AGW = Al Gore Whingeing [on the NYT Op-Ed Page, no less]

"I am Dr. Amy Bishop in Drag, with a Potty Mouth from Hell!"

Fat Albert used to be one of Bill Cosby's characters in his record albums including the Tomato that Ate Chicago and other iconic fictional archetypes. Fat Al Gore has been hibernating the last few months while AGW has been eroding chip by boulder by landslide. But today he loosed his unctuous tongue in forked fashion blabbering incoherently in an NY Times Op-Ed, obviously as a laugh riot designed to make drama queen Frank Rich and grammar-impaired Paul Krugman relatively respectable.
I see now that Ann Althouse has deconstructed Lyin' Al so much better than I could ever hope that I'll just let you read Ann's lucid slamdown and be done with trying to make sense of a fellow who is now perhaps ready for long-term rehabilitation---as a habitual liar, cheater, and Bernie Madoff wannabe as described in a November 9, 2009 article in the NY Times:

Critics, mostly on the political right and among global warming skeptics, say Mr. Gore is poised to become the world’s first “carbon billionaire,” profiteering from government policies he supports that would direct billions of dollars to the business ventures he has invested in.

Representative Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, asserted at a hearing this year that Mr. Gore stood to benefit personally from the energy and climate policies he was urging Congress to adopt.

Mr. Gore says that he is simply putting his money where his mouth is.

Lockbox Al took one science course during his years at Divinity School and got graded at a D+.

Doesn't seem he's improved either in the divinity/morality department or the science department since then.

The Bad Seed: Amy Bishop Spared to Kill Again

"I am Dr. Amy Bishop!"

Sam Tanenhaus's book The Death of Conservatism may be setting a Guinness record for rapid removal to the remaindered bin, but he does have an insightful article on how heroic feminism is now deader than "Thelma & Louise." Indeed, when Amy Bishop wiped out the University of Alabama-Huntsville biology department with her 9mm. handgun, she became a different kind of killer, as Sam explains...

the landscape of unprovoked but premeditated female violence remains strangely unexplored. Women who kill are “relegated to an ‘exceptional case’ status that rests upon some exceptional, or untoward killing circumstance: the battered wife who kills her abusive husband; the postpartum psychotic mother who kills her newborn infant,” Candice Skrapec, a professor of criminology, noted in “The Female Serial Killer,” an essay included in the anthology “Moving Targets: Women, Murder and Representation” (1994).

Ms. Skrapec was writing at a time when Hollywood seemed preoccupied with women who commit crimes — in productions like “The Burning Bed,” the 1984 television film in which a battered wife finally sets her sleeping husband aflame, and “Thelma & Louise” (1991), in which a pair of women go on a outlaw spree after one of them is threatened with rape.

Both are essentially exculpatory parables of empowerment, anchored in feminist ideology. Their heroines originate as victims, pushed to criminal excesses by injustices done to them. The true aggressors are the men who mistreat and objectify them. So too with “Monster” (2003), in which Charlize Theron, in a virtuosic instance of empathy (and cosmetic makeover) re-enacted the story of Aileen Wuornos, a real-life prostitute who, after years of sexual abuse, began murdering her clients.

Those are the old victim turning against tormentor archetypes, but Dr. Amy represents an entirely new level of social pathology:

It is not hard to imagine Mr. DeLillo or Mr. Scorsese mapping the interior circuitry of Timothy McVeigh; Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech killer; or Bruce E. Ivins, the Army biodefense expert who, the F.B.I. concluded last week, committed anthrax terror in the aftermath of 9/11 — the paranoia, the lethal mix of fantasy and ruthless plotting. But what artist might do justice to Dr. Bishop and her complex story, as its details have so far been reported: the privileged upbringing; her stable marriage to a uxorious husband, who was also her collaborator on scientific inventions; their four children, some of whose homework Dr. Bishop is monitoring from her jail cell? And what of the accounts given by associates and neighbors of her personal qualities — assertive, bristling with sharp opinions, vocal on the subject of her brilliance, harboring fierce resentments?

The uncomfortable fact is that for all her singularity, Dr. Bishop also provides an index to the evolved status of women in 21st-century America. The number of female neurobiologists may still be small, but girls often outdo boys in the classroom, including in the sciences. (Mattel recently announced a new addition, Computer Engineer Barbie, to its line of popular dolls.) A Harvard Ph.D. remains a rare credential for women (as well as for men), but women now make up the majority of undergraduates at many prestigious colleges. And the tenure struggle said to have lighted Dr. Bishop’s short fuse reflects the anxieties of many other women who now outnumber men in the work force and have become, in thousands of cases, their family’s principal or only breadwinner.

But art did prefigure life in a hopscotch manner in the Bishop case, as middle-aged Dr. Amy perhaps was a fossil from the fifties, a decade before bras & other accoutrements of an earlier femininity were consigned to the dustbin of history:

two middle-aged classics of genre literature eerily prefigure aspects of the Bishop case. In William March’s 1954 novel “The Bad Seed,” later adapted for both stage and film, an 8-year-old girl viciously murders a classmate but is protected by her mother, only to kill again. This parallels the allegations in Dr. Bishop’s case, at least according to the resurfaced police report on the death of her brother nearly a quarter-century ago.

No genre writer had sharper antennae than Shirley Jackson, whose gothic classic, “We Have Always Lived in the Castle,” first published in 1962, was reissued last fall. Its narrator is an 18-year-old multiple murderess who lives with her devoted sister and fantasizes about killing again. She is “socially maladroit, highly self-conscious, and disdainful of others,” Joyce Carol Oates wrote in a penetrating essay recently in The New York Review of Books. “She is ‘special.’ ” Words that ring ominously in the context of Dr. Bishop.

Ms. Oates, of course, has examined violence as thoroughly as any living American writer. When I asked her what she made of the case, she drew an implicit comparison between Dr. Bishop and Shirley Jackson’s narrator: “She is a sociopath and has been enabled through her life by individuals around her who shielded her from punishment.”

Slate has a dialogue between a Huntsville history prof and Slate regular Emily Bazelon in which the prof questions Emily's musing about a gender discrimination suit she'd filed because of her tenure rejection:

...Amy was unstable and violent long before she entered the workforce and in other contexts beyond the workplace. In addition to (probably) murdering her brother, and (possibly) mailing a pipe bomb to her lab supervisor, during a visit to an IHOP she punched a woman in the head over a booster seat while yelling, "I am Dr. Amy Bishop." Many of her "publications" also indicate a certain instability, as she lists her young children as co-authors. She also had an enormously difficult time working with (male or female) graduate students in the lab, which was part of the reason she was denied tenure. A lab can't function without grad students, and hers kept quitting or being fired.

The basis of the gender-discrimination suit was that a colleague referred to her as "crazy." As a historian, I am well-aware that "crazy" is a label often reserved for women who don't know their place, but in this situation it meant that she is, as one student put it, "bat-shit crazy." (That's a quote that didn't get into the paper.) When a colleague here in the history department heard that there had been a shooting in the science building, her first thought was, "Amy's lost it." The shooting was a horrible surprise, but nobody was surprised it was Amy.

Dr. Amy's high wire act on the edge of flipping out was evidently widely known at UAH and no more a function of her female gender or Harvard PhD than Ted Kaczynski's maleness, Harvard undergrad degree, U of Michigan PhD & UCalBerkeley Asst. Prof. position distinguished him as predisposed to lunacy.

But Joyce Carol Oates hit the nail squarely on the head when the IHOP screamer "I am Dr. Amy Bishop" announced that she was "special" and that like The Bad Seed, was a child of the entitlement era who, sheltered from accountability for the murder of her brother, went on to bigger and nastier exploits in the archives of crime.

Ars gratia artis.
UPDATE The Spearhead notes that Bishop "always got a pass." [h/t: Mangan's Miscellany]

Pelosi Pinata Bursts & Spills Botox onto Celebrants!

Pelosi Pinata or Dr. Amy Bishop in Lounge Suit?


Zsa Zsa Huffington will of course accuse the Pinata whackers of trying to "slaughter" Pelosi as she did of Glenn Beck for using a metaphor on the economic chaos descending on the American Middle Class because of Obama's screwy economic stimulus.

Abolishing the Filibuster Establishes Tyranny of the Majority

Mickey Kaus Holding Leftists at Bay

Charles Krauthammer has crafted a lucid summary of the last thirty years just in time to head off the usual foolishness put out by the ultra-left poobahs calling for a "different form of government." Starting with the lamentable James Earl Carter, Krauthammer contrasts the difference between weak leaders like.... oh well, you know:

In the latter days of the Carter presidency, it became fashionable to say that the office had become unmanageable and was simply too big for one man. Some suggested a single, six-year presidential term. The president's own White House counsel suggested abolishing the separation of powers and going to a more parliamentary system of unitary executive control. America had become ungovernable

.
I remember those days well, with double-digit interest rates, high unemployment, galloping inflation, the foreign policy failures brought on in Iran and Afghanistan we are still living with three decades later..... Indeed, the last year of Carter's limp-wristed governance saw him fire his entire cabinet and establish his sixth and seventh "economic plans" under his fourth Secretary of the Treasury. And the professional chatterers could only talk about the terrible threat of a Reagan presidency which would immediately begin momentum toward World War III. But when RWR was elected in 1980, a funny thing occurred: he fired a bunch of striking air traffic controllers, which threw the not yet Lame Stream media into a tizzy. What a threat to public safety! But Reagan had actually acted on principle, that there is no right to strike when such a strike itself would threaten the public. And Reagan went on to take on larger impediments to national economic & foreign policy success.

