Because it is better for a president to be thought of as petty and vindictive than to be thought of as vacillating and weak, Barack Hussein Obama had to fire his commander in Afghanistan. General Stanley McChrystal wasn't actually insubordinate.  But the reporting of the Rolling Stone article that sparked this controversy gave the impression he was. It had to hurt a man with an ego as large as Mr. Obama's to read this description of their first one-on-one meeting: "‘It was a ten minute photo op,' said an adviser to McChrystal.  ‘Obama clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was.  Here's the guy who's going to run his (expletive) war, but he didn't seem very engaged.  The Boss was pretty disappointed.'" The thoughts expressed are not rare in the U.S. military, but they are not supposed to be expressed publicly. It was appallingly poor judgment for Gen. McChrystal's aides to be so frank with a Rolling Stone reporter, and for Gen. McChrystal to have granted him such access.  "If an officer cannot figure out Rolling Stone, how can he understand the Taliban?" wondered military historian Victor Davis Hanson.  Or as Maureen Dowd of the New York Times put it: "So this general with the background in intelligence who is supposed to conquer Afghanistan can't even figure out what Rolling Stone is? We're not talking Guns & Ammo here; we're talking the antiwar hippie magazine."

The United Nations confirmed yesterday (6/21) it is moving staff out of Afghanistan because of rising violence there.  So far this month 59 international soldiers, 36 of them Americans, have been killed, and a governor in a key district has been assassinated. It remains to be seen whether this June will be the bloodiest month ever for U.S. and NATO troops.    But it's clear things have gotten worse since President Barack Hussein Obama decided last December to send 30,000 more troops there. Three obvious reasons why this is so are the deadline the president set for next year to begin withdrawal of U.S. troops; ridiculous rules of engagement, and the poisonous relationship Mr. Obama has established with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. So what exactly is it that our soldiers are dying for in Afghanistan?

Journalists who in the past have had orgasms when President Barack Hussein Obama spoke were unimpressed by his speech from the Oval Office Tuesday (6/15)  on the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. "We know that the country is eager for reassurance," the New York Times said in an editorial.  "We're not sure the American people got it from a speech that was short on specifics and devoid of self-criticism." "President Obama said he is going to use the Gulf disaster to immediately push a new energy bill through Congress," said comedian Jay Leno.  "How about first using the Gulf disaster to fix the Gulf disaster?" The most hilarious line of the evening came when Mr. Obama said: "the one approach I will not accept is inaction," because inaction is what has characterized his response in the first 57 days.  This president doesn't act in a crisis.  He reacts -- sluggishly -- and does so chiefly to deflect blame from himself.

The 19th century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) once commented on accusations that a political opponent of his was lying regarding an important issue before Parliament:  "It is worse than a lie - it is a blunder." Disraeli's ghost is talking about our president today. President Barack Hussein Obama went to a photo-op at a trucking firm in Hyattsville, Maryland last Friday (6/4), and made a fool of himself. The addition of 431,000 jobs in May shows "the economy is getting stronger by the day," he said. This was a remarkably stupid thing to say, since the employment report issued that morning by the Bureau of Labor Statistics was so disappointing the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 324 points on the news.

"I felt this thrill going up my leg," MSNBC's Chris Matthews famously said after hearing Barack Obama speak during the 2008 campaign. But after the president's news conference last week (5/27), Matthews and the Obama-worshipping media are singing along with blues great B.B. King, The Thrill Is Gone. The thrill is gone The thrill is gone away The thrill is gone baby The thrill is gone away You know you done me wrong baby And you'll be sorry someday  

