Saudi Islamic Law professor: “Kill the TV station owners!”

Via MEMRI, an interview with Yousuf Al-Ahmad, Professor of Islamic Law at Al-Imam University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Saudis who own TV stations -including al-Arabiya– should face trial in an Islamic court and execution for spreading immorality and disorder in the land. Remember, this man is an acknowledged expert in Islamic Law and, in his opinion, these station owners pose a worse threat than the Jews:

Sheikh Yousuf Al-Ahmad: […] “I believe that one of our problems is that we continue to bury our heads in the sand, and talk about ‘Lebanese’ TV channels, as if we are being honest. Take LBC, for example. We all know who owns it. We should say to [the owner] Al-Walid bin Talal: Beware. The same is true of MBC TV, Al-Arabiya TV, the ART and Rotana channels – all these [Saudi] channels serve to destroy Islam and the Muslims.

[…]

“Regarding these base channels that I have mentioned, and others like them – I have no doubt whatsoever that their danger to the Islamic nation is no less than that of the Zionist Jews, or of the Crusader Americans in Iraq and elsewhere.”

Interviewer: “What led you to such an extremist view? Note that you are equating channels owned by Muslims, by Saudi citizens, with the Jews.”

Sheikh Yousuf Al-Ahmad: “I wasn’t equating them. I said they are more dangerous. I was being precise. In my view, the deadly poison that they are spreading has reached the bone marrow.

[…]

“The people who spread corruption in the land – whether highway robbers, drug dealers, or the owners of these TV channels, who are even more dangerous… These channels broadcast corruption and nudity. They are all people who spread corruption in the land, and they should be tried in an Islamic court of law and sentenced to death. This [fatwa] is clearly in accordance with Islamic law. There’s no doubt about it.”

The esteemed sheikh goes on to explain how killing the station owners is in accord with Islam and Allah’s will, and he scoffs with contempt at the idea that Islam is a religion of “tolerance and leniency.” Bear that in mind the next time an apologist for Islam tries to tell you that it is a religion of peace and tolerance, or that it’s compatible with democracy and the principles that underlie it. (It isn’t, not if one is to practice it as Muhammad intended.)

LINKS: Jihad Watch provides the Qur’anic citations for Sheikh Al-Ahmad’s opinions.

‘Cuda Watch

According to the dearly-held beliefs of liberals and the cocktail conservatives, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is an irrelevant has-been and a hick. A nothing and an embarrassment to the Republican Party who should just go away and hunt moose.

Which explains why the CLSA Investors Forum in Hong Kong invited her to be their featured speaker:

Bill Clinton, Al Gore and Alan Greenspan have spoken at the event, hosted by brokerage and investment group CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets.

Story continues below ↓

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advertisement | your ad here

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“Our keynote speakers are notable luminaries who often address topics that go beyond traditional finance such as geopolitics,” company spokeswoman Simone Wheeler said in a statement.

“We just felt it would be a fabulous opportunity for CLSA clients to hear from Mrs. Palin,” Wheeler said, adding that CLSA approached Palin with the offer.

She said the conference aimed to present investors “a diversity of views that potentially influence decision-makers who help shape the markets.”

Yeah, she’s irrelevant all right, which is why the Democrats and the media take any chance they can to slag her.

You betcha. 

(via Dr. Melissa Clouthier)

Must resist … flatulence jokes….

As I’ve said before, the stupidity of our enemies is often our greatest ally in war:

Saudi tightens security to protect oil plants

Saudi Arabia has tightened security at oil facilities after the country’s anti-terror chief, Deputy Interior Minister Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, escaped a suicide attack, guards at Abqaiq, the world’s biggest oil processing plant, said yesterday.

“Thursday night we received a call to tighten security and car inspection at all gates,” one guard said. “Even Aramco employees undergo inspection. There’s a lack of trust as militants disguised in Aramco’s cars attacked the facility in 2006,” he said.

Interior Minister Prince Nayef yesterday defended the policy of enticing “repentant” militants after one tried to assassinate his son, but warned there could be more attacks ahead.

“The security efforts and strategy that the country is following will not change,” Prince Nayef said in Jeddah. “This incident will not change this policy by which we open the door for those who repent.”

Al Qaeda, meanwhile, claimed responsibility for the suicide attack and said that the bomber, Abdullah Hassan Taleh Al Asiri, had managed to pass security checkpoints and board a private aircraft, Site Intelligence said yesterday.

