Sign of the times?

We’ve gone from this:

To this:

The peasants are revolting O Light Worker.

Obama’s fascist SOTU speech

When modern Americans think of fascism, in our mind’s eye we picture it in its most brutal, almost cartoonish form: jackbooted Nazis in black uniforms crushing all before them, or Mussolini haranguing his fascisti:

"I promise to lead us into total disaster!"

But fascism is more than just cool uniforms (You have to admit, the Nazis did have a sense of evil sartorial style.) and a boot to the throat, though thuggishness is in its nature. It’s also a philosophy that claims to get “beyond politics” by bringing everyone together in unity behind a leader who personifies the nation and knows its will better than the average man or woman. It promises to care for the individual from cradle to grave, in the process transforming a free citizen into a dependent, and the individual with rights into part of a group that has rights superseding the individual’s. If all of this rings a bell, it should: the brutal European fascisms we fought against in the middle of the last century (and their related communist totalitarianisms) share intellectual roots with American progressivism, what is called in today’s US politics “liberalism.” (More correctly, “conservatives” in America are largely classical liberals, and “liberals” are progressives.)  Jonah Goldberg has written a brilliant, eye-opening book on the topic, Liberal Fascism, that I can’t recommend highly enough.

To come round to President Obama’s State of the Union address, Ben Shapiro (who has some strange ideas about overrated directors) penned an article for Human Events that looks at the speech as something squarely in the tradition of liberal fascism – Obama’s Philosophically Fascist State of the Union Address:

There sure is something different about President Obama. Usually, the State of the Union address is a laundry list of proposals spiced with sycophantic applause and dipped in an admixture of boredom and bravado. It is rarely a statement of basic philosophy.

Not for President Obama.

President Obama’s State of the Union address was the greatest American rhetorical embrace of fascist trope since the days of Woodrow Wilson. I am not suggesting Obama is a Nazi; he isn’t. I am not suggesting that he is a jackbooted thug; he isn’t (even if we could be forgiven for mistaking Rahm Emanuel for one).

President Obama is, however, a man who embodies all the personal characteristics of a fascist leader, right down to the arrogant chin-up head tilt he utilizes when waiting for applause. He sees democracy as a filthy process that can be cured only by the centralized power of bureaucrats. He sees his presidency as a Hegelian synthesis marking the end of political conflict. He sees himself as embodiment of the collective will. No president should speak in these terms — not in a representative republic. Obama does it habitually.

Click through for the rest. The author’s occasional snark aside, I think he pretty much nails it.

(via neo-neocon)

Amsterdam’s dhimmi judges

A few days ago I wrote about the trial of Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders, who has been charged with “inciting hatred” for criticizing Islam. At the time, I described the decadent state of liberty in Holland, where a free man could be put on trial for expressing an opinion. The great Pat Condell minces no words in his latest video, declaring that Wilders was put on trial for embarrassing the Dutch establishment with the truth and calling shame on the crooked judges of Amsterdam:

The ten most corrupt people in Washington

And nine of them are Democrats:

Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, today released its 2009 list of Washington’s “Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians.” The list, in alphabetical order, includes:

• Senator Chris Dodd
• Senator John Ensign (the lone Republican)
• Representative Bawney Fwank Barney Frank
• Treasury Secretary Timothy “Turbo-Tax” Geithner
• Attorney General Eric Holder
• Representative Jesse Jackson, jr.
• President Obama
• Speaker Nancy Pelosi
• Representative John Murtha

And Representative Charlie Rangel, whose entry we reproduce below:

