Daniel Henninger on giving Herman Cain a second look

The WSJ has an interesting article on why Herman Cain should get a better look-see in the GOP primary season. Good article and makes sense.

Crony Capitalism or Privativist Fascism---Which one fits better?

Nancy Pelosi is going to her grave a wealthy woman, it seems, unless The Weekly Standard is getting its facts wrong:

Despite the growing Solyndra scandal, yesterday the Department of Energy approved $1 billion in new loans to green energy companies -- including a $737 million loan guarantee to a company known as SolarReserve:

SolarReserve LLC, a closely held renewable energy developer, received a $737 million U.S. Energy Department loan guarantee to build a solar-thermal project in Nevada.

The 110-megawatt Crescent Dunes project, near Tonopah, Nevada, will use the sun’s heat to create steam that drives a turbine, the agency said today in a e-mailed statement. SolarReserve is based in Santa Monica, California.

On SolarReserve's website is a list of "investment partners," including the "PCG Clean Energy & Technology Fund (East) LLC." As blogger American Glob quickly discovered, PCG's number two is none other than "Ronald Pelosi, a San Francisco political insider and financial industry polymath who happens to be the brother-in-law of Nancy Pelosi, the Minority Leader of the United States House of Representatives."

But wait... there's more! One of SolarReserve's other investment partners is Argonaut Private Equity:

Steve Mitchell and Argonaut Private Equity might have a chance to recoup some of their losses in the Solyndra debacle now that the Department of Energy has given a $737 million dollar loan guarantee to a company backed by Argonaut that also lists Mitchell among its board of directors.

Mitchell served on the Solyndra LLC Board of Directors. He also serves as Managing Director for Argonaut Private Equity, a company that invested in Solyndra through the LLCs parent company. After Solyndra declared bankruptcy, two Democratic members of the U.S. House asked that Mitchell testify about Solyndra. Though he has not appeared before Congress, he has "been asked to provide documents to Congress" pertaining to Solyndra.

And for good measure, it's also noteworthy that Obama is about to hold a big money fundraiser at the home of Tom Carnahan in St. Louis:

Carnahan, a member of the prominent Missouri Democratic family, has been tapped by the Obama campaign as its chief Missouri fundraiser. He is chairman of the board of Wind Capital Group, a wind energy company that makes it corporate headquarters in St. Louis. He formerly was president and CEO of the company.

Last year, Wind Capital's Lost Creek Farm facility in northwest Missouri received a $107 million tax credit from the Treasury Department, among many such wind operations receiving support from from stimulus funds.

Tom Carnahan is the son of former Missouri governor Mel Carnahan and former U.S. senator Jean Carnahan. He's also the brother of current Missouri secretary of state, Robin Carnahan.

It's increasingly hard to tell the government's green jobs subsidies apart from the Democrats' friends and family rewards program.

Politics and Money:stuck together like a horse and carriage.....!

Can You Prove This Negative? Melissa Explains it all!

A Clown Named Harris-Perry comes close to proving one oxymoron-----social sciences are not social nor are they scientific! Here's the first paragraphs of James Taranto's deconstruction of another foolish cretinette:

Obama was helped into office by a wave of racial goodwill. Even many critics and skeptics, including your humble columnist, celebrated his election as the surest sign ever that racism in America was still dead. But if racism is dead--or, to be less hyperbolic, completely marginalized--we're still hearing an awful lot about it, in large part because the liberal left in America is obsessed with race. Even during the campaign, liberals found racism in the unlikeliest places, such as the observation that Obama is skinny. Then the Tea Party arose in opposition to Obama's fiscal recklessness, and phony charges of racism were central to the effort against it.

With the president limping toward 2012, it's safe to assume he and his supporters will try to guilt-trip voters into giving him a second term, arguing that the failure to re-elect him would amount to a betrayal of black America. One who states that case explicitly is Melissa Harris-Perry, a racially oriented political scientist from Tulane University.

"Electoral racism in its most naked, egregious and aggressive form is the unwillingness of white Americans to vote for a black candidate regardless of the candidate's qualifications, ideology or party," she begins an essay in The Nation:

This form of racism was a standard feature of American politics for much of the twentieth century. So far, Barack Obama has been involved in two elections that suggest that such racism is no longer operative. His re-election bid, however, may indicate that a more insidious form of racism has come to replace it.

This is a familiar refrain. The left's view of racism has taken on a central trait of a conspiracy theory: unfalsifiability. The absence of "overt" racism is taken as evidence of "insidious" or "subtle" or "unconscious" racism, the presence of which can always be asserted and never disproved.

Click the link and see how much funnier Melissa gets as she combines illiteracy and lack of a triple-digit IQ to prove how some people get jobs at Tulane which are even dirtier than a janitor's....!!!!

Why Rasmussen is so Accurate and the PPP/CBS polls are not

Pollsters have biases and this note from The Democratic Strategist from December, 2009, demonstrates just how far off a bias in the methodology will skew the results:

In his recent post, Mark Blumenthal provides an excellent discussion of some of the possible explanations for the differences between the results of Rasmussen polls and the results of other national polls regarding President Obama's approval rating. What needs to be emphasized, however, is that regardless of the explanation for these differences, whether they stem from Rasmussen's use of a likely voter sample, their use of four response options instead of the usual two, or their IVR methodology, the frequency of their polling on this question means that Rasmussen's results have a very disproportionate impact on the overall polling average on the presidential approval question. As of this writing (December 4th), the overall average for net presidential approval (approval - disapproval) on pollster.com is +0.7%. The average without Rasmussen is +7.1%. No other polling organization has nearly this large an impact on the overall average.

A similar impact is seen on the generic ballot question reflecting, again, both the divergence between Rasmussen's results and those of other polls and the frequency of Rasmussen's polling on this question. The overall average Democratic lead on pollster.com is 0.7%. However, with Rasmussen removed that lead jumps to 6.7%. Again, no other polling organization has this large an impact on the overall average.

According to Rasmussen, Republicans currently enjoy a 7 point lead on the generic ballot question among likely voters. Democracy Corps, the only other polling organization currently using a likely voter sample, gives Democrats a 2 point lead on this question. To underscore the significance of this difference, an analysis of the relationship between popular vote share and seat share in the House of Representatives indicates that a 7 point Republican margin of victory in the national popular vote next November would result in a GOP pickup of 62 seats in the House, giving them a majority of 239 to 196 over the Democrats in the new Congress. This would represent an even more dramatic shift in power than the 1994 midterm election that brought Republicans back to power in Congress. In contrast, a 2 point Democratic margin in the national popular vote would be expected to produce a GOP pickup of only 24 seats, leaving Democrats with a comfortable 234 to 201 seat majority.

Of course, Rasmussen's honest polling methods were only one seat off eleven months before the actual elections in November, 2010, when the GOP won 63 instead of the 62 predicted. The Democrats, like all leftists, lie to themselves and their constituents, which makes their polling methods and results the comic funhouse mirror absurdities that we see in PPP or the usual CBS polling, which always selects more Dems than the national pct. and doesn't ask about likely voters or even voter registration. The elaborate hoaxes Dem pollsters regularly pull off on the gullible public would put Bernie Madoff to shame. But the Democratic Strategist crew compound their absurdly dishonest "scientific" claims by making another one-liner straight from Homer Simpson's neuron ruts:

Moreover, Rasmussen has been less than totally open about their method of identifying likely voters at this early stage of the 2010 campaign, making any evaluation of their results even more difficult. However, there is one question on which a more direct comparison of Rasmussen's results with those of other national polls is possible--party identification. Although the way Rasmussen asks the party identification question is somewhat different, reflecting its IVR methodology, Rasmussen's party identification results, like almost all other national polls, are based on a sample of adult citizens. Despite this fact, in recent months Rasmussen's results have diverged rather dramatically from those of most other national polls by showing a substantially smaller Democratic advantage in party identification. For example, for the month of November, Rasmussen reported a Democratic advantage of only 3 percentage points compared with an average for all other national polls of almost 11 percentage points.

Yes, you Demonrat brainiacs are certainly right on your usual path to self-destruction. Rasmussen must have been wrong about the "average of all other national polls.....," yeah, that's the ticket.

It appears more and more likely that delusion is a significant part of the mental illness commonly called liberalism.

