent to Damascus in the context of a formal cooperation deal, goes deeper than a Turkish/Israeli temporary spat.

Each week, the members of the Watchers Council nominate one of their own posts and a second from outside the Council for consideration by other council members in a contest for the week's best post. Last week's submissions were written in the background of the grassroots victory over Scozzafava in the NY-23, polls showing a Republican crush in Virginia, and the promise of at least moral victory in deep blue New Jersey. The eventual top posts expressed a kind of justifiable sanguine confidence in the future of conservativism.

Post-PelosiCare, things are looking less rosy. In Britain even the Conservatives have to express "100% support" for the NHS, the political reality in a nation long ago infantalized by government paternalism. Promises of grassroots anger have a lot less sting when you project out 3 years into a political environment where taxpayers, having been drained of wealth and holding up an incredible national debt, have no choice but to turn to the government for their health care. The rationalizations will be fast, furious, and vapid - but they'll be ubiquitous.

This week is starting off badly enough, with Iranian triumphalism abroad and the possibility of an anti-Israel ambush in DC. You know, there's a theory under which a country that abandons its friends while supplicating its enemies isn't laying the foundation for future prosperity. Anyway, evaluate for yourselves:

Council Submissions
* Joshuapundit - Conservatives Win In NY 23
* The Provocateur - Interview With Wade Rathke II
* The Glittering Eye - What's A Foreseeable Rate of Taxation?
* Bookworm Room - Do They Even Listen to Themselves?
* Right Truth - Half of all U.S. children will be on food stamps according to study
* The Razor - Laws Need Limits
* The Colossus of Rhodey - Once again, the Democrats back vote fraud
* Mere Rhetoric - The Omri Ceren Show - 2pm PST - Barry Rubin On Lebanon's Crisis And Ours

Non-Council Submissions
* Submitted By: Joshuapundit - Big Government - The Public Option Deception
* Submitted By: The Provocateur - New Ledger - George Soros Assautl on the Free Market
* Submitted By: The Glittering Eye - E. D. Kain-American Tory - Nothing's ever certain except race and taxes
* Submitted By: Bookworm Room - Black & Right - Comment of the Day
* Submitted By: Right Truth - Sense of Events - Is Obama a milleniarian without a plan? Does he even need one?
* Submitted By: The Razor - Washington Examiner - Conservative revolt good news for Republicans
* Submitted By: The Colossus of Rhodey - The Boston Globe - Islam's Darwin problem
* Submitted By: Mere Rhetoric - Solomonia - SDS Still Alive and Planning Disruptions...at Brandeis
* Submitted By: The Watcher - Michael J. Gaynor at Web Commentary - ACORN 8 Supporter Tries to Disparage Michelle Malkin and Anita MonCrief in Halloween Hit Piece

References:
* Taxing: Policy and Tedium as a Result of Left Wing Beliefs and Attitudes [Watcher Of Weasels]
* 'I Am A Proud Conservative Day' - Taking Back The Republican Party [Watcher Of Weasels]
* PM heads to U.S. under threat of Palestinian statehood declaration [Ha'aretz]
* Iran expecting nuclear talks with world powers [AP]

Related Mere Rhetoric Categories:
* American Politics Coverage
* Democratic Politics Coverage
* Republican Politics Coverage

Buried on the second page of Politico's "don't believe the post-election conservative hype" article, this is going to have Mickey Kaus positively tickled. Couple it with how death panels got reinserted into House legislation, and everything old really does seem new again:

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs insisted Wednesday that the White House plans no changes whatsoever in its legislative strategy or agenda as a result of this week's contests. However, a White House aide told ABC that the administration will seek to bolster moderates by returning to an argument that health care reform will curb the deficit -- a talking point Obama aides have de-emphasized in recent months in favor of a focus on making the insurance system more secure and predictable.

The way I remember it, Obama aides de-emphasized Orszag's bend-the-cost-curve argument because it wasn't true. It wasn't true before Pelosi started outright lying about the cost of the House bill. It won't be true after politicians incite populist resentment against people who "choose" to be unhealthy - smokers, drinkers, people with dietary choices that Bay Area scolds frown upon, etc. Private ambulances are adding surcharges for obese patients. I'm just hoping they never discover that sex kills just like alcohol and obesity.

Six or seven years into nationalized health care - when citizens have to choose between higher taxes or scapegoating the overweight guy next door - won't that be a pleasant public sphere? I'm especially interested to see how the left handles the soda drinkers they're looking for excuses to tax. The race-infused classist condescension, already on display in some of our more refined liberal outlets, is going to be exquisite.

In fairness, that little dig about fashionable Bay Area health fads was probably unfair. Democrats are floating taxes on wine along with their sin taxes on beer. So it's not like they're being elitist.

References and related after the jump...

First of all - and I know this is ticky-tacky but the left's ubiquotous pseudo-sophisticated name checking gets obnoxious - Julius Caesar was not a particularly great writer. Even if that wasn't true, Marcus Aurelius was in every way a better scribe and at least equally as powerful. And as a purely historical matter, though it's distasteful to admit, Lenin and Mao also need to be included as writer-leaders who controlled huge swaths of territory. All of them obviously lived after Caesar.

This is why we have separate sandboxes for academics. People who study things like history - where precision is still at least gestured toward - play in one sandbox. Then we put theater and music experts like Landesman in a different sandbox, where there are no sharp facts for them to swallow or cut themselves with. There they can spin metaphorical tapestries of fancy and pass them off as profundity, and we pat their heads and assure them that they're bright and shiny.

The pursuit of the arts, of course, is irreplaceable in and indispensable to a well-cultivated society. But its practitioners should avoid political activism, lest they end up sounding like moronic protofascist bootlickers. And just to be clear, it's the "moronic" part that's particularly grating:

Three days after Landesman was confirmed as the head of the NEA, his communications director, Yosi Sergant, told NEA grantees in a conference call: "I would encourage you to pick something, whether it's health care, education, the environment -- you know, there's four key areas that the corporation has identified as the areas of service." Two days later, a host of arts organizations endorsed Obama's health-care plan... of the 21 groups signing the statement, 16 had recently received grants from the NEA or were affiliated with organizations that had...

Landesman debased himself with incandescently vulgar obsequiousness to his supreme leader. "There is a new president and a new NEA," he proclaimed. "This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln. If you accept the premise, and I do, that the United States is the most powerful country in the world, then Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar. That has to be good for American artists."

Not for nothing, but the last time I got an email about the Cashill hypothesis it was from a far left academic. He found it highly unlikely that Obama metamorphosed from his crappy pre-Dreams self into the transcendent political author of our time. I'm not totally sold on that theory yet, though I agree that bad writers don't become a good writers without years of practice that Obama never had. But as a simple matter of public argument, invoking the President's literary brilliance might be two-sided.

The weird thing about the NEA dustup is how unnecessary it was. Was the White House worried that artists weren't consistently producing agitprop for the Messiah In Chief? Because they were and are:

What is unofficial Obama art? That's what I wondered when I heard there will be a display of such art in Chicago at the Chicago Tourism Center. Basically, it's art by any artist who was inspired by Obama's run for president to create a video, a painting, a poster or whatever to commemorate the occasion. This is not just any art, but good art. People whose work is represented in the exhibit sent it in for consideration. The result is more than 100 artworks. Some of the pieces may seem familiar like the Go Tell Mama series of posters or Sol Sender's Obama '08 logo--the one that ended up on yard signs and bumper stickers.

Website and exhibit:

Each week, the members of the Watchers Council nominate one of their own posts and a second from outside the Council for consideration by other council members in a contest for the week's best post. My submissions for this week are roughly "liberals always support the war we're not in" and "liberal American Jews always support Israeli self-defense except when Israel actually tries to defend itself." It's almsot like they're being insincere.

I think I've already locked down my favorites for the week, though I'm still in the air about my non-Council picks. Feel free to sound off which ones you would chose under the Mere Rhetoric Facebook page under this post.

In the meantime, make sure you check out the most current post on the Watchers site. TV stations won't show a picture of Muhammad delivering a pizza, but peeing on Jesus is oh so risque. Dumb.

Council Submissions
* Mere Rhetoric - Lefty Meme Congeals: The Real War Is In Pakistan Not Afghanistan
* Joshuapundit - J Street - A Particularly Nasty Dead End To Be Avoided
* Bookworm Room The march of the thought police
* The Provocateur - My Interview with Wade Rathke
* The Glittering Eye - Are We Promoting Our Grand Strategy?
* Rhymes With Right - And To Think The Average Income Of American Families Dropped By 3.6%
* Right Truth - - Overwhelmed by current situation in America and the world

Council Submissions
* Submitted By: The Watcher - Dismantling America - Thomas Sowell at Real Clear Politics
* Submitted By: The Watcher - Riehl World View - Exclusive: How The NRCC Bungled NY - 23
* Submitted By: Mere Rhetoric - Pajamas Media - Showdown on J Street
* Submitted By: Joshuapundit - The Augean Stables - Investigate the investigators: A time to rebuke Goldstone
* Submitted By: Bookworm Room - GM's Place - Splitting: Fox News and the White House
* Submitted By: The Provocateur - Mercury News - Racial Skirmishes in our Own House
* Submitted By: The Glittering Eye - Daniel W. Drezner - Theory of International Politics and Zombies
* Submitted By: Rhymes With Right - JammieWearingFool - Why Is GE Exempt From Government-Ordered Pay Cuts?
* Submitted By: Right Truth - The Tygrrrr Express - Why not just kill all conservatives?

References and related after the jump...

Cherry picking nutroots comments sections and finding antisemitism - not a neat trick. Finding the same antisemitic meme in comments across six top nutroots blogs - still not a particularly neat trick because what do you expect from Daily Kos, Wonkette, HuffPo, ThinkProgress, FiveThirtyEight, and DU? But closer!

What would be really interesting is if blogs like HuffPo had been randomly filtering Lieberman's health care calculations through an Israel prism for weeks. Then their commenters' anti-Jewish dual loyalty canards would go from being mere seething bigotry to something more like institutionalized habits of thoughts that lends themselves to symptomatic outbursts.

HuffPo contributor M.S. Bellows, "Fate of Healthcare Reform Is in Joe Lieberman's Hands", October 9, 2009:

But if Lieberman intends to become a Republican next year, he will lose that chairmanship anyway. And, with Democrats holding both the White House and solid majorities in both houses, Lieberman has no realistic chance of advancing his hawkish, pro-Israel foreign policy agenda despite being chair. Lieberman has nothing to lose, and everything to gain, from jettisoning his chairmanship now and becoming a hero to the Right by singlehandedly stopping Barack Obama's signature domestic policy initiative in its tracks.

His duly incited audience responded with charming observations like "Joe is not an American supporter other than our military and welfare money to the theocratic state of Israel" and "If the fate of health care reform is in Lieberman's hands, it's doomed. Lieberman doesn't vote for anything that isn't Pro-MIC and Pro-Israel."

Fast forward to today's half bluff / half bombshell. Why would Lieberman do it? Tough to say. It could be because he's an experienced political hand who knows he has enormous leverage to insert specific health care reforms he's been pursuing for years. Or it could be, per this self-styled analyst at FiveThirtyEight, that he wants Obama to give Israel the green light to expand settlements and start a war across West and Central Asia:

Liebermann is playing political games for Israel. He wants this administration to let them do what they want, ie, expand settlements to their hearts content, use Iraqi air space for an attack, etc. He knows he can get concessions on Israel on his HC vote.

Of course there's room for nuance here. This DKos strategist doesn't think Lieberman wants Israel to bomb Iran. Apparently the Senator's actual plan is to install a warmongering GOP President who will have America do the bombing, albeit 4 years from now when it would no longer matter (?):

The full rankings for last week's Watchers contest are worth reading in full. The top Council blogs focused mostly foreign policy and the top non-Council posts did almost precisely the opposite. A good mix.

The top Council post from Joshuapundit dealt with the latest round of "anti-Zionst" government and media witchhunts. Two notable things: (1) any concrete accusations against the Jewish State are demonstrably and admittedly false and (2) those false accusations all happen to sound exactly the same as age-old antisemitic dual loyalty canards. Strange how that keeps happening:

And speaking of paying attention, that's brings me to another piece that hit the news today. Laura Rozen, one of the Politico's Leftist 'foreign policy experts' ran a story under this cheerful headline: "Maryland scientist arrested for attempted espionage for Israel." Here are some more headlines on this story: "Moon scientist Stewart Nozette held as Israeli spy in FBI sting" (The London Times), "Top US scientist accused of trying to spy for Israel" (The British Telegraph), US scientist charged with attempting to sell military secrets to Israel (al-Guardian), US scientist Stewart Nozette charged with trying to sell secrets to Israel (The Christian Science Monitor),

Only one thing wrong with these headlines. Israel wasn't involved in the least. What we actually had here was an FBI sting where someone posed as a Mossad agent, and Nozette made it known that he had secrets to sell for cold, hard cash. The agent could have just as easily said he was from Britain's MI5, or the French Sûreté, or the Russians. It would have made no difference.

The runner up Council post from Bookworm Room makes it clear that venom is being sprayed at our allies all over the world. Not so much at our enemies though.

The non-Council posts all focused in one way or another on the post-partisan era of unity we've entered since the Obama inauguration. Whoever's compiling Obama's enemies list, described by the top non-Council Real Clear Politics post, is apparently the one exception:

But this White House seems to feel they're different. It's not just that the current occupant of the Oval Office has a particularly thin skin when it comes to criticism - which is especially ironic given that he's been the recipient of more glowing press coverage than possibly any candidate or president in modern American history. But not since Nixon conjured up an "enemies list" have we seen the full weight of the Office of the Presidency brought to bear in such a targeted and deliberate effort to delegitimize a media organization critical of the President... The current presidency, as much perhaps as any in history, is built upon the foundation of the President's personal popularity. President Obama has, out of necessity, become the Salesman-in-Chief for his progressive agenda. But as the White House continues to struggle adjusting to the reality of governing versus campaigning, it is either unwilling or unable to brook criticism of the President or his policies. Thus FOX News is targeted as the enemy.