Rangel, the man in charge of writing tax policy for the entire country, has yet to adequately explain how he could possibly “forget” to pay taxes on $75,000 in rental income he earned from his off-shore rental property. He also faces allegations that he improperly used his influence to maintain ownership of highly coveted rent-controlled apartments in Harlem, and misused his congressional office to fundraise for his private Rangel Center by preserving a tax loophole for an oil drilling company in exchange for funding. On top of all that, Rangel recently amended his financial disclosure reports, which doubled his reported wealth. (He somehow “forgot” about $1 million in assets.) And what did he do when the House Ethics Committee started looking into all of this? He apparently resorted to making “campaign contributions” to dig his way out of trouble. According to WCBS TV, a New York CBS affiliate: “The reigning member of Congress’ top tax committee is apparently ‘wrangling’ other politicos to get him out of his own financial and tax troubles…Since ethics probes began last year the 79-year-old congressman has given campaign donations to 119 members of Congress, including three of the five Democrats on the House Ethics Committee who are charged with investigating him.” Charlie Rangel should not be allowed to remain in Congress, let alone serve as Chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, and he knows it. That’s why he felt the need to disburse campaign contributions to Ethics Committee members and other congressional colleagues.

Well done, one and all! 

Be sure to read the whole list, and savor the quality of your elected leaders.

(via Big Journalism)

Religion of Nihilism Watch

If, as the saying goes, our children represent our belief in a better future, what does it say about a society that uses nine-year olds as suicide bombers?

Yeesh.

UPDATE: More disgusting details at Threat Matrix.

Religion of Misogyny watch

In Turkey, two men are under arrest for the murder of a teenage girl. Her crime? Befriending boys. Her punishment? To be buried alive. And her killers are were her father and grandfather:

A 16-year-old girl was buried alive by relatives in southeast Turkey in a gruesome honour killing just because she reportedly befriended boys, the Anatolia news agency reported Thursday.

Acting on a tip-off, police discovered Medine Memi’s body in a sitting position with her hands tied, in a two-metre-deep hole in a chicken pen outside her house in Kahta town, Adiyaman province, 40 days after she went missing, the agency said.

A subsequent post mortem revealed that she had a significant amount of soil in her lungs and stomach, meaning that she was buried alive, foresic experts told the agency.

“The autopsy result is blood-curdling. According to our findings, the girl — who had no bruises on her body and no sign of narcotics or poison in her blood — was alive and fully conscious when she was buried,” one anonymous expert said.

Medine’s father and grandfather have been formally arrested and jailed pending trial over her killing, the agency said.

The father is reported to have said in his testimony that the family was unhappy she had male friends.

Honor killing, the butchering of women to preserve a family’s “dignity,” isn’t restricted to remote, barbaric corners of the world, much as we’d like to believe. It happens in “civilized” Western countries, too, such as the UK, Canada, and even America.

The perpetrators are almost always Muslim. As Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch points out:

In 2003 the Jordanian Parliament voted down on Islamic grounds a provision designed to stiffen penalties for honor killings. Al-Jazeera reported that “Islamists and conservatives said the laws violated religious traditions and would destroy families and values.”

And a manual of Islamic law certified as a reliable guide to Sunni orthodoxy by Al-Azhar University, the most respected authority in Sunni Islam, says that “retaliation is obligatory against anyone who kills a human being purely intentionally and without right.” However, “not subject to retaliation” is “a father or mother (or their fathers or mothers) for killing their offspring, or offspring’s offspring.” (‘Umdat al-Salik o1.1-2).

In other words, someone who kills his child incurs no legal penalty under Islamic law.

That’s why these honor killings keep happening — because they are broadly tolerated, even encouraged, by Islamic teachings and attitudes. Yet no authorities are calling Islamic leaders to account for this.

And yet to call-out Muslim spokesmen for the miserable status of women in Islam is to be labeled Islamophobic. The fault is always ours, never theirs.

LINKS: More at The Jawa Report. The Middle East Quarterly has a good article on honor killings. Stop Honor Killings is an organization dedicated to fighting this outrage, without regard to religion or sect.

Quote of the day

Jim Geraghty, from his Morning Jolt e-newsletter, on the current state of Democratic politics in Illinois:

So, just to clarify, seeking to turn the page on the era of Rod Blagojevich and Roland Burris, the Democrats’ statewide candidates this year are Rod’s two-time running mate, Tony Rezko’s banker, and the psycho ex-boyfriend who’s blackmailing Katee Sackhoff’s character on 24 this season.