The tyranny of entitlements? Reagan collaborated with Tip O'Neill, the legendary Democratic House speaker, to establish the Alan Greenspan commission that kept Social Security solvent for a quarter-century. A corrupted system of taxation? Reagan worked with liberal Democrat Bill Bradley to craft a legislative miracle: tax reform that eliminated dozens of loopholes and slashed rates across the board -- and fueled two decades of economic growth.

Later, a highly skilled Democratic president, Bill Clinton, successfully tackled another supposedly intractable problem: the culture of intergenerational dependency. He collaborated with another House speaker, Newt Gingrich, to produce the single most successful social reform of our time, the abolition of welfare as an entitlement.

It turned out that the country's problems were not problems of structure but of leadership. Reagan and Clinton had it. Carter didn't. Under a president with extensive executive experience, good political skills and an ideological compass in tune with the public, the country was indeed governable.

Now we seem to have a great rhetorician who, in the current VP's words back in '07, speaks well and in the current Senate Majority Leader's felicitous phrase: speaks good English without a negro accent, when he wants to. But is talk the answer? Krauthammer thinks the superficial suits and talking heads of the leftist commentariat are off base in Obama's current quandry. Welcome back, Carter.....

It's 2010 and the first-year agenda of a popular and promising young president has gone down in flames. Barack Obama's two signature initiatives -- cap-and-trade and health care reform -- lie in ruins.

Desperate to explain away this scandalous state of affairs, liberal apologists haul out the old reliable from the Carter years: "America the Ungovernable." So declared Newsweek. "Is America Ungovernable?" coyly asked The New Republic. Guess the answer.

The rage at the machine has produced the usual litany of systemic explanations. Special interests are too powerful. The Senate filibuster stymies social progress. A burdensome constitutional order prevents innovation. If only we could be more like China, pines Tom Friedman, waxing poetic about the efficiency of the Chinese authoritarian model, while America flails about under its "two parties ... with their duel-to-the-death paralysis." The better thinkers, bewildered and furious that their president has not gotten his way, have developed a sudden disdain for our inherently incremental constitutional system.

Bantamweights like Joe Klein of Time and Anne Quindlen of Newsweak [resurrected for a single Cassandra-like dirge and then dismissed back to her career tomb] rail against ignorant Americans while flyweights like Dickerson and Chait exhale twaddle about the "perversity of the filibuster" and emit screeches about the danger of a Republican renaissance. But a clear, long-sighted thinker like Krauthammer, a former MD, diagnoses the ailment.

Yet, what's new about any of these supposedly ruinous structural impediments? Special interests blocking policy changes? They have been around since the beginning of the republic -- and since the beginning of the republic, strong presidents, like the two Roosevelts, have rallied the citizenry and overcome them.

And then, of course, there's the filibuster, the newest liberal bete noire. "Don't blame Mr. Obama," writes Paul Krugman of the president's failures. "Blame our political culture instead. ... And blame the filibuster, under which 41 senators can make the country ungovernable."

Ungovernable, once again. Of course, just yesterday the same Paul Krugman was warning about "extremists" trying "to eliminate the filibuster" when Democrats used it systematically to block one Bush (43) judicial nomination after another. Back then, Democrats touted it as an indispensable check on overweening majority power. Well, it still is. Indeed, the Senate with its ponderous procedures and decentralized structure is serving precisely the function the Founders intended: as a brake on the passions of the House and a caution about precipitous transformative change.

The Founders realized that weak and hysteric leadership could seize the House of Representatives easily, leaving only the Upper House able to keep the Constitutional safeguards against nuttiness intact with the filibuster.

And the ineffable screwball Krugman himself predicted in 2004 that insane commentators would call for the abolition of the filibuster just when the Dems needed it most---of course, he was right and himself, the nuttiest columnist of all, came out recently against the filibuster. Luckily, not every liberal has sold his birthright for a bowl of porridge.

Leave it to Mickey Kaus, a principled liberal who supports health care reform, to debunk these structural excuses: "Lots of intellectual effort now seems to be going into explaining Obama's (possible/likely/impending) health care failure as the inevitable product of larger historic and constitutional forces. ... But in this case there's a simpler explanation: Barack Obama's job was to sell a health care reform plan to American voters. He failed."

He failed because the utter implausibility of its central promise -- expanded coverage at lower cost -- led voters to conclude that it would lead ultimately to more government, more taxes and more debt. More broadly, the Democrats failed because, thinking the economic emergency would give them the political mandate and legislative window, they tried to impose a left-wing agenda on a center-right country. The people said no, expressing themselves first in spontaneous demonstrations, then in public opinion polls, then in elections -- Virginia, New Jersey and, most emphatically, Massachusetts.

That's not a structural defect. That's a textbook demonstration of popular will expressing itself -- despite the special interests -- through the existing structures. In other words, the system worked.

I'm finishing up the book Game Change, a superb analysis of the Democrats' obsession with political process. As far as running campaigns for election or re-election, they leave the Republicans in the dust. But in leadership and governance, with the exception of Bill Clinton, Dems are always thrashing around to find some sort of way to outfox rather than to step up to the plate and behave like adult males. [Hysteria seems to be just beneath the surface with most successful left-wing Democrats, accompanied by doctrines of class warfare and media hyperbole.]

Even today, the flailing Obama is seeking to impose a public option healthcare monstrosity on the American people, not because it is right or popular or good public policy. He and Reid and the Botox-Queen are doing it because they know better, because there may be a procedural way to sneak reconciliation past the Senate parlementarian [although Dem. Sen. Byrd might object concerning goofing around with the "Byrd rule" mandating reconciliation to be used only in tax and budget matters, not in policy and entitlement expansions.]

The Dems see the handwriting on the wall this November and may try to sneak and cheat their way to a policy Pyrrhic victory in health care or the completely discredited cap-and-trade now that Global Warming has been demonstrated to be a systemic and well-organized hoax.

That systemic and well-organized hoax seems in itself a good working definition of the current Democratic Party.

Podesta Says "US System Sucks" Economist Blames Obama

The Economist makes an excellent analysis of why Mr. Podesta could make such a thoughtless statement and still utter a third or quarter truth. After noting how many bills await passing, the mag says:

This, argue the critics, is what happens when a mere 41 senators (in a 100-strong chamber) can filibuster a bill to death; when states like Wyoming (population: 500,000) have the same clout in the Senate as California (37m), so that senators representing less than 11% of the population can block bills; when, thanks to gerrymandering, many congressional seats are immune from competitive elections; when hateful bloggers and talk-radio hosts shoot down any hint of compromise; when a tide of lobbying cash corrupts everything. And this dysfunctionality matters far beyond America’s shores. A few years ago only Chinese bureaucrats dared suggest that Beijing’s autocratic system of government was superior. Nowadays there is no shortage of leaders from emerging countries, or even prominent American businesspeople, who privately sing the praises of a system that can make decisions swiftly.

Wisely, the problem is approached slantwise:

A criticism with more weight is that American government is good at solving acute problems (like averting a Depression) but less good at confronting chronic ones (like the burden of entitlements). Yet even this can be overstated. Mr Bush failed to reform pensions, but he did push through No Child Left Behind, the biggest change to schools for a generation. Bill Clinton reformed welfare. The system, in other words, can work, even if it does not always do so. (That is hardly unusual anywhere: for all its speed in authorising power stations, China has hardly made a success of health care lately.) On the biggest worry of all, the budget, it may well take a crisis to force action, but Americans have wrestled down huge deficits before.

Indeed, the Founders might consider the Constitution designed by Madison at the moment as performing according to specs:

America’s political structure was designed to make legislation at the federal level difficult, not easy. Its founders believed that a country the size of America is best governed locally, not nationally. True to this picture, several states have pushed forward with health-care reform. The Senate, much ridiculed for antique practices like the filibuster and the cloture vote, was expressly designed as a “cooling” chamber, where bills might indeed die unless they commanded broad support.

What America is confronting at the moment is a slight case of the hiccups:

Broad support from the voters is something that both the health bill and the cap-and-trade bill clearly lack. Democrats could have a health bill tomorrow if the House passed the Senate version. Mr Obama could pass a lot of green regulation by executive order. It is not so much that America is ungovernable, as that Mr Obama has done a lousy job of winning over Republicans and independents to the causes he favours. If, instead of handing over health care to his party’s left wing, he had lived up to his promise to be a bipartisan president and courted conservatives by offering, say, reform of the tort system, he might have got health care through; by giving ground on nuclear power, he may now stand a chance of getting a climate bill. Once Mr Clinton learned the advantages of co-operating with the Republicans, the country was governed better.

And another part of the clunky performance problems might lie in the "safe seat" system, not too far off from the "Rotten Boroughs" of the early 18th century:

So the basic system works; but that is no excuse for ignoring areas where it could be reformed. In the House the main outrage is gerrymandering. Tortuously shaped “safe” Republican and Democratic seats mean that the real battles are fought among party activists for their party’s nomination. This leads candidates to pander to extremes, and lessens the chances of bipartisan co-operation. An independent commission, already in existence in some states, would take out much of the sting. In the Senate the filibuster is used too often, in part because it is too easy. Senators who want to talk out a bill ought to be obliged to do just that, not rely on a simple procedural vote: voters could then see exactly who was obstructing what.

These defects and others should be corrected. But even if they are not, they do not add up to a system that is as broken as people now claim. American democracy has its peaks and troughs; attempts to reform it dramatically, such as California’s initiative craze, have a mixed history, to put it mildly. Rather than regretting how the Republicans in Congress have behaved, Mr Obama should look harder at his own use of his presidential power.