A statement posted on jihadist forums by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula said Al Asiri passed through checkpoints at Najran airport, near the Yemeni border, and Jeddah airport, the US monitoring service said.

He then boarded Prince Mohammed’s private jet with his explosives, according to the statement, which said he finally blew himself up amongst the prince’s guards. The site also published a picture of Asiri.

Saudi-owned Al Arabiya TV said Asiri was a 23-year-old Saudi whose brother Ibrahim was also on the wanted list.

It said the attacker concealed the explosives in his anus, allowing him to evade detection.

The network also quoted an expert as saying that the method of concealment aimed the blast away from the target, while blowing the bomber to bits.

I probably wouldn’t call that one “silent but deadly.”

(via Iraq the Model)

Seen on vacation with a Pina Colada

From the Daily Mail, news that a team of IBM researchers has managed to photograph a single molecule:

It may look like a piece of honeycomb, but this lattice-shaped image is the first ever close-up view of a single molecule.

Scientists from IBM used an atomic force microscope (AFM) to reveal the chemical bonds within a molecule.

‘This is the first time that all the atoms in a molecule have been imaged,’ lead researcher Leo Gross said.

The researchers focused on a single molecule of pentacene, which is commonly used in solar cells. The rectangular-shaped organic molecule is made up of 22 carbon atoms and 14 hydrogen atoms.

In the image above the hexagonal shapes of the five carbon rings are clear and even the positions of the hydrogen atoms around the carbon rings can be seen.

To give some perspective, the space between the carbon rings is only 0.14 nanometers across, which is roughly one million times smaller than the diameter of a grain of sand.

Click through to see the picture. Perhaps as amazing as the photo itself is how it resembles the classic diagrams of molecules we’ve all seen in chemistry texts.

Neat! 

Yes, he really said that

White House Deputy Press Secretary Bill Burton tried to make a funny when talking about President Obama’s plans to go to Camp David after a week at Martha’s Vineyard:

Obama will head to Camp David on Wednesday, Sept. 2, and stay through the weekend, White House spokesman Bill Burton told reporters in a Thursday briefing.

Joking that it may have been “wishful thinking” to suggest Obama’s current trip out of Washington would coincide with a news-free week, Burton quipped that the president needs a “break from his vacation.”

Quite the comedian, eh? Don’t get me wrong: I don’t begrudge Presidents time away from the White House. It’s a very stressful job, and they never really escape it. But then Burton kept going and showed why he should have a lounge act in Vegas:

On Monday, Burton pointed to former President George W. Bush’s vacation habits to defend scattered criticism of Obama’s August schedule.

“As I recall, the previous president [took] quite a bit of vacation himself, and I don’t think anyone bemoaned that,” Burton said.

William Jacobson takes notice and says “Oh, really?”

Funny guy, that Mr. Burton.

How to rescue ObamaCare

Charles Krauthammer argues that the current Democratic proposals for health-care reform are dead. If they want to pass anything that they could call a victory, they need to junk the current schemes and come up with a new plan. Call it ObamaCare 2.0:

…Make health insurance universal and permanently protected. Tear up the existing bills and write a clean one — Obamacare 2.0 — promulgating draconian health-insurance regulation that prohibits (a) denying coverage for pre-existing conditions, (b) dropping coverage if the client gets sick, and (c) capping insurance company reimbursement.

What’s not to like? If you have insurance, you’ll never lose it. Nor will your children ever be denied coverage for pre-existing conditions.

The regulated insurance companies will get two things in return. Government will impose an individual mandate that will force the purchase of health insurance on the millions of healthy young people who today forgo it. And government will subsidize all the others who are too poor to buy health insurance. The result? Two enormous new revenue streams created by government for the insurance companies.

And here’s what makes it so politically seductive: The end result is the liberal dream of universal and guaranteed coverage — but without overt nationalization. It is all done through private insurance companies. Ostensibly private. They will, in reality, have been turned into government utilities. No longer able to control whom they can enroll, whom they can drop and how much they can limit their own liability, they will live off government largesse — subsidized premiums from the poor; forced premiums from the young and healthy.

It’s the perfect finesse — government health care by proxy. And because it’s proxy, and because it will guarantee access to (supposedly) private health insurance — something that enjoys considerable Republican support — it will pass with wide bipartisan backing and give Obama a resounding political victory.

Sounds brilliant, doesn’t it? Simple, seductive, almost irresistible. Rather than the bloated, laden with mines legislation now being pushed, Congress simply mandates private coverage for all and provides subsidies for those who can’t afford it. (Never mind the constitutional questions.)