That about sums it up.

For background, Ed Morrissey has a good summary.

Political ads go weird

Okay, this first is relatively normal, but it’s also pretty hard-hitting. It’s one thing to sling mud at your opponent, but how often have you seen the allies of one candidate call another a member of the Mafia?

Unless this is not unusual in Illinois? 

Next comes something I just didn’t expect: a near-lock on the Stupid Political Ad of the Year award by the Carly Fiorina US Senate campaign. I mean, is she trying to say that fiscal conservatives are all sheep waiting to be victimized by… demonsheep?

Fortunately, the DeVore campaign is on top of the Demonsheep threat.

Finally, I’m not sure why a race for coroner needs a TV ad, but, if I lived in New Orleans, I’d be tempted to vote for this guy:

Could have used a cameo by Elvira, however. Sex sells.

(via Baseball Crank)

Private health care me, not for thee

From the Department of Hypocrisy: the Premier of Canada’s Newfoundland and Labrador province, Danny Williams, has run screaming from Canada’s vaunted universal health-care system to seek treatment in the US:

Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams will undergo heart surgery later this week in the United States.

Deputy premier Kathy Dunderdale confirmed the treatment at a news conference Tuesday, but would not reveal the location of the operation or how it would be paid for.

“He has gone to a renowned expert in the procedure that he needs to have done,” said Ms. Dunderdale, who will become acting premier while Mr. Williams is away for three to 12 weeks.

“In consultation with his own doctors, he’s decided to go that route.”

Mr. Williams’ decision to leave Canada for the surgery has raised eyebrows over his apparent shunning of Canada’s health-care system.

I’ll say. So, the single-payer wonder that is Canada’s health-care system couldn’t provide the needed specialist, whereas the free-market system in the US could? Or was it that the rationing that is inevitable in such systems wouldn’t allow him access fast enough? That would perhaps be ironic, and certainly hypocritical, since Williams has been a fervid defender of Canada’s system.

These are interesting questions, and the answers may well be relevant to the health-care debate here in the United States. We want to wish Premier Williams well with his surgery and hope he has a speedy recovery (and, if this is heart trouble, perhaps he should lay off the poutine?); we’ll be very interested in what he has to say on his return.

LINKS: More from Neo-neocon, The Jawa Report, Big Government, and Fausta.

Liberal Fantasies vs. Reality, Can you Spot the Difference?

Andrew Klavan plays the “compare and contrast” game between reality and modern American culture:

More on the space program budget cuts

From the fair is fair department, I should point out that not everyone shares my gloomy, pouting perspective on the new NASA budget. Michael Belfiore sees some good in it (h/t Instapundit):

The new budget calls for a course correction—for putting money back into the kind of basic research NASA does best, keeping the space station going through at least 2020, and hiring private contractors for crew and cargo flights. It’s a boon to private space flight companies such as SpaceX but an anathema to politicians who want to keep riding a very lucrative gravy train building paper spaceships. As SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said today during a commercial space telecon organized in response to the budget request, “There are certain members of congress who cannot be swayed by any rational argument. They simply want the answer to be that funding continues in their district independent of any sound basis for it.”

I would argue that the new direction is not just the best option for NASA, but the only one. NASA already has no choice but to rely on the Russians for rides to the International Space Station after the shuttle retires this year. It’s an embarrassment. Obama’s budget will open the door to homegrown solutions for crew and cargo delivery to the space station, while providing much needed research funding for the development of next-gen technologies such as heavy-lift rockets and on-orbit refueling depots.

It’s a step that’s long overdue, though not one without peril. The private sector will have some very big shoes to fill, without the track record to prove that it’s up to the job. And can it succeed without succumbing to the kind of bloat that has eaten our defense budget alive? Working with the government tends to increase the amount of paperwork and oversight, along with the bureaucracy required to handle that extra workload, so it’s a legitimate concern. But, after all, the goal is to reduce the cost of reaching space. It has become clear to the right people, including many engineers and managers at NASA, that the traditional way of doing things hasn’t been working. NASA and the White House have every incentive to keep out of the way of the private contracts as much as possible.