Why Rasmussen is so Accurate and the PPP/CBS polls are not

Pollsters have biases and this note from The Democratic Strategist from December, 2009, demonstrates just how far off a bias in the methodology will skew the results:

In his recent post, Mark Blumenthal provides an excellent discussion of some of the possible explanations for the differences between the results of Rasmussen polls and the results of other national polls regarding President Obama's approval rating. What needs to be emphasized, however, is that regardless of the explanation for these differences, whether they stem from Rasmussen's use of a likely voter sample, their use of four response options instead of the usual two, or their IVR methodology, the frequency of their polling on this question means that Rasmussen's results have a very disproportionate impact on the overall polling average on the presidential approval question. As of this writing (December 4th), the overall average for net presidential approval (approval - disapproval) on pollster.com is +0.7%. The average without Rasmussen is +7.1%. No other polling organization has nearly this large an impact on the overall average.

A similar impact is seen on the generic ballot question reflecting, again, both the divergence between Rasmussen's results and those of other polls and the frequency of Rasmussen's polling on this question. The overall average Democratic lead on pollster.com is 0.7%. However, with Rasmussen removed that lead jumps to 6.7%. Again, no other polling organization has this large an impact on the overall average.

According to Rasmussen, Republicans currently enjoy a 7 point lead on the generic ballot question among likely voters. Democracy Corps, the only other polling organization currently using a likely voter sample, gives Democrats a 2 point lead on this question. To underscore the significance of this difference, an analysis of the relationship between popular vote share and seat share in the House of Representatives indicates that a 7 point Republican margin of victory in the national popular vote next November would result in a GOP pickup of 62 seats in the House, giving them a majority of 239 to 196 over the Democrats in the new Congress. This would represent an even more dramatic shift in power than the 1994 midterm election that brought Republicans back to power in Congress. In contrast, a 2 point Democratic margin in the national popular vote would be expected to produce a GOP pickup of only 24 seats, leaving Democrats with a comfortable 234 to 201 seat majority.

Of course, Rasmussen's honest polling methods were only one seat off eleven months before the actual elections in November, 2010, when the GOP won 63 instead of the 62 predicted. The Democrats, like all leftists, lie to themselves and their constituents, which makes their polling methods and results the comic funhouse mirror absurdities that we see in PPP or the usual CBS polling, which always selects more Dems than the national pct. and doesn't ask about likely voters or even voter registration. The elaborate hoaxes Dem pollsters regularly pull off on the gullible public would put Bernie Madoff to shame. But the Democratic Strategist crew compound their absurdly dishonest "scientific" claims by making another one-liner straight from Homer Simpson's neuron ruts:

Moreover, Rasmussen has been less than totally open about their method of identifying likely voters at this early stage of the 2010 campaign, making any evaluation of their results even more difficult. However, there is one question on which a more direct comparison of Rasmussen's results with those of other national polls is possible--party identification. Although the way Rasmussen asks the party identification question is somewhat different, reflecting its IVR methodology, Rasmussen's party identification results, like almost all other national polls, are based on a sample of adult citizens. Despite this fact, in recent months Rasmussen's results have diverged rather dramatically from those of most other national polls by showing a substantially smaller Democratic advantage in party identification. For example, for the month of November, Rasmussen reported a Democratic advantage of only 3 percentage points compared with an average for all other national polls of almost 11 percentage points.

Yes, you Demonrat brainiacs are certainly right on your usual path to self-destruction. Rasmussen must have been wrong about the "average of all other national polls.....," yeah, that's the ticket.

It appears more and more likely that delusion is a significant part of the mental illness commonly called liberalism.

Solyndra: Obama's Marble Boat

Clarice Feldman writes for The American Thinker and compares the hoax set up by Obama to help his contributors to the famous marble boat that Dowager Empress Cixi had constructed for her sailing pleasure on the lake near her palace in Kunming. China famously went down the tubes in the fifteenth century because its fantastic flair for innovation threatened the Mandarin bureaucrats whose jobs would be in jeopardy if new inventions changed the landscape. Like the Democrats, the Mandarins chose bureaucratic authoritarianism over capitalist innovation.

That's why China spent the next 500 years sliding south toward Antarctica.

Murderous Dwarf Putin on the Rise Again

Vlad the Empoisoner, the only head of state who routinely murders his opponents by poisoning them in foreign countries, appears ready to return as Stalin Redux. Read the Guardian story about the new book, Mafia State, and then read Chris Andrews and Vlad Mitrokhin's Sword and Shield to see how the old KGB & the new FSB both run the fascist sh*tpit called Russia.

Hemingway Summed Up in a Nutshell by F.Scott Fitzgerald

Papa's got a gun

Hemingway was for a long time the writer that, as a teenage kid, I wanted to emulate. The tough-guy with a soft heart was what I remember when I first picked up Across The River and into The Trees as a kid of thirteen.

I and my tastes outgrew Hemingway, even though I was told by everyone in my forties that I was his spitting image and should engage in the Key West look-a-like contest, but found the more sensitive, nuanced Fitzgerald better represented my Midwestern roots trying to replant elsewhere.

Alan Massie's new book on Hemingway brings Hemingway's offhand braggadocio and trickiness hiding a more tormented individual to the surface. I'd read Colette and Byron's Travels and now want to read the Hemingway bio. I'm also looking forward to his massive history of the Stuarts.

Like Anthony Burgess, Massie is an admirer of Hemingway with a keen appreciation of just how far short this over-hyped hyper-American stole the stage from better, if less self-promoting writers like Fitzgerald. Hemingway supposedly converted to Catholicism twice and then abjured that faith twice, surely a sign of the deeper struggles raging inside his soul.

Fitzgerald, whose book Tender in the Night, which I read during my honeymoon, according to Massie sums up Hemingway better in two sentences than anyone else ever did. The tormented Dick Driver could have been talking about F. Scott's former friend, who rose to prominence on Fitzgerald's fulsome praise in the early twenties, by this quote of Massie's:

"The change came a long way back—but at first it didn't show. The manner remains intact for some time after the morale cracks."

Read the excellent review by the WSJ at the link above. I've read several books about Hemingway and most of his novels and short stories, but Massie's keen insights are among the best I've ever come across.

Gallup Says 55% of Americans distrust the lame stream MSM

Gallup makes an unusual comment on its graph....

"the 55% who have little or no trust remain among the most negative views Gallup has measured."

Of course, the graphs demonstrate that the vast majority of Americans believe that the libtard lamestream losers at the NYT and LAT are retarded treasonous buttwads.

Gallup sums it up with:

"47% saying the media are too liberal and 13% saying they are too conservative..."

which shows once again that the American people are much smarter than Bri-boy Williams, the d-bag at CBS & Diane Sawyer take them to be.

Case in point: The main legacy media alphabet lame streamers like NBC, CBS, and ABC had ZERO coverage of the Greengate emerging from Solyndra, LightSquared and other crony capitalism deals that tiny Rahm and the crooked Jew Axelrod deny knowing anything about. NADA, except for Brian Ross & Jake Tapper on ABC, which makes it the least despicable collection of DNC pimps in the bunch.

Bad Days Ahead for Europe and its NATO Partner in North America

The Wall Street Journal has a good column by Bret Stephens which fits in nicely with my current reading of Tony Judt's magnificent POSTWAR, a book that should be required reading for Euroweenies everywhere.

As a personal aside, Nikos Papandreaou, the brother of the current Prime Minister, had a one-on-one dinner with me a couple of decades ago and explained the essential corruption of the Greek economy, which is based on no civic accountability and massive tax evasion, plus a giant dose of sheer graft and peculation. Essentially, in Greece everyone lies to everyone else and a wink and a nod are what make the country muddle through from day to day. At the time, his father was the Prime Minister, and his description of an essentially fraudulent state puzzled me. He described it as a third-world country, long before it was foolishly admitted into the Maastricht Accords and the Eurozone. Greece was even back then guilty of massive fraud of a Madoff-size Ponzi numbers scam just to get into the Eurozone and get all that free money. And Nikos laughingly described his countrymen as self-described political experts, who sat around coffee shops all day while the women did the housework and their state-sector jobs did themselves by means of a coat hanging on a chair in their government "office."

Here's Bret Stephens:

When the history of the rise and fall of postwar Western Europe is someday written, it will come in three volumes. Title them "Hard Facts," "Convenient Fictions" and—the volume still being written—"Fraud."

The hardest fact on which postwar Europe was founded was military necessity, crisply summed up by Lord Ismay's famous line that NATO's mission was "to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down." The next hard fact was hard money, the gift of Ludwig Erhard, author of the economic reforms that created the Deutsche mark, abolished price controls, and put inflation in check for generations. The third hard fact was the creation of Jean Monnet's common market that gave Europe a shared economic—not political—identity.

