Exactly Wrong: Michael Gerson & Jacob Weisberg Suck the Bong of Dementia Praecox & Dilate Unwisely

Michael Gerson appears trapped inside that Beltway cocoon. How else to do an assay of this fool's gold:

And the whole system [of blogging] is based on a kind of intellectual theft. Internet aggregators (who link to news they don't produce) and bloggers would have little to collect or comment upon without the costly enterprise of newsgathering and investigative reporting. The old-media dinosaurs remain the basis for the entire media food chain.

Mark Steyn briskly debunks this platitudinous hooey with a short NRO note on how studiously the MSM is ignoring "Warmergate," the whistleblower [?] generated e-mail spew from the East Anglia CRU, the primary logistical gathering point of fallacious and deliberately skewed "data" used to propagate and promote the AGW hoax. Bloggers contribute more nowadays to the "marketplace of ideas" than the full-throated hosannas the alphabet networks and "fishwrap of record" NYT do. Bloggers serve a useful purpose in pointing out the numerous inaccuracies and ridiculous omissions, such as the CRU e-mail whistleblower's data dump, which might hamper Dear Leader's rush to install socialism rather than capitalism as the nation's economic paradigm.

Or perhaps Dr. Gerson, who I believe like Al Gore has a degree in Divinity, demonstrates a penchant for new religions [Gaia] or a reverance for old ones [MSM dinosaurs]. Has Gerson forgotten the overly-long limited hang-out the MSM permitted fraud and hoaxster John Edwards concerning his dalliance with an over-the-hill media whore who seduced him with an ambush in NYC consisting of "You are sooooo hot!???" Edwards is the anti-Palin, as phony as she is sincere, and just the kind of guy the MSM find mirrors their own inner emptiness. Gerson should take a vacation outside the District of Columbia and perhaps actually attend a Tea Party where real tax-paying voting Americans express real grievances. Or actually interview Sarah Palin with an eye to eliciting more than some other version of "gotcha" mousetraps that the alphabet networks sent Katie and Brian and Charlie to set in front of the media neophyte. The MSM still froths at the mouth at the mention of Palin, a reaction perhaps more revealing of themselves than of the former VP candidate.

Jacob Weisberg presents a more extreme sort of eristic nonsense, positing that a "health reform" bill, actually a legislative DOA of an aborted fetus, delivered by the SOTU on January 20th will make him another FDR. If he is speaking about measures this "constitutional-scholar community-organizer" has promoted that may be overthrown by the SCOTUS, Slate's lisping Delphic Sybil may be accurate. A sample of Weisberg's errant gibberish:

When it comes to foreign policy, Obama's accomplishment has been less tangible but hardly less significant: He has put America on a new footing with the rest of the world. In a series of foreign trips and speeches, which critics deride as trips and speeches, he replaced George W. Bush's unilateral, moralistic militarism with an approach that is multilateral, pragmatic, and conciliatory. Obama has already significantly reoriented policy toward Iran, China, Russia, Iraq, Israel, and the Islamic world.

And Obama has been totally unsuccessful in each and every instance Weisberg cites, with no real responses from any of the "reoriented policy" changes he lavishes praise upon. Instead, like Jimmy Carter, the President [and precedent] Weisberg might have been well-advised to use in comparison, Dear Leader has given away the commanding moral heights to anti-democratic dictatorships [including Putin's] while receiving exactly nothing in return, all the while insulting and rebuffing our democratic allies [Poland, Honduras, Czech Republic, Israel].

A longer version of the Slate nonsense above, with its fulsome praise of a stimulus only beginning to sluice money to DNC supported projects or of Obama's foreign policy which is garnering faint praise from everyone save himself, Weisberg vouchsafed to Newsweak to complete his flight from readers' eyeballs. Meacham and Evans will welcome Weisberg's nincompoopery as befitting their editorial lurch into irrelevance.

Peer Review: Fuggeddibouddit!

Dennis Mangan cites The Telegraph's James Delinpole on how a cozy, self-selecting coterie of climate czars have corrupted science beyond repair:

What the CRU’s hacked emails convincingly demonstrate is that climate scientists in the AGW camp have corrupted the peer-review process. In true Gramscian style they marched on the institutions – capturing the magazines (Science, Scientific American, Nature, etc), the seats of learning (Climate Research Institute; Hadley Centre), the NGO’s (Greenpeace, WWF, etc), the political bases (especially the EU), the newspapers (pretty much the whole of the MSM I’m ashamed, as a print journalist, to say) – and made sure that the only point of view deemed academically and intellectually acceptable was their one.
Neutral observers in this war sometimes ask how it can be that the vast majority of the world’s scientists seem to be in favour of AGW theory. “Peer-review” is why. Only a handful of scientists – 53 to be precise, not the much-touted 2,500 – were actually responsible for the doom-laden global-warming sections of the IPCC’s reports. They were all part of this cosy, self-selecting, peer-review cabal – and many of them, of course, are implicated in the Climategate emails.
Now peer-review is dead, so should be the IPCC, and Al Gore’s future as a carbon-trading billionaire. Will it happen? I shouldn’t hold your breath.

Yes, corrupt the institutions and the ripe, low-hanging apple can be plucked by moral knuckle-walkers like Hansen and Mann.

Further and further in the widening gyre....

"Down Please"


Don Surber implies that the Kos Poll giving Obama and Pelosi high numbers probably comprise teenagers and mental misfits [or if he doesn't, I am] and that the real fact overlooked is that in 2010 81% of the Repubs may vote versus 56% of the Dems.

Also, what's that I saw on PBS that Pelosi did some sort of a deal with the Catholic bishops with the Stupak Amendment on abortion?

Parturient Montes, Nascitur Ridiculus Mus

The Lisbon Treaty has finally aborted onto a leadership masthead surely out of a Monty Python lost episode. One should bear in mind that Belgium underwent a year-long leadership crisis only a couple of years ago and the bizarre looking dude Van Rompuy appears to have emerged from the tunnel as the least worst Prime Ministerial candidate

Who better to lead a befuddled and confused EU into the twenty-first century. His Brit backup looks like a role Judi Dench would have passed up in the foreign ministry department. Or actually, if her part as M in Casino Royale is any guide, Dame Dench would be far preferable to a dubious "Baroness" whose only resemblance to Lady Thatcher is by opposites.

NATO versus EU versus Russia?

The Economist must have a managing editor with both sides of his brain working at cross purposes---the Obama as "Quiet American" versus the US as NATO bully.

DAMAGE control is never as good as damage prevention. Despite repeated reassurances, the countries of eastern Europe are worried about security. Their biggest concern is NATO, where officials are meant to be drafting contingency plans to defend Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Barack Obama pushed this idea at the NATO summit in April. A recent big Russian military exercise, which officials say culminated in a dummy nuclear attack on Poland, highlights the region’s vulnerability.

Yet little is happening. NATO officials blame a “lack of consensus”. Western European countries, notably Germany and Italy, are against anything that is not first discussed with Russia. A likely outcome is a generic plan, to be presented privately to the Baltic three in December, that will not deal with specific threats.

Nobody really expects a military conflict. But if NATO even hints that it is no longer in the business of guaranteeing the defence of all its members, it may encourage Kremlin mischief-making over such issues as minority rights or transit to Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave. Eastern Europeans are also cross about the European Union’s recent carve-up of top jobs. Germany and France showed that they decide the EU’s foreign policy, and that easterners do not count, says one minister in the region.

The Americans admit to botching the announcement in September of a new missile-defence plan—upgraded, not cancelled, they now insist. Vice-President Joe Biden has visited America’s main central European allies, as well as Ukraine and Georgia, to dispel feelings of neglect. A formidable American warship toured the Baltic during the Russian exercises. Six senior generals have visited Latvia alone in the past 12 months; bilateral military exercises are planned next year. The administration has offered Poland exercises with Patriot missile batteries armed with live warheads, whereas previously it had offered only dummy drills.