Somebody's lying.  It probably isn't Rep. Joe Sestak, D-Pa.  But he's the one most likely to suffer from it.   No sooner had he won an upset victory over Sen. Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania's Democrat primary than he was caught up in a "he said, she said" with the Obama administration. In an interview Feb. 18 with Philadelphia talk show host Larry Kane, Rep. Sestak, a retired Navy admiral, said he'd been offered a job in the administration if he would drop his plans to challenge Sen. Arlen Specter. Mr. Sestak said the offer came last summer, but wouldn't say who made it, or what job he was offered.  (The scuttlebut says it was Secretary of the Navy.) I can't imagine he made up the story.  What would he possibly have to gain?  I have no use for Rep. Sestak's politics, but he seems an honest and straightforward man.  In any event, his reputation for openness and candor is considerably greater than that of the Obama administration.  That reputation for candor will suffer if Rep. Sestak doesn't provide very soon the critical details: 

He was in way over his head.  But the resignation last Thursday (5/21) of Admiral Dennis Blair as Director of National Intelligence may have deprived the Obama administration's intelligence team of arguably its most capable member. What may have done in Admiral Blair was a scathing report issued by the Senate Intelligence Committee May 19 which identified 14 "significant intelligence failings" in the case of Umar Adulmuttalab, the underwear bomber, who attempted to blow up an airliner on Christmas Day. The most serious of these failings were by the National Counterterrorism Center, which reports directly to the DNI. So why would the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, Peter Hoekstra, say: "Blair's resignation is the result of the Obama administration's rampant politicization of national security?" It's an election year.  But the bigger reason is who the president would rely upon for intelligence advice in lieu of Mr. Blair.

The spin is in.  Here's how the Webzine Politico expressed the conventional wisdom  about the outcome of special election for what had been Jack Murtha's seat: "In the only House race that really mattered to both parties...Republicans failed spectacularly, losing on a level playing field where, in this favorable environment, they should have run roughshod over the opposition," wrote Jonathan Martin and Charles Mahtesian. If this is widely believed, it may turn out to be a good thing for Republicans that Democrat Mark Critz, a former Murtha aide, defeated Republican Tim Burns in PA 12. First, there'll be no more smugness among Republicans about coasting to a takeover of the House in November. Second, Democrats in swing districts may now underestimate how much trouble they could be in.

The city councils in Los Angeles and San Diego passed resolutions calling for a boycott of Arizona.  Both are discovering their politically correct gesture is not without cost. Arizona Corporation Commissioner Gary Pierce reminded LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa that his city receives 25 percent of its electricity from power plants in Arizona. "I am confident that Arizona's utilities would be happy to take those electrons off your hands," Mr. Pierce wrote. San Diego depends heavily on the tourist industry, but the recession has hit it hard.  Typically, about two million Arizonans visit San Diego each year, so when the city council spit in their face, tourism officials were concerned. "I've been approached by a number of hotels who are very concerned because they've received cancellations from Arizona guests," the executive director of the county hotel-motel association told the San Diego Union-Tribune.

The first casualty of voter dissatisfaction with business as usual in Washington is a (more or less) conservative Republican senator from Utah. Robert Bennett, 76, was denied the opportunity to run for a fourth term when he garnered only 27 percent of the vote from delegates to the state GOP convention Saturday (5/8). Under Utah's rules, a candidate must get at least 40 percent of the delegate vote to be eligible to run in the state's primary. "This is a damn outrage," said David Brooks, a "conservative" columnist for the New York Times. "It's almost a nonviolent coup," agreed E. J. Dionne, a liberal columnist for the Washington Post.  "The long promised purge is on," wrote Kathleen Parker, a "conservative" columnist for the Post. The same day Utah Republicans rejected Mr. Bennett, Utah Democrats forced their only Member of Congress, Rep. Scott Matheson, into a primary.  Liberals were upset with Mr. Matheson because he voted against Obamacare and carbon taxes. No journalists described what happened to Mr. Matheson as "a damn outrage," a "coup," or a "purge." The media double standard in which primary battles among Republicans are described as "civil wars" reflecting extremism and intolerance, but primary battles among Democrats are not has reached ludicrous proportions in Florida...