The result was the Wirtschaftswunder in Germany, Les Trente Glorieuses in France and il miracolo economico in Italy. It could have lasted into the present day. It didn't.

In 1965, government spending as a percentage of GDP averaged 28% in Western Europe. Today it hovers just under 50%. In 1965, the fertility rate in Germany was a healthy 2.5 children per mother. Today it is a catastrophic 1.35. During the postwar years, annual GDP growth in Europe averaged 5.5%. After 1973, it rarely exceeded 2.3%. In 1973, Europeans worked 102 hours for every 100 worked by an American. By 2004 they worked just 82 hours for every 100 American ones.


Former FDIC official Vern McKinley gives a brief history of moral hazard.

It was during this general slowdown that Europe entered the convenient fiction phase.

There was, for starters, the convenient fiction that if you just added up the GDP of the European Union's expanding list of member states, you had an economy whose size exceeded that of the United States. Didn't this make "Europe" an economic superpower? There was the convenient fiction that Europe didn't need robust military capabilities when it could exert global influence through diplomacy and soft power. There was the convenient fiction that Europeans shared identical values and could thus be subject to uniform regulations governing crime and punishment. There was the convenient fiction that Continentals weren't lagging in productivity but were simply making an enlightened choice of leisure over labor.

And there was, finally, the whopping fiction that Europe had its own "model," distinct and superior to the American one, that immunized it from broader international currents: globalization, Islamism, demography. Europeans love their holidays and thought they were entitled to a long holiday from history as well.

All this did wonders, for a while, to mask European failures and puff up European pride. But there is always a danger in substituting grandiosity for achievement, mistaking pronouncements for facts, or, more generally, believing in your own nonsense.

Here is where Europe slipped from convenient fiction to outright fraud.

There was the fraud of Greece's entry into the euro, a double-edged affair since Athens lied about its budgetary figures and Brussels chose to accept the lie. There was the fraud of the so-called Maastricht criteria—the fiscal rules that were supposed to govern the euro only to be quickly flouted by France and Germany and then junked altogether in the current crisis. There was the fraud of the European Constitution, overwhelmingly rejected wherever a vote on it was permitted, only to be revised and imposed by parliamentary fiat.

What is now happening in Europe isn't so much a crisis as it is an exposure: a Madoff-type event rather than a Lehman one. The shock is that it's a shock. Greece was never going to be bailed out and will, sooner or later, default. The banks holding Greek debt will, sooner or later, be recapitalized. The recapitalization will be borne by German taxpayers, and it will bring them—sooner rather than later—to the outer limit of their forbearance. The Chinese will not ride to the rescue: They know not to throw good money after bad.

And then Italy will go Greek. Europe's crisis will lap on U.S. shores, and America's economic woes will lap on Europe's—a two-way tsunami.

America will survive this because America is a state. But as Bismarck once remarked, "Whoever speaks of Europe is wrong. Europe is a geographical expression." The "fiscal union" that's being mooted will never come to pass: German voters won't stand for it, and neither will any other country that wants to retain fiscal independence—which is to say, the core attribute of democratic sovereignty.

What comes next is the explosion of the European project. Given what European leaders have made of that project over the past 30-odd years, it's not an altogether bad thing. But it will come at a massive cost. The riots of Athens will become those of Milan, Madrid and Marseilles. Parties of the fringe will gain greater sway. Border checkpoints will return. Currencies will be resurrected, then devalued. Countries will choose decay over reform. It's a long, likely parade of horribles.

Where is the Europe of Ismay, Erhard and Monnet? It's there in memory, if anyone cares to recover it. Give it another 50 years, and maybe someone will.

Nouriel Roubini, the only major economist to predict the 2007-8 crash, expatiates:

Greece is stuck in a vicious cycle of insolvency, low competitiveness and ever-deepening depression. Exacerbated by a draconian fiscal austerity, its public debt is heading towards 200 per cent of gross domestic product. To escape, Greece must now begin an orderly default, voluntarily exit the eurozone and return to the drachma.

The recent debt exchange deal Europe offered Greece was a rip-off, providing much less debt relief than the country needed. If you pick apart the figures, and take into account the large sweeteners the plan gave to creditors, the true debt relief is actually close to zero. The country’s best current option would be to reject this agreement and, under threat of default, renegotiate a better one.

Yet even if Greece were soon to be given real and significant relief on its public debt, it cannot return to growth unless competitiveness is rapidly restored. And without a return to growth, its debts will stay unsustainable. Problematically, however, all of the options that might restore competitiveness require real currency depreciation.

The first of these options, a sharp weakening of the euro, is unlikely while the US is economically weak and Germany über-competitive. A rapid reduction in unit labour costs, through structural reforms that increased productivity growth in excess of wages, is just as unlikely. Germany took 10 years to restore its competitiveness this way; Greece cannot wait in depression for a decade.

The third option is a rapid deflation in prices and wages, known as an “internal devaluation”. But this would lead to five years of ever-deepening depression, while making public debts more unsustainable.

Logically, therefore, if those three options are not possible, the only path left is to leave the eurozone. A return to a national currency and a sharp depreciation would quickly restore competitiveness and growth, as it did in Argentina and many other emerging markets that abandoned their currency pegs.

Of course, this process will be traumatic. The most significant problem would be capital losses for core eurozone financial institutions. Overnight, the foreign euro liabilities of Greece’s government, banks and companies would surge. Yet these problems can be overcome. Argentina did so in 2001, when it “pesified” its dollar debts. America actually did something similar too, in 1933 when it depreciated the dollar by 69 per cent and repealed the gold clause. A similar unilateral “drachmatisation” of euro debts would be necessary and unavoidable.

Major eurozone banks and investors would also suffer large losses in this process, but they would be manageable too – if these institutions are properly and aggressively recapitalised. Avoiding a post-exit implosion of the Greek banking system, however, may unfortunately require the imposition of Argentine-style measures – such as bank holidays and capital controls – to prevent a disorderly fallout.

Realistically, collateral damage will occur, but this could be limited if the exit process is orderly, and if international support was provided to recapitalise Greek banks and finance the difficult fiscal and external balance transition. Some argue that Greece’s real GDP will be much lower in an exit scenario than in the hard slog of deflation. But this is logically flawed: even with deflation the real purchasing power of the Greek economy and of its wealth will fall as the real depreciation occurs. Via nominal and real depreciation, the exit path will restore growth right away, avoiding a decade-long depressionary deflation.

Those who claim contagion will drag others into the crisis are also in denial too. Other peripheral countries have Greek-style debt sustainability and competitiveness problems too; Portugal, for example, may eventually have to restructure its debt and exit the euro too.

Illiquid but potentially solvent economies, such as Italy and Spain, will need support from Europe regardless of whether Greece exits; indeed, a self-fulfilling run on Italy and Spain’s public debt at this point is almost certain, if this liquidity support is not provided. The substantial official resources currently being wasted bailing out Greece’s private creditors could also then be used to ringfence these countries, and banks elsewhere in the periphery.

A Greek exit may have secondary benefits. Other crisis-stricken eurozone economies will then have a chance to decide for themselves whether they want to follow suit, or remain in the euro, with all the costs that come with that choice. Regardless of what Greece does, eurozone banks now need to be rapidly recapitalised. For this a new European Union-wide programme is needed, and one not reliant on fudged estimates and phoney stress tests. A Greek exit could be the catalyst for this approach.

The recent experiences of Iceland, along with many emerging markets in the past 20 years, show that the orderly restructuring and reduction of foreign debts can restore debt sustainability, competitiveness and growth. Just as in these cases, the collateral damage to Greece of a euro exit will be significant, but it can be contained.

Like a broken marriage that requires a break-up, it is better to have rules that make separation less costly to both sides. Breaking up and divorcing is painful and costly, even when such rules exist. Make no mistake: an orderly euro exit will be hard. But watching the slow disorderly implosion of the Greek economy and society will be much worse.

David Brooks: A Self-Admitted "Sap" Confesses his Past Sins of Omission

David Brooks seems to have rewired his attic and his lights are now turning on in the top floor of his brain cavity:

...When the president unveiled the second half of his stimulus it became clear that this package has nothing to do with helping people right away or averting a double dip. This is a campaign marker, not a jobs bill.

It recycles ideas that couldn’t get passed even when Democrats controlled Congress. In his remarks Monday the president didn’t try to win Republicans to even some parts of his measures. He repeated the populist cries that fire up liberals but are designed to enrage moderates and conservatives.