Few people anywhere mourn the departure of George Bush and the strains he placed on America’s allies. But his team of hard-bitten officials who dealt with eastern Europe is still missed. The idealistic Mr Obama has brought a different lexicon to foreign policy: realpolitik is in, talk of common values is out. Some find this a refreshing change from the hectoring of the Bush administration. But eastern Europeans are distressed to hear so much talk of “partners” (bracketing countries as different as China and Poland) and so little of “allies”.

A further worry is the effect on NATO of the war in Afghanistan. The more that NATO’s success there is defined as crucial to the alliance’s credibility, the more eastern members fear the consequences if it fails. Proportionately, eastern European NATO members have helped most in Afghanistan. The American-backed security pledge at the heart of NATO matters most to them too. Western Europeans who privately see NATO as an anachronism are unbothered by American disengagement.

Admittedly, the Obama administration is preoccupied with domestic issues and with other pressing matters abroad. Europe as a whole, not just the eastern Europeans, cannot expect constant nannying. But even in Washington concern is mounting as well. “Why is the most popular man on the planet, leading the world’s strongest country, unable to get relations with America’s closest allies right?” fumes one (apolitical) former official.

Many explanations can be offered. Inexperience is one. European and American observers talk of disorganisation in the administration’s National Security Council. One European official speaks of a “black hole” there. Some note a tribal desire among Obamaites to be different from the Bushies: if they favoured eastern Europe, the new policy must be chillier. Others blame a habit of preferring a friendly atmosphere to tough decisions. “It is not irredeemable. But they have to redeem it,” says Kurt Volker, another former official.

Part of the problem is that the EU and NATO are so frustrating to deal with. The fault lies on both sides—but some of it reflects bad staff work that has made Mr Obama’s summits with the EU and NATO both boring and useless. Even where interests chime, progress is slow. A year after the EU first mooted its “eastern partnership” to boost western ties with six ex-Soviet countries (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine), talks on American involvement are only just starting. A stronger Europe policy in Washington might make easterners less twitchy about America’s dealings with Russia.

Such worries have led Poland to push for a stronger bilateral security commitment from America. That is ambitious, but also risky. If it fails, it could heighten the sense of abandonment. If it succeeds, it could create a two-tier NATO in the east: a few countries with a direct relationship with America, and a vulnerable rump without. A senior Pole denies this is a danger, noting that Polish military plans already include defence of Lithuania. The stronger Poland is, the more it can protect its neighbours. “They are our West Berlin,” he says. Hardly a comforting thought.

Vlad the Empoisoner is even now preparing for a reclamation of the Baltic Republics, whose freedom imperil the crooked crony-capitalism which is eroding the Russian Republic, making it look for the Near Abroad to divert attention from its chronic social instability.

Dear Leader Clever or Weak in Foreign Policy[ies]?

The Economist has a two-handed economist's take on the 44th iteration of George Washington:

This goes to the heart of the debate about Mr Obama’s diplomacy. Which will he be, clever or weak? Does this president have a strategy, backed if necessary by force, to reorder the world? Or is he merely a presidential version of Alden Pyle, Graham Greene’s idealistic, clever Quiet American who wants to change the world, but underestimates how bad the world is—and ends up causing harm?

Short-sighters v long-gamers
The doubters argue that, however decent and articulate, Mr Obama is gaining a reputation as someone who can be pushed around. This month, after the president pandered to China by refusing to meet the Dalai Lama, China pushed for more by banning questions at his Beijing press conference with Hu Jintao, its president. When Mr Obama demanded that Israel stop all work on its settlements in the occupied territories, Binyamin Netanyahu, its prime minister, defied him and still, staggeringly, won praise from Hillary Clinton.

Each time, the doubters say, Mr Obama’s delicate overtures are met with ambiguity or contempt. Since he engaged Iran, it has continued to temporise and dissimulate over its nuclear programme. When Mr Obama abandoned a missile-defence system in Europe, he appeared to extract a pledge from Russia’s president, Dmitry Medvedev, that his country would support sanctions if Iran is recalcitrant—only for Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, repeatedly to say he sees no need. Although America has pledged $7.5 billion in aid to Pakistan over five years, the army seems reluctant to take on the Taliban who drift from northern Pakistan into Afghanistan—indeed, the conditions riding on the grant were spun by the Pakistani security services into an American “insult” (see article). Yes, Mr Karzai eventually buckled in Kabul, but his readiness to thumb his nose at the world superpower was humiliating.

Now you see him, now he is a Cheshire cat disappearing behind a smile:

...as the months drag on, the “weak” case has been gaining the upper hand. Mr Obama has yet to show he has the staying power to take on a dangerous, stubborn and occasionally bad world. Even allowing for Israel’s shift this week, the president has hardly lived up to his promise to work for Middle East peace “with all the patience and dedication that the task requires”. With one big exception, he has not yet shown that he can back his oratory with a stick—and that was a tariff on Chinese tyres, a weak sop to America’s unions.

Calm and conciliatory pragmatism is welcome after George Bush’s impetuous moral certitude, but it also carries risks. Critics on the American right are wrong to carp at Mr Obama’s bowing to kings and emperors. Simple courtesy will help restore America’s image, not diminish it. The trouble is that the president often seems kinder to America’s rivals than to its friends. His guest this week, Manmohan Singh, India’s prime minister, may well have moaned about Mr Obama’s kid-glove handling of China. Allies in eastern Europe, their soldiers dying in Afghanistan, resent being called mere “partners”, Mr Obama’s term for pretty much anyone (see article). The hapless Gordon Brown has got precious little thanks.

The Economist ends on a downbeat note:

And how exactly will Mr Obama’s quiet multilateral vision, in which each nation does its bit for the good of all, work in practice? He is right that American power is circumscribed. But the European Union is not fit to help him police the world (see article). China, India and Russia are not willing.

“God save us always from the innocent and the good”
That leaves Mr Obama with a burden to shoulder on his own. In the coming weeks he could prove the doubters wrong. He could lead the way towards a brave deal on the climate. He could press Iran to negotiate over its nuclear programme before his own end-of-year deadline—or secure Russian backing for sanctions. He could agree to cut nuclear arms with Russia. He could bully the Palestinians and Mr Netanyahu to agree to talk. And he could get Mr Karzai and Pakistan to show that they mean to make Afghanistan governable. Even part of that list would set up Mr Obama as a foreign-policy president. But if there is no progress, then Mr Obama will be cast as starry-eyed and weak. He himself recognised the danger of that in one of those golden speeches: “Rules must be binding. Violations must be punished. Words must mean something.”

Just like this clown's pledge in April to keep the missile sites in Poland and the Czech Republic, only to have August come along....and on the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland, the "innocent and the good" doubletalk vaporizer reneged.

Climate Hoax Never About Saving Planet: About Your Money, Elite Statists Power

The Toronto Sun has an excellent summary about the reasons that "climategate" won't stop political elites and scientific fakes from enacting taxes to give them more power and diminish the freedom and property of us individuals:

If you're wondering how the robot-like march of the world's politicians towards Copenhagen can possibly continue in the face of the scientific scandal dubbed "climategate," it's because Big Government, Big Business and Big Green don't give a s*** about "the science."

They never have.

What "climategate" suggests is many of the world's leading climate scientists didn't either. Apparently they stifled their own doubts about recent global cooling not explained by their computer models, manipulated data, plotted ways to avoid releasing it under freedom of information laws and attacked fellow scientists and scientific journals for publishing even peer-reviewed literature of which they did not approve.

Now they and their media shills -- who sneered that all who questioned their phony "consensus" were despicable "deniers," the moral equivalent of those who deny the Holocaust -- are the ones in denial about the enormity of the scandal enveloping them.

So they desperately try to portray it as the routine "messy" business of science, lamely insisting, "nothing to see here folks, move along."

Before the Internet -- which has given ordinary people a way to fight back against the received wisdom of so-called "wise elites" -- they might have gotten away with it.

But not now, as knowledgeable climate bloggers are advancing the story and forcing the co-opted mainstream media to cover a scandal most would rather ignore.

The problem, however, is those who hijacked science to predict a looming Armageddon unless we do exactly as they say, have already done their damage.