MSNBC anchor Contessa Brewer is bummed the man who put a car bomb in Times Square isn't a right-winger with white skin. "There was part of me that was hoping that this was not going to be anybody with ties to any kind of Islamic country because there are a lot of people who want to use this terrorist intent to justify writing off people who believe in a certain way or who come from certain countries or whose skin color is a certain way," she said on a radio show Tuesday (5/04). Presumably, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg also was bummed to learn the bomber was Faisal Shahzad, 30, a naturalized citizen of Pakistani extraction who is a registered Democrat in Connecticut. On Monday (5/03), Mr. Bloomberg had told Katie Couric of CBS he thought the bomber was "homegrown, maybe a mentally deranged person or someone with a political agenda who doesn't like the health care bill or something." When he learned the truth, Mayor Bloomberg did not apologize for his smear of people who don't like Obamacare.  Instead, he smeared the people of New York City.

The law Arizona just passed to authorize state and local police to enforce federal immigration law is a racist abomination, said Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson.  It reminds them of apartheid, said Cynthia Tucker of the Atlanta Journal Constitution and former New York Times Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse.  Mr. Robinson is exercised that legal immigrants would be required "to carry papers proving that they have a legal right to be in the United States."  Mr. Robinson evidently is unaware that federal law has required that for half a century. Mr. Robinson, Ms. Tucker and Ms. Greenhouse engage in fact-free journalism when they assert the law permits Arizona cops to stop people on the street and demand they produce ID, like the Gestapo did in those World War II movies. There is really no excuse for this, because the Arizona law is not a 2,700-page monstrosity like Obamacare, or a 1,400-page monstrosity like the financial "reform" bill.  It's just 16 pages long, and it's written in simple English.  The key provision of Arizona law SB 1070 is this:

The backlash against President Barack Obama's radical policies has grown so large even the New York Times has noticed. "The fight for the midterm elections is not confined to traditional battlegrounds," wrote Jeff Zeleny and Adam Nagourney in a lengthy analysis Monday (4/26).  "Republicans have expanded their sights to places where political challenges seldom develop." If nothing much changes between now and November, Republicans are likely to have their greatest victory since 1994, when they won 54 seats in the House to take control of that body for the first time since 1952, and 8 seats in the Senate, to win control there for the first time since 1986. Republicans could have their best midterm elections since 1946, when they gained 55 seats in the House and 13 in the Senate. I write this column not to belabor the giddy Republican prospects in 2010, but to point out that the GOP landslides in 1994 and 1946 were followed by Democratic victories in the presidential races two years later.  In 1948, Democrats also retook control of the House and Senate. If a 2010 victory isn't to be Pyrrhic, Republicans had better figure out what went wrong in 1948 and 1996.  Especially 1996.

Think of it as Obamacare for banks. Like Obamacare, the massive financial "reform" bill introduced by Sen. Chris Dodd, D-CT, addresses a serious problem... but would, at great expense, make a bad situation much worse. Most of us are painfully aware the subprime mortgage crisis nearly destroyed our economy. At the heart of the crisis was fraud.  Money was lent to poor credit risks who couldn't pay it back.  For instance, a strawberry picker in Bakersfield, California, with an income of $14,000 a year was lent $724,000. How could firms such as Countrywide Mortgage and Long Beach Savings which were making such loans expect to make money on them?  By being protected by the most corrupt senator on Capitol Hill -- Chris Dodd.  And now Mr. Dodd wants a Bailout Bill that makes that protection permanent and endlessly taxpayer-funded.

What a difference an election can make! "Dissent is the highest form of patriotism," we were told by leading pundits and Democrat politicians from Jan. 20, 2001 to Jan. 19, 2009. And, according to these same worthies, there were few more noble ways to express dissent than protest demonstrations, which were frequent during the Bush administration.  For some, this was true even if the demonstrations turned violent. "Rioting is the voice of the unheard," Rep. Maxine Waters, D-CA, told the Los Angeles Times after the Rodney King riots in 1992.  Their attitudes have changed since Jan. 20, 2009.  Today, criticism of the president is "borderline sedition," said Time columnist Joe Klein.  It could lead to another Oklahoma City bombing, warned former President Bill Clinton.