He claimed we can afford future Medicare costs if we raise taxes on the rich. He repeated the old half-truth about millionaires not paying as much in taxes as their secretaries. (In reality, the top 10 percent of earners pay nearly 70 percent of all income taxes, according to the I.R.S. People in the richest 1 percent pay 31 percent of their income to the federal government while the average worker pays less than 14 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office.)

This wasn’t a speech to get something done. This was the sort of speech that sounded better when Ted Kennedy was delivering it. The result is that we will get neither short-term stimulus nor long-term debt reduction anytime soon, and I’m a sap for thinking it was possible.

David and his high-minded admiration for the crease on Obama's well-tailored bespoke suit had been mesmerized for years by the flatulent flimflammery this community organizer with a flair for self-promotion had beguiled the gullible "brain-dead liberals," as David Mamet would characterize them, with all sorts of intriguing back alleys of political ingenuity---calling something "shovel-ready" when there was a union-restricted proviso attached to the infrastructure improvement being proposed. David was a center-left dupe or fellow-traveler of this protean chimera of a politician, whose only identity seems to be that of a shape-shifter or a chameleon-on-plaid, Brooks was gulled because he is a natural egghead, and his ideals take many blows before he allows them to shatter, or in this case disappear into a cultural-revolution type confession of "crimes against the people." But, like a much finer mind such as that of Augustine or Whittaker Chambers, perhaps this self-confessed "sap" may have finally seen the light. Here's more of his lugubrious musings:

....The president is sounding like the Al Gore for President campaign, but without the earth tones. Tax increases for the rich! Protect entitlements! People versus the powerful! I was hoping the president would give a cynical nation something unconventional, but, as you know, I’m a sap.

Being a sap, I still believe that the president’s soul would like to do something about the country’s structural problems. I keep thinking he’s a few weeks away from proposing serious tax reform and entitlement reform. But each time he gets close, he rips the football away. He whispered about seriously reforming Medicare but then opted for changes that are worthy but small. He talks about fundamental tax reform, but I keep forgetting that he has promised never to raise taxes on people in the bottom 98 percent of the income scale.

That means when he talks about raising revenue, which he is right to do, he can’t really talk about anything substantive. He can’t tax gasoline. He can’t tax consumption. He can’t do a comprehensive tax reform. He has to restrict his tax policy changes to the top 2 percent, and to get any real revenue he’s got to hit them in every which way. We’re not going to simplify the tax code, but by God Obama’s going to raise taxes on rich people who give to charity! We’ve got to do something to reduce the awful philanthropy surplus plaguing this country!

The president believes the press corps imposes a false equivalency on American politics. We assign equal blame to both parties for the dysfunctional politics when in reality the Republicans are more rigid and extreme. There’s a lot of truth to that, but at least Republicans respect Americans enough to tell us what they really think. The White House gives moderates little morsels of hope, and then rips them from our mouths. To be an Obama admirer is to toggle from being uplifted to feeling used.

The White House has decided to wage the campaign as fighting liberals. I guess I understand the choice, but I still believe in the governing style Obama talked about in 2008. I may be the last one. I’m a sap.

Writing a letter to the NYT is like shedding a tear in the ocean when it comes to politics, but here's my latest comment I submitted on David Brooks column:

It's apparent that Obama's absurd new package of roughly $1.5 trillion in "revenue enhancements," removal of tax deductions on charitable contributions and dozens of other tax and spend schemes are, as Brooks finally concedes, simply political markers without a chance of passing in Congress. Rather than having a "Sister Soljah moment" as Clinton did when he pivoted to the center, Obama appears to have doubled down on some sort of "Give 'Em Hell, Harry" strategy and will soon be whining about the "Do-Nothing 111th Congress" or some such silly frontal attack on the GOP. It worked when everyone thought Truman's chances were slim or nil, and Obama's economic haplessness assures another year of no growth.

The top US earners are already double-taxed on capital gains and Obama is removing any motivation to invest in a country which punishes entrepreneurial risk-taking and rewards falling into the 51% of the population, mostly Democrats, who pay no taxes at all. Why invest when regulatory watchdogs and excessive imposts remove any real chance or incentive to succeed. First, Sarbanes-Oxley and now Dodd-Frank are paralyzing the American business environment---and if in the remote chance, one succeeds in innovating or marketing a viable product, without the political backing such as Solyndra had, one's chances of success recede to a vanishing point.

Obama is anti-business and for a mixed-economic regime resembling the corporatist crony capitalism of the Thirties. Despite the efforts of the elite media and academic theoreticians, he is simply going to lose this battle against a windmill of his own imagining.

And Obama'a high-minded rhetorical pomposity is now descending to the silliness of "gun-to-a-knife-fight" bravado and resembles marxist tropes of setting up class warfare as a model for democratic politics. He should be ashamed of himself. A one-termer for sure.

Obama Says "Never Raise Taxes in a Recession" in 2009

Upchuck Todd shows his slavish adulation of O'Bozo in this YouTube where the First Imbecile-in-Chief since Jimmy Carter says something which he is in the process of reversing at this very moment, having called for $1.5 trillion in new revenues just yesterday.

I'm sure serial-suck-up Todd will ignore this, or else come up with some flimflammery such as "we're not technically in a recession, yet."

On top of Fast and Furious and the Greengate called Solyndra, our worst POTUS since Jimmy Carter now calls for massive tax increases, all the while denying that he's doing what he told Joe The Plumber he was doing, "spreading the wealth around."

White House Economic In-Fighting Reflects Obungler's Lack of Leadership

Robert Suskind has a book out that should rival The Big Short and Reckless Endangerment as object lessons or at least as a cautionary tale of the rampant self-serving special pleading of disobedient subordinates of this "community organizer" about six levels over his Peter Principle level of competence & capability.

Also, dissing the distaff advisors should have extended tot he egregious Ms. Warren who has shuffled back to Hah-vahd Yahd to organize a Senate expeditionary campaign that hopefully will hit an iceberg bigger than the one that sank the Titanic. Christine Romer says that even Obama didn't bother to recognize her during a meeting, but she put her tail between her legs and took it like a man....!!!

However, ignoring Anita Dunn and her absurdities, including admiring Chairman Mao's "philosophy" [of mass murder???] was probably beneficial to the intellectual tone, such as it was, of the back-stabbing sessions as described by Suskind. Anita's double-digit IQ produced brain farts which could only be ignored in any polite or intelligent discussion of politics and policies.

Muddled Class Warfare

If you want to find the most biased, marxist gibberish among the loons of the lefty commentari­at, read the insufferab­le Robert Kuttner on how Paul Ryan's comment that taxing more heavily those with money to invest in the economy and to do venture capital risk investment­s in small start-up businesses is "pure malarkey."



Actually, a majority of Americans are intelligen­t enough and gifted with common sense to the degree that they realize that those college profs preaching marxist theories of how businessme­n parasitize off of the workers they hire is pure and simple balderdash­.



And the Dodd-Frank bill to drown financial institutio­ns in paperwork is as loony as the Sarbanes attempt a few years back to do the same. Politicize­, then bureaucrat­ize, then threaten banks with discrimina­tory practices if they "red-line" folks wanting a mortgage by asking them if they have any up-front money and a job to pay the monthly mortgage. The CRA was a crackpot idea of Jimmy Carter, the least successful president of the twentieth century, Hoover included, and it was taken up again by Clinton to stave off the left after he dared to impose welfare reform on hopeless slackers.



Class warfare is a polite way to characteri­ze the economic havoc that will ensue if Obama continues to tax and spend----e­specially spend money he can't tax because of a diminishin­g employment base.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

NYT's Crusade Against Football More Absurd Than Ever

Pinch Sulzberger is obviously too effeminate, despite ostentatiously riding Harleys around the hills of North Carolina, to ever support a manly sport like college football.

Theodore Roosevelt saved football from the effeminate losers such as Pinch back in the early 1900s when girly-men like Sulzberger wanted the game outlawed. Robert Hutchins would probably have preferred the US to have lost the Cold War and have us all speaking Russian than participate in a real manly male enterprise. Pointy-headed eggheads like him and Adlai Stevenson would have surrendered to the Soviets rather than risk getting their hands dirty in anything like an armed confrontation. POTUS's like Dwight Eisenhower, an All-American at West Point, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan all played football.

Democrats are nancy-boys, so they don't like to play rough sports---although JFK tried out for the Hah-vahd team, I understand.

Islam: "Religion of Peace" or a Terrorist Death Cult?