The moment they convinced politicians the way to avert the End of Days was to put a price on emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the unholy alliance of Big Government, Big Business and Big Green was forged.

Big Government wants more of your taxes. Big Business wants more of your income. Big Green wants you and your children to bow down to its agenda of enforced austerity.

What about saving the planet, you ask? This was never about saving the planet. This is about money and power. Your money. Their power.

Lorrie Goldstein goes on to blow the trumpet for a charge on Canadian officials. Perhaps there's a hope that the folks in the Great White North will be able to do something about the fiasco that is being foisted upon advanced industrial nations while "developing countries" like China and India fill the skies with dirt and CO2 in ever-growing amounts:

If it was about saving the planet, "cap-and-trade" (a.k.a. cap-and-tax) -- how Big Government, Big Business and Big Green ludicrously pretend we will "fight" global warming and "save the planet" -- would have been consigned to the dust bin of history because it doesn't work. We know it doesn't work because Europe's five-year-old cap-and-trade market -- the Emissions Trading Scheme -- has done nothing to make the world cooler.

All it's done is make hedge fund managers, speculators and Big Energy giddy with windfall profits, while making everyone else poorer by driving up the cost of energy, and thus of most goods and services, which need energy to be lighted, heated, cooled, grown, constructed, manufactured, produced and transported.

Readers often ask how they can fight back. First, forget about asking when the warmists will see reason. They won't.

Instead, send a message to Prime Minister Stephen Harper by e-mail (pm@pm.gc.ca), fax (1-613-941-6900) or call toll-free (1-866-599-4999) and ask to be put through to the Office of the Prime Minister.

Do the same for Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff by e-mail, (ignatm@parl.gc.ca). fax, (1-613-947-0310), or call-toll free (1-866-599-4999) and ask to be put through to the Liberal Leader's Office.

Tell them you want no part of the madness in Copenhagen.

Blow their phones off the hook.

Ditto for the pathetic cast of Demo-rats about to inflict permanent harm on the American economy already devastated by Dear Leader's silly "porkulus" hyper-spending.

Lysenko versus AGW, which is more dangerous

Armed and Dangerous refutes the stupid pack of lies that the so-called "scientific community" has pushed forward with the promise of billions and trillions more for Big Science and Big Government at the end of the Copenhagen road.

A pathetic unread silly-boy named Colmes, recently dismissed from Hannity's show for persistent underachievement, bleats in his effete tones the usual BS that ice caps are melting, polar bears drowning, etc. while neglecting to point out that ice caps are now growing in Antarctica, etc. It's the sins of omission where the crimes are being committed by the AGW hoax brigades of "meteorologists" and other fake-science phonies. The dogs that don't bark like clueless Charlie [ACORN, what's that?], dumbass Katie the biyotch and phony Brian, the Alex Baldwin of News [funny if you like sick jokes]. Those nets are going to be begging for PBS status soon as they sink slowly into red ink. We can all see, if we ever bother to watch, what boring BS they will become just by allowing our retinas to be violated by the public leftist channel.

No wonder FoxNEWS is carrying the field and now FOX network is winning the entire shooting match, because people just don't like to be lied to, even by omission. And as A&D notes, people really hate rationalization of political control by fake science:

Lysenkoism is also instructive in another way. It teaches us a lesson which, if heeded, might have accelerated the exposure of the AGW fraud — or, perhaps, prevented it from getting traction in the first place. The lesson is this: always, always, always distrust the “science” that accompanies a political power grab.

This is actually a narrower category than politicized science. To see how, contrast creationism with AGW. Creationism is certainly politicized science, but it is marginally less noxious than AGW because it is not cannot effectively be used as a rationalization of control by the permanent political class, a weapon against free markets and individual liberty.

And A&D cites my philosopher of choice, the great H.L. Mencken:

Therefore…the next time we hear a ginned-up panic over some vast environmental crisis, the prudent thing to do will be to remember Mencken: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” It will be prudent to suspect that the science is probably already corrupted and demand extra-stringent scrutiny of it under that assumption.

It took the National Inquirer to uncover a fraud like John Edwards while the MSM dithered and dilly-dallied to protect its golden calf and his sick wife. Remember saccharine and other fake "crises?"

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

The Sage of Baltimore would have also said what esr mentions afterward:

And that brings us to process transparency. I discussed this with particular reference in Open-Sourcing the Global Warming Debate, but there’s another point that deserves attention. Strictly speaking, the rules of science require complete disclosure of all experimental methods, data, and analysis tools so that others can peer-review and replicate the work. We may find it an acceptable to relax those full-disclosure rules to some extent for corporations doing commercially-focused R&D. But that IPR exception should never be granted to scientists whose research touches public policy. Because the stakes are so much higher, disclosure standards must be as well.

FOIA requests were ignored for eight years and it took a whistleblower to send the most damaging e-mails which should result in people losing their jobs.

Instead, a one-term wonder is heading off to Copenhagen next month after not having time to visit the Berlin Wall in his busy schedule. Is anyone going to challenge this double-digit IQ moron?

Obama, Arabs Let Each Other Down

Marc Ginsburg continues to dream the Arab dream that Fuad Ajami has so effectively demolished and The Economist outlines the continuing failure of a cultural and religious nexus which is unable to cope with the twentieth century, let alone the twenty first!

Global Cooling Irks CRU "Scientists"

Newsbusters has a few of the e-mails so-called "scientists" exchanged to attempt to obscure the fact that the Earth since 1998 has actually cooled about a quarter of a degree instead of warming because of us nasty humans.

In the words of a prominent climate skeptic,

So the 1079 emails and 72 documents seem indeed evidence of a scandal involving most of the most prominent scientists pushing the man-made warming theory - a scandal that is one of the greatest in modern science. I’ve been adding some of the most astonishing in updates below - emails suggesting conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more. If it is as it now seems, never again will “peer review” be used to shout down sceptics.

Pseudo-science such as Anthropogenic Global Warming demonstrates the political agenda of the elites as they attempt to impose new taxes on rich countries [who often comply only in a desultory fashion] while allowing massive polluters like China, whose brown coal is the single largest component of human global warming, to avoid the sanctions.

Road To Serfdom Paved by Media Manipulation

Four guides On the Road to Serfdom

Ed Driscoll has a great short piece on how the NYT and other "gatekeepers" keep us uninformed, misinformed and disinformed.

US Scapegoating Karzai on "Corruption" Charges

A well-placed US official who recently spent some time in Afghanistan tells me that the US and UN are scapegoating Karzai with highly-inflated charges of corruption which basically is the cost of doing business in Afghanistan. This official says the real problem was the dearth of funding over the last decade and a half as well as misplaced confidence in eradicating an opium poppy agribusiness too prosperous for farmers to abandon and replacing the poppy growers with traditional agricultural produce. These were only two of the many miscalculations the US has made.

The official says that two-thirds or more of the funds allocated to institutions and dispensed by the US and NGOs actually reach the intended recipients. This is under Karzai's first term and by regional standards and previous Afghani benchmarks, is a great improvement. Yet the US and its FOUR ambassadors keep bumping into each other accusing Karzai of malfeasance and incompetence. And Richard Holbrooke has overemployed his trademark bullying and browbeating to such an extent that he is persona non grata in Afghanistan and is basically regarded as a Pakistani agent.

Holbrooke is now effectively lost any cachet with India as well, leaving him pincered in a Pakistani vise which limits his effectiveness as a regional ambassador and effectively means that Hillary Clinton is the only US official able to deal with all three countries. Given her limited time and skills, this means the US regional policy is at a standstill.

Finally, the spectacle of Karl Eikenberry as a US Ambassador criticizing Gen. McChrystal [who replaced Eikenberry's replacement Gen. McKiernan] has made the American policy toward eliminating or neutralizing the Taliban a complete shambles.

And meanwhile, Dear Leader dithers and dilly-dallies as he can't make up his underdeveloped mind on the issues at hand.

Gallup Shows Dear Leader's Honeymoon is Over

Sliding Slowly into the Forties

Gallup now shows what other polls have already indicated, that Obama's popularity is dissolving faster than a snowman in a sudden warm spell.