The CIA has become a bloated bureaucracy where senior bureaucrats are more interested in protecting their jobs than in gathering intelligence.  A sign of how bad things are is that more than 90 percent of all CIA employees work within the United States. This is curious for an organization whose purpose is to collect foreign intelligence, and it's against U.S. law. In every organization, bureaucracy boosts costs, stifles initiative, slows action.  Bureaucratization is especially pernicious in an intelligence agency, because intelligence is perishable, and risk taking and out-of-the-box thinking are required to gather and interpret it. The massive intelligence failure that led to 9/11 should have sparked reform.  It led to anti-reform, instead.  The CIA is such a mess now that only chopping it up into its constituent parts and assigning those parts to other agencies can lead to real improvement.  Thus concludes a top CIA operative of many years, "Ishmael Jones."  He's written a book you have to read.

President Barack Hussein Obama reminded us this week that before he drives us into bankruptcy, he might get us all killed. On Tuesday (4/06), the president released his nuclear posture review (NPR).  Today in Prague (4/08), he signed a new nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia called START II. The NPR is the more significant, because treaties must be ratified by a two-thirds vote of the Senate, and the START II treaty is so manifestly harmful to the security interests of the United States that it is unlikely to obtain the 67 votes needed. The president listed five priorities in the NPR, noted James Carafano of the Heritage Foundation, a retired Army lieutenant colonel.  Defending the United States wasn't among them.  It's turning out that the greatest national security threat to America is America's own president.

It's a sign of how bad things are at CNN that management there thought David Shuster might help. Mr. Shuster is the MSNBC "reporter" notorious for his rants about what he perceives to be the intellectual and moral shortcomings of conservatives.  Mr. Shuster was suspended Friday (4/02) after MSNBC's management learned he had taped a pilot for a show with CNN. It is, of course, bad form to do such a thing for a rival without first getting permission from your own bosses.  But it is more Mr. Shuster's judgment than Mr. Shuster's morals that has me ROTFLMAO. Mr. Shuster is in the final year of his contract, and MSNBC's ratings have been nothing to write home about.  They were down 15 percent in prime time in the first quarter of 2010 from the first quarter of 2009; down 22 percent in all day programming. But looking for a job at CNN these days is like signing on to the crew of the Titanic after it struck the iceberg. 

Obamacare will cost them a ton of money and could force them to drop the prescription drug coverage they've been providing to their retirees, several corporations have announced. AT&T said it is going to take a $1 billion write down.  Caterpillar announced a $100 million hit, Deere, $150 million. This made Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Cal, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, angry.  He announced plans to hold a hearing April 21 on:  "Claims by Caterpillar, Verizon and Deere that provisions in the new health care reform law could adversely affect their company's ability to provide health insurance to their employees.  These assertions appear to conflict with independent analyses, which show that the new law will expand coverage and bring down costs." Rep. Waxman demanded executives give his committee internal company documents related to health care finances.  A Republican member of Mr. Waxman's committee told Byron York of the Washington Examiner that this was "an attempt to intimidate and silence opponents" of Obamacare.  Mr. Waxman pretends to be a Democrat.  What he really is is a Fascist.

President Barack Hussein Obama is an ignoramus and a boor, White House senior adviser David Axelrod said on CNN Sunday (3/28). Mr. Axelrod did not, of course, use precisely those words.  What he did say on CNN's "State of the Union" program is that there was "no snub intended" when the president abruptly walked out of a meeting at the White House Thursday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to have dinner in the family quarters. Most news accounts described the event as did the London Times: "Binyamin Netanyahu humiliated after Barack Obama ‘dumped him for dinner'."  But it is not the object of boorishness who ought to be embarrassed by boorish behavior.  Barack Hussein Obama is plainly a boor, with no understanding of diplomacy.  You don't treat your brother in law like that, much less a head of state who is a guest in your country.  For more than a year now, this president has treated America's friends as enemies -- and America's enemies as friends.