Almost difficult to understand how a Cult of Personality built on a utopian promise of unity could devolve into thuggishly scapegoating one group after another for "dividing" the country and blocking "the people's will." If only there had been historical examples that academics who unceasingly attacked Bush could have used to speak out against the dangers of charismatic leaders who run on promises of literally remaking the world.

Instead we just wrapped up another round sheer, incoherent political rancor. We were treated to left-of-Democrats Republicans calling the cops on journalists, Democrats rhetorically dismissing the conservative base from "this reality," and even to the eye-roll inducing spectacle of Obama being gushingly proud of his idiotic Nobel Peace Prize. All of that comes via non-Council runner ups The Weekly Standard, Rick Moran, and Toby Harnden, writing about lefties who also must have missed the post-partisan memo.

References and related after the jump...

Each week, the members of the Watchers Council nominate one of their own posts and a second from outside the Council for consideration by other council members in a contest for the week's best post. And each week I inexplicably end up waiting till the subsequent Monday to post the nominations and the winners. Not this time: Sunday!

My own post dealt with how influential public diplomacy expert Marc Lynch advised the Obama administration to pick a fight with Israel, saw that strategy backfire as the Palestinians hardened their demands and fractured, and is now accusing Israel of "intransigence" in every other post he writes. He's a little bit bitter and it's getting kind of unseemly, though there's probably room for sympathy - the foreign policy left's recommendations have been exposed as naivete-soaked delusions, and that can't be fun. Right Truth's post on the ongoing Middle East-wide disasters triggered by State Department diplomacy and foreign policy pseudo-sophistication is to the point.

The Glittering Eye's post on health care probes a question that comes up again and again for foreign policy hawks: putting aside that the left can be relied on to appease our enemies and endanger our allies - see Bookworm Room's post - why is it that they're also so consistently useless and ideological even on domestic affairs? The word "meltdown" makes a couple of appearances.

But at least the GOP seems to have approximated something like a spine on health care. The rest of their stunts have put them at war with their own base, a situation that Rhymes With Right unpacks nicely. Not that the conservative grassroots are without their own potential problems, something The Provocateur lays out.

All of which is really a shame, because - per the Colossus Of Rhodey - the left is becoming unhinged to the point of open racism again. Usually they save that for election season. Ditto for the fangs they're showing about double-loyalty towards the Jewish State - complete with witch hunters who totally fail to implicate Israel but imply the opposite. See Joshuapundit on that last bit. Apparently the left is still addicted to the scapegoating rush they discovered during the campaign. It must feel really good.

References and related coverage after the jump...

I know I speak for everyone when I thank the National Women's Law Center for injecting a note of levelheadedness into the health care debate. The pan of the abused elderly woman was a particularly subtle touch, though it was the body-length scar that really sold it for me.

But the shot of the woman looking at a pregnancy test was, I thought, confusing. When Obama says "reproductive care" it means exactly what you think it means, and it has since at least 2007. But dozens upon dozens of MSM fact checkers have established that ObamaCare won't cover abortions, so I'm not sure what it's doing in the ad:

In fairness, it counts as lying to quote The One on The One. So even though the Associated Press is now suggesting that ObamaCare might cover abortions, they could be making that up. No one - certainly not Congress - has really read the whole thing. Could go either way.

And not for nothing, but the good arguments implicit in the ad - apparently rape has been treated as a preexisting medical condition - are solved by health care reform that stops way short of the public option. You don't have to accept that interstate competition would fix things, though there's nothing like public shaming in an open market to motivate brand-conscious corporations. You just have to believe that passing a law saying "you can't treat rape as a preexisting condition, lest the government fine you into the ground" would prevent insurance companies from treating rape as a preexisting condition.

And then there's this shameless "deficit neutral" two-step:

"I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits, either now or in the future -- period," President Obama told Congress in a health-care address last month. Well, that depends on what the meaning of "plan" is. Senate Democrats wanted to protect doctors from scheduled cuts in Medicare payments over the next 10 years, but there was a problem: Doing so would add a quarter of a trillion dollars to the federal deficit, making mincemeat of Obama's promise. So Democrats hatched a novel scheme: They would pass the legislation separately, so the $250 billion cost wouldn't be part of the main reform "plan," thereby allowing the president to claim that that bill wouldn't increase the deficit.

Whatever. I don't want to spoil anyone's weekend, but the right is going to get clobbered on ObamaCare. Elections, it turns out, matter.

References and related after the jump...

But this time they pinky swear they'll be enthusiastic about supporting any US war effort. Not like when they promised to support "the necessary war" in Afghanistan if only we would abandon Iraq. For realsies this time.

This FP post from Carnegie Endowment for International Peace fellow David Rothkopf, subtly titled "Afghanistan is just not that important", is the second appearance in a week for this nuanced position. It includes the querulous insistence that Obama shouldn't be tied down by his over-the-top campaign posing, where he obnoxiously lectured Republicans about military priorities. Because why should Democrats have to run on what they actually intend to do? If they did that they might never get elected.

Of course changing circumstances require changing tactics, and if the left was making that argument it'd be a different debate. But that's not the argument they're making. They're not saying the Taliban or Al Qaeda have become less "the people who attacked us on 9/11," which was one of the left's tropes ad nauseam during the campaign. Instead they're saying - explicitly - that Afghanistan's just not that important. Now it's true that Obama convinced the American people to trust him as Commander in Chief by saying the exact opposite. But the left didn't really believe him at the time - they know Democrats have to say moderate-sounding things to get elected, and they don't hold that against them - so what's the big deal if he flip-flops now?

Of course The One will need a sophisticated-sounding excuse. And right on cue, here's the matriarch of the nutroots herself. In this post she's advocating that Biden should resign as part of a principled stance against putting more troops in Afghanistan, a decision she insists "generations to come will always be grateful for." Technically true, but obviously not for the reasons she thinks. Anyway:

If Biden truly believes that what we're doing in Afghanistan is not in the best interests of our national security -- and what issue is more important than that? -- it's simply not enough to claim retroactive righteousness in his memoirs. Though it would be a crowning moment in a distinguished career, such an act of courage would likely be only the beginning. Biden would then become the natural leader of the movement to wind down this disastrous war and focus on the real dangers in Pakistan.

That same post also had Huffington comparing Biden to Socrates. Unironically. Because when I think "the most honest and wisest of all men," I think about a a serial liar who, having declared that we have to bankrupt the country to avoid bankrupting it, this week announced that we're in a depressing. This is a thinker of such geostrategic genius that he managed to get every single thing wrong on Iraq, voting for the war, voting against the surge, and in between proposing a 3-way partition plan of such incandescent stupidity that factions engaged in a genocidal civil war came together to oppose it. This is ostensibly our military Socrates, a modern day warrior-scholar.

So in addition to being reflexive appeasers who coat their whimpering pro-surrender histrionics with tough-sounding pseudo-sophistication, leftists also appear to be thoroughly serious people.

References and previously after the jump...

Each week, the members of the Watchers' Council nominate one of their own posts and a second from outside the Council for consideration by other council members in a contest for the week's best post. Last week's posts focusing mostly on domestic issues and dynamics, though the foreign policy stuff was... biting.

There were three foreign policy posts, one of which pointed out that Obama has created a certain kind of Nobel-worthy tranquility (cf. my post using the exact same conceit, published a little more than a week after Joshuapundit used the theme - figures). The Razor pointed out that Biden's delusions of AfPak relevance have now become out and out dangerous, while Right Truth highlighted the President's amoral and illiberal foreign policy in that charming part of the world.

A few of the domestic posts mused about the post-partisan utopia in which Obama's America finds itself ensconced. The Glittering Eye outlined the historical Columbus, one which has been replaced in textbooks by a politically correct, vaguely anti-European caricatures. Fast forwarding to the current day and per the Colossus Of Rhodey, media outlets were willing to basically fabricate quotes as part of a leftist demonization campaign. The Provocateur explored partisanship from the other direction, finding more than a few argumentative slights of hand on the right. Partisan tensions are such that even levelheaded conservatives are talking about the de facto outlawing of conservatism. Rhymes With Right found himself actually having to justify the 1st amendment, which I'm pretty sure we used to rely on implicitly.

At least Obama can always count on the support of the American Jewish community. This is the same community that's recently taken to hosting venemous antisemitic hatefests - complete with calls for the destruction of the Jewish State - in San Francisco. Any port in a storm, huh? Though for what it's worth the Bay Area isn't totally toxic to conservatism or patriotism though. There are enough pro-military families there to justify hosting the Blue Angels show that Bookworm Room discussed. I know, I was as surprised as anyone.

References and previously after the jump...

Over at the NYT Politics blog it's very important that you know "Obama to Name Openly Gay Ambassador." This is presumably because The President needs to "make progress" on gay rights and now he is making progress so that's pretty wonderful isn't it? The foot dragging probably has a lot of reasons, not least among them the "civil war" threats coming from anti-gay marriage African American Dems whose minority status places them awkwardly in unimpeachable Absolute Moral Authority territory.

The strange thing is I don't remember this kind of MSM framing when Bush appointed Michael Guest Ambassador to Romania, making Guest the first openly gay Ambassador ever confirmed by the Senate. And it's particularly weird because in contrast to Obama's appointment - which may objectively set back gay rights by relieving leftist pressure on him to do something bigger - Bush's appointment of Guest demonstrably advanced the cause of civil liberties. It did so internationally by helping shame Romania into repealing anti-gay laws. And it did so domestically by starting a heated debate on the right, which is where that debate will have to happen if gay rights are ever going to go mainstream:

During his speech at Guest's swearing-in ceremony in the State Department Diplomatic Reception Room, Powell explicitly noted the presence of and positively recognized Guest's life partner, Alex Nevarez. LGBT rights groups viewed Guest's appointment, and Powell's remarks, as historic and indicative of greater recognition of gay State Department employees and same-sex partners. Socially conservative groups expressed opposition to Guest's appointment and to Powell's gesture.

Three weeks after Guest took up residence, the NYT ran a story headlined "Bucharest Journal: It's Still No Breeze for Gays, Even Diplomatic Ones." So don't even think about giving Bush any credit. I wonder if the NYT will be running similar stories about Obama's appointee? I'm thinking almost certainly, because they're so assiduous.

In unrelated news, the Obama White House is launching a major effort to stymie the anti-White House leanings of the press. Because that's obviously what's holding him back.

References and previously after the jump...

Two things. First: I forgot about this shadowy permanent transition team that's allowed to take unlimited amounts of tax exempt money without disclosing its donors, the better to employ Obama foot soldiers. What ever happened to those kids? More curiously: if this is where Obama sends loyalists who can't get security clearances and Van Jones isn't part of that group - who the hell are they employing? Who is less fit to hold federal office than a Truther Commie revolutionary who tells followers it's OK to "get rowdy" in the streets?

On the other hand, this does imply they know that some people shouldn't be in the West Wing or in charge of tens of billions of dollars. Or at least they used to:

Called the "Obama/Biden Transition Project," it is a 501(c)4 tax-exempt organization, with no limits on the contributions it can receive and no requirements to divulge the names of individuals or organizations that give it money... No one is certain that any political organization has ever set up a tax-exempt entity that would be shrouded in such secrecy, particularly when Obama claimed he would be more transparent about the way things were done...

As well, the nonprofit may also serve as a haven for Obama supporters and campaign loyalists who for one reason or another can't be employed by the Administration or in the federal government. "There are some people who have been with us from the beginning who are clearly political liabilities or who won't be able to qualify for a job, say, because they can't get a security clearance," says another aide, who was unaware of the unique Obama transition project's tax status.

Do you remember when American Presidents didn't have to worry about scoring sinecures for "supporters and loyalists" who couldn't get security clearances? I guess Obama really does speak to a part of the electorate that other leaders have neglected.

References:
* Wasting No Time [American Spectator]

Previously:
* Mel Levine's Defense Of Obama: He'll Make Obsessed Anti-Israel Lunatics Love The US. Presumably By Magic.
* Van Jones Haikus
* Flashback: Van Jones Mocks Rumsfeld For Resigning, Says He's "Serving Behind The Counter At Wendy's" [Video]

The scrupulous FogCityJohn, member of the reality-based Daily Kos community, currently has a top post intriguingly titled "If Joe Wilson Were A Democrat." He muses thusly:

Tonight a Republican congressman essentially called the President of the United States a liar during a nationally televised speech delivered before both Houses of Congress... But what if the shoe were on the other foot? What if a Democratic congressman had interrupted one of Bush's speeches to Congress by calling Bush a liar? What do you think would have happened then?

I can tell you what would have happened. There would have been immediate demands from Republicans that the offending Democrat resign his office. The next day, the Republican leadership in both houses of Congress would introduce resolutions condemning the congressman for his disrespect of the president. Naturally, the Democratic congressman would get no support from members of his own party. They would be falling all over themselves to condemn his outburst themselves, lest they be accused of tolerating that kind of behavior, or even worse, of being "Bush haters." The resolutions of censure would pass with the support of all Republicans and strong majorities of Democrats. The congressman might even be driven to resign. Even if not, he'd be subjected to protests in his district and in Washington. (Needless to say, the news media would join the baying hounds calling for his head.)

But Joe Wilson is a Republican. So I'm betting that none of the above will happen to him... And that, my friends, is the difference between the two parties in a nutshell. (Somehow seemed appropriate to quote John McCain.)

Remember the time when some deep-feeling member of some activist tribe hoisted up an anti-China sign reading "Would We Have Allowed Nazi Germany to Host the Olympics?" This is nowhere near as awesome as that. But it's still pretty cool. The best part is how he introduces his shrill portrait of grim partisan inequity with a brash "I can tell you what would have happened." Great ethos! Demonstrably idiotic followup made more embarrassing by the combination of seething resentment and righteous indignation. But still great ethos!