Of the post-World War II presidents, Obama now is the fourth fastest to drop below the majority approval level, doing so in his 10th month on the job. Gerald Ford dropped below 50% approval during his third month in office, and Bill Clinton did so in his fourth month. Ronald Reagan, like Obama, also dropped below 50% in his 10th month in office, though Reagan's drop occurred a few days sooner in that month (Nov. 13-16, 1981) than did Obama's (Nov. 17-19, 2009).

Given this fellow's amateurish efforts up to now, especially his dithering over troop decisions and abrupt reversals of stated policy goals [missile sites in Poland, etc.], don't expect his job performance to improve in the near future.

Yemen Becoming New Front Between Al Qaeda & Hezbollah?

I was Political Officer in Jidda in the late '70s in the US Embassy and was accustomed to receiving long missives from the US Amb to Yemen, Tom Scotes, who would dash off three half-dozen page analyses of the Yemeni political situation [which I also covered from a Pol/Mil slant] every week, or so it seemed.

Finally, Amb Tom Pickering from Jordan arrived in Jidda with three black Chevy Suburbans armed with antennae thirty feet high and announced that he wished to drive to Sana to visit Tom Scotes and would myself and the MilATT like to hitch a ride? I took one of the Jidda Suburbans with a broken-down M16, which I had learned to handle in Vietnam, and Tom's son Tim hitched a ride with me as we motored in CB contact with his pop to the Yemeni border. Tom Pickering was a driven man---his nickname was Black Bart---and he blew off an invite from the governor of Najran to get an early start across the unmarked Saudi/Yemeni border and many adventures ensued, including my discovery of Jews settled in a valley north of Saada of whom I have some photos which I will dig out and attach someday to my writings. They are not mentioned in the Economist article above which discusses the area we traversed, but they are one more piece on the zany chessboard that is Yemeni politics, or rather civil strife.

Back in the seventies, Sana's rule stopped at Saada and the hundred miles between Saada and Najran were royalist territory, loyal to the crazy Imam whose exploits amazed travellers like Freya Stark and others. Tim and I were hailed by two hitchhikers in the area not by a raised thumb, but with the usual lowered rifles pointed at us. We picked up the passengers and dropped them off twenty miles later and the M16 was not needed.

Yemen is a country I have visited a half-dozen times or more between my Foreign Service days and my stint as an Amoco Entry Strategist. It is a [barely] functioning medieval society with the Zaidi[Shi'a] and Shafei[Sunni] dichotomy only two of the many cultural/religious rifts splitting the country into a kaleidoscope of clans, tribes, and isolated satrapies. Osama Bin Laden's family hails from the Hadramaut in the southern part of the country which is again trying to affirm its independence from the capital in Sana, itself perhaps the oldest continuously inhabited urban settlement in the world---longer even than Damascus.

Supposedly, Shi'ism had its origin in Yemen from a Jewish convert at the death of the Prophet when the first succession crisis in the new religion arose, and spread rapidly eastward among the Kharajites in Oman and then up the Gulf to Basra and later Baghdad. Certainly, the peninsulars didn't like the Umayyads' move to Damascus and later to Cordoba. Persia/Iran didn't become Shi'ite until the Safavids almost a millennium later, but the Fatamids in Egypt were the genesis of Shi'ite power for a while, throwing off heterodox offshoots like the Druse in Lebanon and Iran [the "Old Man of the Mountain" who founded the sect of the Hashishiim or "Assassins" was an eastern Drusi living on a mountaintop near the Caspian, so the Lebanese Druse claim]. But I digress....

Suffice it to say, as the Economist article linked above outlines a bit, that Yemen is both western-oriented politically and also an unwilling battleground between Iranian-backed, Lebanese-trained Hezbollah and their Houthi allies versus the Al Qaeda strongholds further south in the former PDRY, a godforsaken hellhole where smuggling and piracy are the two main economic sources of income. It appears that Eritrea across the Red Sea from Yemen is also an Iranian base of operations, important because the nearby Bab el Mandeb is a chokepoint for all Red Sea Suez Canal traffic just as the Straits of Hormuz is for Persian Gulf trade and traffic.

The Saudis regard Yemen as their single greatest national security concern, ever since the Treaty of Taif in 1930 deprived Yemen of the Asir and other parts of what is now the southwest part of Saudi Arabia. Even though 15 of the 19 crazed Muslim terrorists who destroyed the WTC in 9/11/01 were carrying Saudi passports, their names showed they were of Yemeni ethnic or tribal affiliation as is Osama Bin Laden and there is no doubt that US and Saudi national security dovetail in this respect.

"The Lives of Others" Depicts Hollywood Ideal of Stasi Snoopery Ruling USA

John Nolte has a great piece on why the pathetic retardos in Hollyweird love Chavez and other Castro-wannabes.

When you and I picture life under Obama’s vision for America, we see a dreary existence spent in breadlines, drab apartments and small jail cells with rat cages strapped to our face conditioning us to say “Herstory” instead of “History.” These Castro-lovers and Polanski-defenders see something completely different.
Watch “The Lives of Others.” Not only is it one of the best films of the decade, it also answers the opening question. You’ll see how life under fascism is the complete fulfillment of every narcissistic desire Susan Sarandon, Barbra Streisand, Oliver Stone, Sean Penn and the rest of their sorry lot has ever had.
Leftist Hollywood is not driven by wealth or artistic freedom, they’re driven by status and the insatiable need to be unconditionally adored. Unfortunately for them, as actors in America, status and adoration is tied to awards and the size of the paycheck – in other words competition and a free market – which they hate. But that’s the least of their worries. All this messy American capitalism forces our favorite artistes into the undignified position of having to beg for money in order to have the millions necessary to watch themselves be all artistic on the big screen, and all this messy American free expression allows people like you and me to criticize and ridicule their hard self-serving work.

Nolte knows that hard work and earning one's honor isn't the way the pervs and perps that comprise Tinseltown's nomenklatura operate. These stoned-slackers want it all and they think that they are entitled to unconditional adoration which they would get if they lived in, say, East Germany before 1989 or the current slave-gulags in Cuba and N. Korea. Nolte sums up the beau-ideal of the trailer-trash "intelligentsia" like high-school dropout Penn or morbidly-obese "health-care expert" Michael Moore as a dystopia where actually scrambling for capital would be unnecessary:

Not so under a dictatorship.
The way they see it, with the right dictator, the State would hand them money for film projects and jail anyone who criticized them in print or elsewhere. Hugo Chavez shutting television stations down doesn’t horrify Leftist Hollywood, it makes them giddy.
Certainly the days of the $20 million pay check and multiple homes would be over, but that would come as a relief because status wouldn’t be tied to uncontrollable market forces. There would be no more stressing all weekend hoping those idiot hicks in Middle America make it a box office hit. As long as the State was happy with the product, the State would hand out status like welfare checks in the form of dinner parties, awards, nice apartments and “important” projects.
But what about artistic freedom, you might ask…
These Leftists enjoy complete artistic freedom now and what do they do with it? They flack for the state, undermine liberty and trash religion. All any fascist dictator would have to say is, “Carry on.”

The suck-ups and libtard elites in the business of movie-making consider themselves artists, which Marlon Brando had enuf integrity to refute by refusing to accept an Oscar for what he considered was mere miming and mouthing---something a Sharon Stone hasn't even mastered to this day!

The Hollywood Blacklist of traitors like Dalton Trumbo was an appropriate response to sad sacks who despise the Constitution almost as much as right-minded citizens despise their pretensions to be "artists."

CMPA Report: Fox is the MOST Fair & Balanced

The Center for Media and Public Affairs [CMPA] has an ongoing study whose preliminary conclusions are that a close analysis of the three networks and Fox's Special Report shows that:
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...Fox has both the most balanced and the most anti-Obama coverage... Simple. It's because the other networks were all so pro-Obama. CMPA analyzed every soundbite by reporters and nonpartisan sources (excluding representative of the political parties) that evaluated the candidates and their policies. On the three broadcast networks combined, evaluations of Obama were 68% positive and 32% negative, compared to the only 36% positive and 64% negative evaluations of his GOP opponent John McCain.