A bigger danger is that NASA could become the only customer for the fledgling spaceflight companies, making them de facto arms of the government, with all the attendant problems, and keeping them at the mercy of changing political winds. That’s one reason Robert Bigelow, CEO of Bigelow Aerospace, which is developing commercial space stations, shuns government financing. “We don’t have NASA currently on our radar screen as a client,” he said during today’s telecon.

That last problem is more likely than I think Belfiore believes; if we’re in for an extended period of statism, then government may well become a “partner” to private space firms. Witness what happened to GM and Chrysler. And even if they take no federal money, the US is still the sovereign over our airspace: they’ll need to placate the government just to get “up there.”

Still, if NASA is being gutted and repurposed to pursue the White Whale of global warming, private enterprise may well offer our best chance to really get back to the future.

State legislatures revolt against ObamaCare mandates

Interesting:

Although President Barack Obama’s push for a health care overhaul has stalled, conservative lawmakers in more than two-thirds of the states are forging ahead with constitutional amendments to ban government health insurance mandates.

The proposals would assert a state-based right for people to pay medical bills from their own pocketbooks and prohibit penalties against those who refuse to carry health insurance.

In many states, the proposals began as a backlash to Democratic health care plans pending in Congress. But instead of backing away after a Massachusetts election gave Senate Republicans the filibuster power to halt the health care legislation, many state lawmakers are ramping up their efforts with new enthusiasm.

The moves reflect the continued political potency of the issue for conservatives, who have used it extensively for fundraising and attracting new supporters. The legal impact of any state measures may be questionable because courts generally have held that federal laws trump those in states.

Lawmakers in 35 states have filed or proposed amendments to their state constitutions or statutes rejecting health insurance mandates, according to the American Legislative Exchange Council, a nonprofit group that promotes limited government that is helping coordinate the efforts. Many of those proposals are targeted for the November ballot, assuring that health care remains a hot topic as hundreds of federal and state lawmakers face re-election.

Legislative committees in Idaho and Virginia endorsed their measures this past week. Supporters held a rally at the Pennsylvania Capitol. And hearings on the proposed constitutional amendments were held in Georgia and Missouri. The Missouri hearing drew overflow crowds the day after Obama urged federal lawmakers during his State of the Union address to keep pressing to pass a health care bill. The Nebraska Legislature plans a hearing on a measure this coming week.

Supporters of the state measures portray them as a way of defending individual rights and state sovereignty, asserting that the federal government has no authority to tell states and their citizens to buy health insurance.

There’s an argument to be made that requiring private citizens to buy a product as a matter of law violates both the Ninth and Tenth Amendments of the Bill of Rights. The Ninth protects “unenumerated rights,” that is, those not specifically mentioned in the Constitution but still derived from natural law, while the Tenth specifies that powers not explicitly granted to the Federal government under the Constitution are retained by the states and the people. The argument over how to interpret these amendments and the proper balance of the roles of the federal and state governments is one of the oldest in American political history, going back to the Constitutional Convention itself.

I’m not an expert, but my guess is that an argument under the Ninth would be that the freedom to decide which products to purchase, if any, falls under the right of the individual to be sovereign over his property, including his money and his own person. Under the Tenth, it could be argued that, since the commerce in health insurance does not cross state borders*, Congress has no power under the Constitution to regulate it, and that state laws barring an individual mandate are therefore valid. Also, since no power to command the purchases of the people was granted, Congress has no authority.

*(I wonder if the Right is opening a can of worms by calling for interstate commerce in health insurance, since then Congress could regulate it under the Commerce Clause…)

I think an argument under the Tenth is probably correct; I have no idea about the Ninth, which, as I understand it, is rarely invoked in US law. Regardless, since I vehemently oppose socialized medicine and, in particular, ObamaCare, I hope these acts by state legislatures withstand constitutional scrutiny.