Tantrum time is over, and it is evident that the Dem wish list is still far from being accepted by more than a fraction of the American electorate. And the hysterics ginned up by the LameStream Media and HatefulBloggers won't be able to keep the American people's eyes off the ball for long.

Obama has been given a free ride on sliding on or skating past his promises, including much needed transparency which he promised during the election in '08 & has reneged on completely. Perhaps liberals have forgotten these promises, but the bulk of the Electorate, the 80% who are not die-hard statist socialists, certainly have not and thank God in the USA we still have a functioning election system, gerrymandered and unbalanced as it might be.

Holder Admits Nine DOJ Lawyers Defended Terrorist Cases

Black Avenger for Historical "Crimes"

Eric Holder is a one-man national security risk, and the only question is whether he should be hanged as a fool or as a knave. Byron York does due diligence after Sen. Grassley's query on whether other lawyers of the DOJ worked on behalf of terrorists. Holder took his time [3 months] to answer and was maddeningly vague on who were the other seven of the lawyers besides the two publicly known. York notes:

...it is possible that there are more than nine political appointees who worked for detainees. Holder tells Grassley that he did not survey the Justice Department as a whole but instead canvassed several large offices within the organization.
Bottom line: Holder revealed no names beyond the two already publicly known. He revealed no cases from which Justice political appointees recused themselves. The letter, which will likely be interpreted on Capitol Hill as a thumb-your-nose statement, is sure to anger Republican senators more than satisfy them.

Nice to go to sleep every night knowing that the terrorists trying to destroy the USA have advocates deep inside and high-ranking in the DOJ! From his own public announcements, we know that Holder verges on being a black racist angry about perceived lack of repayment for historical injustices inflicted on American blacks. Perhaps he's got a vengeance motive and sides with the Islamic terrorists deep down inside his black heart.

Is Greece the Model for America's Future?

Anne Applebaum not only has a husband who doubles as Poland's foreign minister. She had sharp insights into why the EU may have some daunting lessons that we in impregnable [?!?] America might just take seriously.

Greece is bankrupt. And although Greece's bankruptcy is headline news this week—Greece's weak finances threaten the stability of the euro, the common European currency—the truth is that Greece has been bankrupt for years. Its budget deficit in 2009 was 12.7 percent of GDP. Overall debt was 113.4 percent of GDP. Those are not figures that can be achieved overnight.

Consider that the EU has pegged the Eurozone countries as responsible for keeping their budget deficit under 3%. At 12.7%, Greece has quadrupled and then some the deficit guidelines. And Ms. Applebaum notes that among the Euro countries, Greece is not alone:

The political class is aware of the country's economic problems, but it denies them. Last month, the European Commission issued a report accusing Greece's finance ministry and statistical service of "severe irregularities" stemming from "the submission of incorrect data." In eurospeak, that means the commissioners think the Greeks have been lying: That 12.7 percent budget deficit was originally forecast to be 3.7 percent, and plenty of other figures coming out of Greece seem to have been way off. No country makes accounting errors like that by accident.

Greece shares its financial weaknesses with several other European countries (nowadays referred to—really!—as the PIGS: Portugal, Italy—or sometimes Ireland—Greece, and Spain). But in a different sense, Greece's weaknesses are also shared by the United States. Though we do not have precisely the same problems, we do have a similar level of political paralysis and a similar level of partisanship. It is not possible to reform U.S. Social Security: President Bush tried halfheartedly and gave up before he started. It may not be possible to reform health care, either: Hillary Clinton failed, and President Obama, despite throwing in expensive sweeteners, may well fail. The influence of lobbyists cannot be reduced. The power of interest groups to influence legislation cannot be tamed.

We recently had a houseguest from Athens in Boca for a few days and she railed against "the crooks in politics." I once had dinner in DC one-on-one with the brother of the current Prime Minister, who explained to me patiently how the institutionalized corruption in Greece penetrates to every level in Greek society and can be found in every nook and cranny. The system, whose Greek name I've forgotten [it begins with an "r"] demands almost universal participation in avoiding taxes to the government and other ingenious ways to keep the capitalist roots of Greece hale and hardy out in the boondocks.

But in its own far more widespread way, the United States is on the road to the same fate as the PIIGS [although Ireland is showing signs of belt-tightening and serious reforms] and the massive tome Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart assembled,This Time is Different, Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, identifies pre-crisis patterns that recur with eerie consistency in 66 "country cases" over eight centuries. The single best road to financial collapse is deficit spending, and we know how much little o wants to follow that path. Anne is harsh about the USA's future going out a decade or two:

...aside from our very large budget deficit—at the moment, 9.9 percent of GDP and climbing—we also have liabilities that are rarely acknowledged. The costs of Medicare and Medicaid are going up, as is the cost of veterans care. Markets assume that the vast debts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are underwritten by the government, and someday the government might be called upon to pay them. No one is lying about these things, but no one is talking about them very much, either.
The good news is that the American government's bankruptcy is not on the front pages, and it won't be for many years: Our sheer size, our entrepreneurship, and our relatively open business culture will keep us going for a long time. But the Greek crisis shows that the combination of debt and political deadlock can be deadly. The catharsis we feel as we watch it unfold—that Aristotelian combination of pity and fear—should shock us far more than it has so far.

And inevitably, as Greek tragedies show us, the worst part of the catharsis is anagnorisis, the moment we find out that we are our own worst enemy and the cause of our own downfall.

Democrats' Peristalsis Produces Giant Movement!

The Wall Street Journal has a thoughtful analysis of what the Bayh departure from the Senate means. John Podesta says it means that the US system of government "sucks." John used to be sane, but that was decades ago.....

The Dems are pushing the same tired watered-down Marxism that prevailed when I worked for Gene McCarthy in '68 on his National Staff [And John Podesta worked with me in a two-man storefront in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn!]. Back then the buzz was about "The Movement," a sort of inevitable progression toward a socialist state mirroring the Social Democrats in Europe with a foreign policy rather benign toward the USSR's imperialism. Indeed, I can remember Gene McCarthy commenting at the Chicago Convention that the crushing of the Velvet Revolution in Prague was "of no importance."

The Wall Street Journal does have the Dems' history rhyming whenever they get their hands on the WH. Peristalsis always prevails. There persists the tendency to tax and spend from statist "commanding heights" which tries to monopolize the levers of power over the economy as well as more traditional American political segments. Sadly, after Carter and Clinton, GWB repeated some of their mistakes almost by inference and unlike Carter and especially Clinton, GWB didn't want to get his hands dirty pushing unpopular legislation such as Social Security reform when it ran into absurd hysterics by Nancy Botox in '05, as she raved about Katrina & blew him off his game. When the Dems are out of power, they always scream "politicize" every issue that presents itself, even if not a traditional sphere of government concern. When they gain power, the Dem's peristalsis kicks in and they autonomously begin to process unconsciously American goods and services, tax them, and turn them into that Giant Movement toward the Great Cesspool of socialism.

Obama appears to be more leftist than Carter or Clinton, coming from a Chicago Machine which is a version of an urban mixed economy. To try to nationalize Chicago's crooked unions and gigantic public sector corruption made us all want to gag and puke---especially independents who thought he might be sincere about transparency. No C-Span for this little o.

This reminds me of Winston Churchill's dictum: "The United States always ends up doing the right thing, but not without exhausting all the possible alternatives."

Why has Global Warming Ceased since 1995?

The Bernie Madoff of Climate "Science"

Phil Jones is an IRCC scientist who refused to turn over data on Climate Change due to FOIA requests. Besides losing his mind [he thought of suicide since his incriminating e-mails were released by a whistleblower], Phil also loses documents by the carload, including the data points which contributed to his constructing the hilarious "hockey stick" graph which conveniently eliminated over four hundred years of relatively balmy European weather [from 1000AD to circa 1500AD] in order to make a "sky is falling" case that the planet's seas may boil over in the next century or two because of manmade industry and CO2 exhalations.

My uneducated guess that the guilty party in much of the planet's climate variations is due to sunspots, which go in 11-year cycles and generate warm weather. Since 1998, almost no sunspots have been observed, indicating that the sudden plateau of temp climbing since then is caused by a cessation of the heat-generating sunspots. But the Maunder Minimum and sunspot theory is never, absolutely never taken into consideration by the giant minds at the IRCC who plan on taxing us for breathing, except for Chinese & Indian breaths, something pertaining to yoga? [The Maunder Minimum was the period between 1620 to 1750 when sunspots virtually disappeared and the "Mini-Ice Age" hit Europe, as is well-attested in literature of the period. We have ice skates from the Dutch due to the canals freezing for months at a time & the Thames froze over every few years for about four decades. Samuel Pepys and other diarists record some of the horrific winters of the period.]

Hilariously at Copenhagen in December, POTUS Obambi showed up the last day to proclaim a glorious resolution to the problem of third-world developing countries like Brazil, South Af, China & India. The four said they had schedule conflicts & couldn't see the mini-Won [the Indians actually said the PM was on the way to the airport!] until the US Sherlocks snooped and sniffed around to find the four holdouts in camera coordinating their refusal strategy!

Obama was invited to [literally!] pull up a chair and observe another Copenhagen defeat as great and humiliating as his Chicago in '16 bid.

So much for being a kinder and gentler superpower!

US Becoming Endangered As China Reorients & the West goes into Deep Debt

Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson is a far better economist than Paul Krugman, and an outstanding and prolific historian. And he isn't afflicted with the Marxist virus recurring in the West---particularly Greece, whose govt. workers refuse to take any cuts in pay or other benefits, threatening a general strike if these are enforced upon them.