As a long-time student of the Middle East, I also happen to be a State Dept-trained Arabist who has lived in three Arab countries as Political Officer---Lebanon, Saudi Arabia & Yemen. Pakistan is not an Arab country, but its virulent brand of Islam is worse than the Salafist Wahhabism that keeps Saudi Arabia culturally and socially in the 16th century, AD.

The official murder sanctioned by the Pakistani government with no legal representation of this young woman demonstrates the barbarity of the entire country and the cowardice of the worst president in the history of the USA since Jimmy Carter---or maybe James Buchanan. Hillary Clinton, the laughable Secretary of State is worse than Warren Christopher or Madeleine Albright as a complete moral failure and diplomatic featherweight when it comes to representing American values in the international arena.

I personally made over a dozen business trips to Pakistan in the 1980s and was a personal friend of Arnie Raphel, our US Ambassador murdered there by terrorists, or perhaps murdered by ISI, since President Zia Al-Haqq was also killed in the plane that blew up in mid-air just after picking up a huge load of mangoes [yes, MANGOES!] from Multan, which I can assert grows the tastiest in the world. ISI is a terrorist organization that makes the CIA look like a finishing school and the KGB like a goodwill organization. ISI's terrorist cadres are fighting America and aiding Al Qaeda and are also responsible for the Mumbai massacre almost two years ago. The Paks are accomplished liars as well as specimens of canine breeding and porcine hygiene---Founding President Jinnah used to enjoy eating pork and bacon, just to demonstrate the essential hypocrisy and fraudulent fake religiosity of this collection of human riff-raff. I say open our country to non-Muslim Indians and throw out the Paki imbeciles and morons who have sneaked into the USA.

I say this even though I still have my honorary marshal's badge for Pakistan Day in New York City back in the mid-'80s. I was working for Denis Neal and Charlie Wilson back then as well, and met a lot of Pakis---even gave a speech to their political PAC convocation at the Commodore Hotel in New York City in 1986.

I had the opportunity to have a half-hour interview with the number two ISI Chief at the time and it didn't go very well. He was a brutish specimen of nasty arrogance. I've been in every part of Pakistan except the Beluchi part and it is a beautiful country, but is now governed by terrorists and an Army riddled by corruption, treason, & hatred for the USA.

Despite the sacrifices of our brave fighting men, my firmest hope is that the USA let the Taliban take over Afghanistan & Pakistan, so we and India can nuke the sh*t out of these two Islamic hellholes. Ditto for Iran. I also happen to be a State Dept trained Arabist who has lived in three Arab countries---the Pakistanis also persecute what they consider heretical types of Sunni Islam and the Shi'ites as well---however, as they are both terrorist states, the Paks get along well officially with Iran.

Sadly, the PRC is the true friend of Pakistan & got the stealth helicopter parts left behind in the killing of POS Osama bin Laden. Pakistan isn't worth one US life and represents Islam at its worst. A sort of Fareed Zakaria as if he were a country----full of lies, BS, and treachery.
UPDATE Admiral Mullen met with the chief Pakistani about the Haqqani network being run out of ISI which is killing Americans in Kabul and Afghanistan & Indians in Mumbai. I doubt if he'll get anything but the usual lies or defiance by the specimen of murderous thug he's meeting with.

Obama "Jobs" Bill Helps Unions, Blue States in Deep Debt

Obama's RICO scheme aims to give the lion's share of all monies from his "Jobs" bill to blue states.

Last Thursday, the president urged Congress to pony up roughly $200 billion in taxpayer money to "provide more jobs for teachers [and] more jobs for construction workers" and more money to carry out other state and local activities. He urges Congress to spend this money even after handing out hundreds of billions of dollars for similar purposes as part of the 2009 stimulus package, as well as a score and more billion dollars again in 2010.

These vast contributions to the coffers of state and local governments, though pitched as a jobs bill, are in reality the latest in a series of bailouts for debt-ridden state and local governments. They are of special benefit to states in the blue regions of the country where the president's most fervent supporters reside.

In many blue states, legislators have copied the politicians in Washington by running up state debts to extraordinary levels. Nationwide, state debt is running around $3 trillion. If unfunded pension liabilities are factored in, estimated liabilities leap forward by another $1 trillion to $3 trillion, depending on the optimism of the assumptions made.

The crook in the Oval Office is scaring the bond markets....

The bond market has taken notice. Before the 2008 financial crisis, state sovereign debt was just about the safest place to invest. Because investors did not pay taxes on the interest, states were able to borrow money at rates below those paid for federal securities. With the onset of the financial crisis, not only did borrowing costs rise across the board, but differences in interest rates among states widened dramatically. Bond holders concluded that some states, like Greece, had been extraordinarily profligate and, even worse, lacked the will to rein in their expenditures.

In a new study at Harvard's Program on Education Policy and Governance, we discovered why the Obama administration is so interested in helping out the states. States with a bluish hue—that is, states with legislatures that are heavily Democratic and have a highly unionized public-sector work force—must pay interest rates that are often an extra half a percentage point higher than states with a reddish coloring.

Specifically, a 20 percentage-point increment in either the Democratic share of the state legislature or a comparable increase in the share of the public work force that is unionized drives up interest rates by nearly a half a percentage point on a five-year security note. That amount is nontrivial. In Obama's home state of Illinois, it is costing governments over $700 million annually.

The impact of these political factors on interest rates is in addition to the impact of standard economic factors, such as a state's unemployment rate, its gross domestic product growth, and its debt-to-GDP ratio, all of which are themselves shaped in part by the state's political climate.

In short, the bond market has concluded that the more unionized the state and the bluer its political coloring, the riskier it is to hold bonds marketed by that state.

Why doesn't this pimp just stand out under a street light and attract suckers to his sick economic policies?

When it comes to fiscal sovereignty, U.S. federalism is exceptional. Hardly any other country in the world has anything like it. Only Switzerland and Canada—two nations that aren't doing that badly these days—come close.

But federal fiscal bailouts put our federal system at risk. In essence, the national government is acting as if states are too big to fail. In the next financial crisis, the federal government may decide that states need to be treated like General Motors or, at least, be given ever bigger handouts of the kind the Obama administration seems committed to making.

But if the federal government is going to tacitly assume responsibility for state debts, then those $3 trillion in sovereign state debt must be added to the $14 trillion national debt that has already caused grave concern, pushing the current U.S. debt into the danger zone. Even if pension liabilities are ignored, the combined federal-state-local debt runs in excess of 120% of GDP.

The costs go beyond dollars and cents. The more often the federal government bails out the states, the more Washington bureaucrats will insist on regulating state and local affairs. At some point the United States will see the end of state fiscal sovereignty and the demise our federal system of government.

The Supreme Court should stop this cat burglar from ruining the rest of our economy by dragging profligate states like
California, New York & Illinois plus a few other red-light districts into his destruction of the American Way of Life.

Even repeat-cheat CBS has O'Bozo at 43% Approval

CBS News habitually has more Dems than independents or Republicans in its horribly-biased polls, so this is actually newsworthy only because it's the first time ever their silly polling unit has ever admitted the man-child is dumber than dirt [or that's what I infer from the numbers.]

Wonder what the PPP Jensen Poll, owned & run by the DNC, is going to come out with.

Gallup and other halfway-decent polls have Obummer's economic numbers at around 30% approval. The Dems should ask Hillarious to step up to the plate---Barry Soetero or whoever he is appears to be toasting quite nicely in the national kitchen.

Changelessly Hopeless

CNBC has this about "Hope for Future?":

Americans remained gloomy about the future with a gauge of expectations falling to the lowest level since 1980, a survey released Friday showed.

Read the entire article, but I believe Sarah Palin's immortal "How's that hopey-changey thing workin' out for you?" is the appropriate insertion of just how disillusioned the USA is with this failed "community organizer."

D-bag historian Simon Shama tells libtard-C-in-C Charlie Rose that the NYT editorial page continues to be "brilliant." Maybe Shama should put on some tinted glasses or do something or perhaps drop that "a" from the end of his name to clarify his ethical and moral stature.

Perry has Love of Politics in his Veins---Rich Lowry

Lame-duck Obummer had better watch out---and Mitt Romney had better get a personality, because Gov. Perry has just ridden into town and he ain't taking prisoners....

Even during the debates, where his performances have been uneven, Perry has usually been loose and confident. He never shies from a fight, and (most of the time) seems to enjoy them. He laughs easily. No one would vote to elect him to the Oxford Union, but if it somehow happened, he’d have a heck of a time exchanging frank views with “the fellas.”