On the other hand, they do remind me uncomfortably of the Nullification Crisis…

RELATED: A very good book on the Bill of Rights, with a chapter on the Ninth amendment.

UPDATE: I should point out that the Virginia Senate, which is dominated by Democrats, is one of the bodies voting to tell the Fed to stuff it.

More climate-change fraud revealed

The hits keep coming. At this rate, it’s becoming safer to assume that the opposite of whatever the IPCC says is true. First, from China:

Climategate intensifies: Jones and Wang apparently hid Chinese station data issues

The “climategate” controversy intensified last night when the senior British scientist at its centre, Professor Phil Jones, faced fresh accusations that he attempted to withhold data that could cast doubt on evidence for rising world temperatures.

…

But the new allegations go beyond refusing FOI requests and concern data that Professor Jones and other scientists have used to support a record of recent world temperatures that shows an upward trend.

Climate sceptics have suggested that some of the higher readings may be due not to a warmer atmosphere, but to the so-called “urban heat island effect”, where cities become reservoirs of heat and are warmer than the surrounding countryside, especially during the night hours.

Phil Jones is the “scientist” who, until the recent leaking of the damning emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, was one of the Chief Priests of the Cult of Anthropogenic Global Warming.  Now the allegations of fraud extend back at least 20 years and involves hiding evidence of a) how urban areas skew temperature readings and b) the terrible track that’s been kept of these stations, some of which don’t even exist anymore.

And we’re to take this man seriously why?

Meanwhile, following up on a story I covered a few months ago, a major New Zealand research unit has been forced to admit it cannot explain how it came up with the temperature data it has, because it destroyed the raw data:

With great embarrassment the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) in New Zealand has been forced to release it’s raw temperature data, but they have no record of why and when any adjustments were made to this data. Yet again, it appears climate scientists are re-writing the temperature history of the world.

In other words, the adjusted results are crap because no one can test the raw data to verify them. We just have to take them on faith.

How fitting for a cult.

Oh, and the Man Behind the Kiwi Curtain is Jim Salinger, who has collaborated with noted AGW alarmist (and ClimateGate principal) Michael Mann of Penn State… who also happens to be under investigation.

Is this science or a remake of Ocean’s 11?

Once upon a time, we had a space program

And it’s going to seem like a fairy tale to future generations, with the Obama administration killing a return to the Moon:

NASA’s plans to return astronauts to the moon are dead. So are the rockets being designed to take them there — that is, if President Barack Obama gets his way.

When the White House releases his budget proposal Monday, there will be no money for the Constellation program that was supposed to return humans to the moon by 2020. The troubled and expensive Ares I rocket that was to replace the space shuttle to ferry humans to space will be gone, along with money for its bigger brother, the Ares V cargo rocket that was to launch the fuel and supplies needed to take humans back to the moon.

There will be no lunar landers, no moon bases, no Constellation program at all.

I’ll be frank, this makes me very sad. 

I grew up with the space program, from Mercury through Apollo. On launch days, my parents would let me stay home from school, figuring I’d learn more watching TV that day than I’d miss in class. I ran outdoors with my father to look at the Moon the day Neil Armstrong took that first step, and I was glued to the news during the Herculean effort to rescue Apollo 13. I waited patiently (okay, not so patiently) as the program was allowed to wither in the 70s and continue halfheartedly with the Shuttle program. And I remember how jarring it sounded when, for the first time in my life, I heard the calm, confident voice of Mission Control crack when he announced the shuttle Challenger had been lost.

All that time, I believed in my heart we’d return to real space exploration one day, and I cheered when President Bush announced a return to the Moon.

“Forget it,” says President Obama.

Sure, as Allahpundit argues, a fiscal conservative should have no problem with saving money in a time of recession and amidst insane profligacy. And, taken on its own, I’d agree with him.

But the idea that we can achieve significant savings by dropping the Lunar program is, well, a crock of you-know-what. The NASA budget is roughly $18 billion. The bills so far, over several years of development for the Ares rocket and the Constellation program has been an additional $8 billion. Call it $24 billion, total.