What struck me watching a PBS WorldFocus with two China experts was when one opined that the PRC is slowing export-growth economics and is slowly switching to servicing its own internal market, which is what the US did before it began importing vast amounts of cheap goods that formerly were manufactured stateside. Here is Ferguson's baleful glance forward:

What we in the western world are about to learn is that there is no such thing as a Keynesian free lunch. Deficits did not “save” us half so much as monetary policy – zero interest rates plus quantitative easing – did. First, the impact of government spending (the hallowed “multiplier”) has been much less than the proponents of stimulus hoped. Second, there is a good deal of “leakage” from open economies in a globalised world. Last, crucially, explosions of public debt incur bills that fall due much sooner than we expect

For the world’s biggest economy, the US, the day of reckoning still seems reassuringly remote. The worse things get in the eurozone, the more the US dollar rallies as nervous investors park their cash in the “safe haven” of American government debt. This effect may persist for some months, just as the dollar and Treasuries rallied in the depths of the banking panic in late 2008.

Yet even a casual look at the fiscal position of the federal government (not to mention the states) makes a nonsense of the phrase “safe haven”. US government debt is a safe haven the way Pearl Harbor was a safe haven in 1941.

Even according to the White House’s new budget projections, the gross federal debt in public hands will exceed 100 per cent of GDP in just two years’ time. This year, like last year, the federal deficit will be around 10 per cent of GDP. The long-run projections of the Congressional Budget Office suggest that the US will never again run a balanced budget. That’s right, never.

The Obamaniac lemmings chant "faster" in the race to the precipice and then headlong to a messy end. But despite the assurances of former Enron advisor & chief cheerleader for the suicide, the prospect is bleak, but indeed need not be fatal:

The International Monetary Fund recently published estimates of the fiscal adjustments developed economies would need to make to restore fiscal stability over the decade ahead. Worst were Japan and the UK (a fiscal tightening of 13 per cent of GDP). Then came Ireland, Spain and Greece (9 per cent). And in sixth place? Step forward America, which would need to tighten fiscal policy by 8.8 per cent of GDP to satisfy the IMF.

Ferguson is very methodical in explaining how the incredible deficit splurges Obama is proposing will simply wreck any prospect of recovery for our own and our children's lives:

Explosions of public debt hurt economies in the following way, as numerous empirical studies have shown. By raising fears of default and/or currency depreciation ahead of actual inflation, they push up real interest rates. Higher real rates, in turn, act as drag on growth, especially when the private sector is also heavily indebted – as is the case in most western economies, not least the US.

Although the US household savings rate has risen since the Great Recession began, it has not risen enough to absorb a trillion dollars of net Treasury issuance a year. Only two things have thus far stood between the US and higher bond yields: purchases of Treasuries (and mortgage-backed securities, which many sellers essentially swapped for Treasuries) by the Federal Reserve and reserve accumulation by the Chinese monetary authorities.

But now the Fed is phasing out such purchases and is expected to wind up quantitative easing. Meanwhile, the Chinese have sharply reduced their purchases of Treasuries from around 47 per cent of new issuance in 2006 to 20 per cent in 2008 to an estimated 5 per cent last year. Small wonder Morgan Stanley assumes that 10-year yields will rise from around 3.5 per cent to 5.5 per cent this year. On a gross federal debt fast approaching $1,500bn, that implies up to $300bn of extra interest payments – and you get up there pretty quickly with the average maturity of the debt now below 50 months.

The Obama administration’s new budget blithely assumes real GDP growth of 3.6 per cent over the next five years, with inflation averaging 1.4 per cent. But with rising real rates, growth might well be lower. Under those circumstances, interest payments could soar as a share of federal revenue – from a tenth to a fifth to a quarter.

Last week Moody’s Investors Service warned that the triple A credit rating of the US should not be taken for granted. That warning recalls Larry Summers’ killer question (posed before he returned to government): “How long can the world’s biggest borrower remain the world’s biggest power?”

On reflection, it is appropriate that the fiscal crisis of the west has begun in Greece, the birthplace of western civilization. Soon it will cross the channel to Britain. But the key question is when that crisis will reach the last bastion of western power, on the other side of the Atlantic.

If Obama is re-elected in '12, perhaps by the end of his second term, making him a multiplier of the Carter disaster.

Sullivan Calls Palin "a beautiful, big breasted, divinely chosen warrior-mother..."

Commentary's Jennifer Rubin can't help pointing out Andrew Sullivan's hysterics-in-print:

It was the most electrifying speech I have heard from a leader of the GOP since Reagan.

She can electrify a crowd. She has the kind of charisma that appeals to the sub-rational. and she has crafted a Peronist identity – utterly fraudulent, of course – that is political dynamite in a recession with populism roiling everyone and everything. She is Coughlin with boobs – except with a foreign policy agenda to expand Israel and unite with it in a war against Islam.

Do not under-estimate the appeal of a beautiful, big breasted, divinely chosen warrior-mother as a military leader in a global religious war.

Given his well-advertised preference for walking on the wild side, this goofy half-wit

is a man obsessed with Palin and her physique and who cannot resist the urge to degrade and reduce her to a sexual object...

as Rubin follows up because this creepy stalker-wannabe simply cannot control himself and keep his perversions off his page.

Shame on the Atlantic Monthly for "sullying" their pages with such an obvious perverted creepy-crawly sport-of-nature.

IRCC Crook & Liar Pachauri Lied About Glacier Melt to Get Millions!

Pachauri Caught in the Act?

Bernie Madoff has nothing on the crime syndicate led by Rajendra Pachauri and Lyin' ["The Science is Settled"] Al Gore. As the formerly AGW advocate Toronto Daily Mail finally notices:

Meantime, the IPCC – the body widely regarded, until now, as the ultimate authority on climate science – is looking worse and worse. After it was forced to retract its claim about melting glaciers, Mr. Pachauri dismissed the error as a one-off. But other IPCC claims have turned out to be just as groundless.

For example, it warned that large tracts of the Amazon rain forest might be wiped out by global warming because they are extremely susceptible to even modest decreases in rainfall. The sole source for that claim, reports The Sunday Times of London, was a magazine article written by a pair of climate activists, one of whom worked for the WWF. One scientist contacted by the Times, a specialist in tropical forest ecology, called the article “a mess.”

Worse still, the Times has discovered that Mr. Pachauri's own Energy and Resources Unit, based in New Delhi, has collected millions in grants to study the effects of glacial melting – all on the strength of that bogus glacier claim, which happens to have been endorsed by the same scientist who now runs the unit that got the money. Even so, the IPCC chief is hanging tough. He insists the attacks on him are being orchestrated by companies facing lower profits.

Pretty cozy little set-up for Pachauri, who got his degree in railroad engineering of all fields in North Carolina, making him obvious Nobel Prize recipient material for a five-woman panel who gives the Prize to the likes of Al Gore [highest science grade in college divinity school = D+] and a newly-sworn-in Obama.

The IRCC, Obama, the UN and other members of the international left want nothing more than to tax the very air affluent countries breathe. Thank you, PRC, for scuttling the ridiculous Copenhagen Summit las month which proves that an unabashed COMMUNIST government is to the right of the crime syndicate headed by Obama & various NGO chiefs like Pachauri---all aiming in a RICO scheme to deprive free men [and Europeans] of what little liberty they have left. The G & M continues in its 180-degree turn on the AGW issue:

Until now, anyone who questioned the credibility of the IPCC was labelled as a climate skeptic, or worse. But many climate scientists now sense a sinking ship, and they're bailing out. Among them is Andrew Weaver, a climatologist at the University of Victoria who acknowledges that the climate body has crossed the line into advocacy. Even Britain's Greenpeace has called for Mr. Pachauri's resignation. India says it will establish its own body to monitor the effects of global warming because it “cannot rely” on the IPCC.

None of this is to say that global warming isn't real, or that human activity doesn't play a role, or that the IPCC is entirely wrong, or that measures to curb greenhouse-gas emissions aren't valid. But the strategy pursued by activists (including scientists who have crossed the line into advocacy) has turned out to be fatally flawed.

By exaggerating the certainties, papering over the gaps, demonizing the skeptics and peddling tales of imminent catastrophe, they've discredited the entire climate-change movement. The political damage will be severe. As Mr. Mead succinctly puts it: “Skeptics up, Obama down, cap-and-trade dead.” That also goes for Canada, whose climate policies are inevitably tied to those of the United States.

“I don't think it's healthy to dismiss proper skepticism,” says John Beddington, the chief scientific adviser to the British government. He is a staunch believer in man-made climate change, but he also points out the complexity of climate science. “Science grows and improves in the light of criticism. There is a fundamental uncertainty about climate change prediction that can't be changed.” In his view, it's time to stop circling the wagons and throw open the doors. How much the public will keep caring is another matter.