Indeed, the CMPA report shows that the three nets gave slavish adulation to Dear Leader:

In fact, Obama received the most favorable coverage CMPA has ever recorded for any presidential candidate since we began tracking election news coverage in 1988. The totals were very similar--within a few percentage points--at all three networks. (These figures exclude comments on the candidates' prospects in the campaign horse race, which obviously favored Obama.)

And although FoxNEWS was not very friendly to Obama, it matched it with a distinctly unfriendly attitude to the RINO Repug excuse for a candidate, you know, the one whose pudgy blonde bimbette daughter trashes conservatives on a blog?

Meanwhile, Fox's Special Report was dramatically tougher on Obama, with only 36% favorable vs. 64% unfavorable evaluations during the same time period. But McCain didn't fare much better, garnering only 40% favorable comments vs. 60% negative ones. So the broadcast networks gave good marks to one candidate and bad marks to another, while Fox was tough on both--and most balanced overall.

Of course, in the WH barnyard, Napoleon brooks no half-praise and has sent his sewer rats Axelrod and Emanuel out to emasculate FoxNEWS for being the only media outlet which dares to reveal its crime sprees like ACORN and SEIU which are getting fat on federal subsidies from the porkulus package---Napoleon doesn't mind even if he is a pig. Or is Fox the only culprit which dares to question Dear Leader on his aspirations to be King of the World?

Of course, all this is old news. White House staffers went after Fox because of what they perceived as the Murdoch News Network's trashing of the new Democratic administration. So what has Fox done to Obama lately? To find out, I consulted CMPA's ongoing study of the president's television news coverage, which is being conducted by scholars at George Mason and Chapman universities.

It turns out that Fox's coverage of President Obama has been even more negative than its coverage of candidate Obama: From Inauguration Day to Oct. 10, only 27% of Special Report's comments on the president were favorable. That sounds like proof positive of Fox's negative intentions. But if Fox hasn't lost its anti-Obama edge, it has certainly lost its distinctiveness. During the same period only 35% of the evaluations on ABC, CBS, and NBC were positive. So from the administration's point of view, Fox's coverage has gone from being the worst of all to merely the worst among equals.

Moreover, distressing as it may seem to a president used to unusually friendly coverage, this negativity is surprisingly normal. CMPA's earlier studies found that the broadcast networks gave almost identically negative coverage to George W. Bush (37% positive), Bill Clinton (34% positive) and Ronald Reagan (37% positive) during their first seven months in office.

These numbers are too similar for mere coincidence; instead, they represent a historical pattern. Based on the experience of the past three decades, incoming presidents should expect to receive twice as much bad press as good press and plan accordingly. In the modern era of media politics, presidential honeymoons end with the transition to power. Once they try to put their agendas into practice, Republican and Democratic presidents alike are fair game for a media anxious to tell the other side of the story.

The real reason for Obama's ridiculous coverage during the election, was, well.....

Obama differs from his predecessors mainly in the false hopes generated by sometimes fawning campaign coverage from jaded journalists who temporarily let themselves get carried away by his eloquence and the historic nature of his candidacy. When politics returned to normal, their coverage returned to form.

The only word I'd quibble about in the quote above is "fawning."

Of course Fox remains a special case among Obama's tormentors, with its stable of conservative talk show hosts singing the same discordant tune. But odds are that the next Republican president will get the same reception from Fox's liberal counterparts on MSNBC. A GOP president will also have to cope with the growing trend among entertainment-oriented cable channels to feature liberal commentators, such as Comedy Central's Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert and HBO's Bill Maher.

Across the cable landscape, reporting seems to be merging with commentary just as surely as news is merging with entertainment. In light of White House charges that Fox is "not really a news organization," it is ironic that among all the cable channels that feature political news and comment, Fox is the only one that runs an old-fashioned half hour of nightly news modeled on the broadcast networks.

To be sure, this president can expect more criticism from Fox than from CNN and MSNBC. But to single out Fox as the problem, because--unlike other television news--it has morphed from a news organization into an adversary? He should be so lucky.

Stewart and Colbert are funny, and Maher is beneath contempt. But unmentioned in Lichter's analysis is the fact that FoxNEWS is routinely outdrawing ALL FOUR of the other cable "news" [MSNBC is an agitprop corporate suck-up channel] outlets.

Remember back in the late '90s when FoxNEWS went 24-7, an atheist drunk said CNN would "crush it like a bug?" AOLTimeWarner's only smart move was to evict that diesel fanny out of its boardroom first item of business.

FBI & Feda Claim "First Amendment Rights" for Terrorist Muslims

Bernie Goldberg tells it the way Dan Rather never would or could, nor could Bob Shieffer, his witless successor:

Bernard Goldberg, a former CBS News correspondent, took the media to task for its coverage. "What's the story line they run with? Religion? Of course not. Can't do that. He's a Muslim," he said Friday on Fox News' "The O'Reilly Factor." "They run with post-traumatic stress syndrome because that gives them a chance to take a shot at a couple of wars they never liked from the get-go."

And a brave colonel instructed his subordinates to:

"Please send a message to our training centers, the (logistics support bases), and the (divisions) advising them of ...(their) responsibility to provide this command a status of their respective anti-terrorism plans."

Most media are acolytes of the cringing grandson of Socialist Norman Thomas, a Newsweak pondscum specimen of the name of Evan, who whinges:

"I cringe that he's a Muslim," said Evan Thomas of Newsweek. "I mean, because it inflames all the fears. I think he's probably just a nut case. But with that label attached to him, it will get the right wing going and it just -- I mean these things are tragic, but that makes it much worse."

But my old friend Barry Rubin, who had his wedding reception back at our home in DC some twenty years ago, sums it up:
Satirical blogger Barry Rubin of "The Rubin Report" wondered if today's New York Times covering the Lincoln assassination would overlook the fact that John Wilkes Booth shouted out a Confederate motto after the shooting and report instead that he "was psychologically unstable...frightened of the Civil War coming to an end and having to face a peacetime actors' surplus."

Great comparison, Barry, and the fishwrap tabloid of the ultra-left neo-Commie risorgimento still is Walter Duranty updated and with new traitorous flourishes.

Gladwell Rips Off Dawkins, but Won't Admit it!

Serial Confabulator and Master of the Obvious Malcolm Gladwell quite simply has made a career of taking other people's ideas and expanding on them, a la Gail Sheehy of Passages fame way back in the day. At least he doesn't overtly plagiarize, but stealing without attribution is a kissing cousin.

Nasty Gay-Baiter in Oval Office Taunts Opponents

Gay-baiter-in-Chief Taunts "Teabaggers"

The nasty cafe-au-lait creep used a sexual slur to describe his Tea Party opponents who threaten to bring down his plan to socialize America.

[Unintentionally] Funny Jon Klein Explains CNN's bottom status in Cable News

Jon Klein is himself the real reason CNN is at the bottom of the pack in the cable news race, but he can't say that and keep his job, so instead he does a comic turn with the LATimes.

Lamestream Media Blames PTSD for Terrorist Major

Bernie Goldberg blames the "Lamestream Media" for many ridiculous assertions in NYT, Time, Newsweak and other creepy misfits pretending to be journalists.

Bill O'Reilly and FoxNEWS now routinely outdraws ALL other cable news in competing time slots as do his fellow FoxNEWS cable colleagues. Indeed, as I noted in a previous blog, the number of DEMOCRATS watching FoxNEWS from 8-11PM outnumber the collective number of Demo-rats watching CNN, MSNBC, & HLN.

No wonder SNL, Jon Stewart, and unintentionally comic [Wolfie Blitzer, Davey Shuster, and the Shemale] newsies now make Fox-bashing one of their major segments almost every weekend/night. Of course, being terminally stupid [as Wolf proved in Jeopardy! when he went more than $4000 in the hole!], these unintentionally funny lamestream media freaks of nature are simply making their own dwindling audience wonder what all the fuss is about, driving up FoxNEWS numbers as more than a few find that the libtard liars are actually one-sided and Fox by comparison actually "fair and balanced."