What we’re about to see is if these qualities of Perry — call it his “hossness” — are enough for him to become the durable frontrunner in the Republican-nomination fight. He can go a long way just by demonstrating he’s a fighter in the mold of a Sarah Palin or a Donald Trump. That means making the occasional incendiary comment, never apologizing, earning the hatred of the elites, and not sweating the details. All of this, Perry has nailed.

But to become president of the United States, he’ll have to reach persuadables who don’t value outrageousness for its own sake. If he’s never willing to back down, he’ll have to go — should he win the nomination — all the way to November 2012 defending the notion that Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke is possibly guilty of treason. On Social Security, he’s managed to take what turns out to be his thoroughly conventional Republican view that the program should stay the same for seniors and near-retirees while it’s reformed for younger people and make it radioactive through his choice of words and his theoretical musings. His campaign so far has no policy except generalized statements celebrating Texas and condemning the federal government.

Tellingly, his weakest moments in the debates have come when he’s been attacked from the right and can’t fight back with brassy, crowd-pleasing one-liners. He’s made uncomfortable by his streak of pragmatism as Texas governor. For all his self-portrayal as an anti-government purist, he’s adept at marshaling and using power. When he says he’s pro-business, he’s not kidding. Republicans will have to quickly drop the phrase “crony capitalism” from their vocabulary if he’s the nominee.

In this year of populist discontent, the blunt outsider Rick Perry has a natural call on the Republican heart. The question is whether he can maintain enough appeal over time to the Republican mind, which will eventually calculate the odds of a prospective nominee vanquishing the incumbent. Whether Perry makes it or not, he’ll never be dull. If success were solely a matter of animal spirits, he’d be a lead-pipe cinch.

Of course, how his tougher than nails and nasty in-your-face persona plays with the independents is the key. And he doesn't look like he wants to pussyfoot and play pattycake with the meth-NBC crew of pirate bolshies.

Eurozone May be Saved by Dallar's Liquidity

Dollar Rides to the Rescue is the gist of a Wall Street Journal article replete with ironies that even the dumbest Euroweenies can't miss. But the whining from the Eurosnobs in Frogland didn't stop there---

The central-bank move is a de facto admission that dollar funding has been drying up for many European banks. We warned on June 27 ("Money-Market Mayhem") about the dangers to U.S. money funds from their lending to banks heavily invested in Greek and other sovereign debt. The money-fund lobby said we were exaggerating, but the funds have since cut their lending dramatically. This is prudent, since the world doesn't need a repeat of 2008 when a U.S. money fund broke its $1 net asset value.

The problem is that this withdrawal by money funds reduces the options for European banks to finance their dollar-lending operations. Moody's downgraded two of the three biggest French banks on Wednesday, citing liquidity and short-term funding needs. The CEO of Societe Generale—one of the downgraded banks, with Credit Agricole—said his bank was "adjusting to the reduction in the money-market fund exposure."

It gets funnier still when the ENArch fuddy-duddies sniffed yesterday at the WSJ for daring to publish a piece by a French banker about their shortcomings.

We [at the WSJ] received our own immersion in the issue this week after we published an op-ed Tuesday by contributor Nicolas Lecaussin quoting an unnamed executive from BNP Paribas as saying the bank had lost its access to dollar funding. BNP immediately said it was "fully able to obtain USD funding in the normal course of business, either directly or through swaps." It also acknowledged a "reduction and shortening of resources" from U.S. money funds.

In its official statement, BNP Paribas said only that its borrowing from U.S. money funds had recently declined to €36 billion outstanding from €46 billion, so we asked the bank to support its claim that it was "fully able" to meet its dollar needs. BNP's treasurer, Michel Eydoux, elaborated in an interview that "some of the money market funds have not renewed" their loans and others are of shorter maturities—generally one month instead of three to 12 months previously.

He said BNP is thus relying more on foreign-exchange swap contracts for its dollar needs. The counterparties to these swaps are, according to Mr. Eydoux, "banks and corporations who want the same maturities" that BNP is seeking and can no longer obtain from the money markets. The bank is also trying to expand its dollar deposit base among corporations and governments in Asia and Middle East that need someplace to keep their dollars.

Much to our surprise, BNP Paribas also requested that the French equivalent of the SEC, the Autorité des Marchés Financiers, "open an investigation into the publication of erroneous information about its funding in dollars in an article in the Opinions section of the Wall Street Journal."

The AMF is "tasked with safeguarding investments and maintaining orderly financial markets in France" and it can also conduct investigations, although by its own account its jurisdiction does not normally extend to the press. An official at the AMF declined to say how often newspaper articles lead to investigations.

Meanwhile, a senior French government official called us "as a reader," he said, to express his shock that we had published Mr. Lecaussin's op-ed. The article, he said, "was quite damaging to this bank and to French banks generally." At least he conceded that perhaps he was "abusing his position" as a top government official to express his displeasure.

We certainly hope the French government and BNP intention isn't to shut down reporting on French bank problems. We can't imagine, say, White House chief of staff Bill Daley calling us about a story on Bank of America, or BofA siccing the SEC on us. Relations between banks and the government are closer in France than they are in the U.S., but we'd have thought French politicians had enough problems without picking a fight over press freedom.

All the more so because we're far from the only messengers. In a report last week, JP Morgan analysts argued that French banks as a group had one of the lowest ratios of highly liquid assets to short-term funding needs in Europe. JP Morgan pegged BNP's so-called liquidity-coverage ratio at 70%. When asked about that figure, one BNP official sputtered that JP Morgan's own coverage ratio was only 52%. Under the Basel III international banking standards, banks are required to achieve a 100% liquidity-coverage ratio by 2015.

The funding status of French banks is news because fears of 2008 are still fresh and Europe's woes could spill into U.S. banks and the larger world financial system. Europe's banks have done far less than American banks since 2008 to strengthen their capital base, own up to their bad assets, and generally clean up their act. Until they do, the world's lenders will treat them with well-deserved wariness.

Ca alors! Qu'est-ce qui se passe? On ose mentionner que les enarques sont des imbeciles dans l'Haute Politique & concernant des affaire foncieres? Que les sales 'ricans et leurs dollars .......!

Nobel Physics Laureate Resigns APS over AGW Hoax

Pope Pius IX caused a furor in 1870 when he declared that any Catholic dogma proclaimed by the Pope is "infallible," if he speaks ex cathedra.Read the linked story on how and why a Renssalaer Professor who won his Nobel in 1973 disagrees that

the theory that man's actions have inexorably led to the warming of the planet, through increased emissions of carbon dioxide.

Fox News and Climate Depot have stories on how the Anthropogenic Global Warming Hoax is being discredited as an example of "Cargo Cult Science" of the type Richard Feynman warned about in his famous CalTech 1974 commencement address .

Pinball Wizard Starts to lose his touch?

Che Lives in My Oval Office in Spirit and in my Bolshie Policies

Bob Turner defeated a liberal Demonrat named Weprin who was a State Assemblyman in the Weinergate run-off special election, showing GOP strength in a district that had NEVER elected a Republican---although its Catholic & Orthodox Jewish constituencies are more conservative than most of Brooklyn/Queens bolshie netherlands.....

I just can't wait for the WH comment tomorrow or how the mentally-retarded Baghdad Bobs of the liberal Demonrat commentariat are going to try this electoral catastrophe for their socialist policies go away. The upstate victory last Spring after a GOP moron showed his six-pack abs in the mirror for admiration on Craigslist was of a mediocre GOP female by a highly-funded and supported Demonrat RICO conspiracy. This GOP victory in the heart of the Bolshevik archipelago is something else.

My guess is that deaf, dumb and blind kid [or shall we say man-child?] in the Oval Office won't even acknowledge that he is swirling slowly downward in the porcelain bowl towards his true cloacal home---the sewer of community organizing and agitpreppie BS which spawned him in the first place!
UPDATE
Debbie Wasserman-Schmuck and the compulsive motor-mouth Upchuck Shumer, now a US Senator, will have a difficult time explaining how Shumer's old CD where he served as a Congressman [when I met and talked with him---or rather he bragged at me that he was the first Jew on Harvard's basketball team---at a Sag Harbor cocktail confab with Betty Friedan, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. & a bunch of other "social elite" stroking each other's egos]. By coincidence, this seat has not been GOP since 1920 and was also the springboard for Geraldine Ferraro's career. I just can't wait to hear the agitpreppies try to spin this catastrophe into some sort of Demonrat victory....!!!

ft's Wolfgang Munchau on Bad Times ahead for Eurozone

FT's Munchau and Martin Wolf are two of the best FT writers. Here's the two opening paras on WM's take on the near future:

The two real options for a resolution of the eurozone crisis came into full conflict last week. The first is a common eurozone bond. The second is a monetisation of national debt through the European Central Bank. Angela Merkel rejects the former. Europe’s central bankers reject the latter. Jürgen Stark, a member of the European Central Bank’s executive board, rejects both, and last week resigned in protest. Along with other conservative economists, he is advocating a third way, adjustment through depression – the simultaneous deleveraging of the private and public sector debt.
As an advocate of eurozone bonds, I have to admit their prospect looks grim after last week’s ruling of the German constitutional court. The court upheld the European financial adjustment facility, the crisis mechanism. This was, undoubtedly, good news. But after I read the whole ruling, which ran to 29 tightly written pages, I realised that this judgement was not a victory for the eurozone at all. On the contrary, it categorically rules out any policy option beyond what has been agreed so far. I cannot see how it can be consistent with the survival of the eurozone, given the policies of member states and the ECB.