I've let the clip run a little long at the end so you can see how your moral betters stayed petulantly rooted to their seats after having shouted down Bush, so disgusted were they by the prospect of Social Security reform:

In fairness to the liberals currently wetting themselves over Joe Wilson's destruction of Congressional civility, maybe those shouts of "no" and "boo" were meant supportively. Like "No! Good God NO! Thank you so much for bringing this to our attention! Boo on reality!" Because otherwise this morning's histrionics seem kind of self-serving and hypocritical. And moronic.

References:
* If Joe Wilson Were a Democrat [Daily Kos]
* Would We Have Allowed Nazi Germany to Host the Olympics? [Right Mind]

Previously:
* The Ugly Left - Failed Singer Reunites With Harvard Brat, Threatens To Kill President Bush. Ms. Coulter Responds [Video]
* Progressive Democrats To Palin: Get Back In The Kitchen
* Roseanne Barr Dresses Up As Hitler, Bakes "Jew Cookies" In Oven

Here are last week's Council results, barely a day before this week's nominations get posted. I know that's the kind of timeliness and efficiency you've come to expect from MR, and I wouldn't dream of offering any less. Joshuapundit's exposition on the wide and wonderful ways that Kennedy degraded public discourse and public policy took top honors:

Senator Ted Kennedy could accurately be called the Godfather of our current immigration mess, starting with his role in creating and passing the Immigration Act of 1965, which radically changed the demographic face of America. It abolished the long standing quota system based on national origins that had regulated America's demographic composition based on the fair proportion of each group's existing presence in the US population... Kennedy assured the American people that immigration would remain at around 300,000 per year, as it was in 1965. It almost doubled the year after the bill was passed and is now running at well over a million legal immigrants per year.

Typical bait and switch. Kennedy probably would have approved of the left's increasingly obvious plan to smuggle in single payer health care under the umbrella of a public option. And by "approved" I mean "planned." And by "would have" I mean "did."

The runner up Council post was my interview with an auto industry insider who explained how Cash 4 Clunkers distorted the market, wiped out rebates, and cemented Japanese dominance. One of the runner up non-Council posts, from Big Hollywood's Leigh Scott, discussed the same "what's yours is ours and what's mine is mine" incompetence as a function of stoner ethics.

I can't wait to see how these geniuses justify their health care takeover now that the recess is over. If it's anything like how Reid was doing it during the recess, per the top non-Council post from the Las Vegas Review Journal, it's going to be entertaining:

On Wednesday, before he addressed a Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce luncheon, Reid joined the chamber's board members for a meet-'n'-greet and a photo. One of the last in line was the Review-Journal's director of advertising, Bob Brown, a hard-working Nevadan who toils every day on behalf of advertisers. He has nothing to do with news coverage or the opinion pages of the Review-Journal. Yet, as Bob shook hands with our senior U.S. senator in what should have been nothing but a gracious business setting, Reid said: "I hope you go out of business."

The other two non-Council runner up posts, from Jerold Auerbach and Zenpundit respectively, discussed the centuries-old Muslim campaigns to wipe out Jews and the broader apocolyptic theologies that drive them. On the plus side, peace will be here just as soon as Israel stops building grocery stores in East Jerusalem. Obama promises!

References and previously after the jump...

Another weekend, another scramble to bring your attention to the last round of great Watchers Council posts before the next one goes live. Kennedy's death was obviously the most topical subject, with sentiments running about the way you'd expect. Rhymes With Right actually titled her post Arlington National Cemetery Desecrated By Burial Of Traitor, which is harsh but not entirely untrue. Joshuapundit's extremely long post ran through Kennedy's legislative and public record, making the case that the Senator was something less than a force for good.

The Glittering Eye discussed the incoherence of treating health care as one of the sources for its inevitable failure. My post addressed the same issue tangentially, in an interview with an auto industry insider. The Obama administration - which wants to enforce said health care right by taking control of 15% of the US economy - managed to screw up a simple car rebate program in a genuinely impressive number of ways. Though given the myopic radicals that The Colossus of Rhodey convincingly argues are in charge of White House policy, that's hardly a surprise.

In the past the Obama administration's incompetence might have been successfully suppressed - at least for a time - by a worshipful media (cf. media blackout, Van Jones controversy). But in an environment where fiscal conservatives are able to go viral, per The Provocateur's post, gatekeepers have a much harder time deciding what people should get to hear.

Speaking of Obama worship, Bookworm Room extended her thoughts from the previous week about the reflexive anti-Americanism and denigration of conservatives that runs through Hollywood. Hollywood's denizens have latched onto a myriad of obnoxious tropes, from sneering anti-conservative contempt to faux-sophisticated anti-imperialism to repetitive smears of our military. Presumably they think these hack jobs earn them extra credit with critics because by traditional metrics like "do they make money" they're failures.

Shifting gears, it's still not peace in the Middle East. Soccer Dad suggested the situation might have something to do with the Palestinian refusal to accept the right of Jews to be alive in a Jewish State, but it could be anything really. Politically-inspired Islamic terrorism also came in the context of Right Truth's post on the disgraceful release of the Lockerbie bomber, which from one side looks like base appeasement but from another angle seems like a huge misunderstanding. There's a lot of that going around.

References and previously after the jump...

Because that's apparently where you go when you're forced out of the White House. The only difference being that Rumsfeld resigned in dignity, noting that he had obviously lost the confidence of the American people. Van Jones not so much:

Van Jones, special adviser for green jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, resigned Saturday, following weeks of pressure from the right and a flurry of revelations about his past statements. "I am resigning my post at the Council on Environmental Quality, effective today," Jones said in a statement dated Sept 5 released around midnight on Sept 6. "On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me. They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide," he continued.

In fairness to him, those YouTube videos of his past speeches really were dishonest. How vicious of the right to use them, along with his other past statements, to discover what the media refused to acknowlege even after the controversy broke.

Speaking of YouTube videos and past statements, here are two minutes of Van Jones mocking Rumsfeld for being "out of work" and "serving behind the counter at Wendy's," much to the delight of the assembled sycophants. The full speech is 28 minutes and was posted at the time by these lefties but I took the liberty of clipping it down to the relevant 2 minutes.

If you have time for the full 28 minutes though, it really is a tour de force. Especially striking phrases: "slave ship on dry land," "a new Jim Crow," "you don't have to call someone the N-word if you can just call them a felon," and "in just 24 months 6 years of one party authoritarian rule would be shattered." Also: "you might have to get rowdy, and I understand." A nice juxtaposition with the left's new found emphasis on low-key deliberative dignity.

Anyway, it's not just that he's celebrating the left's victory in a particularly obnoxious way, and it's not even that he had already bonded with the crowd over how Rumsfeld was "at home watching [them] on TV." It's that he's just so pleased with himself about the joke, as if this is the most clever routine ever. The self-satisfaction, combined with the crowd's catcalls, creates a nauseating effect very similar to watching MSNBC anchors nod along to Obama sanctimoniously preaching about Teachable Moments. The great orators of our time, I guess.

Though remind me again - what is it they say about the gods and hubris?

If you want to contribute your own under this post on the Mere Rhetoric Facebook Page, I suggest you do it sooner rather than later. Kaus thinks he's gone by midnight.

Health care Waterloo.
Can't have any "distractions."
Warm up the bus please.

Communist Truther
ignored by White House vetters.
Now he goes away.

Left's "true progressive"
is a Truther Commie loon.
No argument here.

Obama Green czar
rants re "asshole GOP."
Post-partisanship!

San Fran radical
wants you to know he's reformed.
Because you're stupid.

"9-11 Truth"
is very ambiguous.
He just didn't know.

Recall: campaign smears.
Obama's radical friends
might get appointed.

White House dumping Van.
There's a "death panel" joke here
but it's kind of stale.

Left as an exercise for the reader: references to feverish anti-American, anti-Israeli hiphop.

References:
* Van Jones, Gone in 60 Seconds? [Kausfiles]
* Sing It... Van Jones Cut Nasty Hate-Filled Music Album, Too! (Video) [Gateway Pundit]

Previously:
* Change! Kos Finally Finds A Cop Killing Revolutionary He'll Criticize
* Nightstick Carrying Pro-Obama Thugs Intimidating Voters In PA
* Obama Campaign Demands Ban On Republican Jewish Group, Escalates Thuggish Intimidation

The wonderful thing here is that it's not just a story of glazed-eyed government incompetence breaking at the same time that the Obama administration is trying to nationalize 15% of the US economy. It's that the incompetence has its source in interest groups who issue diktats according to whatever the prevailing liberal pseudo-sophistication happens to be. 30 years ago it was preservation, then we decided that nature should always be allowed to take its course, then we decided we had to plant trees everywhere to enrich the atmosphere - opps! - and now we've got some kind of non-interventionist hodgepodge.

The upshot being that if you think this is bad, wait until panels of doctors and bureaucrats get to make calculations - and set premiums - based on which social groups they think are responsible for unreasonable costs. The public "blame the smokers no blame the drinkers no blame people who drive too much" populism is going to be exciting enough.

But when well-heeled Blue State bureaucrats start making decisions based on a combination of non-replicated studies, shrill urban hand-wringing, and a sensibility about healthy living derived mostly from the Barnes and Noble "Personal Enrichment" shelf - that's when things get really awesome. If someone in San Francisco has made a serious effort to ban or regulate something you enjoy consuming, bummer.

Anyway, yeah:

Federal authorities failed to follow through on plans earlier this year to burn away highly flammable brush in a forest on the edge of Los Angeles to avoid the very kind of wildfire now raging there... Months before the huge blaze erupted, the U.S. Forest Service obtained permits to burn away the undergrowth and brush on more than 1,700 acres of the Angeles National Forest. But just 193 acres had been cleared by the time the fire broke out, Forest Service resource officer Steve Bear said.

The agency defended its efforts, saying weather, wind and environmental rules tightly limit how often these "prescribed burns" can be conducted... Some critics suggested that protests from environmentalists over prescribed burns contributed to the disaster, which came after the brush was allowed to build up for as much as 40 years. "This brush was ready to explode," said Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich... "The environmentalists have gone to the extreme to prevent controlled burns, and as a result we have this catastrophe today."...

The blaze has destroyed more than five dozen homes, killed two firefighters and forced thousands of people to flee... Biologist Ileene Anderson with the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental organization, said burn permits should be difficult to get because of the potential damage to air quality. Clearing chaparral by hand or machine must be closely scrutinized because it can hurt native species.

Acres supposed to get cleared: 1,748. Acres actually cleared, according to official records: 12.8. In fairness, the fire service says that the records are wrong by a factor of 10 and that they actually managed to clear 193 acres.

So just over 10%.

References:
* Careful Where You Put That Tree [Wired]
* Shh... Massachusetts Proves Mandate-Based Health Reform Will Be A Disaster [MR]
* Feds didn't clear brush in wildfire area [AP]

Previously:
* Geithner Tells Reporters: "I'm Very Confident You... Will Do A Good Job Of Framing This Thing"
* Guy Who Accused Bush Of "Ethnically Cleansing" New Orleans Wets Himself Over Obama Hitler Poster
* Incompetence In Education, Foreign Policy, Economics. But Especially Education. (Plus: Uber-Competent Right Truth Joins Watchers Council)

The Council winners for last week got posted Friday so naturally I'm getting to them now. Joshuapundit had the week's top Council post, discussing the White House's power grab on interrogations and just about everything else:

Deputy White House press secretary Bill Burton announced today that President Obama has approved creating a brand new anti-terrorism interrogation squad that will report directly to the White House... First, the formation of this new unit reporting directly to the president is yet one more example of this Administration's obsessive consolidating of power in its own hands through minions and 'czars' and 'special envoys' who report directly to the White House and undercut the normal congressional oversight... Second, this statement is a clear indication that Obama has decided to reduce the CIA to a mere figurehead, and the fact that the FBI is taking the lead is a clear indication that this White House considers Islamist fascism as primarily a law enforcement problem.

The Council runner up was Bookworm Room. Her post on the smug condescension of the workaday Blue State liberal juxtaposed nicely with the top non-Council post, where Fouad Ajami discussed the creepy fascination the left has with Obama's Cult of Personality:

So we are to have a French health-care system without a French tradition of political protest. It is odd that American liberalism, in a veritable state of insurrection during the Bush presidency, now seeks political quiescence. These "townhallers" who have come forth to challenge ObamaCare have been labeled "evil-mongers" (Harry Reid), "un-American" (Nancy Pelosi), agitators and rowdies and worse.

A political class, and a media elite, that glamorized the protest against the Iraq war, that branded the Bush presidency as a reign of usurpation, now wishes to be done with the tumult of political debate. President Barack Obama himself, the community organizer par excellence, is full of lament that the "loudest voices" are running away with the national debate. Liberalism in righteous opposition, liberalism in power: The rules have changed.

The non-Council runner up was Oceanguy's eulogy for Scott Speicher. Suffice to say that it's not the easiest read.

References:
* Sowing the Seeds of Discontent [Watcher Of Weasels]
* Obama Versus CIA: New WH Interrogation Unit Created As Panetta Threatens To Resign [Joshuapundit]
* Why pay $10 for Julie & Julia just to suffer gratuitous insults? *UPDATED* [Bookworm Room]
* Obama's Summer of Discontent [Fouad Ajami / WSJ]
* Welcome Home Scott Speicher [Oceanguy]

Previously:
* Watchers Council Results - Watching Obama Watching Iran
* Watchers Council Results - Liberal Activism In Academia And Beyond
* Watchers Council Results - Actual Literal Wealth Destruction Is Very Nuanced

Republican myths blah blah web 2.0 blah blah blah setting the record straight. On the plus side at least this emailed tripe, courtesy of the White House Open Government Initiative, doesn't read as if it was written by someone's unemployed nephew who got the job on the strength of his Comp Lit degree. At least there's that:

Our latest Reality Check video features Vice President Joe Biden addressing the biggest whopper of all: that our health insurance system works just fine and Americans don't care about reform. Nothing could be further from the truth. So we're trying something new. You can help the Vice President debunk this myth by uploading your own video on why reform matters to you. This is an opportunity for Americans of all backgrounds and situations to make the case for reform in your own words.