Hopeless moral lepers like Gore & cabalmeister Pachauri notwithstanding, it appears that Richard Feynman's great speech on Cargo Cult Science has prevailed over the Chicken Little panic attacks of frauds and "Sky is Falling" hoaxsters who hoped to pull a fast one while the gullible and undereducated [morally and ethically] leftish lumpenproletariat watched like those Germans gazed on the Holocaust during World War II.
UPDATE:
East Anglia Capi di Tutti Capiti Phil Jones, the head of the IRCC stat-magic cabal who skewed and cheated on the numbers, whines that he thought about suicide, then changed his so-called mind. "He fiercely defends the unit’s science — “I stand by it 100%” — but now accepts that he did not treat Freedom of Information (FoI) requests for the data as seriously as he should have done. Jones believes that the unit was maliciously targeted with multiple FoI requests by climate change sceptics determined to disrupt its work." Or, from another point of view, the FOI recipients might have outed the phony numbers and fake "science" embedded in hoaxer Jones' so-called output. Actually, he delayed on the FOI requests for over five years, so the protests that he was "maliciously targeted" can be stood on their head and made to say he "maliciously avoided" due diligence outside a small coterie of select cabal-members.
UPDATE 2Obama's complete loss of credibility on climate change issues was demonstrated at Copenhagen:

...on the last day of the talks, the Americans tried to fix up one-to-one meetings between Mr Obama and the leaders of South Africa, Brazil and India – but failed each time. The Indians even said that their prime minister, Manmohan Singh, had already left for the airport.

So Mr Obama must have felt something of a chump when he arrived for a last-minute meeting with Wen Jiabao, the Chinese prime minister, only to find him already deep in negotiations with the leaders of none other than Brazil, South Africa and India. Symbolically, the leaders had to squeeze up to make space for the American president around the table.

There was more than symbolism at work. In Copenhagen, Brazil, South Africa and India decided that their status as developing nations was more important than their status as democracies. Like the Chinese, they argued that it is fundamentally unjust to cap the greenhouse gas emissions of poor countries at a lower level than the emissions of the US or the European Union; all the more so since the industrialised west is responsible for the great bulk of the carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere.

Obama's wishful-thinking projection of a kinder gentler USA has predictably been taken as a demonstration of weakness---countries new to democracy with brutal histories regard weakness as something to be exploited, not as a signal to play pattycake in a sandbox of globalization kumbayeh silliness.

Our Wonderful Democratic Majority Needs a Better American People

A Short Jewish Lisping Version of Patrick Kennedy, RI Drunk

Repulsive lisping ogre too degenerate to even be an msnbc talking head, Jacob Weisberg is picking up on the JournoList meme first propagated by Joe Klein of Time magazine and Anne Quindlen brought back from enforced retirement to spew the silly twaddle that the American people don't deserve a great thoughtful agenda such as Obama, Reid, and Pelosi have spelled out to save us from our poor ignorant selves.

First uttered in America by chain-smoking high-school dropout Peter Jennings in response to the '94 success of the Contract for America, the complaint is an old Communist meme reminding one of Bertholdt Brecht's famous observation when the German "Democratic" Republic's Chief Commissars & Stalinist Cupbearers complained after the 1953 Berlin Riots that the German People were undeserving of the delights of worker-paradise Communism. Brecht is supposed to have remarked, "Then why doesn't the GDR dissolve the German populace and choose a new people?"

Condescension from idiots who have never had a read job and being patronized by chattering class scribblers will certainly remind the American people to shape up, because there are leftist degenerates who believe the Constitution doesn't start "We the People of the United States of America...." as much as it should with the music of the Internationale.

I'm sure Zsa Zsa Huffington has a variant on this theme in the works. And we can bet that George Soros will order his galley-slave "Media Mutters" to inform the American people how backward they are for rejecting the idea of trillion dollar deficits and a socialist health plan.

The Appealing Lure of the Biggest Most Bodacious Kulturkampf---the War Between "Culture" & REALITY

Phoney Values? What would Holden Caulfield Say?

"Gatekeeper" is the term mental schlubditzes persist in calling the role of he/she who weeds out unacceptable truth when it conflicts with doctrines of "social justice" and apparatuses of "feel-good" Panglossian hallucinatory schlubditzthink. George Orwell and G.K. Chesterton are among the many outcasts who represented that Truth of an objective sort exists. But the gatekeepers serve as a sort of Dr. Mengele sorting out truth as it arrives in the marketplace of ideas and dispatching it immediately to obscurity/oblivion. What remains is the mirage of whatever lies over the rainbow, the elusive quest for what W.B. Yeats somewhere described the basis of metaphor: "the desire to be someone else somewhere else some other time." Andrew Klavan explains in a very cogent very short essay:

Culture in America is an enchanted place where the conservative facts of life are magically transformed into liberal fantasies. In movies, TV shows, novels, even comedy routines, our intellectuals, entertainers, and other fools are busily reshaping reality into works of art through their piercing insights into what will get them good reviews and awards, and through their rich and varied experience of the café in the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles.

To illustrate, I’ll give you some examples. See if you can spot the difference between reality and American culture. In reality, President John F. Kennedy was a fierce Cold Warrior who twice tripled America’s military presence in the Vietnam War to try to stop the spread of Communism and risked nuclear disaster by standing up to the Soviet Union in Cuba. He was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald, an America-hating leftist who had once defected to the USSR.

Now, the culture: in Oliver Stone’s film JFK—nominated for Best Picture Oscar in 1991—Kennedy is a peaceful lefty contemplating a withdrawal from Vietnam. He’s assassinated by a vast right-wing cabal that includes every single person in America except for Oliver Stone. Reality, culture. Can you spot the difference?

Here’s another: in reality, Terri Schiavo was a severely brain-damaged woman who was judicially starved to death in 2005 at the request of her husband, while evangelical Christian right-to-life groups unsuccessfully petitioned to keep her alive. In the culture, a 2005 episode of Law and Order entitled “Age of Innocence” depicted a severely brain-damaged woman whose husband tried to euthanize her—until he was murdered at the instigation of an evangelical Christian right-to-lifer. In reality, evangelical Christians try to keep people alive. In the culture, they murder people. That’s a subtle one, I know—but can you spot the difference?

Let’s try again. Isn’t this fun? In reality, anthropological studies have shown that primitive societies are even more violent than civilized ones. Primitive life is pretty miserable in general, with no protection against drought or famine, no medicine—so that even the simplest diseases can be deadly—and no equality for women, who have zero defense against pregnancy or oppression.

Now let’s look at the culture. In films such as Dances with Wolves, Pocahontas, and now Avatar—which are really all the same film—a civilized man enters primitive society and finds its values far superior to his own. The collectivist natives are peaceful, the women are treated with respect, and ancient forms of medicine work as well as modern ones.

Spot the difference? Right! In reality, it’s civilization, democracy, capitalism, and technology that give us greater health, equality, and happiness. So when you go to see Avatar and enjoy its special effects and 3-D imagery, just think to yourself, wow, we’d never have anything as cool as that if we lived like the Indians. I mean, they never even invented the wheel!

Hey, and speaking of Avatar, it not only celebrates being at one with the sacred Earth, but portrays U.S. soldiers as evil sadists out to destroy native peoples. Can you spot the difference between Avatar and, say, Haiti, where our old pal the sacred Earth slaughtered innocent people by the thousands and the U.S. military turned out in a massive rescue effort?

But in our culture, the U.S. military is always evil, housewives are always desperate, corporations are always corrupt, and poverty is always the fault of wealthy people’s greed. Can you spot the difference between those assumptions and reality?

If you can’t, you’re probably a liberal. And a knucklehead.

Thankfully, Superschlub Michael Moore wasn't mentioned, nor was the patron saint of schlubthink James Earl Carter.

But you can understand it best if you realize that the international left lives like in cloud-cuckoo land. Its doctrines such as AGW & the immanent goodness of humanity, though contradicted by facts, persist. Director John Ford, though a cultural conservative, summed up the sort of mentality required to succeed in a culture based on unreality---"when the facts conflict with the legend, print the legend."

So Michael Moore can preach the superiority of Cuban health care to America's, but the Canadian premier goes to the USA for treatment of his heart ailment. You can only take the pretense only so far. When it comes to life and death, the real world kicks in.

Ajami Article Stirs Uproar About Obama's Rapid Plunge in Polls

High-Flying Obama Singed by the Klieg Lights

Fouad Ajami follows up his article last week with an interesting five-minute interview by Wall Street Journal reporters.

Watch the YouTube interview, highlighted by the WSJ female reporter's wonder at the vitriolic hatred some mentally-challenged Democrats vented at Fouad, a gentle man whose giant mind is greater than any Dem concerned with foreign policy. In the years I knew Fouad, he always surprised me with the compassionate breadth of his POV concerning other cultures, which he combined with a straightforward assessment of these cultures' drawbacks and shortcomings. Born of a Shi'ite family in South Lebanon, Fouad has a deep understanding of the Sunni/Shi'a divide and his Persian heritage serves him well in assessing Iran's role in the Middle East as well.

Another interesting comment is Fouad's observation that it was a big mistake for Obama to accept the Nobel Peace Prize from a board of five Norwegian women [well, four women and a gender-confused whomever] after zero accomplishments in the US foreign policy area. This demonstrated that, unlike JFK, another wildly popular POTUS whose candidacy subsumed the hopes and dreams of many Americans, Obama may have the dangerous inclination to believe his own hyped-up reviews.

But the video of Fouad's Q&A reveals much about how a very wise and gifted man sees the Obama presidency as teetering on the brink of a plunge into one-term Carterhood.

Michael Barone on the True Meaning of Populism

Michael Barone

Michael Barone gives a magisterial short-course on populism, from Andrew Jackson to Obama. The punch line:

"...when Republicans either had majorities in Congress or held the White House, Americans did not have much occasion to think hard about "spread the wealth around" policies. But in 2009, with Mr. Obama as president and large Democratic majorities in Congress, they did.

The reaction to the stimulus package's vast increases in government spending and the health-care bills, with their redistributive taxes, has been unmistakably negative. If you have any doubts about this, check out the election returns in Massachusetts.