The Pelosicrats' vote to approve Obamacare Sunday (3/21) was historic.  But Democrat euphoria may be premature.  Prohibition was historic, too.  But few look back upon it as a good idea. Sunday's vote means Obamacare is likely to be a major issue not just in the upcoming midterms, but for many elections to come.  Obamacare will be hard to repeal, but not as hard to repeal as Prohibition, which required a constitutional amendment. Democrats are telling themselves people will like Obamacare once it's enacted.  But to believe that requires the kind of faith that sustains belief in the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny.

Wouldn't it be ironic if the death blow to Obamacare were delivered in part because of President Barack Hussein Obama's gratuitous snub of the Supreme Court? On Jan. 21, the Supreme Court ruled the provision in the McCain-Feingold law that forbade corporations from buying political ads was unconstitutional. "Last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests -- including foreign companies -- to spend without limit in our elections," President Obama said in his State of the Union address Jan 27.  "Well, I don't think American elections should be bankrolled by America's most powerful interests, and worse, by foreign entities." The president is entitled to his opinion, which many share.  But, said columnist Kevin McCullough, it was "terribly inappropriate when he openly encouraged belligerent reaction against the Supreme Court with the Justices sitting in the chamber.  It was a cheap shot, and scholars believe it may have violated the spirit embodied in our government's commitment to the separation of powers." So what does this have to do with Obamacare?

"Let me be clear: I'm not normally in favour of boycotts, and I love the American people. I holiday in their country regularly, and hate the tedious snobby sneers against the United States. But the American people chose to elect an idiot who seems hell bent on insulting their allies, and something must be done to stop Obama's reckless foreign policy, before he does the dirty on his allies on every issue." --London Daily Telegraph editor Alex Singleton, March 11. One of the most poorly kept secrets in Washington is President Obama's animosity toward Great Britain, presumably because of what he regards as its sins while ruling Kenya (1895-1963).  "It is truly shocking that Barack Obama has decided to disregard our shared history," notes one British writer.  "Does Britain's friendship really mean so little to him?" One could ask, does the friendship of anyone in the entire world mean anything to him?  Apparently not.

Perhaps the surest sign an administration is in trouble comes when members of the president’s party start saying in public the president must shake up his staff. The Obama administration has accomplished the remarkable feat of simultaneously alienating both most moderates and left-winger moonbats.  The moderates see what he’s trying to do, and are frightened and angry.  The moonbats note that he hasn’t yet been able to do it, and are frustrated and angry. The head moonbats would most like to see roll is that of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who, they think, is too willing to compromise.  Agreeing with them is that acme of the moderate Democrat establishment, Leslie Gelb.  Yet it turns out he's not to blame for sinking Obama's ship.

Why does Barack Hussein Obama hate insurance companies?   He explained why he was traumatized by one of them at the recent "Healthcare Summit."   He had to buy auto insurance for a "beat up old car" when he got out of college.  When he got rear-ended, he called up the insurance company to get his car repaired, and "they laughed at me." He's hated them ever since.  Especially now, when they won't cooperate with his ObamaCare program.  For, as he put it, "it's one thing if you've got a beat up old car that you can't get fixed.  It's another thing if your kid is sick or you've got breast cancer." 25 years ago, college-graduate Obama didn't understand - just as President Obama still doesn't understand today - the difference between liability insurance, required by law to protect other drivers from injuries or damage you may cause, and collision insurance to protect you and your car (and which he had not purchased). So of course the insurance agent he called laughed at him.  After laughing at him ourselves, we need to ask, Just how dumb is this guy?

Rashad Hussain, 31, is President Obama's choice to be the U.S. envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, an organization of 56 Islamic states that promotes Moslem solidarity in economic, social and political affairs. A Moslem of Indian extraction born in Wyoming and a brilliant young attorney (BA from the University of North Carolina in two years; two masters degrees from Harvard, a law degree from Yale), Mr. Hussain would seem a fine choice for the post. But there's a problem. In 2004, Mr. Hussain made a speech at a Muslim Student Association conference in Chicago in which he said the trials of Sami al Arian and several others were "politically motivated persecutions."