The circulation/viewership of the libtard left is cratering/plummeting/diminishing [pick your verb] at about a 7% average every SIX MONTHS as Editor & Publisher notes every half-year, except for the Wall Street Journal, which actually gained a half-percent while USA TODAY lost close to 10% to cede highest circulation to the WSJ---a fact the far left E&P noted in neither the headline, nor even in the first three paragraphs, but HALFWAY THROUGH the FOURTH para. As a former editor at a daily, this is the kind of journalistic crime that only libtard lying tabloids, of which the NYT and WaPo are two, commit on a frequent basis.

The funniest comment about all this from the witless, clueless, airhead Chief Editor of the NYT, a moron named Keller, noted that "nobody watches "Drudgereport" any more." Keller, of course, is unaware that Drudge recently moved about three rungs up the ladder of mos-viewed sites on the web, while the donkey squat fishwrap NYT website fell two rungs the same period---with Drudge passing the NYT like the benighted ship that it is.

Pinch Sulzberger better sell what remains of his family legacy, as he is becoming the Jeff Immelt of the newspaper world.

Obama Numbers Plummet Almost as fast as Keith Odorboy's & MSNBC's

Dear Leader losing "Dearness"

American Thinker has a nice graph on how rapidly the American people are realizing what a complete mistake they made last year in electing a clown.

And there's a graph from TVNewser demonstrating on how FoxNEWS has CRUSHED the competition over the last 12 months in a steady increase in viewership. Of special interest is a Pew report mentioned by one commenter:

FNC: 39% Republican, 33% Democratic, 22% Independent
CNN: 18% Republican, 51% Democratic, 23% Independent
MSNBC: 18% Republican, 45% Democratic, 27% Independent

This would indicate more democrats are watching fox than MSNBCs total audience. Cant get anymore fair and balanced than that.

Lets see the libs here spin that…HOBO

And of course, the libtards always profess that "only old people" watch Fox. Study the chart and you'll find that the coveted 25-54 viewership slice for O'Reilly is around 900,000 which is more than three times as many as the less than 300K viewers who watch Odorboy. And basically Nancy Grace ties Keith-O while Campbell B is less than 200K---always great to mention when you remember that chronic drunk atheist Ted Turner said he would "CRUSH FoxNEWS like a bug" back 13 years ago when the cable news outlet announced it was challenging [Corrupt]NN around the clock. Now in the prime 8PM slot, :FoxNEWS has almost FIVE TIMES the viewers that CNN has, and imbecile-in-chief Jonathan Klein refuses to replace nitwit Brown with Lou Dobbs, who actually draws better numbers than the non-journalist Brown. Nor will Zucker replace the Odorboy show which is obviously on life support.

The GE prostitute-in-chief Jeff Immelt is hoping for a government subsidy, I guess. NBC's ratings are down across the board and not even SNL & 30Rock can keep that scow barge above the waterline.

Unraveling Begins For Obama as NBC Chicago Affiliate Scores Him on Fort Hood.

NBC Chicago may be different than the suck-up affiliate in S.Florida, but this was on its website:

After news broke out of the shooting at the Fort Hood Army post in Texas, the nation watched in horror as the toll of dead and injured climbed. The White House was notified immediately and by late afternoon, word went out that the president would speak about the incident prior to a previously scheduled appearance. At about 5 p.m., cable stations went to the president. The situation called for not only his trademark eloquence, but also grace and perspective.
But instead of a somber chief executive offering reassuring words and expressions of sympathy and compassion, viewers saw a wildly disconnected and inappropriately light president making introductory remarks. At the event, a Tribal Nations Conference hosted by the Department of Interior's Bureau of Indian affairs, the president thanked various staffers and offered a "shout-out" to "Dr. Joe Medicine Crow -- that Congressional Medal of Honor winner." Three minutes in, the president spoke about the shooting, in measured and appropriate terms. Who is advising him?
Anyone at home aware of the major news story of the previous hours had to have been stunned. An incident like this requires a scrapping of the early light banter. The president should apologize for the tone of his remarks, explain what has happened, express sympathy for those slain and appeal for calm and patience until all the facts are in. That's the least that should occur.

This guy is beginning to wear very thin, and his insane Speaker of the House is going to get him diselected in 2012.
Kimberley Strassel at the WSJ has a more long-term view. She calls this November poll a "tipping point:"

Gerry Connolly? The freshman Democrat last year won the 11th congressional district, a Northern Virginia suburb of Washington that has trended blue. Mr. Obama cleaned up 57% of voters, and the district was hailed as an example of a new tide toward Democrats. Mr. Connolly, feeling safe, has supported every aspect of the Democratic agenda, from stimulus to health care.

Tuesday, those suburban voters came swinging back. Mr. McDonnell won 55% of the vote, improving John McCain's number by 13 points. Two more Democratic incumbents on the local ballot went down to GOP contenders. Local businessman Keith Fimian has already announced a rematch against Mr. Connolly; he outraised him by $100,000 in his first fund-raising quarter.

Forget the freshmen—how about Virginia's ninth district, home to 27-year-incumbent Rick Boucher? That's coal country, though Mr. Boucher, confident in incumbency, has been playing a dangerous game of shepherding through his party's climate bill. Will Morefield, a little-known Republican running for the Virginia House of Delegates, centered his campaign against that legislation. He beat the Democratic incumbent by 14 points. Mr. McDonnell? He won a devastating 66% of the district vote.

These are the numbers the 49 Democrats who sit in McCain districts are dissecting. The mass defection in the independent vote, the uptick in the angry-senior vote, the swing in suburban voters, the drop-off in Democratic turnout—the figures have even hot incumbent blood running cold. The White House can shout that this is not a referendum on the president's policies. What vulnerable Democrat wants to take that chance?

The White House and the congressional leadership saw this coming, and it is why Speaker Nancy Pelosi is force-marching her health bill to a vote tomorrow. She's not about to give her members time to absorb the ugly results, or to be further rattled by next week's Veteran's Day break, when they go home for a repeat of the August furies. If not now, she knows, maybe never.

Look for it, nonetheless, to be a squeaker. A lot of Democrats are getting a sneaky suspicion Mrs. Pelosi is willing to sacrifice their seats on the altar of liberal government health care. Combined with the election results and Mr. Obama's falling poll numbers, this is no recipe for loyalty. Hello, tipping point. Hello, even crazier Washington.

Into the Valley of Death rode the 218, more or less.....

Berlin Wall Twentieth Anniverrsary: No Dear Leader Brobambi---Too "Busy!"

The USA has abandoned any pretense at leadership in international affairs as the cafe-au-lait "Tween" wavers on the far edge of pre-pubescence in foreign affairs and decides the water is too chilly!

The Red Queen: Off With Their Heads!

John Fund of the WSJ has a few choice quotes of Speaker of the House Pelosi's Dem minions who believe that advanced dementia has set in on her 1990-page dog's breakfast of lunacy. Of course, the AARP cadres and a rump-parliament of AMA also says they support it, but this is simply another indication that swine-flu encephalitis is rotting the DNC from the top down. And unlike libtard fabulation artists like Jonathan Allen who pulls out "quotes by sources who wish to remain anonymous" from his nether regions at the drop of a hat, John Fund quotes Democrats WILLING TO GO ON THE RECORD:

That's not how many of her own troops see it. Democratic Rep. Parker Griffith of Alabama told Politico.com that members are "very, very sensitive" to the fact that the agenda being pushed by party leaders has "the potential to cost some of our front-line members their seats" On health care, added New Jersey Democrat Bill Pascrell: "People who had weak knees before are going to have weaker knees now."

So those "anonymous" quotes from JournoList lying libtards [excuse tautology] don't register any more. Ben Smith tries to equal fake "quotes" without attribution if Allen gets too far ahead of him. Here's Fund's summary of the Madness of Queen Nancy:
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hat the bill would be a job killer isn't the only concern. Democrats worry about a backlash from the one-fourth of seniors enrolled in Medicare Advantage -- a program that faces steep cuts in both the likely Senate and House bills.