Bismarck famously pronounced that "God has a special providence for drunks, idiots, children and the United States of America." Once again, no matter how badly things go in our own land of the free, the land Euroweenies despise and Muslims in Grovesnor Square hate BECAUSE of our democratic freedoms, we are lucking out, even if it is through Bernanke's sneaky "quantitative easing."

The FT is a beast on copyright infringement, so read the rest of the article and find out why Europe has EVEN harder times ahead than the USA. The good news, the USA might be able to slough off the -power-drunk idiot man-child now living in the White House. Ain't it great that God's "SPECIAL PROVIDENCE" Bismarck spoke of prioritizes the USA before drunks, idiots and children?

Obama Value Meal: You order a couple of burgers & fries & drinks---The guy behind you pays for it!

Michael Barone expands a bit on the Conan O'Brien joke in the headline:

What is there to say about Barack Obama's speech to Congress Thursday night and the so-called American Jobs Act he said Congress must pass? Several thoughts occur, all starting with P.

Projection. That's psychologist-speak term for projecting your own faults on others. "This isn't political grandstanding," Obama told members of Congress, as Republicans snickered (but thankfully resisted the temptation to shout, "You lie!"). "This isn't class warfare."

These sentences came four paragraphs after Obama insisted that "the most affluent citizens and corporations" should pay more taxes (which spurs job creation how?) and not long before he promised to "take that message to every corner of the country."

Lest there be any doubt about Obama's real intentions, consider that his speech was obviously modeled on Harry Truman's call for a special session of the Republican Congress in the summer of 1948 so he could campaign against it. And consider that Obama pointedly refused to rebuke Jim Hoffa's "let's take these sons of bitches out" -- meaning Republicans -- when he introduced him last Monday in Detroit.

Pragmatism. Perceptive writers like David Brooks of the New York Times told us in 2008 that Obama was basically a pragmatist, a slave to no ideology but simply a student of what works. Brooks was apparently impressed by Obama's mention of Edmund Burke and the sharp crease in his pants.

But a pragmatist would probably not choose to call for more of the policies that plainly haven't worked. Infrastructure spending (shovel ready, anyone?), subsidies of teachers' salaries, fixing roofs and windows on schools: These were all in the 2009 stimulus package, which has led to the stagnant economy we have today.

A pragmatist doesn't keep pressing the same garage door button when the garage door doesn't open. He gets out of the car and tries to identify what's wrong.

Paid for. "Everything in this bill," Obama said in his eighth paragraph, "will be paid for. Everything."

By whom? Well, in the 24th paragraph he tells us that he is asking the 12-member supercommittee Congress set up under the debt ceiling bill to add another $450,000,000,000 or so to the $1,500,000,000,000 in savings it is charged to come up with. The roving camera showed the ordinarily hardy supercommittee member Sen. Jon Kyl looking queasy.

Obama is like the guy in the bar who says, "I'll stand drinks for everyone in the house," and then adds, "Those guys over there are going to pay for them."

What's fascinating here is that once again the supposedly pragmatic and sometimes professorial president is not making use of the first class professionals in the Office of Management and Budget to come up with specifics, but is leaving that to members of Congress, maybe in a midnight marathon session with deadlines pending. Same as on the stimulus package and Obamacare.

Pathetic promises. Perhaps he hoped people wouldn't notice, but Obama did put in two words -- "faster trains" -- as a plug for his pet project of high-speed rail. Liberal blogger Kevin Drum calls California's HSR project, the largest in the nation, "a fantastic boondoggle," likely to cost three or four times estimates and with ridership estimates that are "fantasies." "We have way better uses for this dough," Drum concludes.

Political payoffs. Nearly one-quarter of this latest stimulus package -- sorry, American Jobs Act -- is aid to state and local government, to keep teachers and other public employee union members on the job and paying dues to the unions. Altogether unions gave Democrats some $400 million in the 2008 election cycle. Pretty good return on their "investment," eh?

Pettifoggery. Obama impressed many conservative writers in 2008 with his ability to state their positions in fair terms -- which led some to think that surely he must agree with them. But he seems to have lost this knack.

Conservatives, according to this speech, want to "wipe out the basic protections that Americans have counted on for decades" and "simply cut most government spending and eliminate most government regulations."

"Most" means more than 50 percent. Does the White House have documentation for the claim that Republicans want to cut government spending by more than 50 percent? And what "basic protections" do they want to "wipe out"?

Obama seemed like an unhappy warrior Thursday night, still unreconciled to the results of the 2010 elections, "seeming desperate and condescending at the same time," in the words of maverick liberal blogger Mickey Kaus. That darn garage door just won't open!

Mark Steyn on The Post-Postmodern 9/11 Contextualization Frenzy

Mark was born in Belgium and that alone explains how he understands a post-postmodern mentality. In the Nati0onal Review, he shows how living in Australia, then Canada, and finally New Hampshire has given him the most "diverse" POV possible. The whole article is rife with the insanity promulgated by NPR, PBS, "artistes" and bien-pensant victims of their own chronic serial brainfarts. Here is a small sample, but read the entire piece entitled "Let's Roll Over":

We retreat to equivocation, cultural self-loathing, and utterly fraudulent misrepresentation of 9/11.

Waiting to be interviewed on the radio the other day, I found myself on hold listening to a public-service message exhorting listeners to go to 911day.org and tell their fellow citizens how they would be observing the tenth anniversary of the, ah, “tragic events.” There followed a sound bite of a lady explaining that she would be paying tribute by going and cleaning up an area of the beach.

Great! Who could object to that? Anything else? Well, another lady pledged that she “will continue to discuss anti-bullying tactics with my grandson.”

Marvelous. Because studies show that many middle-school bullies graduate to hijacking passenger jets and flying them into tall buildings?
Whoa, ease up on the old judgmentalism there, pal. In New Jersey, many of whose residents were among the dead, middle-schoolers will mark the anniversary with a special 9/11 curriculum that will “analyze diversity and prejudice in U.S. history.” And, if the “9/11 Peace Story Quilt” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art teaches us anything, it’s that the “tragic events” only underline the “importance of respect.” And “understanding.” As one of the quilt panels puts it:

You should never feel left out

You are a piece of a puzzle

And without you

The whole picture can’t be seen

.

And if that message of “healing and unity” doesn’t sum up what happened on Sept. 11, 2001, what does? A painting of a plane flying into a building? A sculpture of bodies falling from a skyscraper? Oh, don’t be so drearily literal. “It is still too soon,” says Midori Yashimoto, director of the New Jersey City University Visual Arts Gallery, whose exhibition “Afterwards & Forward” is intended to “promote dialogue, deeper reflection, meditation, and contextualization.” So, instead of planes and skyscrapers, it has Yoko Ono’s “Wish Tree,” on which you can hang little tags with your ideas for world peace.

Mark sets us up for a condemnation of the nanny or is it ninny who masquerades in a transvestite mode as Mayor of NYC. The egregious Bloomberg has made the ultimate fool of himself, though you won't know that by listening to girly-men like Fareed Zakaria and even that doughty isolationist Pat Buchanan, who really don't know what IS missing from the ten-year anniversary:

What’s missing from these commemorations?
Firemen?