Iraq "could be one of the great achievements of (the Obama) administration," Vice President Joe Biden told CNN's Larry King Feb. 10. This statement was fascinating, on at least three levels. First, it's a breathtaking lie.  What turned around the situation in Iraq was the troop surge President Bush ordered in January, 2007.  Then Senators Barack Obama and Joe Biden strenuously opposed it. Second, it assumes the American people are idiots.  It's not exactly a secret that Sens. Obama and Biden opposed the troop surge.  They spoke about it often.  There are plenty of television news clips attesting to this. Third, it indicates that after a year in office the Obama administration is so hard up for "accomplishments" that it feels compelled to claim credit for the leading accomplishment of its much maligned predecessor.  You might say this was just Sloe Joe -- but he's not the only wacko in the White House.

The manner in which the Abdulmutallab underpants bomber case has been handled has, understandably, drawn criticism from Republicans, and not only from them.  In a Rasmussen poll released Dec. 31, 71 percent of respondents said Mr. Abdulmutallab should be turned over to the military.  Only 22 percent wanted him tried in a civilian court. The administration has fought back in a variety of clumsy ways.  First, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Mr. Abdulmutallab had given up all the useful information he had in the 50 minutes before he was Mirandized, a statement so preposterous it was not repeated. Then White House counterterrorism "czar" John Brennan, in a "Meet The Press" interview (2/07) and an op-ed in USA Today (2/09), described critics of the way the Abdulmutallab case has been handled as "partisans" who are "politicizing intelligence" and serving "the goals of al Qaeda."  Grotesque overstatement and outright lies from a hack flack are one thing; from the administration's counterterrorism czar, quite another.  No wonder Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, says, "It's hard to trust anyone in the White House right now."

Eve Ensler, writer of the radical feminist "Vagina Monologues" play, tittered with Joy Behar on Ms. Behar's talk show Monday about how stupid Sarah Palin is for not regarding earthquakes and tsunamis as proof of anthropogenic (man-made) global warming. "I just think the idea that she doesn't believe in global warming is bizarre," said Ms. Ensler, who was on the show to promote her new book. "Every scientist at every note believes in it but Sarah Palin doesn't," Ms. Behar said. "We just have to walk around the world at this point and look at what is happening to nature and earthquakes and tsunamis," Ms. Ensler said. "Right," agreed Ms. Behar. Earthquakes are caused by sudden shifts beneath the surface of the earth.  What happens in the atmosphere has no effect on them.  Likewise, a tsunami is a giant ocean wave caused by sudden motion on the ocean floor, not by changes in atmospheric temperature. Ms. Ensler and Ms. Behar are airheads who think they're smart.  They are -- alas -- typical of believers in AGW, particularly of those in journalism.

In his State of the Union address, President Barack Hussein Obama said: "We face a deficit of trust -- deep and corrosive doubts about how Washington works that have been growing for years.  To close that credibility gap, we have to take action on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue -- to end the outsized influence of lobbyists; to do our work openly; to give the people the government they deserve." The day after the president uttered those words, a senior administration official offered private policy briefings to lobbyists on the administration's plans. Do you think it will ever occur to our Narcissist-in-chief that he has become the source of this "deficit of trust"?

President Barack Obama evidently thinks he can solve his political problems by changing the lipstick on the pig. In his State of the Union speech last night (1/27), the president indicated he intends to press forward with the agenda voters in Massachusetts found so objectionable they sent a Republican to the U.S. Senate for the first time in 38 years. A CNN poll released Tuesday (1/26) indicated only 30 percent of Americans want Obamacare passed in anything approaching its present form.  But in his SOTU, the president urged Congress: "Do not walk away from reform.  Not now.  Not when we are so close." A CNN poll released Monday (1/25) indicated nearly 75 percent of Americans think at least half the money in the "stimulus" bill passed in February -- which the Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday will cost $862 billion -- has been wasted.    But in the SOTU, Mr. Obama urged the Senate to pass a $154 billion second stimulus bill the House passed last month. Same pig, just different lipstick.