But Speaker Pelosi isn't about to step back. In fact, she plans to force her troops to vote on health care just one day after Friday's jobless numbers are due, which are likely to show unemployment still growing. "When I take this bill to the floor, it will win," she proclaimed earlier this year.

One Democratic House moderate says the leadership has mislearned a lesson from the 1994 collapse of Hillary Clinton's health care bill. "They believe they lost the elections that year because they failed to pass anything," he says. "But they forget it might have been even worse if they'd passed the wrong bill."

The obsession with passing a clearly flawed and overly complex health care bill does indeed recall the classic movie in which Major Nicholson (played memorably by Alec Guinness) convinces his fellow British POWs in Thailand to build a railway bridge for their Japanese captors -- losing touch with the larger reality that the bridge would be used by the enemy against his own people.

John Feenery, who worked for then-House Minority Leader Bob Michel, sees many similarities with Congress's ill-fated rush to pass "catastrophic" health coverage for seniors in 1988. "Like the catastrophic bill, the Democrats' health care bill frontloads the pain and backloads the gain," he told CNN last month. Because Democrats wanted to avoid a negative deficit score from the Congressional Budget Office, taxes went up immediately while benefits were phased in. But seniors revolted. House Ways and Means Chairman Dan Rostenkowski was famously chased down a Chicago street by an angry mob. In November, 1989 -- almost exactly 20 years ago -- Congress took the extraordinary step of repealing the catastrophic health care law.

Should the far more complex health care bill now being debated pass, no one expects it could be fully repealed. But Democrats surely would pay a political price for passing a liberal bill with no bipartisan support. Like Major Nicholson on the River Kwai, they may wake up to find they built a monument to a set of presumptions that were really a form of madness.

Speaker Botox will have to tell her galley slaves to "let them eat cake" and I just can't wait for the avalanche of sh*t to begin rolling downhill while the jobless numbers go through the roof.

Barone Berates "Gangster Government" and SEIU is BIGGEST Loser on Tuesday.

Michael Barone used to put out an amazing encyclopedia of Congressional districts every session with a fellow named Grant Uffisa [sp?] that micro-analyzed each CD and gave its past electoral history for a generation or so. Michael is sane and sober and intelligent, so he gets little air time on the rant shows filled with the Keith Overbites & DUI unconvicted killer Rick Sanchez---he is certainly glad about that! Here is his insight on Tuesday:

[Tuesday night on TV] you missed seeing the guy who may have been the biggest loser of all—a man who according to recently released White House logs has been a guest in the White House 22 times since Barack Obama became president, more than any other single individual.

That man is Andy Stern, who has boasted that the Service Employees International Union, which he heads, ponied up something like $60 million for Barack Obama and other Democrats in the 2008 campaign cycle. Altogether, Mr. Stern and other labor union leaders reportedly gave Democrats some $400 million last year.

This was, to borrow a word from Mr. Obama, an audacious gamble. Unions these days represent only 8% of private-sector employees (and that's counting General Motors and Chrysler as private sector) and some unions went into debt to make these contributions. Public employee unions of course are financed by taxpayers, who pay the salaries from which dues are extracted, but even so their resources are ultimately limited.

What have the unions gotten in return? Some not insignificant things. The Obama administration bludgeoned General Motors and Chrysler bondholders, in what I called an episode of "gangster government," and effectively turned over the two auto companies to the United Auto Workers. The building trades got project labor agreements—i.e., plenty of dues money flowing to their coffers—in the $787 billion stimulus package.

A lot of that stimulus money went as well to state and local governments. The goal was to spare public employee union members from the vicissitudes of the recession to which the rest of us are subject—and to keep that dues money flowing in.

But the union leaders have been frustrated on their No. 1 goal, the card check bill that would effectively abolish the secret ballot in unionization elections. A couple of bulky guys in varsity jackets visit your home and, um, persuade you to sign a card, and later the union—with the help of a mandatory arbitration clause—impose contracts on employees and rake in the dues money.

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele (left) stands with Virginia's Governor-elect Bob McDonnell on Nov. 3.
Just about every House Democrat voted for the misleadingly titled "Employee Free Choice Act," and every Senate Democrat cosponsored it when George W. Bush was president and it had no chance of becoming law. As Barack Obama was inaugurated, Atlantic blogger Marc Ambinder was speculating on how many Republicans would come on board.

Instead, support evaporated as Democrats from places as dissimilar as Arkansas and California thought hard about what life would be like with card check. Today the bill looks dead no matter how many Democrats are elected to Congress.

And after Tuesday's elections, it looks like fewer Democrats will be elected to Congress in 2010 than in 2008. In the election results and the exit polls there are clear signs that the Obama majority coalition has splintered.

Barone has another group of analytical gems about the 2008 election that bears a lot of reflection:

Mr. Obama benefited last year from a big turnout of young voters, who backed him by a 66% to 32% margin. This year young voters formed only about half as large a percentage of the electorate in Virginia and New Jersey as they did in 2008, and in Virginia they voted about as Republican as their elders.

The big-government programs of Obama Democrats evidently have less appeal than those trendy posters and inspiring rallies and cries of "We are the change we are seeking." I have yet to see survey research showing that young Americans want to work under union contracts, with their 5,000 pages of work rules and rigid seniority systems. That doesn't sound like a tune that appeals to the iPod generation.

Economically, the Obama majority was a top-and-bottom coalition. The Democratic ticket carried voters with incomes under $50,000 and over $200,000, and lost those in between. As the shrewd liberal analyst Thomas Edsall has noted, there's a tension between what these groups want. High earners in non-Southern suburbs have been voting Democratic since the mid-1990s largely because of their liberal views on cultural issues; low earners vote Democratic because they want more government money shoveled their way.

And it's clear that the high-end "culture-vulture" elitists on the metaphorical Upper West Side of the country may be making an agonizing reappraisal of where their true interests lie:
T

uesday's elections suggest those whose money gets shoveled are having second thoughts about this odd-couple coalition. In Virginia, Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell carried affluent and immigrant-heavy Fairfax County, which Barack Obama carried by 21%. In New Jersey, Republican Christopher Christie cut Democrat Jon Corzine's margin in demographically similar Bergen County from 16% in 2005 to 1%. A Republican was elected county executive in Westchester County, New York, and the Republican candidate for state Supreme Court in Pennsylvania carried the four-county suburban Philadelphia area—turf that voted 57% for Barack Obama in 2008.

A health-care bill financed by either higher taxes on high earners or on those with generous, employer-provided health insurance, looks like a hard sell in high-earner constituencies. It looks politically risky especially for newly elected Democrats.

Mr. McDonnell carried nine of Virginia's 11 congressional districts, and the three districts that Democrats captured from Republicans last year voted 62%, 61% and 55% for the Republican this time. No wonder Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is talking about postponing health-care votes until next year.

The unions' unprecedented political push in 2008 has not been unnoticed by the voters. Mr. Corzine's cozy relationship with public employee union heads proved a liability in New Jersey, and in Virginia Mr. McDonnell campaigned hard against card check and the Obama agenda. The Gallup organization reports that Americans are less pro-union than they have been at any time since it first started asking the question in 1936. Maybe around the country union members will start asking their leaders what they have gotten for all the money they've spent on politics.

As a former COPE organizer in Barone's native Michigan and a member of other unions, I can only guess how a lot of the hard-working types in real unions like AFL-CIO & UAW will look on the flaketard SEIU social activists who promised them money and got them zilch.

Michele Bachmann Gets the JournoList CABAL Kiddies Knickers in a Twist!