Need some help? We also have a new online quiz to help set the record straight about health insurance reform. Find out what's in reform for somebody like you by answering a few questions. What does reform mean if you already have insurance? What if you don't? What does it mean if you're young? If you're a senior? If you have children? Take the quiz and then share it -- simple tools like this are a great way to cut through the noise and get the facts about reform: www.WhiteHouse.gov/realitycheck/quiz

My favorite part of the video is the oozing condescension about how you'd have to be a total moron to believe they're cutting Medicare, something that used to be Obama's Orszag-driven selling point for "comprehensive" reform. Note the weasel word "eliminate" though. At least he's only being intellectually dishonest!

The political upshot is that they're doubling down on the "Republicans think health care is just fine" line, a particularly brown thread in the dull "Republicans have no alternative" tapestry the White House is weaving. In addition to being flat out false - Republicans have multiple alternatives that will never be let out of committee - it's also been a spectacular loser for them.

Although you have to admire Democrats for spinning "the other side" as anti-reform, just a few days after Reid's "trial lawyers are scary" response to Palin-style calls for tort reform.

But perhaps most importantly: "reality check"? That's really what they're calling it? Could they be more obnoxious?

References:
* At kf It's All-Platform Game-Changers 24/7 [Kausfiles]
* Shhhh! There's a Republican Alternative to Democrat-Care; Don't Let Anyone Know! [Herman Cain]
* Rasmussen: GOP now more trusted on health care than Democrats [Hot Air]
* Video: Dean says no tort reform because trial lawyers too intimidating [Hot Air]
* Palin: No health-care reform without tort reform [Hot Air]

Previously:
* Shh... Massachusetts Proves Mandate-Based Health Reform Will Be A Disaster
* Dems: We'll Finance Health Care With Cigarette Tax That Will Cause People To Stop Buying Cigarettes
* Obama To Lawmakers Concerned About Health Care: Stop Talking

They're not even talking about the part where Biden bragged that he was delivering money to competitive rural districts. These stunts go way beyond the White House, presenting nice little case studies in how even the most fundamentally economic programs will inevitably get politicized by Congressional reps who are driven by self-interest and ideology and have the taxpayer money to indulge in both. File this where ever you keep "we're not going to run GM" followed by "hey, let's build green cars!"

A sleepy Montana checkpoint along the Canadian border that sees about three travelers a day will get $15 million under President Barack Obama's economic stimulus plan. A government priority list ranked the project as marginal, but two powerful Democratic senators persuaded the administration to make it happen. Despite Obama's promises that the stimulus plan would be transparent and free of politics, the government is handing out $720 million for border upgrades under a process that is both secretive and susceptible to political influence....

The Whitetail project, which involves building a border station the size and cost of a Hollywood mansion, benefited from two key allies, Montana Sens. Max Baucus and Jon Tester. Both pressed Napolitano to finance projects in their state. Tester's office boasted of that effort in an April news release, crediting Baucus and his seat at the head of the "powerful Senate Finance Committee."...

Customs and Border Protection, the Homeland Security agency overseeing border projects, allowed the AP to review the list but will not make it public or explain its justifications for deviating from it.

I'm not really concerned that the most transparent administration in history is keeping stimulus measures opaque. After all Romer says that the stimulus is "absolutely" working at its 5 month mark, even though that's definitionally unknowable since most of the money hasn't been spent and any stabilization is probably the result of monetary policy and effects on consumption have been minimal. But why should facts and logic be allowed to get in the way of reckless politicized spending?

Hey, if dead people got stimulus checks in May - and they did - who can really complain about a mansion-style checkpoint or two?

References and previously after the jump...

This week's Watchers Council nominations are up. It hasn't been the best week for Obama and the vast new health care bureaucracy - aka the permanent Big Government Democratic constituency - that he wants to create. The Colossus of Rhodey ran down ObamaCare's financial and social costs, the administration's unblinking denials to the contrary. In the same context The Glittering Eye outlined the health care reforms we need and why ObamaCare's entire approach is misguided.

Of course you don't actually need new bureaucracies to throw more government money at Democratic constituents. My own post described how California Democrats hiked the salaries of their personal staff and tried to cover it up. Or, more ominously, The Provocateur - digging into mind numbing tax records - did genuine investigative work proving that the federal government is shoveling millions into ACORN's coffers.

Joshuapundit and Right Truth's both dealt with the many layers of stupidity involved in Holder's CIA witch hunt, with Joshuapundit focusing more on the institutional impacts and Right Truth going after Obama's motives. The reflexive liberal sympathy for terrorist prisoners - a sensibility usually justified with gestures toward the rule of law or toward "our values" - extends all the way into freeing filthbags like Megrahi and coddling rogues like Iran and its proxies. See Soccer Dad's post on that.

Bookworm Room described sitting through Julie & Julia. Liberal filmmakers seem to believe they get extra credit for slipping gratuitous anti-conservative stereotypes into their works (they used to in cinema school - old habits die hard). This self-satisfied sneering is a particularly charming aspect of Blue State cocoons, though to get the full experience you really need to go to Broadway. Those tools are still slipping unscripted anti-Bush references into their songs, much to the delight of their aren't-we-oh-so-liberal-together audiences.

But for some reason, per Rhymes With Right, even a whiff of conservative group think is enought to cause liberal journalists to wet themselves.

As always this a great collection of Council posts. Feel free to sound off about any of them under this post on Mere Rhetoric's Facebook page.

References and previously after the jump...

Do you think that they know just how mind-blowing their mind-blowing hypocrisy actually is?

I suppose it was inevitable that the liberal intelligentsia would start comparing George Bush to Adolf Hitler. Here is what Los Angeles Times columnist and Georgetown University law professor Rosa Brooks recently said... "I think we do live in 1930s Germany, but the question is, in which part of 1930s Germany? Some people argue that we are in the Germany of 1939, other people argue that we are in the Germany of 1934... are you already over some crucial tipping point and it's already unstoppable"... it would not take much for things to get past the crucial tipping point where the US ceased be a democracy." Brooks was discussing a book by former Al Gore adviser Naomi Wolf, "The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot." In the book, Wolf insists that she is not equating Bush with Hitler, nor the United States with Nazi Germany, then proceeds to do just that... Nazi Germany became a one-party state in July 1933, six months after Hitler came to power...

That was in the run-up to the 2008 election, which turned out to differ from post-Wiemar Germany in several salient respects. The part about having an election at all, for instance, seems to be the kind of distinction that should have implied a difference. But that did little to dilute the ultra-sophisticated discussions about what flavor of fascist Bushilter exactly was.

In fairness to these tools times really have changed. When you're resisting a genocidal, free-speech destroying junta like the Bush administration, it's any means necessary. Now that The One has ascended, more the opposite:

From a Q&A with the speaker of the California assembly, Karen Bass, in the Los Angeles Times: "The Republicans were essentially threatened and terrorized against voting for revenue. Now [some] are facing recalls. They operate under a terrorist threat: 'You vote for revenue and your career is over.' I don't know why we allow that kind of terrorism to exist. I guess it's about free speech, but it's extremely unfair."

Change!

References:
* Guy Who Accused Bush Of "Ethnically Cleansing" New Orleans Wets Himself Over Obama Hitler Poster [MR]
* Is Bush Hitler? I don't think so. [Boston Globe]
* Right-Wing Talk Radio = Terrorists? [Kathryn Jean Lopez] [KLo / NRO]

Previously:
* These Are Just Not Serious People (Plus: Another Rich Liberal Enamored With Che)
* Watchers Council Nominations - Shameless Hypocrisy Doesn't Make MSM Liberals Wrong. But It Does Make Them Shameless Hypocrites.
* Israeli Flag Is Offensive, Bush=Hitler Poster Not So Much

As Allah put it in Hot Air's writeup, "if you want to fight dirty for god's sake stop whining when the other side fights dirty in return." I think there's a legitimate theory that these tools are too narcissistic to realize the mind-blowing hypocrisy of, say, manufactured outrage over Obama effigies. But that doesn't make their routine pants wetting - or the strutting hosannas that accompany them - any less obnoxious.

Here's Barney Frank in 2007 coming dangerously close to Bush = Hitler territory, a charming gesture to the explicit "Bush equals Hitler and New Orleans is a concentration camp." hysteria that his nutroots shills were only too happy to indulge in:

Frank, the new chairman of the House Committee on Financial Services, said that after the administration's initial "incompetence," it has done "virtually nothing to alleviate" the loss of housing by the poor in New Orleans, who mostly are black. "What I believe is, at this point, you're not talking about incompetence, you're talking about values ... when in a calculated way you refuse to do anything for well over a year after the disaster," Frank said. "The policy, I think, is ethnic cleansing by inaction..."

And here's Frank this week blustering about how someone would have to live on another planet to compare US policy to "Nazi policy":

Next up: Barney Frank goes ballistic on someone for demagoguing us into a global financial meltdown.

References and previously after the jump...

References:
* Just a reminder: The Obama Hitler posters are being carried by Lyndon LaRouche nuts [Hot Air]
* Barney Frank accuses Bush of 'ethnic cleansing' [WND]
* Catalog Of Mind-Blowing Liberal Hypocrisy Now Includes Manufactured Outrage Over Effigies [MR]
* Bush equals Hitler, New Orleans a concentration camp [newsgroups.derkeiler]
* Obama: AIG Is Like A Suicide Bomber. One Of Those Bad Suicide Bombers. [MR]

Previously:
* NJDC Tool Aaron Keyak Helpfully Illustrates How Liberal Activists Sneeringly Cocoon Themselves In Asinine Arguments And Dishonest Smears
* Farrakhan: Obama Is "A Herald Of The Messiah... A Savior" (Plus: Obama's Followers Attacking Conservatives, Fantasizing About Shooting Palin)
* Obama Campaign Cripples Anti-Ahmadinejad Rally, Neatly Crystallizes Thuggish Liberal Fascism

What's the only thing more absurd than being a Democrat who cuts government salaries, then issues worthless IOUs anyway, then demands workers pay income taxes on those IOUs? Doing it at the same time you're giving your own staff tangible raises that you cover up so hamfistedly the MSM calls you out and specifically identifies you as a Democrat:

At least 87 California Assembly staff members received raises totaling more than $430,000 on an annualized basis, even as the state faced a growing budget deficit that led to furloughs and pay cuts for many other government workers... salary bumps went to three employees in the office of Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, the Los Angeles Democrat who leads the 80-member chamber, and three to staff members of the Democratic caucus she oversees. In the 40-member Senate, nine staffers had a boost in pay, leading to an annualized increase of $152,000...

Both houses of the Legislature refused the AP's request to make the payroll records available electronically. Details of their spending are not listed in the annual budget the governor signs, as they are for other state agencies and departments, meaning there is no way to cross-check the information the Legislature provides.

This is a perfect illustration of why Angelinos have an inferiority complex vis a vis other big Blue State cities. I can guarantee that when Chicago Democrats decide to surreptitiously slip money to their friends - which I assume is pretty much every day - they do it right. None of this "so moronic that the AP's Sacramento beat reporter can crack it between lunchtime martinis" nonsense.

California Democrats so incompetent they can't even leverage decade-long legislative domination over an opaque budget into an end-of-session salary bump. No wonder we can't get get them to balance the budget.

At least I assume it was only Dems feeding at this particular trough, since the word "Republican" would have appeared at least once if the AP could have inserted it. The article does mention Schwarzenegger's office at the very end, noting that it shed both total workers and total salary expenditures. At times like this I like to remember Harold Meyerson's prescient 2001 American Prospect article, "California's Progressive Mosaic:"

[W]ith its Democratic governor, U.S. senators, state legislature, and congressional delegation, California is the only one of the nation's 10 largest states that is uniformly under Democratic control... a number of its cities are coming to look like Justice Louis Brandeis's "laboratories of democracy" - enacting minimum wage, health care, and worker-rights ordinances that would normally be the responsibility of the federal government... a civic left has emerged in California, with the state's new-model labor movement... at its core...

California has responded to the economic travails and political opportunities that have come with its immigrant workers by getting out in front of much of the nation, by creating a model of social equity, of worker and public power, at a time of capital supremacy. A full continent off-Broadway, the next New Deal is in tryouts.

It's a truly wonderful article, filled with celebratory descriptions about how the alliance between Big Labor and Latino groups systematically transformed California into an unruly progressive utopia. The phrases "especially innovative union movement" and "the critical factor... is the SEIU" are, I think, particularly poignant. It calls upon the rest of the nation to keep an eye on California to see how the subsequent decade turns out. As the academics are wont to say, it's a piece that rewards multiple readings.

References:
* California: You owe us taxes on those IOUs [Hot Air]
* AP investigation: Calif. lawmakers boost staff pay [AP]
* California's Progressive Mosaic [Meyerson]

Previously:
* NJDC Tool Aaron Keyak Helpfully Illustrates How Liberal Activists Sneeringly Cocoon Themselves In Asinine Arguments And Dishonest Smears
* State Dept Importing 1,350 Palestinian Saddam Supporters From Iraq Into Southern California
* J-Street: You Know What American Campuses Need? More Left Wing Anti-Israel Activism.

I can't wait for these guys to get into the health care business. They're so awesome at everything they do. From reviving the economy...