Why has the politics of economic redistribution had such limited success in America? One reason is that Americans, unlike Western Europeans, tend to believe that there is a connection between effort and reward and that people can work their way up economically. If people do something to earn their benefits, like paying Social Security taxes, that's fine. But giving money to those who have not in some way earned it is a no-no. [my emph] Moreover, like Andrew Jackson, most Americans suspect that some of the income that is redistributed will end up in the hands not of the worthy but of the well-connected.

Last year Mr. Obama and his policy strategists seem to have assumed that the financial crisis and deep recession would make Americans look more favorably on big government programs. But it turns out that economic distress did not make us Western Europeans.

Now the president and his advisers seem to be assuming that populist attacks on the rich will rally the downtrodden masses to their side. History does not provide much hope for this audacity. William Jennings Bryan, whose oratorical skills outshined even Mr. Obama's, got lower percentages of the vote each time he ran."

NASA Loses $100 billion moon money; Goddard will keep its Weather Lying Money

Hansen Arrested for Fighting Jobs & Trying to Wreck US Economy

James Hansen is the equivalent of the East Anglia IRCC Climate Hoax liars, but less accountable and hopefully now that NASA is going to eventually lose any cachet it used to have, the Goddard Lying Center will disappear with it. The piece of lying shit that is Hansen lies again, and is dutifully quoted by the Ministry of Lies' chief spokesman, the New York Times:

The decade ending in 2009 was the warmest on record, new surface temperature figures released Thursday by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration show.

The agency also found that 2009 was the second warmest year since 1880, when modern temperature measurement began. The warmest year was 2005. The other hottest recorded years have all occurred since 1998, NASA said.

James E. Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said that global temperatures varied because of changes in ocean heating and cooling cycles. “When we average temperature over 5 or 10 years to minimize that variability,” said Dr. Hansen, one of the world’s leading climatologists, “we find global warming is continuing unabated.”

This fuckwit is a "climatologist?"

I think Richard Feynmann meant fuckwits like Hansen and Rajendra Pachauri when he gave his famous lecture at CalTech about "Cargo Cult Science" which predicted scammers and frauds and hucksters and shills like Hansen and Pachauri unless the scientific method were followed with no thought of desired outcome or cherry-picking data to achieve a predetermined result.

The IRCC and Gore Whores both got Nobel Prizes from five stupid Norwegian women for practicing Cargo Cult Science. I'm sure Hansen believes he lied and cheated enough on the data to deserve one himself.

Juvenile Kos KIddies Try to Arouse Fear of Repob "Extremists"

The American Thinker has a great piece up debunking the ridiculous Kos-sponsored poll with questions out of a fevered brain from the ultra-left.

And that's where the Daily Kos poll comes in. It was dreamed up, executed, and reported for the express purpose of scaring the GOP out of using campaigns stressing these very basic convictions. Seriously, would there be any benign reason why the Daily Kos would pay for a poll of Republican voters?

And the way they did it is really quite transparently infantile. They are using the preferred liberal method of creating straw men and changing the subject. Some of the questions were so childishly worded that even the Mensa Society could not look intelligent if they were polled in this manner. Consider:

Do you believe Barack Obama wants the terrorists to win?

Do you believe ACORN stole the 2008 election?

Do you believe Barack Obama is a racist who hates white people?

These kind of questions make it impossible to register displeasure with Obama's terror policies, ACORN, or the impact of Jeremiah Wright on the president without sounding juvenile. Mommy, mommy -- Bawack stole the ewection and he wants the tewowists to win over the whities. Waaaaah.

I can only wonder if the erudite David Brooks will have the mental dexterity to see through this brilliantly diabolical plot. I rather doubt it.

Brooks has long ago defected to some sort of middle of the hash-mark on the left side of the gridiron & keeps drifting toward the sidelines day by day in the hope of keeping his day job with the NYT---which hired Ross Douthat when Brooks lost any credibility with the people between the forty-yard line in the stands.

The idea was to hitch a scarlet letter of craziness and extremism to the Tea Party and conservative movements. Nobody at the Tea Parties made these an issue in their demonstrations. There were no posters proclaiming "bring the women home" or "keep 'em barefoot and pregnant."

This is a naked political psych warfare. We know that Robert Menendez -- the head of the Democrat Senatorial Campaign Committee -- has stated that he wants to drive a wedge between the GOP and the Tea Party. You can bet that this Daily Kos poll is the first wedge attempt. And The Politico -- a competitor of the Daily Kos who should be eager to point out that site's frivolity -- instead jumps right in and sums up the poll results this way:

The poll of 2,000 Republicans ... paints a picture of a base that's angry, disaffected and acutely hostile to President Barack Obama. 39% of Republicans polled think Obama should be impeached, 36% say he wasn't born in the United States and one in four say they aren't even sure he's a U.S. citizen. Another 63% labeled the president a "socialist."

The intended net result is to paint conservatives as infantile, religious zealots who are simply mad as hell and consumed with Obama's birthplace and a plethora of cultural issues. Why? To keep the GOP's party apparatus scared of and embarrassed over their own base voter.

The idea is to make it plain to the suits inside the Beltway that the party must not get too cozy with these crazies -- or they will never win another election. But consider their convoluted logic:

If Republicans want to leverage Scott Brown's Massachusetts victory into a November electoral avalanche, they'll need to keep their base riled up -- but not too riled up.


The party's greatest challenge, operatives and elected officials in both parties say, is keeping the conservative base energized without overshooting the mainstream and driving away the moderate "Brown independents" they'll need to take back Congress.

Moderate Brown independents? You mean the ones who wanted lower taxes, less government, more business, and harsher treatment of terrorists? Those Brown independents sound a lot like Reagan, or even Palin -- i.e., conservatives -- to me. Yet the intellectual disconnect drones on:

"This shows a huge vulnerability for Republicans," says Jef Pollock, a veteran pollster and Democratic strategist working for Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa). Independents, who are particularly disinclined toward any kind of partisan rhetoric, are going to be turned off when they hear Republicans say stuff like this..." Pollock said.

And there you have it. Arlen Specter is the poster boy with all that is wrong with Republicans going moderate, and his brilliant strategist has just said that Brown's win -- plus this kooky poll -- shows a huge vulnerability for the GOP.

Oh yeah, Menendez, who did such a good job getting Corzine re-elected and Pollock, who is going to have trouble getting hair-plug Arlen the Dem nomination, let alone re-election which Toomey will almost certainly win.

I say just the opposite. Brown's win shows that the right basic convictions need only to be clearly stated in order to win. State clearly that you believe in limited government and lower taxes. Be proud of the free-market system. Be proud of the military, and be ready to treat enemies of this nation as they should be treated. And be proud to stand in the way of Obamacare.

That is the message that the Republican Party must take from Massachusetts as well as New Jersey and Virginia. If the beltway strategists of the feckless Arlen Specter, as well as The Politico and The Daily Kos, want to believe that the GOP is all in a dither over the birther movement and keeping women at home, then let them have at it. They will pay the price in November of 2010.

But for the record -- I do believe Obama is a socialist. Because, well, he is. So call me crazy, but perhaps you should ask Van Jones or Jeremiah Wright if I am all that far off first.

Yes, Obama, the Repubs aren't calling you a Bolshevik. A Menshevik will do, just for now.

Happiness is A Sports Fan Whose Team Wins It All!

Geaux, Equipe, Geaux!

Dan Henninger of the Wall Street Journal evokes what most of us inarticulate supporters of teams, baseball, football, basketball, soccer, or even cricket only feel deep within---the incredible rush that accompanies the victory of MY team in the championships.

Somewhere deep down inside, there has got to be a specific gene, not just parceled out to males, that is activated by a sporting or other competitive activity. And the untrammeled joy of victory is balanced withthe agony of defeat, as Bill Simmons categorized the fifteen most officially "tortured" franchises in major sports---[interesting footnote, with Cleveland owning three and Buffalo with the Bills and Sabres two, Lake Erie generates five tortured teams, with Detroit just a very short drive away to reach the Lions]. Like any New York pseudo-sophisticate, however, Dan cites Frederick Exley's "A Fan's Notes" about the sadness of supporting the '50s Giants, but the flip side is the joy of seeing my own personal hero, Alan Ameche, score the Gigantic Touchdown in The Game in 1958, so one man's poison is another man's joyous choicest cuts of meat!

In 1966, the loathsome Cowboys froze in the Ice Bowl, surely one of the greatest entertainment spectacles of the twentieth century, in a small company town north of the Arctic Circle which gained the sobriquet, sorry, of TITLETOWN and immortalized Vince Lombardi as UeberCoach and Patron Saint of the NFL. I just found out one of my sister-in-law's sisters was at that fabled frozen tundra event, on a field that symbolized the NFL past and future so well, the day Bart Starr plunged that short yard into the end zone and into the Canton Hall of Fame and football immortality.

The reason the Super Bowl regenerates the Immortal Moments of the '58 "The Game" and the '66 "Ice Bowl" onto a yearly basis lies in the genius of Pete Rozelle, the long-ago NFL commissioner who shoehorned the AFC into the NFL with the NFC, making a replication of the Baseball World Series possible. But much more importantly, Pete discovered that equal monies present equal opportunity, which rather than complete equality, is the basis for the American Dream.

Long ago, then-NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle figured out this greatest of all human truths, that the only value most people have in common, other than life itself, is the desire for a competitive home team. Family members who would sink a dinner fork into each other over Barack Obama's health-care plan will do high fives in the living room later if the Cleveland Browns beat the Pittsburgh Steelers.Rozelle got the league's teams to distribute TV-broadcast revenue equally, so that no team would be permanently in the dumpster. Basketball and hockey did the same thing. Baseball has not, and it is well established that Chicago Cubs fans do not believe happiness exists.