The performance of the stock market was the one bright spot in the otherwise dismal year for the economy in 2009.  The Dow Jones Industrial average rose 65 percent from its March low, causing many to hope it was a harbinger of recovery. President Barack Obama has fixed that.  Last week the Dow fell 552 points in the three trading days since the president announced his plans to "reform" the financial services industry.  Of course -- solve the wrong problem, demonize Wall Street, and misdirect attention away from the real culprits, politicians in Washington.  Perhaps this president should be nicknamed "Red Herring" Obama.

There is a silver lining for Democrats in the Brown cloud that has descended upon them.  It's distracted attention from testimony revealing that the intelligence failures with regard to the Christmas bomber were more appalling than we'd been told. Yesterday (1/20), as panicked Democrats wondered what Scott Brown's stunning win in the Massachusetts senate race portends for them, four senior intelligence officials testified before the Senate Homeland Security Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee about the interrogation, such as it was, of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian who had tried to blow up a Northwest Air Lines flight with a bomb built into his underwear. The officials were Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Admiral Dennis Blair, National Counterterrorism Center Chairman Michael Leiter, and FBI Director Robert Mueller.  All three stated they weren't consulted before the decision was made to treat Mr. Abdulmutallab as a criminal defendant. That decision was made by a senior official at the Justice Department who the Obama administration is unwilling to identify.

Those few pilots who've survived one can tell you it's extremely difficult to recover from a flat spin.  Unlike normal spins, in which the nose of the aircraft is pointed down, in a flat spin the nose is pointed up -- rather like the noses of Washington Democrats toward the hoi polloi who attend TEA parties.  This makes the controls unresponsive, and the airplane falls from the sky like a leaf falling from a tree. The Obama administration is in a flat spin.  No president in the history of polling has tumbled so far in a single year from the lofty heights he enjoyed on the day of his inauguration.  But as "change you can believe in" morphed into socialism you must pay for, the administration stalled out and tumbled earthward. It's clear now this president has made one of the greatest miscalculations in American political history.

It is rare in the history of our politics for an election for an office other than president to have profound consequences for the future of our nation.  But one such election is next Tuesday January 19th, when voters in Massachusetts will select someone to fill the two remaining years of the U.S. Senate term of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy. Massachusetts is the bluest state in the nation.  A yellow dog running on the Democrat line ought to be able to defeat any Republican by at least 20 points.  A perfect storm is required to elect a Republican statewide in Massachusetts.  But for this this election -- which  is more important than almost every other Senate race in history -- that perfect storm may have formed.

In a March, 2008 interview John Brennan, then the chief adviser on intelligence matters for Barack Obama's presidential campaign, said he thought the Bush administration was too concerned about terrorism. Mr. Brennan's more relaxed attitude toward the threat of Islamic terror is reflected in the National Intelligence Strategy for 2009, in which global warming and pandemic disease (the H1N1 virus) compete with al Qaeda for the attention and resources of the Intelligence Community. A shift in focus to natural disasters from terrorism prevention is part of the reason why the inspector general for Department of Homeland Security said, in a report issued in November, that DHS' National Operations Center is "unable" to do its job of ensuring coordination among the 22 agencies that comprise DHS. That relaxed attitude evidently also was shared by President Obama, whose initial reaction to the attempted Christmas terrorism by the Blow Your Balls Off For Allah Bomber was annoyance that his vacation was interrupted.

It evidently didn't matter to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab that Barack Hussein Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, is trying to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, and has sucked up shamelessly to the Islamist regime in Iran. Mr. Abdulmutallab, 23, is the Nigerian who on Christmas Day boarded Northwest Air Lines flight 253 with a sophisticated bomb built into his underwear.  That Mr. Abdulmutallab wound up doing more harm to liberal shibboleths than to the 278 passengers is due to a faulty detonator, and prompt heroic action by Dutch tourist Jasper Schuringa rather than to any action taken by the U.S. government. But that didn't prevent Janet Napolitano, the comically inept secretary of Homeland Security, from responding to the incident by imposing new restrictions on travelers.  Had they been in effect at the time, these restrictions would have done nothing to frustrate Mr. Abdulmutallab's plans, but could have subjected Mr. Schuringa, who did frustrate Mr. Abdulmutallab's plans, to criminal prosecution. The reason for such perversity is that we have a government far more concerned with not hurting the feelings of Moslems that with protecting Americans from Moslem Terrorism.