The Obama administration used economic stimulus money to pay for 50 airport projects that didn't meet the grant criteria and approved projects at four airports with a history of mismanaging federal grants, a government watchdog said Monday. Transportation Department Inspector General Calvin Scovel said he plans to examine the Federal Aviation Administration's process for selecting programs for the $1.1 billion in grant money. Among the projects that Scovel said didn't meet the FAA's minimum score was $14 million that went to Akiachak, Alaska, a town of 659 residents, to replace its airfield. The town has a seaplane and is only 14 nautical miles from the state's fourth busiest airport.

... to manipulating the market in a greener direction...

But what LaHood and other administration officials usually don't mention is that some trucks and sport-utility vehicles that get less than 20 miles per gallon, like the Ford F-150 truck and one version of the Cadillac SRX Crossover, also are being purchased with the new government subsidies. Both are bulky vehicles weighing more than 6,000 pounds when loaded that boast at least 248 horsepower. Just how many consumers used the federal rebates to buy these larger, not-so-green vehicles is unclear. The Obama administration has declined so far to release detailed records of purchases under the program being compiled by the Transportation Department, listing every clunker deal requesting rebates. The Associated Press requested the data July 31.

The Transportation Department distributes regular summaries of sales from the clunkers program and has used the electronic sales information from dealers to bolster arguments that Americans are dumping gas guzzlers for gas savers. But its failure to release detailed records means the public can't verify those claims... Even the Top 10 list of mostly smaller, fuel-efficient cars that LaHood has cited as evidence of the program's success is being questioned. A different Top 10 sales list produced by Edmunds.com, an auto consumer Web site, from dealer sales data shows fewer small cars and more large vehicles like trucks and utility vehicles make up the best sellers.

... there's really no task so basic that they can't screw it up through a combination of ideology, "send money back to the district" vote buying, and sheer incompetence. With this kind of talent to choose from, I'm sure we'll have no problem filling up a vast new government health bureaucracy with only the best and brightest.

Of course as of last spring the White House hadn't even managed to fill up existing health care posts. But no worries - no doubt there's a glut of super-competent, super-trained Americans just waiting to fill government ranks. The reason that they haven't pitched in on TARP, the stimulus, or Cash For Clunkers is because they're saving themselves for nationalized health care.

References:
* Gov't watchdog questions airport stimulus projects [AP]
* SPIN METER: $3 billion buys not-so-green vehicles [AP]
* As flu hits, holes in W.H. health team [Politico]

Previously:
* Shh... Massachusetts Proves Mandate-Based Health Reform Will Be A Disaster
* Obama To Lawmakers Concerned About Health Care: Stop Talking
* New Poll: Only 26% Consider Health Reform A Success In Massachusetts

Gather around class, as we open up one of the central passages from Freud's seminal Interpretation Of Dreams:

The term Kettle Logic or La logique du chaudron refers to Freud's mention of the defensive tactics engaged by a neighbor who had borrowed a kettle and was accused of having returned it with a hole. Freud mentions this tale in his Interpretation of Dreams... "The whole plea -- for this dream is nothing else -- recalls vividly the defence offered by a man who was accused by his neighbour of having returned a kettle in a damaged condition. In the first place, he had returned the kettle undamaged; in the second place it already had holes in it when he borrowed it; and in the third place, he had never borrowed it at all. A complicated defence, but so much the better; if only one of these three lines of defence is recognized as valid, the man must be acquitted."

Democrats and their MSM water carriers on Palin's "death panel" accusation:

(1) We'll have death panels in the plan because they're necessary:

Obama came a lot closer to talking about "death panels" back in April than I'd thought... He's talking about a panel of independent experts making end-of-life recommendations in order to save costs that have an effect at an individual level. And he thought it would be in the bill that emerges... It's also pretty clear that something like the "IMAC" panel is what he has in mind. Whether or not the IMAC would actually do this - Harold Pollack says end-of-life issues are well down the curve-bender's list, for example - Obama thought it would do it.

(2) There are no death panels in the plan:

Former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin says the health care overhaul bill would set up a "death panel." Federal bureaucrats would play God, ruling on whether ailing seniors are worth enough to society to deserve life-sustaining medical care. Palin and other critics are wrong. Nothing in the legislation would carry out such a bleak vision. The provision that has caused the uproar would instead authorize Medicare to pay doctors for counseling patients about end-of-life care, if the patient wishes.

(3) We're dropping death panels from the plan:

"Independent" guidance to seniors about death with an eye to reducing the lion's share of health-care spending. What could go wrong? Tired of the political migraines it's getting from this, the Finance Committee finally decides to, er, pull the plug:

"On the Finance Committee, we are working very hard to avoid unintended consequences by methodically working through the complexities of all of these issues and policy options," Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said in a statement. "We dropped end-of-life provisions from consideration entirely because of the way they could be misinterpreted and implemented incorrectly..." Grassley said. The veteran Iowa lawmaker said the end-of-life provision in those bills would pay physicians to "advise patients about end-of-life care and rate physician quality of care based on the creation of and adherence to orders for end-of-life care."

Do you think nutroots cretins will apologize to Palin for the last few days of "you'd have to be an idiot not to understand that there are no death panels in ObamaCare"? I'm thinking they're such a reality-based community - to say nothing of gracious argumentative disputants - that they'll pretty much have to.

References:
* Kettle Logic [HG]
* Will You/Won't You Be on My "Death Panel"? [Kausfiles]
* FACT CHECK: No 'death panel' in health care bill [AP]
* Breaking: Finance Committee drops "death panel" provisions from Senate bill [Hot Air]

Previously:
* Dems: We'll Finance Health Care With Cigarette Tax That Will Cause People To Stop Buying Cigarettes
* Obama To Lawmakers Concerned About Health Care: Stop Talking
* Shh... Massachusetts Proves Mandate-Based Health Reform Will Be A Disaster

Karl at Hot Air is a little taken aback that the left is still obsessed with this nonsense, but that's only because he doesn't have the pleasure of hanging out with academics. When the Iranian election riots started, it was genuinely impressive to see how quickly status updates like "if only Americans cared this much about stolen elections" started appearing on Facebook. It's just where their minds naturally leap. See?

Anyway, this is hardly dumber than the moral and historical fudging that Obama indulged in on his apology tour. I guess its kind of gratifying that, despite all the energy the left has poured into brainstorming post-colonial equivalences between the US and the rest of the world, they still have to make shit up:

"Answering a question about Nigeria's recent election, Clinton said, 'In 2000, our presidential election came down to one state where the brother of the man running for President was the governor of the state. So we have our problems too.'"

That is a tasty combo of the Obama administration's "America sucks" foreign policy, coated in some rich, gooey Bush Deragement Syndrome. Sure, the "media recounts" of the 2000 election showed that the recounts requested by Al Gore or ordered by the Florida Supreme Court would have still resulted in a victory for George W. Bush. Why would that stop our country's chief diplomat from suggesting that her predecessors in government were there illegitimately? Certainly not Pres. Obama's faux insistence that we let go of the politics of the past.

How awesomely awesome would it be if someone casually dropped "well you know, Bill never would've made that gaffe" in front of her?

References:
* Parallels between Iranian election and America's in 2000 and 2004 [New Jersey News Room]
* Another disgrace: In Nigeria, Hillary hints that 2000 U.S. election was rigged [Hot Air]
* Hillary: "My Husband Is Not Secretary Of State, I Am!" [MR]

Previously:
* Clinton: Just A Head's Up, But Engagement With Iran Probably Won't Work
* Hillary Demonstrates Sophistication - Refuses To Negotiate With Individual Terrorists
* Hillary Asks "Who Painted" Miraculous Lady of Guadalupe On John Diego's Cloak

Remember the time when Obama branded AIG execs "suicide bombers" and threatened them with pitchfork-wielding mobs? Those AIG execs can rest easy for a while. The left's ever-spinning wheel of scapegoating - the necessary relief valve for any utopian movement that creepily coalesces around a Dear Leader - has temporarily landed on a new target:

"The war's on," says Rep. Baron P. Hill, and he's not talking about a conflict overseas, but a battle over health care in his own back yard, where thousands of people are trying to tell him what to do, some not so nicely... One thing Hill is not doing is holding public town-hall meetings like those at which opponents have heckled members of Congress. He held at least six unannounced meetings with constituents last week and is mulling a day-long series of one-on-one meetings or a telephone conference call. "I'm trying to control the event," Hill said... "What I don't want to do is create an opportunity for the people who are political terrorists to blow up the meeting and not try to answer thoughtful questions."

How dare political constituents try to tell their elected representatives what to do? The nerve. Though apparently there was a time when that sort of thing was celebrated by liberal journalists and academics. Historians the period "the Bush administration."

Here's a passage from an academic journal criticizing the Bush administration for using "War on Terror" rhetoric to "demonize enemies to serve as scapegoats for unifying the nation." Academic scrutiny of Presidential rhetoric has for some reason been a little more lax since Obama took office. Which is a little weird because Obama is the President who made "unity" into a brand. You'd think the "fascism" criticisms would be similar:

A cluster of characteristics commonly associated with fascism include deploying the themes and imagery of the nation's dominant religion for propaganda purposes, demonizing enemies to serve as scapegoats for unifying the nation, appealing repetitively and blatantly to nationalism and patriotism, pandering to fear and national security, undermining human and civil rights, militarizing society while expanding the power of law enforcement agencies, favoring a corporate culture of business and industrial power while suppressing labor, controlling news media and stifling dissent, and promoting an expansionist foreign policy.

In fairness nobody can really accuse Obama of suppressing labor. The part about "appealing repetitively and blatantly to nationalism and patriotism" gets a little more dicey:

Temper Madam Secretary, temper:

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's temper flared on Monday when a Congolese university student asked her for her husband's thinking on an international financial matter... Clinton was clearly displeased by the question at town hall forum in Kinshasa. "You want me to tell you what my husband thinks?" she replied incredulously when the male student asked her what "Mr. Clinton" thought of World Bank concerns about a multi-billion-dollar Chinese loan offer to the Congo. "My husband is not secretary of state, I am," an obviously annoyed Clinton said sharply. "If you want my opinion, I will tell you my opinion. I am not going to be channeling my husband."

I'd be testy too if every month brought a new article about how I had been successfully pushed aside by the Obama Administration. Though after getting institutionally marginalized by Obama's army of czars and personally humiliated by Obama's misogynist brat pack, I'm not sure what she expects.

Eh. If she didn't want to be treated poorly she shouldn't have aired Birth Of A Nation-style race baiting commercials during the election:

There had to be a murky racial subtext in [the 3am ad] somewhere; every attack on Obama contains one if you're just willing to look hard enough. I thought TPM would be the ones to find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow but instead it's Orlando Patterson, drinking in a critique of a black candidate that features sleeping non-black children and concluding, naturally enough, that it's quasi-Klan propaganda.

See?

References:
* Clinton: I'm secretary of state, not Bill [AP]
* The curious case of the steadily shrinking Hillary Clinton [Daily News]
* Stephanopoulos Doesn't Ask Hillary If Obama Has Marginalized Her [News Busters]
* Video: Campbell Brown rips Hillary for laughing off Obama speechwriter's photo [Hot Air]
* Harvard prof: You know what Hillary's "3 a.m." ad reminds me of? Birth of a Nation [Hot Air]

Previously:
* CNN Spends Evening Searching For Democrat Who Can Explain Why Anti-Palin Smears Don't Reek Of Sexism. Fails. (Plus: Guess When "Shrill" Used To Be Sexist)
* Mind-Blowing Hypocrisy: US Leads Int'l Attacks On Israel For Evicting Illegal Palestinian Squatters From East J'lem After Igniting Crisis Over Legal Jewish Residents
* Hillary Asks "Who Painted" Miraculous Lady of Guadalupe On John Diego's Cloak

Which makes sense given how American health care providers - having created the best health care system in the world - are so much more intransigent and conniving than the Iranian mullahs. It's almost like Obama targets the people who are objectively farthest from what he professes to believe with the most vitriol. Strange, that:

Listen to the cheers that greet the spectacle of an American President telling American citizens to shut up. Can't you just feel the post-partisan love? You can't? Racist.

I'm shocked that a guy who banned surrogates from debating Republican Jews during the election would stoop to shutting down domestic debate after the election. Ah well. At least it'll leave him time for dialogue with Iran:

Rice said reports that some of the demonstrators had been tortured "are of grave concern" to the United States. But she nonetheless insisted that President Barack Obama's offer to start a dialogue on Iran's nuclear program is still open. "That option remains on the table, and we leave it there in our national interests," Rice said.

Because that's a group of rational leaders we can do business with, in sharp contrast to the mob-driven thugs concerned about ObamaCare.

References:
* Ten leading indicators of
American health-care superiority [Hot Air]
* You're racist for worrying about ObamaCare [Hot Air]
* Obama Campaign Demands Ban On Republican Jewish Group, Escalates Thuggish Intimidation [MR]
* Rice denounces Iran 'show trials' [AFP]

Previously:
* Shh... Massachusetts Proves Mandate-Based Health Reform Will Be A Disaster
* Obama To Lawmakers Concerned About Health Care: Stop Talking
* Obama Pollsters Now Bragging About Their Poll-Tested Scapegoating

You've got to be kidding:

"However, it is now evident that an ugly campaign is underway not merely to misrepresent the health insurance reform legislation, but to disrupt public meetings and prevent members of Congress and constituents from conducting a civil dialogue," the two leaders wrote. "These disruptions are occurring because opponents are afraid not just of differing views -- but of the facts themselves. Drowning out opposing views is simply un-American." They point to a series of protests at congressional-district hearings held by members of Congress this summer, including one where the likeness of a Maryland congressman was hanged in effigy, one where the tombstone of a Texas congressman was displayed and meetings where protesters shouted down opponents with "Just say no."

One salient difference between the inexcusable Kratovil effigy and the fake lynching of Sarah Palin during the election: the health care opponent didn't try to hide behind the facade of being oh so ironic. Another salient difference: the conservative launched his stunt in the context of a policy disagreement, while the Palin death fantasies - along with the Palin rape fantasies and the Palin assault fantasies - were motivated by the pathological hate that leftists proudly and explicitly brag about.