There’s a doozy of a catch, however, a big, fat worm hidden at the core of this oh-so-sweet looking apple. There always is. Read the whole thing to find out. And remember Maine.

TANGENT: Krauthammer’s point three essentially agrees with and validates Palin’s death panel metaphor. So why the elitist nastiness in telling her to “leave the room?”

Time for a revolution?

They just don’t get it in Sacramento, do they? After telling them in no uncertain terms last May that we are taxed enough and won’t tolerate any more until the state gets serious about controlling spending, the Mandarins of the Golden Dome and their creatures in the Franchise Tax Board have decided to do it anyway, but by a different route. Instead of raising taxes, they’ll lower the breakpoints between rates so that, without ever getting a raise, we can qualify for a higher rate:

While Californians are still feeling the sting of income and sales tax hikes signed into law earlier this year, now comes news that state tax authorities plan to take a little more from their pockets.

For only the second time in 30 years, the tax board is lowering the point where each tax bracket begins, bumping many people into a higher category. At the same time, officials are cutting back some deductions.

Everyone will pay more, even people whose bracket or income doesn’t change.
The extra sums will total as much as $140 per family, on top of the increases previously enacted.

Bear in mind, as the cited article mentions in passing, this comes after other measures to “enhance revenues:” a deal to end last year’s budget crisis raised income taxes to nearly 10% at the top rate and sales taxes to 9.75% in many counties. Then the government decided it needed the money faster, so it decided to accelerate the rate of withholding. And now this latest move makes it a trifecta.

Think about this: the nation is in the worst recession in nearly 30 years, and California is worse off than most – state revenues are crashing and unemployment has reached 11.9 percent. (PDF) Businesses are fleeing the state to escape the high cost of doing business here – and taking jobs with them. Many who haven’t lost their jobs are facing pay cuts.

So what do these morons in Sacramento do? They decide to take even more money from the people and from businesses, money that instead could have been used to buy goods and services – and create productive jobs. Genius, sheer frakking genius!

Not ever do they even consider doing what’s truly necessary: reducing expenditures to meet revenues, lowering taxes to let more money flow into the economy, and generally removing the barriers to doing business and creating jobs. Yes, reducing expenditures to meet revenues would hurt – a lot. A lot of people dependent on state subsidies in one way or another would be hurt as the subsidies are cut off. A lot of state workers would have to be laid off and state services curtailed. It would be painful as Hell.

But because of the insane spending and borrowing binge this state has been on for more than a decade, using short-term revenues to make people reliant on promises of social nirvana but not having the means to pay for it long-term without more taxing and more borrowing, there is no other way to restore California’s economic health in the long run. Like a chronic alcoholic, it has to go cold-turkey or it will never break the habit.

But the oligarchs in Sacramento won’t do it. They have neither the desire nor the political will, after years of selling the people a social-democratic acid trip. And since they won’t do what’s required, the only thing left is a revolt at the ballot box. Off with their political heads!

We started it last May, voting down those tax-increasing ballot measures. Evidently they still don’t think we’re serious, so it’s time to show them how serious we truly are. It’s time to vote them all out of office and replace them with true representatives, men and women who understand what the state needs and what the people want – and who don’t treat the people as terrorists.

So, as the 2010 campaign approaches, talk to the candidates for the Assembly, for the State Senate, and for statewide office. All of them, of whatever party. Ask them where they stand on taxation, spending, and borrowing. Don’t accept weasel words – demand specifics.  And let them know that, if they want your vote, you want their personal commitment to a break with the past and a return to sensible, sane governance.

California can’t afford any more of this madness.

LINKS: Hot Air.

Technorati tags: California, taxes, jobs, recession, unemployment

Culture of corruption watch

First the Obama-Holder Justice Department dropped charges against members of the New Black Panther Party who intimidated voters in Philadelphia last November. (Civil Rights? Never heard of them.) Now the Justice Department has dropped its corruption investigation of New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, an early and major supporter of President Obama’s campaign for office.

I’m shocked, shocked, I tell you!

LINKS: More at Hot Air and from Don Surber.

ECON 101

Whatever else President Obama has hidden in his transcripts, ABC’s John Stossel makes it clear he never took basic economics:

Debate Shows How Little Obama Understands

“Choice, competition, reducing costs — those are the things that I want to see accomplished in this health reform bill,” President Obama told talk-show host Michael Smerconish last week.

Choice and competition would be good. They would indeed reduce costs. If only the president meant it. Or understood it.

