Obama Musings 2010 -- Our Daily March to Socialism and Surrender

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ObamaCare: No Deal or Bribe too Sleazy for the Democrats

By Gary Starr for The Neville Awards

March 19, 2010

In the Senate during the Christmas season of 2010 it was Harry Reid's time of "giving". There was the Cornhusker Kickback, the Lousiana Purchase and union carveouts for tax exemptions. ObamaCare passed the Senate on Christmas Eve.

Then came the Massachussettes Miracle and Obamacare looked like it was on life support.

Not so. Obama had ten House Democrats who voted against ObamaCare in November to the White House for a little armtwisting. Obama was also trading judgeships for votes: One of the ten was Jim Matheson of Utah. The White House sent out a press release announcing that Obama nominated Matheson's brother Scott M. Matheson, Jr. to the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.

In this season of Lent Nancy Pelosi and our Fraudinator-in-Chief are also in a giving mood.

Because ObamaCare also includes the Student loan takeover banks are effectively out of the student loan business....except for one "loanly" bank in North Dakota.

Sen. Kent Conrad and his House North Dakota colleague Earl Pomeroy are getting a special provision that exempts a state-owned Bank of North Dakota from the unrelated private student loan takeover that Democrats have included as part of ObamaCare.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a no vote in November because the bill wasn't liberal enough, went down on "prez schvantz" for a much cheaper price. He got a ride on Air Force One and now he's voting yes.

And to make the dubious deficit numbers "work" Democrats decided at the 11th hour to increase their new tax on investment income to 3.8% from 2.9%. Hello bear market.

Our Fraudinator-in-Chief's contempt for America, Americans and the Constitution was on full display during an interview with Fox's Bret Baier:

BAIER: You have said at least four times in the past two weeks: "the United States Congress owes the American people a final up or down vote on health care." So do you support the use of this Slaughter rule? The deem and pass rule, so that Democrats avoid a straight up or down vote on the Senate bill?

OBAMA: Here's what I think is going to happen and what should happen. You now have a proposal from me that will be in legislation, that has the toughest insurance reforms in history, makes sure that people are able to get insurance even if they've got preexisting conditions, makes sure that we are reducing costs for families and small businesses, by allowing them to buy into a pool, the same kind of pool that members of Congress have.

We know that this is going to reduce the deficit by over a trillion dollars. So you've got a good package, in terms of substance. I don't spend a lot of time worrying about what the procedural rules are in the House or the Senate.

(CROSS TALK)

OBAMA: What I can tell you is that the vote that's taken in the House will be a vote for health care reform. And if people vote yes, whatever form that takes, that is going to be a vote for health care reform. And I don't think we should pretend otherwise.

(CROSS TALK)

OBAMA: Bret, let me finish. If they don't, if they vote against, then they're going to be voting against health care reform and they're going to be voting in favor of the status quo. So Washington gets very concerned about these procedural issues in Congress. This is always an issue that's - whether Republicans are in charge or Democrats in charge - when Republicans are in charge, Democrats constantly complain that the majority was not giving them an opportunity, et cetera.

What the American people care about is the fact that their premiums are going up 25, 40, 60 percent, and I'm going to do something about it.

Every serious poll shows that Americans, including many Democrats, do not want this bill. Yet Pelosi and Obama keep plowing ahead. The machinations and legislative sleight-of-hand, including the so-called unconstitutional "Slaughter rule" are approaching banana republic dimensions. That they are still running into such resistance after a year of pleading reveals what a historic boondoggle ObamaCare really is.

And this is what happens when a willful, inexperienced and ideological President and his hijacked party try to govern America from the left, imposing an endless and reckless expansion of the entitlement state.

And we will remember in November.

On Mar. 18, 2010, former U.S. Attorneys General Edwin Meese III and William P. Barr released the following statement:

The convoluted and questionable method under discussion by both Houses of Congress for final passage of the long-debated health care legislation raises serious constitutional concerns, which, at best, will lead to protracted and wholly avoidable litigation and continued doubt about the bill's validity. Members of Congress from both parties have criticized the use of such sleights of hand, and The Washington Post has rightly editorialized against such "unseemly" and "dodgy" maneuvers for the health care bill. Beyond the obvious practical concerns shared by all citizens, the use of such obscure "rules" for final passage is even harder to justify in light of the real constitutional doubt and the erosion of public confidence in government that it will cause.

Contrary to what President Obama and some congressional leaders have been repeating of late, the American people do care passionately that the process for consideration of health care reform be both constitutional and fair. At a bare minimum, article I, sec. 7, cl. 2 of the U.S. Constitution requires that before it becomes law "(1) a bill containing its exact text was approved by a majority of the Members of the House of Representatives; (2) the Senate approved precisely the same text; and (3) that text was signed into law by the President." Clinton v. City of New York, 524 U.S. 417, 448 (1998).

The "deem and pass" and similar options under consideration in the House of Representatives plainly violate at least the spirit of the Constitution's bicameralism and presentment requirements. Those constitutional requirements were intended to ensure democratic transparency with a straightforward up-or-down vote in each House on all bills that become law. More importantly, these requirements were designed to ensure that the new national government actually followed "the consent of the governed," which the Declaration of Independence had declared to the world was the only basis of legitimate government.

The "deem and pass" options under consideration in the House and the subsequent use of a "reconciliation" process that is reserved for budget issues in acts already signed into law further erode confidence in the rule of law. Some past uses of the "deem and pass" or "self-executing" rules raise similar concerns, but none was as convoluted as the proposed use, and significantly, there may have been no one with legal standing to challenge prior uses in court. Many individuals will have standing to challenge any health reform legislation that restructures one-sixth of the American economy, and the contemplated use of the "deem and pass" maneuver in this instance may be combined with questionable procedural steps in the Senate that render it much more subject to challenge.

There is no need to engage in such procedural machinations, and no asserted reason for doing so exists other than to avoid the traditional legislative safeguards in the Senate and to obscure the appearance that Members of the House actually voted for the Senate bill, which is a prerequisite for genuine reconciliation. The constitutional requirement of bicameralism should not be jettisoned under any circumstances-and certainly not for such trivial and partisan reasons.

Members of Congress take an oath to uphold the Constitution. Members should violate neither the letter nor spirit of the Constitution, especially when there is so much at stake, not only as a policy matter, but when the very legitimacy of the legislative process is in question. Given that many parts of the underlying legislation itself raise substantial constitutional concerns, these "unseemly" and "dodgy" procedures underscore the justified concern the American people have that their elected representatives are blatantly disregarding the Constitution, and as a result, undermining the rule of law.

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Lawyers Who Represented Terrorists Working at the Holder/Obama Justice Department

By Gary Starr for The Neville Awards

March 3, 2010

In November of 2009, on behalf of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley asked U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder for "the names of political appointees in your department who represent detainees or who work for organizations advocating on their behalf…the cases or projects that these appointees work with respect to detainee prior to joining the Justice Department…and the cases or projects relating to detainees that have worked on since joining the Justice Department."

On February 19, 2010, Mr. Holder responded via letter, conceding nine such new hires at the Department of Justice worked for terrorist detainees or on behalf of the rights of terrorist detainees. He did not name 7 of those, only naming the two already known: Principal Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal, former lawyer to Osama bin Laden's driver, and Jennifer Daskal, a detainee advocate at Human Rights Watch.