For the last week I've been thinking this is a "can dish it out but can't take it" dynamic, ala Kos strutting about how the nutroots should "have some fun" with the Michigan primary and then demanding legal action against Rush for Project Chaos. That would certainly explain how liberals who absurdly complained that Bush was stifling dissent are now really trying to stifle dissent.

But that doesn't account for the surreal tone deafness of mainstream Democrats. Telling constituents to shut up and get out of the way? Really? So now I'm beginning to think that they're so deluded that they really believe they survived 8 years in the darkened basements and dispersed gulags of the Bush-Cheney regime, and now they're merely giving back in kind. This is getting borderline pathological.

References and previously after the jump...

This would be slightly less poignant if the left hadn't just spent eight years screeching about how expert opinion carries the day in their reality-based community. It would still be exactly as disturbing:

The Obama administration's sweeping financial regulatory reform proposals have been met by criticism from lawmakers and the financial industry, but dissent from fellow federal regulatory agency heads was too much for Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner to take. Last Friday, Geithner said enough is enough, using a meeting at the Treasury to throw down the gauntlet to officials from other agencies.

"We planned this meeting as a venue to deliver a tough message to regulators that we should work together to get reform done -- and focus less on protecting turf," said Treasury spokesman Andrew Williams. As reported by the Wall Street Journal, Geithner directed an expletive-laden critique at the heads of the Federal Reserve, the FDIC, the SEC, and other agencies. One source familiar with the meeting said, "It was a sh*t storm."... judging by the tone of last Friday's meeting, Geithner left no doubt that the time for the agencies to air their views had run out. In a calculated attempt to silence the dissenters, the Treasury chief made it clear that the in-fighting had to stop.

I'm pretty sure that at least some of those groups - the SEC, for instance - are supposed to be non-partisan independent agencies insulated from politicized Executive pressure. Actually I'm pretty sure that's true for all of them. Which would probably make this little display of intimidation unseemly at best and borderline illegal at worst. They really do think that they're still pushing around construction yards in Chicago, don't they.

Anyway: does anyone know if criticizing financial reform counts as the kind of "fishy" activity that we're now supposed to snitch to the White House about? I want to make sure I'm not falling down on my civic duty.

References:
* Throw Down: Geithner Blasts Government Regulators for Criticizing Administration's Financial Reform Measures [ABC News]
* Issa to Emanuel: Back Off! [House.gov]
* White House Blog Seeking Snitches [JWF]

Previously:
* Video: Obama Youth March In Lockstep, Chant About Inspirational Leader Who Will Guide Them Into Glorious Future
* Limited Post-Election Activities For Obama's Creepy Worshipers and Devoted Brownshirts?
* Obama Using Full Range Of Federal And State Power To Silence Dissent, Intimidate Voters

Mere Rhetoric, June 25, 2009:

When a country embraces a national health policy... [what] happens is what always happens when a government embarks on grandiose utopian schemes... When those schemes begin to collapse... the government needs to continuously manufacture new scapegoats to explain away the failures... If it's not smokers it'll be drinkers. If not drinkers then the obese. Or red meat eaters. Or people who refuse to exercise. Any group that regularly comes in for nanny state tsk tsk'ing is fair game... If all else fails, there are always the "doctors, hospitals and the health insurers" that a recent lefty screed attacked for having the gall to "continue to reap profits."... they make lots of money, setting up a little bit of populist class warfare.

Washington Post, July 31, 2009:

Obama has framed the health-care debate in Washington as a campaign against insurance companies... he told an audience that the existing system "works well for the insurance industry, but it doesn't always work well for you." The message is no accident, as the president's chief pollster made clear in a rare public speech last month... extensive polling revealed to the White House what many there had guessed: People hate insurance companies. "Take the public plan, for example," Benenson said. "Initial reaction to it wasn't as positive as it is now. . . . But we figured out that people like the idea of competition versus the insurance company, and that's why you get a number like 72 percent supporting it."

This is an administration known for amping up populist resentment to the level of death threats before demanding the equivalent of protection money to stand between its victims and the pitchfork-wielding crowds it created. Can you believe that some conservatives were concerned that Obama is a class warrior?

Just for the record: yes Obama's economic predictions are almost willfully inaccurate and no that won't matter. In contemporary public deliberation you don't really need a good argument to create noise. You just need a colorable pretext that nutroots zombies and worshipful journalists can repeat with varying degrees of condescension.

This is a media environment where headlines are actively rewritten to insulate The One from public criticism. Taking talking points about "bending the cost curve" and reprinting them as news practically qualifies as honest.

References and previously after the jump...

This week's Watchers Council submissions have been posted, with the vote to come over the next few days. A ton of the posts focused on Gatesgate, which is good because it gives me a chance to finally blog something about it. On the downside I'm not sure what I have to contribute other than, yes, Gates was obviously as ass, and no, that's not something the police get to arrest you for. They certainly don't get to arrest you for it if you're in your own home. The Colossus of Rhodey more or less seemed to agree, adding that these kinds of incidents depress police recruitment.

None of which is a defense of Obama's reflexive "suck up to the base in the guise of strutting confidence" stunt. In the aftermath, Right Truth anticipated how The One's beer diplomacy would end with a sonorous apologia for Gates and an implicit attack on Crowley. Wolf Holwing sounded genuinely optimistic though, suggesting that reactions to Obama's gaffe suggest we really are entering a post-racial age. JoshuaPundit was significantly more excised, tracing the institutional credibility that Gates had and still has by virtue of identity politics.

Domestic expert analysis came in for criticism across a range of issues. Soccer Dad unpacked the think tank apologias for Obama's first six months. Rhymes With Right outlined how the multiculturalist emphasis on "world cultures" undermines sound education in Texas primary schools. And The Glittering Eye took apart some health care numbers being peddled by WaPo.

Also on the health care front, Bookworm Room penned a heartfelt attack on the health rationing that would mobilize government power in the interest of encouraging the elderly to "abandon the will to live." How much can be done about it is still an open question of course: liberals own Congress and, as The Razor pointed out, are much better at waging lawfare than are conservatives.

My own post was the one about the One Jerusalem conference call with George Gilder, which argued that Israel is hated as much because of where it succeeds - technological innovation, etc - and not because of the fantasized atrocities peddled by anti-Israel partisans.

UPDATE: I missed The Provocateur's entry, a definitive breakdown of the first 500 pages of the health care bill.

References and previously after the jump...

Moron:

The care with which we are carrying out the provisions of the Recovery Act has led some people to ask whether we are moving too slowly. But the act was intended to provide steady support for our economy over an extended period - not a jolt that would last only a few months.

Now some people might suggest that the use of "... some people..." to set up a straw argument means this op-ed was ghostwritten by Obama's speech team. But the gaffetastic insistence that the stimulus was never supposed to be "a jolt" is a giveaway - pure Biden. Via Hot Air via Swamp Politics, direct from the Office Of The Vice President:

We also came forward with what we're going to talk about today, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, an initial big jolt to give the economy a real head start. But some criticism -- we've not gotten enough money out so far. Well, look, since I was the guy put in charge of it, I want to make sure these first hundred days we do it right. The one thing that could undermine this whole effort is if you had read stories the last hundred days about how this money was being wasted and the tens of billions of dollars.

In fairness to Biden he was just echoing his boss. Behold, the wonders of 45 seconds of Lexis work:

Washington Times, Nov 25, 2008:

In his news conference, Mr. Obama laid out a hefty agenda for his first Cabinet appointment, tasking Treasury Secretary-designate Timothy F. Geithner and the rest of his new economic team with crafting a spending package to "jolt" the economy.

Washington Post, Feb 10, 2009:

"So, you know, we can differ on some of the particulars, but again, the question I think that the American people are asking is: Do you just want government to do nothing, or do you want it to do something? If you want it to do something, then we can have a conversation," he said. "But doing nothing -- that's not an option, from my perspective." Obama defended the role of government in the recovery process, saying that "with the private sector so weakened by this recession, the federal government is the only entity left with the resources to jolt our economy back to life."

Oh and not for nothing - but it's not hysterical, impatient wingnuttery to give Biden flack for failing to (a) boost aggregate demand via massive government spending without (b) overheating the economy while (c) preventing government waste. That hat trick is pretty much impossible given economic fundamentals and bureaucratic corruption. But that's why conservatives opposed the stimulus. It just can't be done. Something inevitably has to give.

Whining in the New York Times about how he can't spend government money fast enough for it to be effective because he knows if he tries things will go wrong - that's the whole damn point.

References and previously after the jump...

He's had it up to here with outdated concepts like democratic deliberation. Nothing must be allowed to delay his grandiose scheme to destroy the economy:

"The time for talk is through." -- President Obama, talking to liberal bloggers on a conference call Monday night... Nothing goes into effect in any case until 2013--except the tax provisions, which would begin in 2011. Yet President Obama wants everyone to stop debating and deliberating, and act now--because he and he alone has decided "now is the time to go ahead and act." Congress should assert itself, stand up for the deliberative and democratic process, and defy this presumptuous presidential dictate. The time to debate is now. There's plenty of time to act later.

For some reason the ABC News White House puff-piece didn't do much to assuage the public's concerns. Which is weird because you'd think a professional organization with that much experience would be better at producing effective agitprop.

Maybe it has something to do with the CBO's most recent scoring. A trillion dollars over the next 10 years sounds like something worth talking about. Or it could be that people are just tired of the Democrats' brazen fear-mongering:

The democrats aren't even hiding their intentions anymore:

FOX News analyst: But they're afraid. Private insurance companies are afraid that they will be put out of business. So why shouldn't they fight it?

Sen. Sanders: They should be afraid. Let me tell you they should be afraid. I think when they deny people health care because somebody has breast cancer a few years ago, when they throw people off of health insurance because people were sick and ran up a health care bill they have a right to be exposed, a right to be afraid.

Although I suppose it's better to start the scapegoating early. That way people at least know what they're in for.

References:
* Kristol: Shut Up, Obama Explained [Weekly Standard]
* ABC to broadcast town hall on health care -- from the White House
* Document drop: CBO scores the health care takeover [Malkin]
* Sen. Sanders: Private Insurers SHOULD BE AFRAID Of Going Out of Business (Video) [Gateway Pundit]
* Shh... Massachusetts Proves Mandate-Based Health Reform Will Be A Disaster [MR]

Previously:
* Dems: We'll Finance Health Care With Cigarette Tax That Will Cause People To Stop Buying Cigarettes
* New Poll: Only 26% Consider Health Reform A Success In Massachusetts
* Stimulus Czar Biden: In Fairness To Me, "Everyone Guessed Wrong" About How Few Jobs Stimulus Would Create

The video is kind of a cheap shot because (a) Obama obviously knows that Putin's the Prime Minister and not the President and (b) technically "President Putin" is not an entirely incorrect honorific. On the other hand the Russian press is having a good time implying that our President is a moron, which officially elevates it to the level of a gaffe.

I was told we were past this:

U.S. President Barack Obama inadvertently misspoke Vladimir Putin's title during his first meeting with the prime minister Tuesday, a second slip of the tongue in as many days that indicates he remains uncomfortable with who is who in the ruling tandem of Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev... Obama described Putin as president before correcting himself. "I suspect when I speak to President ... er ... Prime Minister Putin tomorrow, he will say the same thing," Obama said when talking about Russia's objections to a planned U.S. missile shield in Europe.

Later Tuesday, Obama bungled Putin's title again, referring to him as "President Putin" in an interview with NBC television. He sought to downplay the mistakes. "I don't think it's Freudian," Obama said. "He used to be president."

If Bush had done it - can you imagine?

Smart power!

References:
* Obama Bungles Putin's Title (Again) at Breakfast [St. Petersburg Times]

Previously:
* Obama Continues Pattern Of Sophisticated Phone Calls With Post-Inauguration First Call To Holocaust Denier, Erstwhile Terrorist
* Obama Worshiping Yahoo Blogger: "It's Heartening" When Presidents Stumble Over Words
* Video: CNN's Aww Shucks "Top 10 Obama Faux Pas" Roundup Misses A Few Things

In rhetorical theory we have a description for how people can believe that an objectively crumbling economy is actually on the upswing. It has to do with something called a "terministic screen." It's not too complicated but the way that it links up to identity can get kind of technical.

As an alternative hypothesis, we might want to explore the possibility that the bulk of Obama worshiping Democrats are just straightforward morons:

Democrats in June 2009 are evenly divided as to whether the economy is getting better or worse. By a 58% to 20% margin, Republicans say the economy is getting worse. Among unaffiliateds, 54% say the economy is getting worse while 22% say it is getting better. While there are big differences about where the economy is headed, there is little difference about the state of the economy today. Nine percent (9%) of Republicans rate the economy as good or excellent while 10% of Democrats say the same. Those not affiliated with either major party are a bit less upbeat.

"Is the economy getting better or worse?" That's not a question beyond the realm of human reason. It's not like literature, where people might entitled to their own opinions. There's an answer.

Though in fairness that super creepy Obama idol that's been touring the country does inspire reverence and adoration:

So if he says that the stimulus is working - which, unbelievably, he does - then the stimulus is working.

References:
* Unreal. With Unemployment at 9.5% Obama Tells Crowd: Stimulus Is Working (Video) [Gateway Pundit]
* Partisan Economics: Democrats, GOP See Different Economy [Rasmussen]
* Giant Obama Statue Tours US, Spreading Goodwill, Creepiness [Ace]

Previously:
* Paul Krugman, Economic Guru, 2002: "Greenspan Needs To Create A Housing Bubble"
* CA Dems: Instead Of Cutting Costs, We're Going To Increase Taxes And Destroy CA's Oil Industry
* New Poll: Only 26% Consider Health Reform A Success In Massachusetts

Iran is speeding up their missile production. Their envoys are now openly admitting that the regime is pursuing nuclear weapons. They've got more than enough material to make a bomb, and even Gates says they're an increasing threat.