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In a free market, a business that is complacent about costs learns that its prices are too high when it sees lower-cost competitors winning over its customers. The market — actually, the consumer — holds businesses accountable and keeps them honest. No “public option” is needed.

So the hope for reducing medical costs indeed lies in competition and choice. Today competition is squelched by government regulation and privilege.

But Obama’s so-called reforms would not create real competition and choice. They would prohibit it.

Read the rest. John McCain claimed he was no expert in economics, but I think even he understood this.

More about the Lion of the Senate

Not only was Ted Kennedy the kind of man who would leave a woman to die, not only was he a drunk and a sexual harasser, but he was also a self-serving, disloyal bastard who offered to work with the Soviets against the sitting President of the United States.

This is the man whom the congressional Democrats and the media wish to honor.

No surprise. It’s in a line with their behavior during the Iraq War, too. 

Bah.

LINKS: Hot Air has more.

The Pelosi-Obama deficits

Forwarded by a reader, this Wall St. Journal editorial provides a very clear summary of the administration’s deficit and spending binge and the fantasies on which it’s based:

Earlier this year when President Obama was selling his first budget blueprint, he promised to end years of “borrow and spend” budgeting. Yesterday, reality struck.

Mr. Obama’s White House and the Congressional Budget Office told us that current U.S. fiscal policy is “borrow and spend” on a hyperlink. The good news is the deficit for 2009 will be “only” $1.58 trillion, about $250 billion lower than expected thanks to less need for TARP funds. But the Obama fiscal plan envisions $9 trillion in new borrowing over the next decade, which is $2 trillion more debt than the White House predicted earlier this year. The 2010 deficit also rises by about as much as the 2009 deficit falls from January, so even the TARP windfall gets spent.

We’ve never fretted over budget deficits, at least if they finance tax cuts to promote growth or spending to win a war. But these deficit estimates are driven entirely by more domestic spending and already assume huge new tax increases. CBO predicts that debt held by the public as a share of GDP, which was 40.8% in 2008, will rise to 67.8% in 2019—and then keep climbing after that. CBO says this is “unsustainable,” but even this forecast may be optimistic.

The Journal’s editors are being kind to use the word “optimistic.” The more fair description is “delusional.” The progressive’s “plan” to control the deficit assumes Congress will hold spending to just the rate of inflation for the next 10 years – here’s a bipartisan reality check. Even funnier are the progressives’ assumption that crashing federal revenues will not just recover, but reach historic highs, sort of like running your credit cards to the max on the assumption you’re going to get that big raise. And the economic growth they’re counting on to provide those revenues is sure to be crippled thanks to the taxes imposed by their health-care reform plans and cap-and-trade scheme.

Whatever they’re smoking, I want some of it.

As I’ve said before, there are only three ways to pay for the deficits the Democrats are running (and growing): borrowing from overseas, leaving future generations saddled with the debt and its interest (think credit cards, again); printing money, which inevitably will cause high inflation and make creditors angry as their debt becomes worth less – and thus less likely to loan more; or raising taxes on everyone to massive levels, thus breaking another of the Lightworker’s promises and again crippling economic recovery.

And, let’s face it, they’ll probably come up with a combination of all three.

November, 2010, can’t get here fast enough. 

When are bonuses not evil?

When Congress decides to pay retention bonuses to its own staff, of course.

That’s different, you see.

The narrative is the story

Bill Whittle at Big hollywood asks a darned good question: Why is Rodney King famous and Kenneth Gladney unknown?

Here’s a better question: If Kenneth Gladney — a black American who was beaten when he went to protest ObamaCare — had been there instead to support President Obama and had been beaten up and called a nigger by Anti-Obama town hall protesters…

…Well, does anyone doubt he would have been as famous as Rodney King? Why is Kenneth Gladney ignored? And why did a black patriot who showed up in opposition to ObamaCare with an AR-15 have his face and hands edited out of the video that MSNBC used to create the belief that wild white mobs, enraged at the very idea of a black man in the White House, were waiting outside to lynch the “President of Color?”

The example of these two black patriots flies dead in the face of The Narrative. Well, what is “the Narrative?”

To find out the answer and see a related video, be sure to read the rest.

Ted Kennedy is dead

He passed away last night from brain cancer:

Sen. Ted Kennedy died shortly before midnight Tuesday at his home in Hyannis Port, Mass., at age 77.

The man known as the “liberal lion of the Senate” had fought a more than year-long battle with brain cancer, and according to his son had lived longer with the disease than his doctors expected him to.