Holder went on to say that the lawyers in question are only minimally and narrowly recused from dealing with detainee matters, despite their prior interest in advocating on their behalf. Of course!!!

This is typical Holder/Obama obfuscation. Our Fraudinator-in-Chief and his AG messenger boy Eric Holder are terrorist enablers as we have stated often on these pages. From wanting terrorist trials in NY to giving Miranda rights to the Christmas Pantywaist bomber the current administration has displayed over and over again that it simply does not take national security seriously and, indeed, they have more concern for the rights of terrorist scum than in keeping this nation safe. So it goes with the LPSC (Liberal Progressive Socialist Communist) Community in this country. Terrorists....good....Americans....bad.

As always, Charles Krauthammer says it with precision:

Charles Krauthammer, Fox News Analyst on the O'REILLY Factor:

You don't have to be a psychiatrist to figure this one out. This one is 100 percent ideological affinity.

Look, what you're dealing with here is a bunch of lawyers, very successful, corporate lawyers, private lawyers. They make a lot of money, and now they want to give to the community and do work for free. Now, do they choose to defend a black kid in the inner city caught up in a drug deal but he's going to get 30 years? Or do they choose to defend working-class people in Brooklyn who are going to lose their home so a developer can build an arena? No.

These people chose to do for free, defense work for people in Guantanamo, for people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who not only was the architect of 9/11, but he boasts of slitting the throat of Daniel Pearl. So he's choosing, at least nine people who chose that this is the work they are going to do on the side. That tells you there is some ideological affinity here, and that's very troubling because it tells you why the Justice Department has ended up with some of the absurd decisions it's made in the War on Terror.

It's not that either he nor they sympathize with the terrorists themselves, but he or they have - and they have this idea about our justice system, that if you catch a terrorist, you've got two choices. You either give them a trial in New York, civilian trial with all the pomp and ceremony, all the defenses you and I have that they, in my view, do not deserve, or you let them go. Now, that, I think, is an absurd idea, but that's what they believe. Holder is a man who was in a law firm that itself probably devoted over probably $1 million worth of free work on defense of Guantanamo detainees.

These people - he's not hiring them for their expertise. They are not going to be the ones in the courtroom. These are people who share his view of how the justice system ought to deal with terror. These are people who give him the advice that Abdulmutallab, the guy who tried to blow up the airplane on Christmas, ought to have Miranda rights. They believe in them.

I think these are people who have a peculiar understanding of the American Constitution and who have a view contrary to Adams, who believed that the Constitution is not a suicide pact. These are people who believe for some reason that when you capture a terrorist overseas or even at home, he gets his Miranda rights. In all of our history, that's never been true. A German prisoner of war never got a civilian trial. He never got a judge. He waited until the end of the war. But these people have a contrary view, and that's why Holder has chosen them. He wants people with an ideological affinity to him, and that's what he got.

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Obama's Healthcare Summit Lays an Egg

By Gary Starr for The Neville Awards

Feb 27, 2010

Normally we would put a story about the Healthcare Summit on our healthcare page. But this wasn't about healthcare. It was an attempt to embarrass Republicans. It backfired.

Instead we got Healthcare Kabuki Theater. We got Obama, hogging the floor saying "I'm the President" while sitting there looking like he was presiding over a city council meeting debating some water and land use bond. We got NY Rep. Louise Slaughter and Harry Reid going for the emotion. Slaughter was gassing around about a women using her dead sister's dentures. Harry Reid opined about cleft palates. Is there an epidemic of denture shortages and a lack of cleft palate surgeries in the United States? We got Obama upbraiding John McCain saying "We're not campaigning."

We got Joe Biden's open mic moment - Biden to Sen. Eric Cantor:

Biden: How you doing Eric?
Cantor: Not bad Mr. Vice President
Biden: Good, doing alright. It's easy being Vice President believe me.
Cantor: It's like being a grandparent and not the parent.
Biden: Yeah that's it.

We did get substantive suggestions from the assembled Republicans on Healthcare reform which were dismissed by Obama and the Democrats. Over the seven hour marathon Republicans spoke for just 58 minutes.

Ironically pollster Frank Luntz, appearing on the O'Reilly Factor, wired up 13 Republican and 11 Democrat citizens to gauge their responses to the proceedings. The Democrats said they were surprised to hear that Republicans actually had real suggestions on how Healthcare Reform might be achieved.

Note to Democrats: The Republicans have been proposing 4 to 5 key alternatives to ObamaCare for the last year. The mainstream liberal press has imposed a blackout on this information and Obama, Harry Reid and Nanacy Pelosi have been lying to you. They have consistently said "Where are the Republican points" all the while calling the Republicans the party of 'no'. This is proof positive of the complete collapse of objective journalism. If it doesn't fit the liberal/progressive narrative it doesn't get published.

Excerpted from the Wall St. Journal:

Defining ObamaCare Down-We're all free-market moderates now.
FEBRUARY 26, 2010
http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB10001424052748704479404575087311436130980.html

A bipartisan health-care consensus will remain elusive after yesterday's marathon summit, as expected, though viewers who stuck out the full seven-plus hours could be forgiven for wondering what happened to all the liberals. General anesthesia? To listen to President Obama and his closest Democratic allies, you'd think John McCain had won the election and their bill had been drafted by Paul Ryan, Tom Coburn and the scholars at the American Enterprise Institute.

In his opening statement, Mr. Obama said the key issue is "figuring out how can we control the huge expansion of entitlements," especially "the exploding costs of Medicare." He said Congress must fix "some fundamental structural problems" in U.S. health care, with reforms that lower spending by increasing "choice and competition."

If only politics hadn't intruded-"politics I think ended up trumping practical common sense," he claimed-peace would reign upon the Earth and the two parties could "focus on where we agree because there actually is some significant agreement on a host of issues."

It's as if the last year didn't happen. Only minutes into the discussion, it became clear the Democratic strategy was to portray this debate as somehow taking place between the 49 yard lines. Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus chimed in that "The main point is, we basically agree."

The morning was dominated by an argument over whether ObamaCare would lower insurance costs, and the exchange was telling. Republicans, led by Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander, rightly said that premiums would increase, while the President disagreed. "This is an example of where we've got to get our facts straight," he said, in keeping with his strategy of depicting any disagreement as factually challenged or politically motivated.

One fact is that the Congressional Budget Office estimates that premiums in the individual market would jump by 10% to 13% in 2016 because the government will mandate that consumers buy richer benefits than they otherwise would. Mr. Obama eventually conceded that point but said these mandates are simple consumer protections. "Yes, I am paying 10% to 13% more because instead of buying an apple, I'm getting an orange," Mr. Obama said. "We want competition, we just want some minimum standards."

Mr. Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican, posed the fundamental question: "Should people in Washington decide exactly how this works and what you can and cannot buy?" We thought the GOP acquitted itself fairly well, noting the irresponsibility of using Medicare cuts to float a new entitlement when the status quo has $37 trillion in unfunded liabilities. They also focused on smaller, incremental reforms that might do some modest good.

Mr. Obama claimed that "Every proposal that health-care economists say will reduce health-care costs, we've tried to adopt," yet this is demonstrably untrue. The White House has delayed its own excise tax on ultra-expensive health plans (previously sold as the key cost-control measure) until 2018, well after Mr. Obama is out of office, assuming he wins a second term.