It appears that a silly pseudo-journalist named Jonathan Allen fashions himself the TMZ of Politico
The JournoList CABAL of little nasty Ivy-leaf dudes like Jonathan Chait and several other MSM houseboys on the ultra-left posing as journalists? It seems as if Glenn Beck and Rush and Michele are more important than the scatterbrained specimen of dementia now doing a zombie-walk as Speaker of the House. As the snotty little Jonathan [Allen] quotes the usual "anonymous" source:

A conservative Republican House member, speaking on the condition of anonymity, suggested that Bachmann’s views — and her willingness to state them — make it hard for her to keep staff. “When your captain’s crazy, it’s time to find a new ship,” the lawmaker said

Jonathan uses the usual pre-pubescent anonymous quotes that can be used for dozens of Hill denizens. I heard the very same quote concerning Senator Barbara Mikulski of MD about two decades ago when she would have tempestuous tantrums due to her absurd [lack of] stature, she's four-ten in heels, and her deviant sexual tastes. At least Michele is an attractive female, something Democrats fear more than conservative blacks. Maybe Jonathan should concentrate on what are traditionally REAL newsmakers.

You know, the botox-poisoned airhead ditz named Nancy? I guess it isn't news when you have a cowering craven hem-kissing lap-puppy to dictators [Chavez, Ahmedinejad, Putin, Ortega...] inhabiting the Oval Office, the one who answers non-stop insults to the US from Iran with more simpering step-and-fetch-it yes-sir, please-sir responses.

We have a dysfunctional House, Senate, and Executive Branch and lil Jonathan Allen and his bunkmate Ben Smith can only yammer about Michele, Glenn, and Rush. And don't forget about Mark Lavin, who sold more books last year than any lefty has for the last decade!!!

Why not take the focus off a floundering collection of Demwit imbeciles by doing the old Saul Alinsky trick of demonizing, as the CABAL of JournoListers appears to do?

It sure takes the pressure off that task of being a REAL journalist!

Brainless Unread Ditz Drools Over Rush Limbaugh

MoDoDo of the NYT has another ignorant screed against Rush Limbaugh, and it may be because Rush gets about 20 times the attention that this barren hag gets with her NYT "columny." [I'm sure illiterate libtards will consider her Oh So Clever for that!]

She can remember the wine he ordered about 20 years ago, but can't lay a glove on him with her Airhead attempts at sucker-punching putdowns.

...the tactics of Limbaugh, Palin, Cheney & Fille are more cynical: They spin certainty, ignoring their side’s screw-ups, and they exploit patriotism, labeling all critics as traitors.

In an interview on “Fox News Sunday With Chris Wallace,” Limbaugh accused the president of trying to destroy the economy — yes, the same economy that W. came within a whisker of ruining.

“I have to think that it may be on purpose,” Limbaugh said, “because this is just outrageous, what is happening — a denial of liberty, an attack on freedom.”

Asked about Afghanistan, another W. cataclysm that has left Obama agonizing, Limbaugh stated, “I also don’t think he cares much about it.” Again suggesting that the president is an unpatriotic fop, the radio ranter averred: “He wants to manage this rather than achieve victory.”

So it's wrong to have strong beliefs in America. Elsewhere this childless has-been reverts to name-calling {"narcissist," "ranter," and "chickenhawk," among other epithets] while presuming to defend a witless Dear Leader with small-caliber ammo in her tiny brainpan-cavity.

The Wall Street Journal now has more than double the circulation of the NYT and is rising while the NYT continues to hemorrhage readership because of second-rate verbiage from a superannuated hack. As well as being absolutely clueless about the true intent of the Chicago Mafia.

Pelosi 2K Page Monstrosity Headed for Dead-Tree Cemetery?

Speaker of the Asylum Pelosi has demonstrated the restraint needed to keep her health plan to merely 1990 pages, thus avoiding the convenient 2K moniker I used above.

The generalized insanity of Dear Leader, Dingy Harry, and Botox-Brainiac SanFranNan all combine to make what the WSJ calls a "runaway train." And tonight, just to check in on one of the inmates' little helpers, a creature named Maddow on [P]MSNBC, this permanent substitute for a talk show host was opining on the great Republican disgrace that Bloomberg was only winning his mayoral re-election job by a margin of 5%! Then she checked in with a creature from Hollyweird about Joe Lieberman, whom said creature had led a "people's rebellion" against two years ago, and how it was "impossible" for Lieberman to hold up the HealthCare Bill's passage---but I had to switch to ESPN for the latest LeBron dissing of Dwight, or was it Allen Iverson dissing the bench he sat on for much of the game while watching the Grizzlies up front and personal....

Wolf Blitzer, after effing up so much on "Celebrity Jeopardy" that he attained a record $4000 IN THE HOLE, has demonstrated similar lack of knowledge and other skill sets normally required to host a News/Talk program, but he's on for several hours daily, a sort of Dan Rather for the terminally stupid. After Wolf critiqued SNL's skit ridiculing Dear Leader Brobambi for "factual accuracy." this candidate for the world's ugliest dog had three possible contenders, including the witless Anita Dunn, on yesterday to explain WH communications skills, or lack of same.... They couldn't or didn't, take your pick.

But Wolf will remain as long as C[orrupt] News Network has a cretin named Jonathan Klein, or is it Ezra, or is it some other Klein, calling the shots.

Remember when terminal drunk atheist Ted Turner said in 1996 that C[orrupt] News Network would "squash" FoxNEWS like "a bug?"

Where's Ted now and why was he kicked out of the CEO job of the network he himself founded and owns?

Check your local asylum....

Happy Days May be Just a Year Away!

The NYT has an article that even the retarded ruminants in Iowa are having second "thoughts" [sort of] about Our Dear Leader.

In few places did people get a longer and closer look at Mr. Obama than in Iowa, a swing state home to deep strains of both conservatism and liberalism. Mr. Obama was a constant presence here during the formative months of his candidacy. Many voters have pictures of him on their mantels, looking him in the eye as they took a measure of the man and the politician before giving him a crucial victory in the caucuses. A social studies teacher who saw Mr. Obama on his maiden visit here wonders whether momentum from the election is gone forever. A retired electrical engineer who became a Democrat to support Mr. Obama believes that the president too often blames others for his troubles. And a teacher who voted for Mr. Obama because she was fed up with President George W. Bush does not trust this administration any more than the previous one.

ABC-TV may have encapsulated the feelings of more sophisticated Americans with its new much-hyped scifi series called "V." White House aides say that Dear Leader wasn't watching election returns tonite and that might be because he was glimpsing what a lot of people think happened to the USA when they bought into his vapid vaporous twaddle:

a message of hope and reconciliation based on compromise and promises to marshal technology for a better future that will include universal health care.

The news media swoons in admiration -- one simpering anchorman even shouts at a reporter who asks a tough question: "Why don't you show some respect?!" The public is likewise smitten, except for a few nut cases who circulate batty rumors on the Internet about the leader's origins and intentions. The leader, undismayed, offers assurances that are soothing, if also just a tiny bit condescending: "Embracing change is never easy."

So, does that sound like anyone you know? Oh, wait -- did I mention the leader is secretly a totalitarian space lizard who's come here to eat us?

Yes, that was a custom among Obama's recent ancestors on his Drunken Bigamist Daddy's side of the family until just recently, perhaps, although they were just ordinary primates who didn't fly in from outer space.

The Chicago Tribune [remember when a "tribune" in Roman Republic days actually spoke on behalf of the people? Not the dictatorship of the patrician elites condescending to those mere plebeians?] goes on with its review as it ridicules the majority of its readership who voted in this Chicago Style Deep-Dish Cannibal-fest with a dissident Catholic priest:

A handful of dissidents hold out against the rapturous reception given the V's. Some are simply uneasy, such as the youthful priest Father Jack (Joel Gretsch, "The 4400"), who sharply criticizes the Vatican's embrace of the V's as divine creations: "Rattlesnakes are God's creatures too."

I am thinking that the Tea Party people are those brave souls who didn't buy into the mass hysteria. And the atheist press will surely hate it that a priest is among the leaders of the resistance.

Don't the Tea Party and Christian proles know what's good for them? Worcester Sauce and other condiments, perhaps, as the "V" types search for a special "mineral water."

Evian, or perhaps Pelligrini, to make the internal organs wash down those ACORN-lizard throats!