So naturally the Dems have blocked sanctions in the House...

Yesterday, Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives defeated a Republican effort to impose sanctions on Iran. On a near party-line 174-250 vote, the House rejected a motion to send the State Department reauthorization bill back to committee with instructions that it be amended to include the text of the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act (IRPSA)... Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN), a long-time stalwart of pro-Israel and pro-national security efforts on the House Foreign Relations Committee, offered the motion, explaining that Iran's steady progress toward nuclear weapons capacity makes prompt action a matter of the utmost urgency. Somewhat incredibly, Rep. Berman, Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee led the charge to defeat his own Iran sanctions bill!

... and Obama has blocked sanctions at the G8:

The United States is opposed to enacting a new set of financial sanctions against Iran that are due to be discussed in the G8 summit next week, diplomatic officials in New York reported Friday. According to officials, sanctions against Iran are expected to top the G8's agenda. Sources are also predicting a pointed debate between the heads of the industrialized nations over an appropriate response to Iranian authorities' suppression of reformist demonstrations in Iran led by Mir Hossein Mousavi and other Iranian opposition leaders... According to the Italian prime minister, "the general leaning [among G8 leaders] is toward sanctions." However, diplomatic sources in New York reported that American officials are working behind the scenes to prevent new sanctions from being imposed against Iran.

A week ago Berlusconi described new sanctions as likely. This morning the G8 announced that they're not imposing any new restrictions. It'd be interesting to know what changed.

Incidentally, the standard liberal argument - that new sanctions would undermine Obama's outreach - is crap even by the less than robust standards of the pro-engagement crowd. Clinton just warned Iran about "even stricter" sanctions if outreach fails. Presumably that's the "stick" we're carrying into talks.

But if that's true then we can impose sanctions now in response to, say, the IRG beating the shit out of citizens, declaring a military coup, and threatening to lash out against Western "enemies." Then we can offer the "carrot" of removing those sanctions later.

Unless Obama and Clinton rightly think that more sanctions won't work, since Iran circumvents them and laughs literally all the way into New York banks. If that's the case then the WH's reticence would make sense, since imposing sanctions now would given them time to visibly fail now. That would leave Obama's "tough diplomacy" looking very much like rank appeasement. Awkward!

References and previously after the jump...

First thing's first. Biden is a moron. Trying to reverse engineer his statements is equivalent to using a Magic 8-Ball to unlock prophesies hidden in tea leaves. But just so we're all on the same page, here's the crucial part of that "green light" interview:

STEPHANOPOULOS: And meanwhile, Prime Minister Netanyahu has made it pretty clear that he agreed with President Obama to give until the end of the year for this whole process of engagement to work. After that, he's prepared to make matters into his own hands. Is that the right approach?

BIDEN: Look, Israel can determine for itself -- it's a sovereign nation -- what's in their interest and what they decide to do relative to Iran and anyone else.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Whether we agree or not?

BIDEN: Whether we agree or not. They're entitled to do that. Any sovereign nation is entitled to do that. But there is no pressure from any nation that's going to alter our behavior as to how to proceed. What we believe is in the national interest of the United States, which we, coincidentally, believe is also in the interest of Israel and the whole world. And so there are separate issues. If the Netanyahu government decides to take a course of action different than the one being pursued now, that is their sovereign right to do that. That is not our choice.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But just to be clear here, if the Israelis decide Iran is an existential threat, they have to take out the nuclear program, militarily the United States will not stand in the way?

BIDEN: Look, we cannot dictate to another sovereign nation what they can and cannot do when they make a determination, if they make a determination that they're existentially threatened and their survival is threatened by another country.

Did Biden inadvertently signal that there was a secret agreement between Obama and Netanyahu, trading Netanyahu's recognition of a Palestinian state for a green light on Iran? Yossi Alpher, one of the Mossad's former Iran guys, thinks maybe. The WH walked back Biden's statement with boilerplate about engagement, but Mullen is publicly musing about how attacking Iran is a mere "political decision." And there is that half-analysis/half-preparing-the-public Bolton editorial.

On the other hand: moron. The WH has expended not inconsiderable efforts to box in Israel diplomatically and militarily. Institutionally the administration is dominated by the Iran Lobby. Obama still seems fully committed to appeasement. No one gave Israel a green light for anything.

Biden was probably trying to invoke "national interest" as an explanation for why the Obama administration isn't and won't support Israel. He got a little tangled up trying to seem magnanimous, acknowledging Israel's national interest but overemphasizing it a little too much.

Nonetheless the liberal foreign policy community - the one that spent so much time publicly crowing about how Israel had been put on a leash - went into full hyperventilation mode. FP blogger Marc Lynch:

Almost a dozen Cabinet officials are being dispatched to campaign in various rural districts over the summer:

The White House is making sure it reaches voters in crucial swing districts. The itinerary laid out by the White House for its just-announced "Rural Tour" includes several politically competitive districts, which would give the Obama administration a chance to make its case to people who voted Republican in past congressional races but are now represented by Democrats up for reelection in 2010. As part of the tour, 10 Cabinet secretaries are being dispatched to nine states over the summer. Locations include several districts that Republicans are targeting in next year's midterm elections.

At the same time, Biden just wrapped up a rural tour and announced that the White House is releasing $4 billion in stimulus money for Internet projects in those districts:

The U.S. government will soon release $4 billion of loans and grants aimed at expanding broadband access to underserved areas across the United States, officials said on Wednesday. The funds are part of a $7.2 billion program to build an affordable high-speed Internet structure in rural areas. The project is being pushed by President Barack Obama, in part, to shore up the U.S. economy with job creation in the telecommunications sector. "This funding is a down payment on the president's commitment to bring the educational and economic benefits of the Internet to all communities," Vice President Joe Biden said in a statement.

I'm a little wary of this whole thing, as I think it might be a violation of checks and balances. The Founders clearly wanted to reserve to the Legislative the power to buy votes with earmarks.

References:
* Obama administration touring competitive rural districts [LAT]
* UPDATE 2-U.S. gov't to release $4 bln soon for broadband [Reuters]

Previously:
* Super Smart Stimulus Czar: Knowing About The Economy Is "Above My Pay Grade"
* Stimulus Czar Biden: In Fairness To Me, "Everyone Guessed Wrong" About How Few Jobs Stimulus Would Create
* Reader Poll: What's The Dumbest Thing That Iraq Czar Biden Has Said About Iraq?

Taken on June 1st, during some announcement about how the government was taking over the auto industry, and published on the White Houses's Flickr stream. I'm supposed to include a disclaimer stating that my use of this picture does not "in any way suggest approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House." Just in case that was unclear:

Subtle, no? I wonder what part this statue's played in getting Obama's agenda passed.

References:
* Obama: Passing Cap And Trade Is A Lot Like Freeing The Slaves, Isn't It? [MR]

Previously:
* Obama Worshiping Yahoo Blogger: "It's Heartening" When Presidents Stumble Over Words
* Video: CNN's Aww Shucks "Top 10 Obama Faux Pas" Roundup Misses A Few Things
* Black Press Of America: Obama "Lifts America's Spirit In Speech Of Hope," Economy Is Bush's Fault

Rahm's spin to Newsweek about this bizarre appointment was that Biden "knows the players... he brings a lot of experience and expertise on this issue to the table." Which is weird, because he actually seems to know nothing about the players and keeps making experienced, expert recommendations that would trigger full-blown regional wars.

Here are your candidates for Biden's dumbest Iraq-related comment or idea. I've dumped a poll after the jump if you feel particularly strongly about one of the choices:

(A) Calling the success of the surge a "fantasy" - At the present there seems to be a consensus that this was at best a touch over-wrought, displaying a less than astute understanding of Iraq. Just wait a few months though. As violence continues to escalate, the left will begin reciting no end of talking points demonstrating that the surge never fixed anything. Which brings us to...

(B) Claiming that he got shot at inside the Green Zone - That was quite the politicized Walter Mitty fantasy, given that the election pivoted on foreign policy judgment pivoted on the success of the surge and the stabilization of Iraq. Open question: what's worse, that he was intentionally making it up or that he's actually delusional and has no understanding of 2006-2009 Iraqi security dynamics?

(C) Crafting a plan to partition Iraq into 3 regions - This was so blisteringly stupid that Iraqi factions locked in a civil war came together to mock Biden in unison. It's still a weight on his presence in the region. The particularly awesome thing about this plan - which would have codifying ethnic boundaries and undercut the nationalist Iraqis of the Anbar Awakening - is that it also would have guaranteed Iranian and Saudi intervention. "Experience and expertise."

(D) Thanking Zapatero for Spain's help in Iraq - I don't think this was technically a gaffe, at least not in the sense that he didn't know Zapatero bailed on Iraq. Biden's been obsessed with the awesomeness of post-appeasement Spain since the election: it was one of the repeated, obnoxious namechecks that he kept going to during the VP debate, setting up the MSM to coo about his mastery of geopolitics. So it probably seemed automatic to praise them for something. Or maybe he really does think that Spain's ignoble abandonment of the Coalition was helpful, to the extent that it undermined Bush.

(E) The US has to be "much more aggressive in forcing [Iraqi officials] to deal with" issues - This was a few months ago. What a charmer. He's going to be welcomed with open arms in Baghdad.

Click through for the poll. I turned off PollDaddy's built-in comments, but feel free to explain your vote under this post on MR's Facebook Page.

I guess he's done with his other formal responsibilities, like running the US economy and fixing our foreign intelligence apparatus. It'd be a pity if he let all his spare time go to waste, idle hands and the devil's playground and all that. So I'm thinking this is good:

Vice President Joe Biden's official portfolio is expanding. NEWSWEEK has learned that President Obama has asked Biden to take the lead role on Iraq as the U.S. begins its scheduled drawdown of combat troops, a move that comes as administration officials are expressing concerns about the uptick in violence and political instability in the region. Biden's role will be something of an unofficial envoy to Iraq, though he won't handle day-to-day dealings with officials on the ground. The goal is to "raise the level" in hopes that Biden's stature encourages Iraqi officials to bridge their political differences, says a senior administration official who didn't want to be named talking about high-level personnel decisions. "He knows the players," White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel tells NEWSWEEK. "He brings a lot of experience and expertise on this issue to the table, and the president trusts him."

He certainly does know the players. He doesn't technically know what any of them do, which is how he ends up thanking people who bailed on Iraq for helping us with Iraq. At least the country isn't heating up again, with jihadists infiltrating from Syria at the same time that the Obama administration is sucking up to Assad. Supple and incisive geopolitical minds, this bunch.

Whatever. The media's more than ready to cover for him on Iraq, just like they've been doing on everything else since the election campaign.

References and previously after the jump...

When the Obama administration screws up public education even more dramatically - a virtual guarantee given that the Education Secretary is an abysmally poor education administrator and the Department itself is miscalculating budgetary needs by billions of dollars - it will be useful to have this handy:

Today must have been an especially busy news day because so far there is surprisingly little interest in a new CEP analysis showing some good news for the No Child Left Behind policy... Is it too cynical to think it would be bigger news if it went the other way? And hard to make the case that CEP is in the tank for the last administration, in fact the opposite case has been made...

This is the only good justification I've heard for the policy - implemented broadly across Los Angeles and New York - of paying teachers not to teach. Apparently the people who've been in charge of education for the last few decades have not been entirely on the ball, and needed NCLB's performance-measuring push.

Which is weird, because I would think that an educational culture steeped in self-esteem idiocy would actually boost test scores.

References and previously after the jump...

On one hand this is kind of a cheap shot. None of Obama's current or past advisers support von Brunn's actions or goals. They were undoubtedly horrified by the shooting. None of them harbor violent thoughts or intentions, though at least one has been known to quiver in rage when talking about Jews and Israel.

On the other hand, parts of von Brunn's note do bear striking similarities to on-the-record diatribes from a number of Obama-linked figures. To the extent their anti-Israel foreign policy proposals often exceed what might be recommended by levelheaded analysis, that's far from comforting.

One of these lines is an easily recognizable quote from Rev. Wright, who was an Obama adviser until he ceased having an official relationship with the candidate back in 2008 (all the way back then!) The others are either from post-election appointments or from von Brunn. Try to guess which are which without looking at the answers.

(1) "Jews control the mass media."
(2) "The Lobby" makes sure that "no one in the United States dares to publish" anti-Israel articles.
(3) "The Holocaust is a lie."
(4) "Jews aren't going to let" Obama do what he wants.
(5) Obama's "Jew owners tell him what to do."
(6) "The US sacrifices billions of dollars servicing" Israel.
(7) "Jews captured America's money."

Click through for the answers.

He did a boatload of fund raising for a shameless crook who repaid him by using racial demagoguery to get him into the Senate. Then Senate Democrats appointed him to the Armed Services Committee, because with two ongoing hot wars it's not like that's an important position. Magic:

How lame of a Senator is Roland Burris, the hack brought in by Illinois' indicted ex-governor to take Barack Obama's seat? The guy has himself an appointment to the Armed Services Committee. Which means he oversees the Pentagon... Burris seemed genuinely shocked to discover that the Defense Department devoted so much time and money to science and technology. "You're saying that [the armed] services have their own research laboratories going?" he asked Zachary Lemnios, the administration's nominee to be the Director of Defense Research and Engineering... then he asked Lemnios-- pronouncing his name "Leonis" - the follow-up question you'd expect from a son of the Chicago Machine: So does that mean you're the guy in charge of all that research cash?

Could it be that many Democrats don't know or care that much about the military?