The Obama budget proposal released today projects a deficit of $1.267 trillion. The cost of NASA plus the Constellation program to date is less than 1.9% of the federal deficit. It’s six-tenths of a percent of the proposed budget. To argue that canceling the return to the Moon represents any real savings is farcical at best, and an insult to the intelligence of the American people. It’s like a fat man ordering a double bacon-cheeseburger and fries, and then claiming it’s okay because he also got a diet soda.

As I wrote on another matter:

You [President Obama] were willing to blow nearly $800 billion on a stimulus bill that was a monument to waste. You want to take over one-sixth of the American economy, a move opposed by nearly two-thirds of the nation, at a cost of … what is it these days, a trillion dollars? You have flushed down the toilet tens of billions on auto and mortgage bailout programs that have netted the Republic nothing. And that’s only in your first year!

And what’s NASA supposed to be doing, since it’s no longer taking us to the stars? Navel-gazing. Monitoring climate-change on Earth. The irony is almost overwhelming. We’re going to save money by not going to the Moon, but we’re going to flush down the toilet what we do spend tracking a “problem” that’s been shown to be a gigantic fraud. Head, meet brick wall.

While I applaud the plans mentioned in the original article to bring in more private contractors and I agree there’s an important role for the commercial development of the inner Solar System, I still believe we need a American space program.  I’m somewhat of a national greatness conservative; while I support the idea of limited government, there are still some areas that are legitimate Federal projects, and space exploration is one of them. A nation descended of pioneers, we need explorers to challenge the boundaries and open up to us the possibilities of “out there.” We need the jolt of national pride that comes from doing what everyone else says is impossible, like walking on the Moon. We need heroes.

Sure, it’s a romantic notion. For all the practical arguments one can make about the benefits of high tech developed through the program or of jobs provided from Alabama to California, it’s all about a kid’s dreams that came to life one day in July, 1969.

Don’t tell me kicking those to the curb is worth six-tenths of a percent.

LINKS: LowDown Central, where Lance Thompson say the President has mooned the American spirit. Pamela Geller on trillions for a hoax. Rich Trzupek – To Boldly Go Nowhere.

UPDATE: Buzz Aldrin, Apollo 11 co-pilot and the second man on the Moon, likes the plan.

Perspective

The next time someone tels you that “Bush was as big a spender as Obama” (usually followed by a mature “nyah-nyah”), show them this:

And note that that Bush-era deficits were declining until the financial crack-up and bailouts of 2008.

There simply is no comparison.

(hat tip: Instapundit via Darcysport)

Forget the shoe-bomber and the pantybomber

The next attack by al Qaeda may come via the boob-bomber:

Terrorists ‘plan attack on Britain with bombs INSIDE their bodies’ to foil new airport scanners

Britain is facing a new Al Qaeda terror threat from suicide ‘body bombers’ with explosives surgically inserted inside them.

Until now, terrorists have attacked airlines, Underground trains and buses by secreting bombs in bags, shoes or underwear to avoid detection.

But an operation by MI5 has uncovered evidence that Al Qaeda is planning a new stage in its terror campaign by inserting ‘surgical bombs’ inside people for the first time.

Security services believe the move has been prompted by the recent introduction at airports of body scanners, which are designed to catch terrorists before they board flights.

It is understood MI5 became aware of the threat after observing increasingly vocal internet ‘chatter’ on Arab websites this year.

The warning comes in the wake of the failed attempt by London-educated Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to blow up an airliner approaching Detroit on Christmas Day.

One security source said: ‘If the terrorists are talking about this, we need to be ready and do all we can to counter the threat.’

A leading source added that male bombers would have the explosive secreted near their appendix or in their buttocks, while females would have the material placed inside their breasts in the same way as figure-enhancing implants.

When you’re done laughing, bear in mind, as the article points out, it only takes a few ounces of PETN to blow a fatal whole in an airplane. And this is being planned to circumvent body scanners, which would find explosives hidden where the sun doesn’t shine.