“We’ve lost the irreplaceable center of our family and joyous light in our lives, but the inspiration of his faith, optimism, and perseverance will live on in our hearts forever,” the Kennedy family said in a statement. “He loved this country and devoted his life to serving it.”

While my sympathies go out to his family and those who cared for him, it’s hard for me to feel anything but contempt for the man, for he never admitted guilt nor ever paid for leaving Mary Jo Kopechne to die in a Chappaquiddick estuary. Any accomplishment he may ever have had is blighted by that.

Maybe now he’ll finally have to answer for it.

(via Tigerhawk)

LINKS: RS McCain shows no restraint. Power Line looks at his role in the smearing of Judge Bork and its effect on American political culture. More at Hot Air, Baseball Crank, and Sister Toldjah.

UPDATE: I linked to Crank’s post above -do read it- but I wanted to excerpt a portion because of the lesson it teaches that Barack Obama should have learned:

Kennedy’s career could have been a cautionary tale for our current president, who might not have found himself in quite the fix he is in at the moment if he’d followed Ted’s example, bided his years, spent more time in the trenches doing the unglamorous work of legislating and taking the hard punches that must be taken to sell the product to the public, learning how the system works, why it works and who makes it work. Most of the changes Ted Kennedy made in this nation over his career were change for the worst – but he did, over time, make real change because he worked at it instead of just saying the word “change” and hoping it would be so.

Ouch! 

Quote of the day

I don’t have much patience or understanding for people who play games with national security for political benefit, so let me dismiss the political strategy of this outrage by saying it once again demonstrates the danger of believing your own political spin, and taking the lovestruck panting of a sycophantic media seriously. Real Americans are not anxious to punish the people who shut down al-Qaeda’s domestic operations. While liberals wave the Justice Department’s report on CIA interrogation techniques at the rest of the world and tearfully beg them for forgiveness, the rest of us are wondering why we don’t reduce the deficit by selling the rights to these interrogations on pay-per-view.

You can read the rest here.

The end of liberal fascism

The blog, that is, not the trend in our current politics. Jonah Goldberg is putting a close to his blog at National Review Online, mostly from lack of time to keep it updated. Sadly, these days, it needs a lot of updating.

As always, Jonah’s post is full of useful things to think about: he recounts the progressive/corporatist/fascist tendencies and acts of the Obama administration in its first six months, providing a summary of disturbing things we may have missed or forgotten, since they’ve come so fast, one after the other: the growth of state capitalism, the marriage of union and government, and indeed the resurgence of the concept of the State as the agent of God:

Indeed, our own messianic president, who insists that we can create a Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, also apparently believes that “we are God’s partners in matters of life and death” and that religious organizations that are true to their calling should rally behind a united front to expand the scope and role of government.  When the head of state says such things, it is hard not to be reminded of the Progressive concept of the God State, a major theme of Liberal Fascism. The “State is the actually existing,  realized moral life . . . The divine idea as it exists on earth,” Hegel declared in The Philosophy of History. The State, according to Hegel, was the “march of God on earth.” The progressives agreed.  Richard Ely, the founding father of progressive economics, proclaimed “God works through the State in carrying out His purposes more universally than through any other institution.”

But Goldberg has another message that’s just as important: if we’re to recognize and fight the fascist tendencies in our own politics, we must guard against facile comparisons to Hitler and even Mussolini (something I’ve done in my more irritated moments). The danger we face isn’t from jackbooted thugs marching on Washington the way Mussolini’s Blackshirts marched on Rome, but the totalitarian nanny-state of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World:

As I make clear in Liberal Fascism, the obvious and pressing threat is not from a Hitlerite-Orwellian dictatorship but from a Huxleyan namby-pamby mommy state. That sort of system could seduce Americans into becoming chestless subjects of the State in exchange for bottomless self-gratification and liberation from the necessity of adult decision-making. Yes, there’s a danger that such a society could then be susceptible to some darker vision that lionizes the lost manhood of a half-forgotten past. But, by that point, this would be America in name only, if even that (“U.N. District 12” has a nice ring to it).

I’ll disagree with Jonah a bit to point out that we have seen flashes of the jackboot under Nanny’s skirts: the beating of a town-hall attendee by purple-shirted SEIU thugs earlier this month, and the Missouri truth squads of last year’s campaign. But, overall he’s right: the greater threat to our liberties comes from the Democrats’ desire to regulate more and more aspects of our lives and, through “social justice programs” such as the proposed health care reform bills, make us dependents and wards of the government, which the Left believes is the only impartial distributor of resources and the only guarantor of our rights – as defined by government. It’s a feminine, maternal fascism as dangerous to free society as anything Benito cooked up.