The point of yesterday's session was to give a soothing, moderate political gloss to a government health-care takeover that will raise costs, greatly expand the entitlement state, and reduce choice and competition-the opposite of everything Mr. Obama claims.

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Obama, the Dalai Lama and the White House Trash Bags

By Gary Starr for The Neville Awards

Feb 20, 2010

So much for the Libs favorite cause: Free Tibet! It has about as much resonance as that other favorite cause: Darfur, where Christians are still being murdered by Muslims.

Yes, where China and our debt are involved Tibet takes a big back seat.

In the Fall of 2009 China warned our Fraudinator-in-Chief not to meet with the Dalai Lama or there would be conseqeunces. Obama folded like a cheap suit and the Dalai Lama was dissed bigtime by the Obama Administration.

Things would be different this time around however. This time Obama was going to really stand up to the Chinese.

This meeting was different to say the least. Typically, when a high-profile foreign dignitary is to meet with the president, photographers and reporters have an opportunity to take pictures and toss a few softballs at the president and his guest while sitting in comfy chairs at the beginning of their Oval Office meeting.

Instead Obama met privately with the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader in the Map Room on the ground floor of the White House, far removed from reporters and photographers. The White House shut out the adoring presscorp (corpse?). No Oval Office or Rose Garden presser for the Dali Lama. Press secretary Robert Gibbs issued only a brief statement after the event, and the White House distributed a single in-house photo of the two leaders.

Asked why the White House had restricted press access, White House deputy press secretary Josh Earnest earnestly replied: "Rather than restrict the president's meeting with the Dalai Lama to a limited group of photographers, the White House has made available a photo of the meeting at flickr.com/whitehouse to allow any individual or news outlet around the world to view and download that photo free of charge."

Profiles in courage all. The picture we have is that of the Dalai Lama exiting out the back door with the White House garbage bags in plain view.

Obama must have thought the ChiComs wouldn't notice. Well they did notice and somewhere down the line the Chinese will retaliate. Taiwan and the U.S. debt that China owns are the first things that come to mind.

Obama tried to have it both ways. As usual he failed to defend freedom by meeting openly and proudly with the Dalai Lama, just as he has failed to support the freedom movement in Iran, or the legitimate President of Honduras, or the young democracies of Eastern Europe or our traditional allies in Western Europe.

2012 can't come fast enough.

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John Brennan: 20% of Terrorists Return to Battlefield -- "Twenty percent isn't that bad"

By Gary Starr for The Neville Awards

Feb 15, 2010

John Brennan-February 13, 2010-top White House advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism: "People sometimes use that figure, 20 percent, say Oh my goodness, one out of five detainees returned to some type of extremist activity. You know, the American penal system, the recidivism rate is up to something about 50 percent or so, as far as return to crime. Twenty percent isn't that bad."

Except that burglars and stickup artists aren't out to wage jihad on innocent Americans if they do not adhere to the same religious practices…or strap on explosive devices to their own body to blow up innocent civilians.

This is the same John Brennan who announced in August 2009 that the War on Terror is over and that to keep saying 'War on Terror' would give the impression we are at war with Islam. Brennan also said that to call the fight against al Qaeda and other terrorist groups - which he said remains "a dynamic and evolving threat" - should not be called "a global war."

This is the Obama law enforcement mentality that has overtaken our approach to the War on Terror.

Regarding the Christmas day bomber being mirandized after a 50 minute interrogation Brennan said this:

I explained to them that [Abdulmutallab] was in FBI custody, that Mr. Abdulmutallab was, in fact, talking, that he was cooperating at that point. They knew that "in FBI custody" means that there's a process then you follow as far as Mirandizing and presenting him in front of a magistrate. None of those individuals raised any concerns with me at that point. They didn't say, "Is he going into military custody?" "Is he going to be Mirandized?" They were very appreciative of the information, we told them we'd keep them informed, and that's what we did. So there's been a--quite a bit of an outcry after the fact where, again, I'm just very concerned on the behalf of the counterterrorism professionals throughout our government that politicians continue to make this a political football and are using it for whatever political or partisan purposes, whether they be Democrats or Republicans.

Amazing.

Sen. Lindsay Graham has called for Brennan to resign. There were also calls for HSS Janet Napolitano to resign in the aftermath of the Christmas Day bombing attempt. AG Eric Holder appears to be the next sacrifical lamb because of his affinity for terrorists and the decision to try KSM in NY. We hope none of them go because it wouldn't make any difference in Obama's approach to terrorism. These three buffoons are merely Obama mouthpieces…we like them just where they are…posterboys for cowardice, treason and surrender.

Unfortunately this insane approach to fighting a war will get Americans needlessly killed.

2012 can't come fast enough.

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State of the Union…State of Confusion

By Gary Starr for The Neville Awards

Jan 29, 2010

First there was FDR's 'New Deal'...then came JFK's 'New Frontier' followed by LBJ's 'Great Society'. Now, building on Barack Obama's vow to "fundamentally transform" the United States of America comes the 'New Foundation'. Reacting to the Massachusetts election our Fraudinator-in Chief went down the populist road in his State of the Union address. As usual he took aim at all of the convenient targets and scapegoated all that "bedevils" our society. The result…Americans are angry, but not necessarily at the favorite targets of the Progressives:

He blamed Bush and/or the "policies of the last eight years" or the "last decade" at least six times.
Americans are angry at "bad behavior on Wall Street."
It is time to "slash the tax breaks for companies that ship our jobs overseas."
Lobbyists are trying to "kill" financial regulation.
American "cynicism" is the result of "selfish" bankers,
CEOs who "reward" themselves "for failure" and lobbyists who "game the system." (No mention of Cornhusker Kickbacks or backroom union deals for Obamacare)
On the deficit he blamed Bush saying that in 2000 there was a $200 Million surplus…in 2008 the deficit was $1 trillion (it was actually $500 Billion). Obama didn't mention that he has exploded that deficit to $1.7 trillion. The Congressional Budget Office shows that over the first three years of the Obama Presidency, 2009-2011, the federal government will borrow an estimated $3.7 trillion. That is more than the entire accumulated national debt for the first 225 years of U.S. history. By 2019, the interest payments on this debt will be larger than the budget for education, roads and all other nondefense discretionary spending.

Obama also handed out some State of the Union goodies:

A new jobs bill: Obama wants $30 Billion in TARP funds and tax credits for hiring, elimination of the capital gains tax on investment...curiously not on profits, and innovation and investment in green tech (forget all the climate fraud at the U.N.), offshore drilling, nuclear and coal (he will get an argument from the envirnment lobby on those points).

Education investment: Obama offered a $10,000-a-year tax credit for college tuition, student-loan payments to be capped at 10 percent of a graduate's income and that the debt be extinguished after 20 years (10 if he or she works in public service, a perverse form of indentured servitude.)

Immigration reform: The strangest line of the night occurred when Obama said, referring to immigration, that there is "unity in our incredible diversity". This, of course, is the exact opposite of E pluribus unum...from many one.

Spending Freeze/ Spending Fraud: As part of the new "austerity program" Obama proposed a 3 year spending freeze to take effect in 2011 trimming the deficit by just 3 percent. Critics immediately jumped on that nugget of lunacy. Labeling Obama's plan for a spending freeze a "fraud," Dr. Charles Krauthammer said that the plan is really a ruse to try to fool the American people into thinking that he is cutting spending when in actuality it is "a racket that locks" in the department budgets of many federal agencies at the "artificially high levels" that he raised them to during his first year in office.