This goes to show that a sole focus on the tactic or the device is wrong, because the enemy will always find a new (and bizarre) way to try to kill us. Until we target the jihadi himself, via profiling, we are exposing innocent people to grave risks.

(hat tip: Fausta)

RELATED: Maybe the boob-bombers will be entering the swimsuit competition?

The Holder Hangover

The Holder Justice Department has made several serious mistakes in its handling of jihadi detainees: treating the Detroit Pantybomber as a common criminal with constitutional rights; ordering a trial in Federal court for the plotter of 9-11, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad; and the end of the CIA interrogation program are among several. Power Line’s Scott Johnson looks to the source of these errors and find it not, where many would put it, in the Attorney General’s office, but in President Obama’s misguided view of constitutional rights:

Speaking at a town hall meeting in Pennsylvania during the presidential campaign in June 2008, Barack Obama addressed the Supreme Court’s Boumediene decision granting Guantanamo detainees the right to challenge their confinement through habeas corpus proceedings in federal court. Obama asserted that the “principle of habeas corpus, that a state can’t just hold you for any reason without charging you and without giving you any kind of due process — that’s the essence of who we are.” He explained:

“I mean, you remember during the Nuremberg trials, part of what made us different was even after these Nazis had performed atrocities that no one had ever seen before, we still gave them a day in court and that taught the entire world about who we are but also the basic principles of rule of law. Now the Supreme Court upheld that principle yesterday.”

Obama’s comments derive from what I facetiously call “the higher wisdom” that fueled his campaign and that is now operative in his administration. Attorney General Eric Holder perfectly reflects it.

In designating the mastermind of 9/11 and his co-conspirators who are detained in Guantanamo for trial in federal court in Manhattan, cloaking them with the rights of American citizens under the Constitution of the United States, Holder sought to give them their “day in court.” He also sought to “t[each] the entire world about who we are but also the basic principles of rule of law.”

The only appropriate response to Obama’s campaign comments on Boumediene is: “Not true.”

Scott then proceeds to dismantle the President’s use of the Nuremberg hearings as a precedent, exposing the supposed “constitutional scholar’s” ignorance of legal history. From this fundamental error, that war criminals and enemy combatants should be treated as ordinary defendants with the full protection of the Bill of Rights flows every other dumb decision Obama and Holder have made.

Sadly, there are many.

And they will come back to haunt us.

RELATED: Scott links this in his piece, but I wanted to point out here an excellent essay by Thomas Sowell that describes the administration’s decision to try terrorists in criminal court as insanity.

Swimsuits and suicide-belts?

According to Dr. Kifah Al-Ramali of the Gaza Islamic University, beauty contests are yet another part of the eternal Western plot against Islam. The true beauty queen, according to Cousin Itt Dr. Al-Ramali, is the “jihad mother” who waits patiently while her menfolk blow themselves up or otherwise get themselves killed trying to murder Jews:

From the transcript:

The real Palestinian beauty queen is the Jihad-fighting mother, the mother who perseveres and endures the siege, the mother who says: We will suffer hunger, but we will not bow down, the mother who sacrificed martyrs and demonstrated forbearance. She is the wife of the martyr, who left her in the prime of life, with her children, yet she says: I will persevere, and I will raise my children to be mujahideen. She is the mother who has lost her husband, her sons, her daughters, her home and her shelter, yet she displays forbearance. She is the queen of the women of the world in its entirety, not just of Palestine.

Of course, the real target of the Evil Beauty Contest Plot(tm) is Muslim men.  Dr. Al-Ramali explains:

The enemies of Allah have studied the mentality of the Muslims, and have studied what harms their religion and their faith. They have studied how to infiltrate our society. First, they intervened in women’s [issues]. This is because they know that the prophet Muhammad said: “The greatest temptation for men is women.” Women are the greatest temptation. They know what weapon to use to fight [Muslim] society. Allah sowed in men the attraction to women, and vice versa.