Goldberg’s blog may be ending, but he’ll still be writing articles and posting observations at The Corner. Meanwhile, though I’ve pimped and promoted Liberal Fascism so often that some readers must be sick of it, I seriously recommend you buy the book or borrow it, but read it, regardless. No intelligent discussion of modern US politics is possible otherwise.

War Porn: Night attack in Afghanistan

God help me, but this just gives me the warm fuzzies knowing that medieval psychos brave, brave jihadis are at the receiving end:

The commentary is amusing, too. 

(via The Jawa Report, which always has the best war porn)

Global Warming alarmist headline of the day

I  expect better than this from a journal as good as New Scientist:

Global warming could change Earth’s tilt

OMG!! WTF?!?! We’ve got to start dumping lime into the oceans and firing sun-reflecting pollutants into the atmosphere NOW!!1!1!

Erm… Not so fast, Doc. If you read a bit further into the article, you find it’s no big deal:

The team found that as the oceans warm and expand, more water will be pushed up and onto the Earth’s shallower ocean shelves. Over the next century, the subtle effect is expected to cause the northern pole of Earth’s spin axis to shift by roughly 1.5 centimetres per year in the direction of Alaska and Hawaii.

The effect is relatively small. “The pole’s not going to drift away in a crazy manner,” Landerer notes, adding that it shouldn’t induce any unfortunate feedback in Earth’s climate.

Emphasis added.

“Could,” “may,” “might” — these are all weasel words global warming alarmists love to use to encourage us to let government take control of huge sections of the economy, all to fight a problem that does not exist. It’s the language of the con job, which is fitting since Anthropogenic Global Warming is the biggest confidence game since Victor Lustig sold the Eiffel Tower.

Shame on New Scientist.

(h/t Watts Up With That?)

So who gets the horse’s head in the bed?

Michael Godwin writes about the President’s come-Hell-or-high-water determination to pass his health-care legislation (among other progressive golden calves) and reminds us that Obama’s favorite movie is The Godfather:

Asked by Couric if he had a favorite scene, the President-to-be said:

“… the opening scene of the first Godfather where the caretaker comes in and, you know, Marlon Brando is sitting there and he’s saying, ‘You disrespected me, you know, and now you want a favor.’

“You know it sets the tone for the whole movie … there’s this combination of old world gentility and you know, ritual with this savagery underneath. It’s all about family.”

Now “The Godfather” trilogy is about many things, and family is surely one of them. But it’s also a cautionary tale about arrogance, and perhaps that’s the lesson Obama should heed.

I doubt he will, though. Unlike Bill Clinton, who tacked toward the political center after his crushing defeat over health-care reform and in the 2010 1994 midterm elections and had a relatively successful presidency thereafter, I don’t think Barack Obama has the political self-awareness and flexibility to eat his piece of humble pie and seek compromise. No, he wants the opposition to kiss Don Barack’s ring, and this arrogance may well cost him his entire agenda.

One question, though: Does this make Biden the administration’s Fredo? 

(via Gaius at Blue Crab Boulevard)

UPDATE: Edited to fix the date of Clinton’s midterm debacle. Then again, with so many former Clintonistas in the Obama government, it does kind of feel like Bill’s around, again… 😉

(Satire) Wait, wasn’t this above his paygrade?

A press release from the Czar of Czars:

WASHINGTON (Iowahawk Business PR Wire) — U.S. Government CEO Barack Obama announced today that his firm had embarked on a new joint venture with metaphysical industrial giant God, saying that “We are God’s partners in matters of life and death.”

“This partnership is a natural,” said Obama. “We both are unfathomably large, we both control people’s lives, we both work in mysterious ways, we both have a fanatical customer base. Instead of competing, it just made basic business sense to work together to become the premier developer of mission critical life-and-death operating systems.”

The announcement came before the annual GodCon trade show in Las Vegas, where Obama gave a product demo of the iGod heath care rationing device, the first of what he said would be “many development projects” between US Government and God. He encouraged independent God developers to support the closed-source iGod / iGov health care platform, warning that “woe be unto the unlicensed app developer, for he shall be smote by a vengeful hail of ACORNs.”

Other iGod apps currently in beta test include an end-of-life calculator, income leveler, and a wireless database detector for anti-government heretics and apostates.

Read the whole thing, citizen.