Krauthammer: "The reason it's a fraud is that what Obama is doing here is not just excluding all the other spending we know about, discretionary spending, social security and the military, and it doesn't include the stimulus. What he's saying is, 'I'm going to do a freeze on the regular departments.' But what he doesn't tell you is that last year, in their first year in office when they had a free ride in spending, they ratcheted up the spending for all of these departments astronomically, an average over the last half of fiscal '09 and all of fiscal '10 an average of about 20%. Now that's huge because normally year over year you'd increase a department's spending by 3%, 4%, especially with low inflation.

So for example, last year alone they increased the EPA budget by 35%. So if you're instituting a freeze, what you're doing is you're ratcheting in, you're locking in the higher spending that Obama slid in last year."

Insulting the Supreme Court: The most astonishing part of the speech was when Obama took aim at the Supreme Court for their decision that declared the Mccain-Feingold bill unconstitutional.

Obama: "Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests, including foreign corporations, to spend without limit in our elections. Well, I don't think American elections should be bankrolled by America's most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities."

One would think that a a graduate of Harvard Law School at least get his facts right. But these are different times and ideology trumps all.

In an attempt to use the high court for political purposes Obama has smeared them, and intimidated them to influence decisions.

Let's look at the facts. Excerpted from the Wall St. Journal:

The Court didn't reverse "a century of law," but merely two more recent precedents, one from 1990 and part of another from 2003. Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce in 1990 had set the Court in a markedly new direction in limiting independent corporate campaign expenditures. This is the outlier case that needed to be overturned.

Mr. Obama is also a sudden convert to stare decisis. Does he now believe that all Court precedents of a certain duration are sacrosanct, such as Plessy v. Ferguson (separate but equal, 1896), which was overturned by Brown v. Board (1954)? Or Bowers v. Hardwick (a ban on sodomy, 1986), which was overturned by Lawrence v. Texas (2003)?

The President's claim about "foreign entities" bankrolling U.S. political campaigns is also false, since the Court did not overrule laws limiting such contributions. His use of "foreign" was a conscious attempt to inflame public and Congressional opinion against the Court. Coming from a President who fancies himself a citizen of the world, and who has gone so far as foreswear American exceptionalism, this leap into talk-show nativism is certainly illuminating. What will they think of that one in the cafes of Berlin?

Nearly every president finds something to criticize about the Supreme Court, but not every one gets to do it to the justices' faces, on national television, in the State of the Union speech. It is an extraordinary thing for a president to trash a decision of the Supreme Court in such a venue. Six of the nine justices in attendance, guests of the Congress, sat there in stony silence. Justice Samuel Alito Jr. shook his head vigorously, and mouthed what seemed to be the words, "Not true." It wasn't exactly a Joe Wilson "YOU LIE!" moment. It was, however, a rivealing moment, a sign of how low progressives will stoop to score a political point.

Obama's scorn and disdain for the high court was on full display...he violated the separation of powers and he owes the Supreme Court and the nation an apology.

Mark Steyn writes: For me the president is pretty much a total bust as an orator. When Jay says below that he's "a very, very good speaker," he is in the sense that he's a mellifluous baritone who'd sound very appealing if you needed a voiceover guy to read some vapid boilerplate for the bland travelogue before the movie on a long-haul flight. But as a persuasive salesman for policy he's bad, and getting worse.

Why is that? Well, look at the SOTU opening. It's eloquent, but in a cheesily generic way, as if one of his speechwriters was sent over to Barnes & Noble to pick up a copy of State of the Unions for Dummies:

They have done so during periods of prosperity and tranquility. And they have done so in the midst of war and depression; at moments of great strife and great struggle.

It's tempting to look back on these moments and assume that our progress was inevitable - that America was always destined to succeed. But when the Union was turned back at Bull Run and the Allies first landed at Omaha Beach, victory was very much in doubt. When the market crashed on Black Tuesday and civil-rights marchers were beaten on Bloody Sunday, the future was anything but certain. These were times that tested the courage of our convictions, and the strength of our union. And despite all our divisions and disagreements; our hesitations and our fears; America prevailed because we chose to move forward as one nation, and one people.

It sounds like an all-purpose speech for President Anyone: We've met here in good times and bad, war and peace, prosperity and depression, Shrove Tuesday and Super Bowl Sunday, riding high in April, shot down in May. We've been up and down and over and out and I know one thing. Each time we find ourselves flat on our face, we pick ourselves up and get back in the race. That's life, pause for applause . . .

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Obama Declares War on Banks & Profit -- Stock Market Tanks...Again

By Gary Starr for The Neville Awards

Jan 22, 2010

In our previous post we noted the following:

Obama's poll numbers are sinking like a stone but, in the wake of defeat, he intends to double down on the agenda to nowhere. He just completed the process of nationalizing the student college loan program. He has proposed taxing banks, even those that took no TARP funds because, as Obama says: "We want our money back" and "The American people need to be made whole."

We at Neville sincerely hope that the Democrat/Liberal/Progressive/Socialist/Fascist/Communist cabal running things in Washington don't get the message and continue on their merry way. It will insure victory in November 2010 and 2012.

True to his word, in the wake of the Massachusetts Massacre, Obama announced a war on banks and profit. Coming on the heels of his 'Tax the banks" scheme our Fraudinator-in-Chief proposed new limits on the size and activities of the nation's largest banks, pushing a more muscular approach toward regulation that yanked down bank stocks and raised the stakes in his campaign to show he's tough on Wall Street.

Mr. Obama said he wants to toughen existing limits on the size of financial firms and force them to choose between the protection of the government's safety net and the often-lucrative business of trading for their own accounts or owning hedge funds or private-equity funds.

In December 2009 President Obama intoned on "60 Minutes" that he "did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street." In announcing the bank tax on January 16, 2010 Obama thundered: "We want our money back...the American people need to made whole" Continuing in that vein Obama lectured on Jan. 21, 2010, "Never again will the American taxpayer be held hostage by a bank that is too big to fail." blah blah blah. On January 22nd, in Ohio, Obama demagogued the Massachusetts defeat by going populist blaming Wall Street and....George Bush.

The immediate results on January 21st and 22nd: The new profit-crimping regulation proposals battered bank stocks and the market in general, dragging down the Dow Jones Industrial Average by 429 points, or 4%, to 10172.88. Some financial stocks sank by more than 5%. Way to go Barack...you are a financial genius.

Using faux populism President Obama and the Democrats have chosen demonizing Wall Street as a campaign strategy for November's elections. Forget jobs and prosperity...creating enemies is waaayyy more important.

Naturally, Obama's favorite quasi-government financial institutions, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the folks who brought you the great recession under the guidance of Rep. Barney Frank and Sen. Chris Dodd) are exempt from the proposed regs. Fannie and Freddie are also immune from Obama's proposed bank taxes proposed on January 16, 2010.

Uber-Investor Warren Buffett, U.S. News and World Report Chairman Mort Zuckerman and NY Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Obama supporters all, expressed their "disappointment" in the new proposals. They can't understand why Obama is tacking so hard to the left. Note to you smart guys...IT'S BECAUSE HE IS A LEFTIST!!!