Devious, isn’t it? The Crusaders (that’s us) and the Jews (We’re their puppets, you know) will distract brave, brave mujahideen from blowing up Jews by showing them a little skin. That’s why women have to be covered, you see: men are unable to control themselves  around an “immodest” woman, like a cat that sees uncovered meat. In other words, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali has pointed out, under Islam women are responsible for the sexual behavior and misbehavior of men. To come back to Dr. Al-Ramali’s sick mind arguments, this is why beauty contests are evil: to participate in them is to allow oneself to be used as a weapon against Islam and to avoid one’s duty as a mujahideen-making machine.

With “intellectuals” like this, is it any wonder Palestinian society is hopeless?

RELATED: More anti-Semitic tripe from the good doctor. In an earlier panel interview, she tells us that Judaism teaches its followers that it is okay to rape and murder non-Jews:

The killing of Palestinian women, and women in general, by the Jews is not a random thing. Rather, it is their ideology, which is taught to their children in their curricula. It is mentioned in the books of the Torah. I will present some short samples, although their books are full of this. For instance, the greatest Jewish scholar, on whom they completely rely, Maimonides, wrote in his book that the Jews have the right to rape non-believing women. By non-believing, he meant non-Jewish.

Read the full transcript and watch the video. Her co-panelists are equally charming.

Chief Estes for President!

A 95-year old Navy veteran unleashes his inner Dutch Uncle in an open letter to President Obama:

After 9/11 you said, “America hasn’t lived up to her ideals.”

Which ones did you mean? Was it the notion of personal liberty that 11,000 farmers and shopkeepers died for to win independence from the British? Or maybe the ideal that no man should be a slave to another man, that 500,000 men died for in the Civil War? I hope you didn’t mean the ideal 470,000 fathers, brothers, husbands, and a lot of fellas I knew personally died for in WWII, because we felt real strongly about not letting any nation push us around, because we stand for freedom.

I don’t think you mean the ideal that says equality is better than discrimination. You know the one that a whole lot of white people understood when they helped to get you elected.

Take a little advice from a very old geezer, young man.

Shape up and start acting like an American. If you don’t, I’ll do what I can to see you get shipped out of that fancy rental on Pennsylvania Avenue. You were elected to lead not to bow, apologize and kiss the hands of murderers and corrupt leaders who still treat their people like slaves.

You tell him, Chief! 

(via Obi’s Sister)

The Bizarro legislature

Remember Bizarro World? The planet on which every Earthman had a weird duplicate, and these duplicates would do the opposite of whatever was the intelligent, sensible thing to do? A people for whom doing the dumb thing was doing the right thing?

That’s the California legislature.

Driving pedal-to-the-metal for that cliff, the state senate voted to approve legislation earlier passed by the Appropriations Committee to create a single-payer universal health-care system:

The 22-14 vote was nearly party-line, with one Democrat, Sen. Lou Correa, D-Santa Ana, voting no. It now moves to the Assembly.

The proposal would create the California Health System, which would be funded by pooling all federal and state money California currently spends on health care and a yet-to-be-determined payroll tax. It is anticipated to cost about $200 billion a year. All state residents would be provided health care and people could buy private health care to cover services not offered through the state plan.

Why do I describe this as something out of Bizarro World? Because the state will run out of cash in less than three months:

State Controller John Chiang issued a stern warning Friday about California’s cash reserves, telling legislative leaders and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger they must act on nearly $9 billion in budget cuts the governor is seeking by March — or the state will run out of cash to pay its bills.

Without making those cuts — which Chiang says will pump $1.3 billion into the state’s checking account — California would be broke by April 1, no fooling.

So, in a time of severe recession with unemployment and under-employment pushing 20%, state revenues crashing, and the treasury almost empty, Senate Democrats want to create a $200 billion entitlement (and we know that’s the low end) and tax even more an already over-taxed population.

Only in Bizarro World could this be considered a bright idea.

(hat tip: Michelle Malkin)