"I didn't run for office to help out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street," Mr. Obama said on CBS' Sixty Minutes last Sunday (12/13).  But actions speak louder than words.  On Tuesday (12/15), the Obama administration "quietly agreed to forgo billions of dollars in potential tax payments from Citigroup as part of the deal announced this week to wean the company from the massive taxpayer bailout that helped it survive the financial crisis," the Washington Post reported. Thanks to the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the big banks made substantial profits in the year since the meltdown.  The banks did this not by loaning money to private businesses, but by investing what were essentially interest free loans mostly in government bonds. The banks are "taking free money from the government (taxpayers) and lending it back to the government (taxpayers) at a phenomenal markup of three full percentage points," said Henry Blodget of the Business Insider.  "And they're taking almost no risk, to boot!"  Despite his denials, Mr. Obama is deep in bed with his fat cat cronies on Wall Street.

The flap over Desiree Rogers, insignificant in itself, illustrates why Barack Hussein Obama's presidency is headed for an epic fail. Social climbing publicity hounds Michaele and Tareq Salahi crashed President Obama's state dinner for Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh Nov. 22.  The Secret Service was unaware of the security breach until the Salahis posted photos of themselves with the president and with Vice President Joe Biden on their Facebook page. Desiree Rogers is the White House social secretary.  A Chicago socialite, she's a pal of White House counselor Valerie Jarrett, and of Michelle Obama.  Ms. Rogers and her ex-husband, John, raised a ton of money for Mr. Obama's presidential campaign.  It's no secret how she got her job. In previous administrations, someone from the social secretary's office was at the gate when the guests arrived, checking their names off the guest list as the Secret Service checked their identification.  But Ms. Rogers felt she could do without this sensible (and obvious) precaution.  She treated herself more as a guest than as someone whose job is to see to the comfort of the guests.  Her total arrogance and that of her boss in invoking executive privilege for a lowly social secretary is a portent of the disaster that always comes from such unbridled hubris.

st1\:* { BEHAVIOR: url(#ieooui) } @font-face { font-family: SimSun; } @font-face { font-family: @SimSun; } @page Section1 {size: 8.5in 11.0in; margin: 1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin: .5in; mso-footer-margin: .5in; mso-paper-source: 0; } P.MsoNormal { MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; FONT-FAMILY: "Times New Roman"; FONT-SIZE: 12pt; mso-style-parent: ""; mso-pagination: widow-orphan; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman" } LI.MsoNormal { MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; FONT-FAMILY: "Times New Roman"; FONT-SIZE: 12pt; mso-style-parent: ""; mso-pagination: widow-orphan; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman" } DIV.MsoNormal { MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt; FONT-FAMILY: "Times New Roman"; FONT-SIZE: 12pt; mso-style-parent: ""; mso-pagination: widow-orphan; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman" } P { FONT-FAMILY: "Times New Roman"; MARGIN-LEFT: 0in; FONT-SIZE: 12pt; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0in; mso-pagination: widow-orphan; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto } DIV.Section1 { page: Section1 } There is a saying among climate scientists: "No problem, no money." The emails, from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in Britain, indicate collusion to deny the data on which the computer models were constructed to other researchers, and to keep scientists skeptical of global warming from being published in peer reviewed journals. "The now non-secret data prove...that most of the evidence of global warming was simply made up," said Frank Tripler, a physics professor at Tulane.  "Not only are the global warming computer models unreliable, the experimental data on which these models are built are also unreliable." The U.S. government has spent more than $79 billion since 1989 on global warming research and related policies, according to the Science and Public Policy Institute.  Somehow, the Associated Press and other major media never mention this in their never-ending stream of stories hyping apocalyptic "climate change." Do you think that it will someday dawn on the media that scientists can be for sale, that $79 billion can buy a lot of global warming?