Happiness has always fascinated thinkers, including America's Founding Fathers. But were the Founders to revisit us, it's not beyond imagining they would upgrade the Creator's inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of fan happiness.

Reading a book on the Revolutionary war by Thomas Fleming last year, i was struck by a vignette from Valley Forge. On March 1, 1778, the Marquis de Lafayette brought George Washington the startling much-hoped-for glorious news that France would put all her resources behind the tiny frozen remnants of the Continental Army. It was the very first day of warm weather after a legendarily tough winter and a bunch of the soldiers were out playing a precursor of baseball called wickets, with sticks for bases, but otherwise more like our National Pastime than cricket. An overjoyed George Washington, the stern immutable leader suddenly took up a stickbat and asked to join. For a few minutes, GW played ball with the guys. Washington was a renowned horseman and, just like his famous successor Abe Lincoln who was a champion wrestler-boxer with forearms as thick as adult men's thighs, anecdotally held to be exceptional in throwing or lifting objects. [This always doesn't work out for the best, as in his youth, Oliver Cromwell was held to be the best "football" player in both Anglia and Cambridgeshire]. But Dwight D. Eisenhower was an All-American in his sophomore year at Army before a crushing knee injury ended his playing days. Gerald Ford was a two-time All American center at U. of Michigan and JFK, RMN, and Ronald Reagan all played on their college football teams. George H.W. Bush was captain of Yale's baseball team. Recently, only LBJ, Carter, Clinton, and GWB didn't play on a college team, but Bush Jr. was famously a cheerleader! Obama played high school basketball in Hawaii.

I digress, but the point is that competitive sports are deep in the bone of the American project, if you will, and watching Obama do play-by-play at the Georgetown-Duke game last weekend reminded me that even if his policies are lame, his analysis of the two teams right then and there was excellent.

Similarly, when soccer-fanatic Henry Kissinger learned of RMN's obsessive interest in college and NFL football, Henry the K applied his superanalytical skills in dissecting the game and would sit next to Nixon during the Sunday games and predict three out of every four plays called by the coach or QB of whatever team in whichever game they were watching. And Kissinger became so impressed with Nixon's own analytical prowess, he credits Tricky Dick with imagining the famous trip to China where Kissinger arranged the tortuous logistics through Pakistan's good offices and Nixon finally shocked the world by going to Beijing in '72.

The extensive digression above is to underline one of the true strengths of American ability to be flexible and suspend disbelief in the impossibility of a given project. The comeraderie which athletic competition builds and sustains are a bedrock to much of the inherent stability of the American way of life.

As Wellington said long afterward "Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton."

Now it is up to the Cubs whose last world championship [1908] was nearer in time to Waterloo than to today to figure out how to wing another World Series!

Don't Get in a Pissing Match with Mark Steyn!

The Great Steyn, Bane of Global Warming Hoaxers!

A schlub of a Canadian journalist babbles that Steyn and others are negligent:

Under prominent bylines I read that the emails exposed man-made climate change as (a partial list): “the biggest fraud in history” (David Warren, the Ottawa Citizen); “one of the biggest scientific scams of our time” (Charles Adler, blog); “the biggest scientific hoax in a generation” (Lorne Gunter, National Post); and a "racket" (Mark Steyn, National Review). Peter Worthington (Sun) cites approvingly Conrad Black’s verdict that, “global warming… is not, in fact, occurring at all.”

Steyn notes that the schlub quotes from his July 4th column of last year that since 1997, no global warming has occurred at all, and that since then both Phil Jones, the chief of the East Anglia Climate Hoax Gang, and a dude named Tim Flannery have both agreed with Steyn [though outlaw Jones characteristically concealed his agreement:

The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998.

I wonder if Richard Feynman's ghost is looking down on the pitiful politicized runts who use a patina of fake "science" to pursue patently political goals and nodding, yes, Cargo Cult Science is alive and thriving under the tutelage of NASA and the spineless degenerates who push the Climate Change Hoax, including the Cap-and-Trade deformities pushed by ultra-left cliques in the US Congress. The Canadian schlub accuses Steyn of NOT yelling fire in a crowded theater as it fills with deadly fumes, but Mark comes down with the sh*thammer of God:

Oh, phooey. To take up your dreary analogy, we're staying in our seats enjoying the show while the environmental correspondents run for the exits shrieking ever more hysterically. If you want to flee in terror and roll around in the snow trying to put out imaginary flames, by all means take as long as you like, and then, when the fever passes, feel free to come back in dripping wet. But it's a bit of a stretch to call me a liar when you're the one insisting your pants are on fire.

Bravo, Mark, and thank you for preserving us from the tainted Great White North, freezing but finger-pointing in a pitiful effort to be relevant---to be honest, Canada's National Post is the best newspaper in the Western Hemisphere on the fallacies of the Great GW Hoax and has at leastfifty and perhaps as many as one hundred articles pointing out the ridiculous nature of the fake "science."

Geezer Power

G,.K. Chesterton

David Brooks has a somewhat thoughtful column in today's NYT advocating the usefulness and political power of the elderly. Alright, he basically admits that since the older segment of the population is getting social security and has learned to use levers of voter power and has the leisure to participate in internet-led movements, let's make the best of a fact that won't go away.

Anyway, Brooks somewhat unconvincingly makes a case that the two groundswell movements of the last two years---Obama & the Tea Party Movement, are largely due to geezers and their large amount of free time. Oh well, as a 67.6-year old, I do gym work at LA Fitness, a lot of discretionary reading, and from time to time I blog, mostly to ventilate but occasionally a shaft of light enters my mind and I try to explicate it.

As G.K. Chesterton once said "A thing worth doing is worth doing poorly."

Does Global Warming Freeze-Out and ObamaCare Collapse Augur End of Obama's Hallucinatory Grandiosity?

Ah, It's Good to be King [of the World]

The American Interest by Walter Russell Mead has a slamdown in diplomatic language of the absolute collapse of the Global Warming hoax, done in by crooked scientists and dishonest UN officials like IRCC Chief & Nobel Prize Winner along with Lyin' Al Gore, Rajendra Pachauri. Indeed, AGW & Cap & Trade encapsulate in miniature the incredible crime spree that the Democrats have been waging against coming generations of Americans by piling up ridiculous taxation legislation, immense deficits, and demonstrating almost daily a complete and total disregard, even disrespect, for what the American people really want.

I can remember when Bill Clinton used to intone about the great collective wisdom of the American people after they re-elected him in 1996 in spite of a rejection of Democrats in both houses of Congress in 1994. Now that the American people have figured out that the elitist scam artists have been trying to foist a ruinous takeover by Big Government through Stealth legislation like the backroom healthcare fiasco, the elites claim the Americans are too stupid to deserve a great POTUS like Barry Soetero. Until recently, Walter Russell Mead had sided cautiously with the Democrats, but now like a true statesman, he has divined the mandate of heaven lies with the GOP in 2010 and now finds fault in the climate change fiasco that Barry was pushing on his second fruitless trip to Copenhagen [the first was the cockamamie Chicago Olympic bid which was rejected in the semi-finals despite Barry's self-esteem and certainty that he was nearly king of the world and could rise in the estimation of foreigners if he just bowed and scraped and sat through enough anti-American harangues by criminals like Chavez & Ortega without visibly flinching.

Berthold Brecht made a famous remark in 1953 after riots by workers made the GDR government observe that the German people did not deserve the wonderful Communist system the Soviets had installed. Brecht, a lifelong Communist, wrote a short poem calling on the GDR to "dissolve the German people and choose itself a new people to communize."

That's how stupid the left-wing elitists in the US MSM like Joe Klein and Keith Olbermann seem to be. Perhaps they can find a new people for Barry Soetero to drag into a super-bureaucrat slave state.

The American people, as they showed in MA, just aren't ready for the glorious future the Demo-cretins had planned.

Fouad Ajami Tells the Truth About Obama: No More Pixie Dust

From Washington to Kazakstan [Most Corrupt Country in the World]

Fouad Ajami remains one of the most insightful pundits in the world---his judgments are those of a man who deeply understands the long-term consequences of American deeds and how the era of Europe fails as a democracy. Most of all, he notes how America succumbed to Obama much like Argentina did to Peron, or Russia to Putin:

The curtain has come down on what can best be described as a brief un-American moment in our history. That moment began in the fall of 2008, with the great financial panic, and gave rise to the Barack Obama phenomenon.

The nation's faith in institutions and time-honored ways had cracked. In a little-known senator from Illinois millions of Americans came to see a savior who would deliver the nation out of its troubles. Gone was the empiricism in political life that had marked the American temper in politics. A charismatic leader had risen in a manner akin to the way politics plays out in distressed and Third World societies.

Fouad understands well how broken societies look to a savior, as France did to DeGaulle after first surrendering and silently cooperating with the Nazis during the Second World War. The international lefts incessant drumbeat of how evil America was for pursuing a democratic vision in the Middle East by GWB convinced the chattering classes of both Left Coasts of the USA that now that religion is gone, we need a secular Redeemer, and his name was Obama:

He was a blank slate, and devotees projected onto him what they wanted or wished. In the manner of political redeemers who have marked—and wrecked—the politics of the Arab world and Latin America, Mr. Obama left the crowd to its most precious and volatile asset—its imagination. There was no internal coherence to the coalition that swept him to power. There was cultural "cool" and racial absolution for the white professional classes who were the first to embrace him. There was understandable racial pride on the part of the African-American community that came around to his banners after it ditched the Clinton dynasty.