From the Wall St. Journal on Jan. 16:

Mr. Obama's new "Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee"-please don't call it a tax-is being sold as a way to cover expected losses in the Troubled Asset Relief Program. That sounds reasonable, except that the banks designated to pay the fee aren't those responsible for the losses. With the exception of Citigroup, those banks have repaid their TARP money with interest.

The real TARP losers-General Motors, Chrysler and delinquent mortgage borrowers-are exempt from the new tax. Why the auto companies? An Administration official told the Journal that the banks caused the crisis that doomed the auto companies, which apparently were innocent bystanders to their own bankruptcy. The fact that the auto companies remain wards of Washington no doubt has nothing to do with their free tax pass.

Also exempt are Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which operate outside of TARP but also surely did more than any other company to cause the housing boom and bust. The key to understanding their free tax pass is that on Christmas Eve Treasury lifted the $400 billion cap on their potential taxpayer losses expressly so they can rewrite more underwater mortgages at a loss.

In other words, the White House wants to tax more capital away from profit-making banks to offset the intentional losses that the politicians have ordered up at Fan and Fred. The bank tax revenue will flow directly into the Treasury to be spent on whatever immediate cause Congress favors. Come the next "systemic risk" bailout, taxpayers will still be on the hook. "Responsibility" is not the word that comes to mind here.

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Scott Brown Wins in Mass. -- Obamacare Barely on Life Support...Long Live the Republic

By Gary Starr for The Neville Awards

Jan 20, 2010

It is a wonderful irony that the beginning of the end of the noxious progressive agenda began on the one year anniversary of our Fraudinator-in-Chief's inauguration.

A year ago they had it all. Republicans were out, dispirited and in disarray. We were told that the Reagan era was over and that conservatives should become more accommodating and get with the program.

Now, after the political earthquake that put a Massachusetts senate seat in the hands of a Republican, the blame game begins. Nancy Pelosi is blaming the Senate….the Senate is blaming Martha Coakley…and no one on the left is blaming Obama…yet. Obama made the defeat all about him of course saying that "the same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office." Can you say narcissist? Can you say tone deaf?

Make no mistake…Brown's victory was all about Obama and the pushy progressive agenda. Let us review Obama's amazingly bad one year report card, Cliff-notes style.

Obama's past associations with radicals, communists and Islamic Jihadist sympathizers (William Ayers, Frank Marshall Davis, Rev. Right, Rashid Khalidi).
TARP and the bank bailout.
Tax cheats in the White House cabinet.
The $787B stimulus package to nowhere and 10% unemployment.
The arrogance of the Democrat-controlled Congress not reading the plethora of 2000 page trillion dollar spending bills...and bragging about it
Obama's race-baiting in the Harvard Professor Louis Gates affair.
ClimateGate and Obama's trip to the disastrous the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.
The rejection of Obama and Chicago by the Olympic Committee.
The Restriction of executive pay by Obama's Pay Czar.
35 Czars...the Obama attempt to concentrate power in the White House.
A $1.5 Trillion dollar deficit and $7 Trillion debt in just one year.
The government takeover of GM and Chrysler.
Endless overseas apology tours and bowing to foreign heads of state.
Compromising the defense of our allies in Eastern Europe and deferring to Iran on it's nuclear program
The Cap & Trade jam down in the House.
The ObamaCare jam down in the House.
The ObamaCare Christmas Eve jam down in the Senate along with the $300M 'Louisiana Purchase' and the 'Cornhusker Kickback', the $60M union deal, and the behind closed door reconciliation process of the House and Senate bills
Denigration of the Tea Party movement and the TownHallers.
Maoists and Communists advising Obama (Van Jones, Anita Dunn to name a few).
Lack of reaction to the first two successful terrorist attacks on U.S. soil since 9-11, Ft Hood and the Christmas Day Bomber.
Obama's neurotic obsession with closing Gitmo, giving civil rights to terrorists on the battlefield, and enabling terrorist-loving AG Eric Holder's decision to bring 9-11 terrorists Khalid Sheik Mohammed and his pals to NY for a civilian trial.

Need we say more? Would any sane person approve of this?

Obama's poll numbers are sinking like a stone but, in the wake of defeat, he intends to double down on the agenda to nowhere. He just completed the process of nationalizing the student college loan program. He has proposed taxing banks, even those that took no TARP funds because, as Obama says: "We want our money back" and "The American people need to be made whole."

We at Neville sincerely hope that the Democrat/Liberal/Progressive/Socialist/Fascist/Communist cabal running things in Washington don't get the message and continue on their merry way. It will insure victory in November 2010 and 2012.

The people running Washington are not your father's Democrats...these are not normal people. These are hardcore socialist progressives steeped in an alien and decidedly un-American ideology forged in the 19th and early 20th Century European political and social cesspool. We must never allow these low-lifes near the reigns of power again.

From the Wall St. Journal:

The Fall of the House of Kennedy The battle over who defines the work and institutions that make a nation thrive and grow.
JANUARY 21, 2010
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704320
104575015010515688120.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond
By DANIEL HENNINGER

Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts will not endure unless Republicans clearly understand the meaning of "the machine" that he ran against and defeated.

Yes, it is about a general revulsion at government spending, what is sometimes called "the blob." But blobs are shapeless things, and in the days ahead we will see the Obama White House work hard to reshape the blob into a deficit hawk. Unless the facade is ripped away, the machine will survive.

The revolt against the machine began with voters' 2006 ouster of the Republican majority in Congress for making a mockery of fiscal rectitude. An angry electorate then swept Barack Obama into office. Now Mr. Obama is saying voters elected him on the same wave of anger that elected Scott Brown. Sorry, but Messrs. Obama and Brown are not surfing in the same political ocean.

Daniel Henninger discusses the political machine that Scott Brown ran against.

The central battle in our time is over political primacy. It is a competition between the public sector and the private sector over who defines the work and the institutions that make a nation thrive and grow.

In 1962, President John F. Kennedy planted the seeds that grew the modern Democratic Party. That year, JFK signed executive order 10988 allowing the unionization of the federal work force. This changed everything in the American political system. Kennedy's order swung open the door for the inexorable rise of a unionized public work force in many states and cities.

This in turn led to the fantastic growth in membership of the public employee unions—The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the teachers' National Education Association.

They broke the public's bank. More than that, they entrenched a system of taking money from members' dues and spending it on political campaigns. Over time, this transformed the Democratic Party into a public-sector dependency.

They became different than the party of FDR, Truman, Meany and Reuther. That party was allied with the fading industrial unions, which in turn were tethered to a real world of profit and loss.

The states in the North and on the coasts turned blue because blue is the color of the public-sector unions. This tax-and-spend milieu became the training ground for their politicians.

Until the Obama exception, the only recent Democrats electable into the presidency had to be centrist Southerners little known to the country. Every post-Kennedy liberal who tried, failed, including Teddy.

What an irony it is that in the same week the Kennedy labor legacy hit the wall in Massachusetts, the NEA approved a $1 million donation from the union's contingency fund to the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate. It is this Kennedy legacy, the public union tax and spend machine, that drove blue Massachusetts into revolt Tuesday.

Yes, health care was ground zero, but Massachusetts—like New Jersey, like California, like New York—has been building toward this explosion for years.