References:
* Senator (For Now) Burris...No I Did Not Try To Raise Money For Blago. And By "Not" I Mean, Yes I Did Try And Raise Money For Him [Ace]
* Guess what factor played into Burris' seating? [Hot Air]
* Burris' Shock Discovery: the Pentagon Has Research Labs! [Wired]

Previously:
* Media Bias Transforms Stupid Shoe Throwing Story Into Dumb Liberal Bias Story
* Obama To Appoint Fundraising Crony As UK Ambassador, British Officials Going Ballistic
* Hey, Anyone Know What Party That Blagojevich Guy Is From?

Oh, Chuck:

Darpa, the Pentagon's far-out science division, is known for beyond-the-bleeding-edge research into thinking machines and shapeshifting drones. But over the last five years, the agency has also given $10 million to New York City's 140 year-old American Museum of Natural History... an iconic institution best known for its display of mummies and dinosaur bones. Every year, Congress orders federal agencies to spend billions of dollars in pet projects, or "earmarks"... rarely is the mismatch this pronounced. ... Since 2005, New York's Rep. Charlie Rangel has tacked $2 million dollars per year onto Darpa's budget for the Museum's Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics... Ordinarily, Darpa managers closely supervises its researchers, who have to meet strict performance goals - or risk getting their funding cut. Earmark recipients, on the other hand, are only accountable to their sponsoring lawmaker.

It's hard to understand how this hasn't come up on MSNBC, given the close attention the station pays to earmark abuse. And why hasn't The One targeted this absurdity, given his incisive understanding of DC budgetary dynamics:

Tapper calls this an "interesting point," which I assume is his polite euphemism for "moronic":

"I just want to make a little commentary about the media here, if you don't mind," Mr. Obama said this afternoon... "When we find $17 billion worth of cuts in programs, what do the same folks say? ... 'That's not significant. That's not important.' Well, you can't have it both ways... If those earmarks were important, then this money is important, too."

Imagine you're $10,000 in debt and your grand plan for reducing the load is to make one $50 payment. Now imagine that a bank owes you $10,000 and the teller only pays out $9,950 because he decided to pocket $50 of it for himself. That's the difference, essentially, between budget cuts and earmarks. Earmarks are basically congressional bribes to fundraisers in their home districts.

Even more importantly: is there any punchline that links this nonsense to Rangel's shameless tax evasion? Tough to say, tough to say.

References:
* Rangel Steers Darpa Millions to Natural History Museum [Danger Room]
* MSNBC Notices Earmark Hypocrisy... of Republicans [Ace]
* Obama whines: How come 1% in earmarks is a lot but 1% in budget cuts isn't? [Hot Air]
* Awesome: GOP congressman introduces "the Rangel rule" [Hot Air]

Previously:
* Great News: Global Economy In Full Meltdown, Obama Transition Team Panicking
* WH: Stimulus "Created" 150,000 Jobs. Or Maybe Just "Saved" Them. Whatever.
* Democratic Catch-22: Executive Salary Caps Unworkable Because Of $10 Billion Tax Revenue Loss

Turns out, knowing whether the CIA committed heinous acts of torture and then lied about it- not that important any more. Obviously they don't want another news cycle of Cheney vs. Pelosi, given how that turned out last time. But you'd think they'd be a little more subtle about it, if only for the sake of formality. Here's the beginning of the FNC interview with Bishop, courtesy of their auto-transcriber plus heavy cleanup:

FNC: [Pelosi] quickly came under fire for those comments and then tried to avoid commenting any further. But House Republicans want answers, introducing an amendment to a bill calling for a special investigation into Pelosi's charges. Democrats last night effectively shutting that amendment down and as it stands now, there will be no investigation. The cosponsor of that amendment is Republican Congressman Rob Bishop of Utah. He's my guest now. Good morning congressman. BISHOP: Good morning. FNC: So why did submit this amendment. BISHOP: Well it's for the integrity of the House. If -- if the house has been subject to systematic statements that are misleading. If we have been lied to by an agency of government. Then we need to know that. Because if our data that is inaccurate then all the decisions we make will be suspect and inaccurate as well.

Therein follow a few minutes of "but you don't believe that, you're just calling Pelosi's bluff" vs. "umm... the point of calling someone's bluff is that I can't say that out loud." Click on the image to watch.

In any case, the odds of the Democrats letting this get to the floor are somewhat less than stellar (h/t: Holly).

References:
* Poll: 66% say Obama's not being tough enough on Iran [Hot Air]
* Staying Silent [Fox News]

Previously:
* Pelosi To Take Stance On The Side Of Airline Imams?
* Pelosi: Pointing Out What A Liar I Am Is A "Distraction"
* Watchers Council Results - When I Was Your Age Being Wrong Actually Meant Something

This week's Watcher Council nominations are now up:

Regardless of the topic you will usually find that Barack Obama is at the root of the problem, not as some sort or problem solver but as an antagonist or an agitprop. Whether it is the Obama administration's missteps on Iran by failing to support democracy and liberty over tyranny and oppression, the illegal firing and subsequent smear campaign against former AmeriCorps inspector general Gerald Walpin or the further degeneration of the mainstream media as ABC teams up with the White House to promote the Democrats plan to get their hands on the Health Care industry and all the dollars that go with it, Barack Obama is a central figure in each of these problems.

The overwhelming concern was the Iraninan election and the subsequent political protests. Obama's lukewarm support for the protesters was particularly noted, especially since this is a President who - per Bookworm Room - is not prone to rhetorical reticence. The Razor's post saw the Carter's debilitating legacy in the White House's tepid statements. On the other side of the argument, Wolf Howling insisted that "Obama went as far as he could reasonably go in his speech."

Council members were also less than hopeful that the administration would be better at dealing with post-election Iran. Joshuapundit pointed out that the next regime will still be intransigent, making engagement as irrelevant as it's always been. My post was about the MSM's beloved pseudo-sophisticated experts who got everything wrong about pre-election Iran but who'll still be pervasively cited afterward. Soccer Dad traced how the rest of Obama's Middle East policy - predictable as it was during the election - is not a recipe for Israeli-Arab peace or stability. More the opposite.

Foreign policy isn't the only place where the left's bien pensant experts have blithely recommended disaster. The Glittering Eye caught Krugman's "we really need a housing bubble" 2002 recommendation. Krugman in 2009, of course, thinks that the housing crash proves we need to embrace his anti-free market policies. Similarly, I'd like to know which part of the President's economic brain trust thought that bulldozing cities and re-primitivizing America was a good idea. Via Right Truth:

Not only does Obama think bulldozing cities and returning them to their natural state is a good idea, roads are not being repaved but are having gravel installed instead. We're going from black top highways to dirt/gravel roads. Hubby reminds me of Toledo, Ohio where people are being fined $25 for parking in their own gravel driveways. What's next, mud huts and the horse and buggy? Speaking of mud huts, it is being reported that many members of Obama's extended Muslim family are planning to write books, to cash in while they can on Obama's fame and fortune... That also includes George who lives in a hut in Kenya. Seems they follow Obama's motto, never let a crisis or opportunity pass by without making the most of it.

On the plus side, The Provocateur traced how ACORN is embezzling money and consolidating power to ensure that the people running the country continue running the country. In the meantime Sotomayor will be placed on the Court, despite the concerns about Ricci that The Glittering Eye outlined. Also in the meantime, they'll presumably continue to smear their opponents as unpatriotic. Rhymes with Right discusses how that's OK now.

References and previously after the jump...

Well first of all, that's true only if you exclude the bevy of conservatives who said that the stimulus would be a net loss. But more importantly: this tool doesn't get a pass just because everyone else was wrong. He's the guy who's supposed to be in charge. He's the mighty stimulus czar! Nobody messes with Joe!

That's why we put specific, proficient experts in charge of specific, complicated industries - because they're supposed to know more and be better at those things. That's why telecom experts run phone companies and auto manufacturing experts run car companies and financial experts run banks. Well except in an Obama-run economy.

And what's the guy in charge of $800 billion doing "guessing" anyway?

Vice President Biden said Sunday that "everyone guessed wrong" on the impact of the economic stimulus, but he defended the administration's spending designed to combat rising joblessness. Biden said inaccuracies in unemployment predictions shouldn't undercut the White House's support of the $787 billion economic revival plan that has not met the expectations of President Obama's team. Instead, the vice president urged skeptics to look at teachers who kept their classroom assignments and police officers who kept their beats because of financial assistance from Washington. "The bottom line is that jobs are being created that would not have been there before," Biden said. But they are not coming at the pace first estimated.

Amazing that a guy who was justifying historically unprecedented wealth confiscation on the basis of isolated, misunderstood anecdotes would turn out to have a bad sense of economic reality. Anecdotes usually work so well as statistical markers. And that strutting "the bottom line is..." line? Who talks like that? I mean other than "a serial exaggerator, liar, and blowhard."

You know, viewed from a certain angle, this is almost an example of how central planners are inefficient in responding to market signals. You don't think there's something deeper underneath that do you?

References:
* Video: Obama Anoints His Breathtakingly Stupid VP "Stimulus Czar" [MR]
* Super Smart Stimulus Czar: Knowing About The Economy Is "Above My Pay Grade" [MR]
* Biden: 'Everyone guessed wrong' on jobs number [USA Today]
* Fact Check: Biden Plays Loose With Stimulus Facts [Fox News]
* Rove Calls Biden A 'Serial Exaggerator,' A 'Liar,' & A 'Blowhard' [Townhall]

Previously:
* Keenly Perspicacious VP: Please Join Me In Destroying The American Airline Industry
* Genius VP Endorses, Then Unendorses Wildly Unpopular NY Governor
* Politically Savvy VP Now Cracking Hilarious $8 Billion Porkulus Graft Jokes

Actually he said nothing of the sort. We're in the midst of a multi-decade campaign of anti-Israel demonization, led in no small part by Carter and former Carter officials. Unseemly expressions of devotion to pathological terrorists are the pinnacle of Romance. This is a love that flows freely and openly, knowing neither geographic nor generational bounds:

Former US President Jimmy Carter was honored by the Palestinian Authority government Saturday and pledged to support the Palestinians' campaign for independence to the end of his days... "I have been in love with the Palestinian people for many years," he said Saturday, adding that this is a feeling shared by members of his family."I have two great-grandsons that are rapidly learning about the people here and the anguish and suffering and deprivation of human rights that you have experienced ever since 1948," he said.

I wonder what textbooks he's using to instill those lessons. If they're the same ones that he uses when he cooks up his casualty figures or when he declares that the pro-Israel lobbies who are pushing for a Palestinian state don't want peace - well, that's better than the alternative.

References and previously after the jump...

In the last few days the Vice President - the selection of whom proved, according to Michelle Obama, that "Barack's not afraid of smart people" - talked up a car tunnel that was actually for trains. The ostensibly savvy DC insider - with whom, as Barack Obama bragged, you just don't mess - had to issue beltway boilerplate about "fastidious" stimulus oversight after admitting that lots of people are in fact messing with him.

Though a longtime member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he committed an amateur hour faux pas by telling police officers that Sotomayor would support them from the bench. Which is not totally surprising, given that he's also the guy who wrecked the judicial confirmation process.

Most reassuringly, Biden explained to reporters skeptical about his economic projections that, despite his role as stimulus czar, he doesn't really know anything about the economy:

But according to The American Spectator, when reporters asked the VP to explain how the White House even came up with the 600,000 number, he asked for a pass, saying a question like that is "above his pay grade" and, "I'm sorry, I'm not an economist. My background is in foreign policy." That is so comforting coming from the guy who President Obama tasked with implementing the stimulus plan.

This lines up nicely with the new GM chairman, who says he doesn't know anything about cars:

Edward E. Whitacre Jr. built AT&T Inc. into the biggest U.S. provider of telephone service over a 43-year-career. By his own admission, he becomes chairman of General Motors Corp. knowing nothing about the auto industry... "I don't know anything about cars," Whitacre, 67, said yesterday in an interview after his appointment. "A business is a business, and I think I can learn about cars. I'm not that old, and I think the business principles are the same."

Actually, it turns out that businesses can be quite different from one another. They operate within industries that have unique dynamics. That's why economists and business leaders spend years specializing in particular areas like, say, telecomm or auto manufacturing.

But whatever. GM's got Nancy Pelosi on their side incompetently trying to give government-owned car manufacturers a taxpayer-subsidized advantage over solvent, private companies like Ford. What could go wrong?

References and previously after the jump...

Average temperature on the island nation of Palau: 82 degrees. If that's a little hot, residents and guests can cool off by swimming amidst the archipelago's famed coral reefs or wandering through endless acres of lush forests. The perfect place to send 17 bloodthirsty, radicalized jihadists:

The South Pacific island nation of Palau has agreed to "temporarily resettle" the 17 Uighurs, or Chinese Muslims, currently being held at Guantanamo Bay, an official with the Palau government told FOX News. "Palau's accommodation to accept the temporary resettlement of these detainees is a humanitarian gesture intended to held them be freed from any further unnecessary incarceration and to restart their lives anew in as normal a fashion as possible," according to a press release provided to FOX News by the official. Two U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to the Associated Press, said the U.S. was prepared to give Palau up to $200 million in development, budget support and other assistance in return for accepting the Uighurs and as part of a mutual defense and cooperation treaty that is due to be renegotiated this year.

At least we finally have a solution to Reid's mindbendingly idiotic suggestion that we close Gitmo but keep all the detainees out of US prisons: we can just pay for them to live in paradise. That'll show them!

No word on how long it'll take these 17 to join the long line of Gitmo recidivists. Though Palau is a long way from Yemen. Or Afghanistan. Or Saudi Arabia. Or Iraq. Or whereever the hell it is that Al Qaeda makes their videos. So I'm thinking at least a couple months.

Of course Gitmo is even farther from those places than Palau. But Obama was clear that freed Gitmo detainees might attack us again, so that's hardly a surprise. Plus it's a small price to pay for upholding our values. Even though our values don't seem to include "not being attacked by fanatics."

References and previously after the jump...