The Republicans demonstrated their dysfunction by nominating an aged war hero and left a competent businessman with technocratic skills and a large background in governing a blue state, Mitt Romney, in the wings, selecting a young and telegenic woman for Vice Presidential candidate. Although she was actually more experienced than any other of the national candidates in running a state and negotiating a large business deal for the state with an oil pipeline company, she was scorned most of all by the barren NARAL and NOW types whose screeching hysteria served as a signal to the Ultra-Left to trash the VP candidate. The NYT came out with a bogus story about McCain "seeing" a woman named Vicki Iseman [and ignored completely the vacuous John Edwards' dalliance with his in-house "video reporter" whom he inseminated during his crusade against the rich---a Marxist from South Carolina's dark satanic textile mills!?! Who managed as a "trial lawyer" to amass a fortune and become a N. Carolina Senator]. The New York Times is a bankrupt institution, both morally and fiscally, under the bizarrely incompetent duo of Pinch & Keller. The NYT, Teddy Kennedy, and the trendy MSM fell hard for the Man Without a Background, whose senior thesis at Columbia U. and complete set of State Senate campaign finance records had "disappeared" without a peep from the MSM so diligent in stalking Sarah Palin's family drama. But I digress. Fouad strikes home:

The white working class had been slow to be convinced. The technocracy and elitism of Mr. Obama's campaign—indeed of his whole persona—troubled that big constituency, much more, I believe, than did his race and name. The promise of economic help, of an interventionist state that would salvage ailing industries and provide a safety net for the working poor, reconciled these voters to a candidate they viewed with a healthy measure of suspicion. He had been caught denigrating them as people "clinging to their guns and religion," but they had forgiven him.

The working class was unaware that Obama was a Manchurian Candidate for Unions, NGO's like ACORN & other ultra-left parties and organizations, and Big Government almost without limits. When he won an election by majority, the first Democrat to do so since LBJ in 1964, the young tyro remained stylish, but somehow became enmeshed by grandiosity, caught himself in the narrative drama of his own improbable vertical ascent almost overnite to Superstardom. And as usual, this sort of overnight ascendancy doesn't end up well:

Mr. Obama himself authored the tale of his own political crisis. He had won an election, but he took it as a plebiscite granting him a writ to remake the basic political compact of this republic.

Mr. Obama's self-regard, and his reading of his mandate, overwhelmed all restraint. The age-old American balance between a relatively small government and a larger role for the agencies of civil society was suddenly turned on its head. Speed was of the essence to the Obama team and its allies, the powerful barons in Congress. Better ram down sweeping social programs—a big liberal agenda before the people stirred to life again.

Progressives pressed for a draconian attack on the workings of our health care, and on the broader balance between the state and the marketplace. The economic stimulus, ObamaCare, the large deficits, the bailout package for the automobile industry—these, and so much more, were nothing short of a fundamental assault on the givens of the American social compact.

And then there was the hubris of the man at the helm: He was everywhere, and pronounced on matters large and small. This was political death by the teleprompter.

Americans don't deify their leaders or hang on their utterances, but Mr. Obama succumbed to what the devotees said of him: He was the Awaited One. A measure of reticence could have served him. But the flight had been heady, and in the manner of Icarus, Mr. Obama flew too close to the sun.

Now this man without limits is going to propose a $3.8 trillion budget that will further enlarge deficits by $1.6 trillion, indeed the budget will project $5.08 trillion in deficit spending over the next five years -- a 35 percent increase over what the administration projected a year ago. And if you believe that this is the final number, a declining dollar and rising inflation are sure to push the deficit closer to $10 trillion while Obama flails at the economy....

Perhaps Obama didn't notice that Scott Brown won his election on fiscal discipline and even the blue states will object. Pace Krugman and other Marxist commissars of a JournoList stripe who infest the media, Obama's further excesses aren't going to cure this economy overnight. And Obama's plunging poll numbers indicate that he is no JFK, the detached student of human tragedy who knew about limits and was himself subsumed in a horrific national tragedy:

We have had stylish presidents, none more so than JFK. But Kennedy was an ironist and never fell for his own mystique. Mr. Obama's self-regard comes without irony—he himself now owns up to the "remoteness and detachment" of his governing style. We don't have in this republic the technocratic model of the European states, where a bureaucratic elite disposes of public policy with scant regard for the popular will. Mr. Obama was smitten with his own specialness.

Perhaps the Eurocentric bias of American thought and opinion give the Eurotards, who run oligarchic top-down non-federal states where media and corporations are under the control of technocratic statist elites, more credibility for being democrats than they actually deserve. The Europeans were saved by the US from Communism, but still regard themselves in some sort of 19th century hegemony, at least in moral terms, which is hardly deserved. They are simply creatures more or less of an international left of which the EU and UN are ancillary arms. Following their institutional shallowness and captious snobbery, as they fall economically behind the Far East, is chasing a false chimera.

In this extraordinary tale of hubris undone, the Europeans—more even than the people in Islamic lands—can be assigned no small share of blame. They overdid the enthusiasm for the star who had risen in America.

It was the way in Paris and Berlin (not to forget Oslo of course) of rebuking all that played out in America since 9/11—the vigilance, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the sense that America's interests and ways were threatened by a vengeful Islamism. But while the Europeans and Muslim crowds hailed him, they damned his country all the same. For his part, Mr. Obama played along, and in Ankara, Cairo, Paris and Berlin he offered penance aplenty for American ways.

But bowing and scraping won't keep away a terrorist combine which relentlessly tries to duplicate 9/11, despite Obama's bleats that a new page has been turned and we're closing Guantanamo and giving terrorist civilian trials without thoroughly debriefing them because Miranda rights trump NATIONAL SECURITY. Obama is so naive and the American left so utterly parochial in its pseudo-sophistication that they believe acts of public contrition will actually affect foreign policy.

But no sooner had the country recovered its poise, it drew a line for Mr. Obama. The "bluest" of states, Massachusetts, sent to Washington a senator who had behind him three decades of service in the National Guard, who proclaimed his pride in his "army values" and was unapologetic in his assertion that it was more urgent to hunt down terrorists than to provide for their legal defense.

Then the close call on Christmas Day at the hands of the Nigerian jihadist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab demonstrated that the terrorist threat had not receded. The president did his best to recover: We are at war, he suddenly proclaimed. Nor were we in need of penance abroad. Rumors of our decline had been exaggerated. The generosity of the American response to Haiti, when compared to what India and China had provided, was a stark reminder that this remains an exceptional nation that needs no apologies in distant lands.

What America doesn't need is a Saddam or a Peron or a Castro or a Chavez to strip away democratic rights like First Amendment speech, as Obama did on his SOTU attack on the Supreme Court. This charmer has already been thrown into a check position on the chessboard by Scott Brown's victory, and Brown's polls began a rapid ascent on Dec. 28th, when the full import of giving the terrorist crotch-bomber his civil rights before being debriefed began to sink in. Brown rose from 20 points behind on Dec. 28th to five points ahead on January 19th, and it seems that Obama [and Holder] were repudiated by Massachusetts in that three-week period [which also saw a second-rate not-ready-for-prime-time candidate utterly self-immolate with stupid thoughtless off-the-cuff demonstrations of her evident entitlement to "the Kennedy seat." The entitlement ethos of the libtard left has been soundly repudiated in the most dramatic fashion, and if Obama thinks he can assuage Republicans by visiting their Baltimore seminar and whining that they act like he's a Bolshevik, he simply isn't ready for prime time himself. He will have to use reconciliation to pass the $4.3 trillion budget unless Boehner & McConnell lose their nerve, or if a dumb female Senator is peeled off by the Dems in the process.

A historical hallmark of "isms" and charismatic movements is to dig deeper when they falter—to insist that the "thing" itself, whether it be Peronism, or socialism, etc., had not been tried but that the leader had been undone by forces that hemmed him in.

It is true to this history that countless voices on the left now want Obama to be Obama. The economic stimulus, the true believers say, had not gone astray, it only needed to be larger; the popular revolt against ObamaCare would subside if and when a new system was put in place.

There had been that magical moment—the campaign of 2008—and the true believers want to return to it. But reality is merciless. The spell is broken.

The USA is an economy based on fiscal years and quarterly reports while its enemies like Al Qaeda and Iran think in terms of eras and millennia. The USA was ranked 19th least corrupt country in the world last year, far better than Kazakhstan, which is one of the TEN MOST CORRUPT. Democracy is a fragile system and the abuse by a "tyranny of the majority" has long been seen as one of its most dangerous contradictions. And tyrannies lead to corruption, as the ACORN saga began to reveal before the MSM "lost interest" and looked in other directions. Chicago-style machine corruption now rules the Democrat Party and it had better realize that the American people have already caught on.

Great change cannot be done overnight in democracies, yet in times of crisis, drastic measures are sometimes called for. But the wrong drastic measures can lead to catastrophe, as the lessons in many other countries can demonstrate over the 20th century. Massachusetts was a signal, or should have been, for Obama, the bloom is off the rose and he had better respect minority rights vis-a-vis political parties just as with human beings.

Otherwise, ridiculous vapid exhalations such as Tom Friedman's about "American instability" may actually become true, though he himself wouldn't have his wits about him to figure it out one way or another. Yeah, compared to Russia or China or the EU, which can't decide whether or not to eject its most delinquent member Greece or assist it on a corrupt road to fiscal sanity? Why does Friedman care more about what Eurotards and second-rate police states think about America? Scott Brown knows that the important goal is to achieve good results so that Americans are protected from terrorists and feel good themselves about this country.

Not what the vapid chattering classes and Left Coast elites think about America.