According to a study done for the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth, spending in specific public categories there skyrocketed the past 20 years (1987 to 2007).

Public safety: up 139%; social services, 130%; education, 44%. And of course Medicaid Madness, up 163%, before MassCare kicked in more Medicaid obligations.

But here's the party's self-destroying kicker: Feeding the public unions' wage demands starved other government responsibilities. It ruined our ability to have a useful debate about any other public functions.

Massachusetts' spending fell for mental health, the environment, housing and higher education. The physical infrastructure in blue states is literally falling apart. But look at those public wage and pension-related outlays. Ever upward.

Enter the Obama administration, the first one born and raised inside this public bubble, with zero private-sector Cabinet members. Act one: a $787 billion stimulus bill, which they brag mainly saved state and local jobs. Then came the six-month odyssey for Obama's $1 trillion health-care bill, dripping with taxes. Independent voters felt like everything was being sucked into a public-sector vortex.

This is why New Jersey's Chris Christie won running on nothing. It's why in California Carly Fiorina is within three points of Sen. Barbara Boxer. It's why the party JFK enabled, "the machine," is hitting the wall.

There's no way out for these Democrats. They made a Faustian bargain 40 years ago with the public unions. For the outlays alone, they'll get some version of the Obama health-care bill. They'll also go to the same old "populist anger" well.

Scott Brown's victory has given the GOP a rare, narrow chance to align itself with an electorate that understands its anger. Now the GOP has to find a way to disconnect from a political legacy that smothered governments at all levels and is now smothering the Democratic Party.

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Obama Rearranges the Deck Chairs -- The Buck Stops With Him

By Gary Starr for The Neville Awards

Jan 8, 2010

Obama finally uttered the unspeakable for a Leftist desperate to be the anti-Bush: "We are at war against al Qaeda". He couldn't bring himself to say Muslim terrorists. Nothing has changed really.

Three successful attacks have occurred on the Obama watch...one soldier killed in Arkansas, thirteen soldiers killed at Ft. Hood and the aborted Pantywaist Bomber.
Attempted attacks are spiking. Since 9-11 there have been 139 homegrown attempted jihadist attacks...41 in 2009 alone (Obama's watch), according to a study from Duke and the University of N.C.
Obama is still conferring rights on terrorists...the Pantywaist Bomber has copped a plea deal and plead not guilty. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his cohorts are going to be tried in civilian court at a cost of $200M per year to the city of New York.
The enemy is still plotting attacks. It doesn't fear the Fraudinator-in-Chief.
Fric 'n Frac Janet Napolitano and John Brennan still have their jobs...not that it would make any difference if they were replaced by different frics 'n fracs.
The enemy is not worried about waterboarding...Obama and AG Eric Holder have taken that off the table.
Obama is still committed to closing Gitmo.
Three Navy Seals are being court martialed for roughing up a jihadist.
Seven CIA officers, including the head of the Afghanistan station were killed by an al Qaeda double agent, vouched for by the Jordanians. This is not unexpected given the administration's antipathy towards the Agency, it's zeal to prosecute Bush era officials for war crimes and Nancy Pelosi's accusations that the agency lied to her about waterboarding. CIA morale is in the tank and everyone is looking over their shoulder these days.

Consider these tough-guy gems from Obama on Jan. 7:

Obama said he had issued several directives to the intelligence community specifically assigning people to investigate all threats. Were they only taking half the threats seriously until now?

Obama has widened the no-fly list and has ordered homeland security officials to strengthen the criteria used to assemble watch-lists.

Obama said he will hold his agencies and staff "accountable" for any lapses, but at this stage of the White House's review it appears that the failure to stop a Nigerian man from boarding the Northwest Airlines flight in Amsterdam "was not the fault of a single individual or agency." What about the buck stopping...? Oh, never mind.

Obama said he had issued several directives to the intelligence community. This includes specifically assigning people to investigate all threats. "We must follow the leads that we get and we must pursue them until plots are disrupted." Wow, we are safer now.

"Ultimately the buck stops with me... and when the system fails it is my responsibility."

Then Obama equivocated, voted present and gave himself cover: "But, even the best intelligence can't identify in advance every individual who would do us harm. There is no silver bullet to securing the thousands of flights. "There is of course no foolproof solution. In the never-ending race to protect our country, we have to stay one step ahead of a nimble adversary."

For seven years after 9-11, and after 30 years of relentless Muslim attacks and advancement, the United States of America was on the offensive against Islam and the jihad. We at Neville have consistently said that as of Jan. 20, 2009 we would be losing this war. With the exception of the drone attacks, a hold-over from the Bush years, the prediction has come true...we are on the defensive on all fronts.

The only way to win is to go out there and kill them...as many as we can...and break their will to fight. Even the Bush team was saddled by the political correctness that saps our will to win. For Obama and his team political correctness is the war plan.

The current crop of Democrats currently holding seats in Congress appear to have no real interest in the operational details of national security, other than thwarting it or complaining about it. Their energies and interests appear to be wholly directed to gathering political power to implement the domestic socialist agenda, such as the health-care, immigration reform and cap and trade. It's a weird narcissistic form of isolationism.

If you think Obama is doing a bang up job on National Security you must necessarily accept this form of isolationism and John Kerry's 2004 remark that ''We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance." Thanks John...how many of us have to die at the hands of Muslims before you are bothered by it?

Obviously the Pantywaist Bomber was a nuisance...he interrupted Obama's golf game.

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Christmas Day Pantywaist Bomber Lawyered Up and Expecting a Plea Deal

By Gary Starr for The Neville Awards

Jan 6, 2010

Obama has issued his third pronouncement regarding the Christmas Day Pantywaist Bomber saying U.S. intelligence agencies knew that al Qaeda in Yemen was targeting the U.S., but "failed to connect those dots". This was his preemptive "failed to connect those dots" mea culpa, an effort to thwart anyone else from saying the same thing as happened after 9/11.

Then the cerebral, "too cool for school" no-drama Obama went all John Wayne: "It is increasingly clear that intelligence was not fully analyzed or fully leveraged. That's not acceptable, and I will not tolerate it." Wow...we are way beyond Bush's "wanted dead or alive" post 9/11 remarks. Obama also acknowledged that the plot, hatched in Yemen, was the result of "crushing poverty and deadly insurgencies."

Leftists have been pushing the "root causes" and poverty lie as the source of crime for sixty years. The Christmas Day Pantywaist Bomber is the son of privilege...his father is an elite banker in Nigeria. As far as "deadly insurgencies" are concerned the Yemeni government has supported al Qaeda and continues to harbor at least two people—Jamal Ahmed Mohammed Ali al-Badawi and Fahad Mohammed Ahmed al-Quso—involved in the bombing of the USS Cole.

One can only remember what the fictional Clemenza (from The Godfather I) said after the hit on Vito Corleone: "After he found out Sonny [Corleone] got mad…he's thinking of going to the mattresses".

Obama will never go to the mattresses…it's just not in his Leftist DNA.

And we would never hear this from Obama:

Yesterday, December 7, 1941 - a date which will live in infamy - the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.
Yesterday the Japanese Government also launched an attack against Malaya.
Last night Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong.
Last night Japanese forces attacked Guam.
Last night Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands.
Last night the Japanese attacked Wake Island.
And this morning the Japanese attacked Midway Island.

Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory and our interests are in grave danger.

With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph. So help us God.

I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.

Excerpted from the Franklin D. Roosevelt speech to Congress - December 8, 1941

This would be Obama's version of going to the mattresses:

Yesterday, December 7, 1941, the United States of America was attacked by naval and air forces allegedly from the Empire of Japan.
Yesterday the Japanese government allegedly attacked on Malaya.
Last night Japanese forces allegedly attacked Hong Kong.
Last night Japanese forces allegedly attacked Guam.
Last night Japanese forces allegedly attacked the Philippine Islands.
Last night the Japanese allegedly attacked Wake Island.
And this morning the Japanese allegedly attacked Midway Island.

I will not rest until the alleged perpetrators of these alleged crimes are brought to justice. I am directing Attorney General Eric Holder to issue subpeanas and arrest warrants so the alleged perpetrators can be brought to justice. We will mirandize the alleged perpetrators and provide lawyers so they can be tried in open court.

We have no evidence that these attacks are acts of terrorism and we should not jump to conclusions until all the facts have been gathered.

However, the evidence does suggest that U.S. intelligence agencies knew that the Empire of Japan was targeting the U.S., but "failed to connect those dots".

It is also clear that the oil and trade embargo instituted against Japan by the previous administration was a primary motivation…the attack was a result of our flawed foreign policy. I ask that Congress hold hearings so we can get to the bottom of this.

In the meantime our Fraudinator-in-Chief has announced that no more Gitmo terrorists will be returned to Yemen. That's a good thing as 20% of repatriated terrorists have returned to the jihad, including two that trained the Pantywaist Bomber.

Obama still reflexively wants to close Gitmo because he believes it's such a potent recruiting tool for terrorists. Moving them to Illinois will dissuade any Muslim from wanting to kill Americans...NOT!!

Newly indicted Abdulmutallab is all lawyered up and expecting a plea deal. According to John Brennan, the top White House counterterrorism official, this is the only way to get any useful information.

Excerpted from the Wall St. Journal:

http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB10001424052748703436504574640560502410466.html

The failed terrorist attack aboard Northwest Flight 253 is proving to be highly educational, not least about the Obama Administration and its pre-September 11 antiterror worldview. Yesterday, the White House reversed itself on repatriating Guantanamo detainees to chaotic Yemen, a step in the right direction.

Ramzi Yousef, you may recall, was the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 who is now serving a life sentence in a supermax prison in Colorado. The Obama Administration likes to cite his arrest, conviction and imprisonment as a model for its faith that the criminal justice system is the best way to handle terrorist detainees.

The World Trade Center trials were successful in winning convictions, and they were understandable because at the time we didn't understand the war we were in.

Yet as far as we know, Yousef told U.S. interrogators little or nothing about KSM's plots and strategy once he was in U.S. custody. This isn't surprising, since once he was in the criminal justice system Yousef was granted a lawyer and all the legal protections against cooperating with U.S. interrogators. To this day, we don't recall any official claim that Yousef has provided useful intelligence of the kind that KSM, Abu Zubaydah and other al Qaeda leaders later did when they were interrogated by the CIA.

John Brennan, the top White House counterterrorism official, tried to defend the criminal indictment on the Sunday talk shows but mainly revealed the Administration's confusion about the law and the uses of interrogation. Asked by David Gregory on NBC's "Meet the Press" why Abdulmutallab wasn't named an enemy combatant, Mr. Brennan said, "Well, because, first of all, we're a country of laws, and what we're going to do is to make sure that we treat each individual case appropriately."

But there is nothing illegal about holding an enemy combatant indefinitely, as the Supreme Court has upheld and as the Obama Administration has argued in court.

When Mr. Gregory pressed about "additional intelligence that could be gleaned" by interrogation, Mr. Brennan replied:

"Well, first of all, we have different ways of obtaining information from individuals according to that criminal process. A lot of people, as they understand what they're facing and their lawyers recognize that there is advantage to talking to us in terms of plea agreements, we're going to pursue that. So-and we are continuing to look at ways that we can extract that information from him."

A plea agreement? Mr. Brennan seems to be saying that now that he has a public defender, Abdulmutallab has clammed up. But the Administration might be able to coax him to talk if it offers him a lower sentence or some kind of other legal concession, even though he tried to kill nearly 300 people aboard an American airliner.

Meanwhile Janet Napolitano is nowhere in sight. We at Neville sincerely hope she is not fired for stating the system worked. She is the gift that keeps on giving.

Per Dorothy Rabinowitz at the Wall St. Journal:

Ms. Napolitano would go on in other ways to prove the potency of man-made disasters-of which she was clearly proving one. In April, she issued a report seeming to target military veterans as potentially dangerous right-wing extremists. She soon apologized. In the same month she managed to suggest that the 9/11 terrorists had entered the U.S. through Canada, which appalled Canadian leaders. Apologies and clarifications followed.

Mr. Obama can't be happy with his Homeland Security chief. It's fair to say no president deserves an appointee so extravagantly unequipped for her job.

America -- don't say we didn't warn you about these Leftist, appeasing clowns.

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Islamic Terrorists 2 - Obama 0 -- Two Attacks on U.S. Soil in Three Months

By Gary Starr for The Neville Awards

Jan 1, 2010

The Obama Administration dodged a huge War On Terror bullet on Christmas Day with the botched attack on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Becuse of this failure we were treated to DHS Secretary Janet 'Incompetano' gassing around on the Sunday chat shows about how the system worked, playing the "lone nut" card dismissing the Christmas Day jihadist as a single operator, and then having to reverse herself the next day when her lunacy was exposed by even the lamestream media. Given her sorry record as DHS Secretary in just eleven months it's time for her to go....not that anything will really change as Obama will just appoint another surrender monkey pantywaist to the position.

We also thrilled to Obama's pronouncement (between rounds of golf) that the US would "not rest" until it has called to account those behind the attempted attack and directives to his national security officials to "keep up the pressure on those who would attack our country". There was also something about U.S. intelligence agencies suffering an unacceptable "systemic failure" and the bomber being an "isolated extremist"...just like the Ft Hood shooter. Way to go Barack. He'll be "studying" lots of intelligence reports just as soon as he gets back from his holiday golf vacation.

Can anyone see the pattern here? We just don't have time for a war on terror right now...it interferes with wealth redistribution, climate change, healthcare and transforming America. The consistent effort to downplay Islamic terror by this administration and the media is unparalleled. Obama simply cannot be seen as having failed in his soft approach to and appeasement of Islam, even when it is now obvious that the approach is a total failure. We have returned to a pre-9/11 mentality as evidenced by the increase in attacks on U.S. soil and Iran thumbing it's nose at Obama. It's just a matter of time before a plane is brought down by jihadists.

If, God forbid, this had been a successful attack and 300 innocents had been murdered, the Obama and Napolitano would have breathed a sigh of relief stating "After an exhaustive (30 minutes or so) review we have determined that this was not an act of terrorism." The Obama Administration would then launch endless Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) "What Brought Down Flight 253?" investigations. No doubt the cause would have been a faulty fuel line or a defective stabilizer...TWA Flight 800 all over again. Terrorism and Obama's incompetence would have been swept under the rug and quickly hushed up...too inconvenient.

Rep. Peter King of New York, ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee and a member of the Intelligence Committee, said on NBC’s “Today” show: “I think that the administration has made a mistake by treating this terrorist as a common criminal, by putting him into the criminal-justice system. I wish they had put him into a military tribunal so we could get as much intelligence and information out of him as we could.”

Former Vice President Dick Cheney accused Obama of “trying to pretend we are not at war” with terrorists, pointing to the White House response to the attempted bombing as reflecting a pattern that includes banishing the term “war on terror” and attempting to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center.

Cheney’s full statement:

"As I’ve watched the events of the last few days it is clear once again that President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war. He seems to think if he has a low-key response to an attempt to blow up an airliner and kill hundreds of people, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gives terrorists the rights of Americans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if we bring the mastermind of Sept. 11 to New York, give him a lawyer and trial in civilian court, we won’t be at war.

“He seems to think if he closes Guantanamo and releases the hard-core Al Qaeda-trained terrorists still there, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gets rid of the words, ‘war on terror,’ we won’t be at war. But we are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren’t, it makes us less safe. Why doesn’t he want to admit we’re at war? It doesn’t fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office. It doesn’t fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency — social transformation — the restructuring of American society. President Obama’s first object and his highest responsibility must be to defend us against an enemy that knows we are at war."

From James Lewis at AmericanThinker.com:

Obama's Second Major Terror Failure in Two Months
December 29, 2009
By James Lewis
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/12/
obamas_second_major_terror_fai.html

Luck was with us on Northwest flight 253. Dumb luck.

This terror attack could easily have been averted but for the Aloha, baby! attitude of the Obumblers regarding domestic terrorism. At Fort Hood last month, a couple of cops finally brought down an Islamofascist killer after he murdered twelve soldiers and left thirty wounded on the tarmac. On Flight 253 to Detroit it happened to be an alert Dutch filmmaker who jumped the would-be bomber when his pants started to burn. But the bomb was an ingredient of Semtex, and he was trying to inject a liquid detonator that could have blown up the Airbus A 330 with 278 people on board.

After a known Islamic radical psychiatrist shot more than forty unarmed American military personnel at Forth Hood last month, this is the second easily preventable failure of the Obama administration to protect the country against domestic terrorism. Obama has let down our guard, and al-Qaida's got his number.

Under the reign of political correctness, anti-terror policy comes down to this: You can't profile terrorists -- certainly not by their African origins, by their known history of Islamist radicalism, or by their Muslim names. So you have to have "everybody's a suspect" rules, in which midwestern grandmas are treated the same as Umar Farouk Abdul Abdulmutallab, who just barely failed to bring down Northwest 253.

Abdulmutallab spent two years as an engineering student at University College London, a known center for Islamist recruitment. Engineering students know enough to make a bomb. The Brits suffer from the dreaded mental illness of political correctness like a pustulating skin outbreak. But even the PC-whipped Brits managed to keep Abdulmutallab out of their country after he lied on a visa application.

OK, suppose we handicap ourselves with political correctness. Even then, a couple of net-surfers sitting at home in their pajamas could do a heck of a lot better than Homeland Security (not to mention Amsterdam Airport Security) did in this case.

Within twenty-four hours of the failed bombing, we know that Amsterdam's boarding security failed to detect the known ingredient of Semtex, the most popular bomb-making material for the last three decades. Abdulmutallab carried a shampoo-bottle-sized plastic container of gelled explosive -- just the reason why nobody is allowed to carry plastic bottles on board anymore. He had it taped to his inner thigh, and apparently we don't have procedures to detect an elementary deception like that. Kids in middle school know about that one.

Furthermore, Homeland Security failed to place Abdulmutallab on the United States No Fly List in spite of the fact that

"... the suspect, Abdulfarouk Umar Muttalab who is an engineering student at the University College, London had been noted for his extreme views on religion since his secondary school days at the British International School, Lome, Togo."
"Abdulmutallab was quoted in a US federal security bulletin to have admitted having extremist ties and said the explosive device 'was acquired in Yemen along with instructions as to when it should be used'."
Abdulmutallab was reported by his father, a wealthy Nigerian businessman and former Minister of Economics who lives in London named Dr. Alhaji Umaru Abdulmutallab. "Four weeks ago Abdulmutallab's father told the U.S. embassy in Abuja, Nigeria, that he was concerned about his son's religious beliefs. This information was passed on to U.S. intelligence officials."
"Police know that the KLM ticket that Abdulmutallab travelled on was purchased on 16 December, with cash, in Nigeria. The departure airport was changed from Accra to Lagos shortly afterwards. When he took his window seat, number 19A, he had only one piece of hand luggage and none in the hold -- unusual for someone who was allegedly planning a two-week stay in Detroit." He wasn't planning to live that long, it seems.
Abdulmutallab was on a half-million-person U.S. terror database "but was not considered an immediate threat. His name was absent from 'no-fly' lists." The "no-fly list" has only four thousand people, so less than 1% of the people in the U.S. terror database are actually stopped from flying to the United States. The other half million are welcome. Makes you feel a lot better, right?
"After graduating, Abdulmutallab tried to return to Britain but his visa request was refused. He applied to return for a six-month course, but was barred by the U.K. Border Agency which judged that the college he applied to was 'not genuine'."

OK, that's enough.

Pretend we're Googling to predict the next plane bomber. We have five facts (all politically correct ones): (a) An engineering student at a known center of terrorist recruitment (b) who is red-flagged on a U.S. security bulletin because of his connection to the terrorist hotspot of Yemen, (c) reported by his Nigerian father for extremist Islamist beliefs, (d) bought a plane ticket with cash in Nigeria and brought only a carry-on for a two-week stay in Detroit -- also a known hub of Islamist agitation. Oh, and (e) he was barred from Britain because he lied on his visa application

We know all that just twenty-four hours after Flight 253 almost went down thanks to the fast action of an alert passenger.

Do you suppose that somebody at Google could set up a database search that could red-flag this guy before he boarded that plane?

If Google can't do it, then I'll bet that American Thinker readers can. It's a no-brainer.

Had the bomber-to-be been flagged in Amsterdam, a body search would have revealed the bomb. Had Homeland Security been on the job, the Airbus crew would have known there was a suspect on board. This guy acted suspicious on board. "[I]nterviews with the passengers and crew of Flight 253 revealed that before the incident Abdulmutallab went to the aircraft's bathroom for approximately 20 minutes."

He could have blown himself up in that bathroom in two minutes. He had twenty. My guess is that he was too freaked to do it then. But that's a guess after the fact, which doesn't count.

We lucked out this time. Pure, dumb luck.

That makes two serious terrorist incidents in Obama's first year in office. Both were easily preventable with commonsense security. We know the Fort Hood terrorist was protected by politically correct insanity in the U.S. military under Obama. We know that Abdulmutallab wasn't stopped from flying, even after his father warned the U.S. that he was dangerous. This guy perfectly fits the terrorist profile in terms of age, religion, radicalism, country of origin, engineering skills, lying on his visa application, use of cash, and even reported links to Yemen.

Notice that Obama is now staying out of sight. He knows he's blown it bad twice in a row. One more, and the American people might start figuring it out, in spite of all the media efforts to cover it up. But the third time, we might be out of luck.

This is completely nuts. The big question is whether we as a nation are now too wimped out to defend ourselves. So far, the answer is yes.

Somebody has to act, and now.