Oh, please. There are some pieces of the puzzle we have to leave out. As Mayor Bloomberg’s office has patiently explained, there’s “not enough room” at the official Ground Zero commemoration to accommodate any firemen. “Which is kind of weird,” wrote the Canadian blogger Kathy Shaidle, “since 343 of them managed to fit into the exact same space ten years ago.” On a day when all the fancypants money-no-object federal acronyms comprehensively failed — CIA, FBI, FAA, INS — the only bit of government that worked was the low-level unglamorous municipal government represented by the Fire Department of New York. When they arrived at the World Trade Center the air was thick with falling bodies — ordinary men and women trapped on high floors above where the planes had hit, who chose to spend their last seconds in one last gulp of open air rather than die in an inferno of jet fuel. Far “too soon” for any of that at New Jersey City University, but perhaps you could reenact the moment by filling out a peace tag for Yoko Ono’s “Wish Tree” and then letting it flutter to the ground.

Upon arrival at the foot of the towers, two firemen were hit by falling bodies. “There is no other way to put it,” one of their colleagues explained. “They exploded.”

Any room for that on the Metropolitan Museum’s “Peace Quilt”? Sadly not. We’re all out of squares.

What else is missing from these commemorations?

“Let’s Roll”?

This quote is from a Mr. Beamer who led the charge to the cockpit of Flight 93 to prevent the aircraft from crashing into either the US Capitol Bldg or the White House, and demonstrated that America still has REAL MALE GONADS among the sissified old biddies teaching their grandchildren anti-bullying happy horseshit. Mark answers his own question with the irony that is the only reaction to the vapid silliness that the NPRs of the Anglo-Saxon world are subsidized by cowards and LGBTs to propagate.

What’s that — a quilting technique?

No, what’s missing from these commemorations is more Muslims. The other day I bumped into an old BBC pal who’s flying in for the anniversary to file a dispatch on why you see fewer women on the streets of New York wearing niqabs and burqas than you do on the streets of London. She thought this was a telling indictment of the post-9/11 climate of “Islamophobia.” I pointed out that, due to basic differences in immigration sources, there are far fewer Muslims in New York than in London. It would be like me flying into Stratford-on-Avon and reporting on the lack of Hispanics. But the suits had already approved the trip, so she was in no mood to call it off.

Of course, anyone who follows the BBC, which has completely morphed since I used to listen to it broadcasting from Cyprus forty years ago when I lived in Beirut. Back then, it was the only voice of sanity in a region full of whack-jobs. Now the BBC has morphed into a menagerie of moronic mindlessness---suitable for a nation like the UK which cannot stop Muslims from rioting and taking over whole parts of the capitol city of London, which mindless pussy-behavior will probably NOT prevent Old London Towne from being viciously attacked by Islamic goons, thugs and murderous morons much like America is being attacked by SEIU foreign-born union members attacking REAL Americans for standing by their constitutional rights.

Here are some more examples of the arrant stupidity of people in Canada, Australia [the Land of Oz is full of flying monkeys, mostly sitting on court benches as judges], and other "allies" who fear being mean to Muslims:

How are America’s allies remembering the real victims of 9/11? “Muslim Canucks Deal with Stereotypes Ten Years After 9/11,” reports CTV in Canada. And it’s a short step from stereotyping to criminalizing. “How the Fear of Being Criminalized Has Forced Muslims into Silence,” reports the Guardian in Britain. In Australia, a Muslim terrorism suspect was so fearful of being criminalized and stereotyped in the post-9/11 epidemic of paranoia that he pulled a Browning pistol out of his pants and hit Sgt. Adam Wolsey of the Sydney constabulary. Fortunately, Judge Leonie Flannery acquitted him of shooting with intent to harm on the grounds that “‘anti-Muslim sentiment’ made him fear for his safety,” as Sydney’s Daily Telegraph reported on Friday. That’s such a heartwarming story for this 9/11 anniversary they should add an extra panel to the peace quilt, perhaps showing a terror suspect opening fire on a judge as she’s pronouncing him not guilty and then shrugging off the light shoulder wound as a useful exercise in healing and unity.

Judge Flannery might just be another Irish drunk [I'm Irish, so I know the type] whose judgment has been fatally impaired by all sorts of liquid or pharmaceutical swallowings. But let's get back to real heroes [Todd Beamer] and really craven cowardly half-witted imbeciles [Mayor Bloomberg]:

What of the 23rd Psalm? It was recited by Flight 93 passenger Todd Beamer and the telephone operator Lisa Jefferson in the final moments of his life before he cried, “Let’s roll!” and rushed the hijackers.
No, sorry. Aside from firemen, Mayor Bloomberg’s official commemoration hasn’t got any room for clergy, either, what with all the Executive Deputy Assistant Directors of Healing and Outreach who’ll be there. One reason why there’s so little room at Ground Zero is because it’s still a building site. As I write in my new book, 9/11 was something America’s enemies did to us; the ten-year hole is something we did to ourselves — and in its way, the interminable bureaucratic sloth is surely as eloquent as anything Nanny Bloomberg will say in his remarks.

In Shanksville, Pa., the zoning and permitting processes are presumably less arthritic than in Lower Manhattan, but the Flight 93 memorial has still not been completed. There were objections to the proposed “Crescent of Embrace” on the grounds that it looked like an Islamic crescent pointing towards Mecca. The defense of its designers was that, au contraire, it’s just the usual touchy-feely huggy-weepy pansy-wimpy multiculti effete healing diversity mush. It doesn’t really matter which of these interpretations is correct, since neither of them has anything to do with what the passengers of Flight 93 actually did a decade ago. 9/11 was both Pearl Harbor and the Doolittle Raid rolled into one, and the fourth flight was the only good news of the day, when citizen volunteers formed themselves into an ad hoc militia and denied Osama bin Laden what might have been his most spectacular victory. A few brave individuals figured out what was going on and pushed back within half an hour. But we can’t memorialize their sacrifice within a decade. And when the architect gets the memorial brief, he naturally assumes that there’s been a typing error and that “Let’s roll!” should really be “Let’s roll over!”

Sometimes it takes a foreigner to judge a culture best---the guy from Belgium/Australia/'Canada can now sit in N.H. and see us for what we have become---a nation with an armed forces that refuses to admit that a Major Mohammed in Fort Bliss wasn't an Islamic firebrand, but only felt left out because nobody, like Priya's pitiful Indian brother on The Big Bang Theory, would date this pitiful pile of stinking moral toxic sewage. Mark Steyn is the antidote to stinking piles of toxic waste like Fareed Zakaria or Chriastiane Amanpour, who hate America because it is great and strong and they come from cultures full of moral lepers......
Mark ends up with a coda castigating the bureaucratic lassitude and litigious lunacy that makes America into a dying flame, despite the Todd Beamers and millions of REAL AMERICANS in this country worthy of our respect. Mark talks some final smack about the pussy-brained fraudulent public office-holders who shrink from representing America as the most dynamic and influential culture in the last two-hundred years----no matter what Euroweenies have been whining about endlessly in their feminized loo-zer mentality:

And so we commemorate an act of war as a “tragic event,” and we retreat to equivocation, cultural self-loathing, and utterly fraudulent misrepresentation about the events of the day. In the weeks after 9/11, Americans were enjoined to ask, “Why do they hate us?” A better question is: “Why do they despise us?” And the quickest way to figure out the answer is to visit the Peace Quilt and the Wish Tree, the Crescent of Embrace and the Hole of Bureaucratic Inertia.

Ayman al-Zawahri Ordered Attacks Against USA On 9/11 Anniversary To Avenge Bin Laden

This twisted psychotic actually trained as a medical doctor until he switched in mid-life from saving lives to taking them---as many as possible. Dr. Al-Zawahir­i is actually a sort of proactive Dr. Kevorkian and represents a very large swathe of what in the Muslim world passes for "poltical thinking." I'm hoping one of our drones can find this specimen of updated-SS Hauptfuhre­r and send him to the flames of his final destinatio­n with no detour toward 72 Virgins or any other stop on his downward spiral into eternal torment.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Packer/Saints Game Biggest Primetime NFL TV Game since Last Century!!!

The Hollywood Reporter demonstrated afain the popularity of pro football in the Americaqn pantheon of pastimes.

Over 25 million Americns watched the game & Thursday nite, 18 million watched the musical inauguration of the season.

Attempts by the statist mafiosi to hamper and hamstring the game are doomed, as are other elements of their feminizing agenda.

This February's Super Bowl drew 120 million viewers, most EVER for any TV broadcast about anything===and 165 million reportedly stayed watching to boost the Super Bowl Packer victory as THE MOST WATCHED EVENT LIVE IN US TV HISTORY......!!!!!!l
UPDATE TV by the Numbers has the latest stats [27.2 million viewers] & it appears the NFL is getting more popular every year.

Interesting contrast: O'Bozo had around 31 million libtards watching this moronic finger-wagging dunce yelling "pass this bill now...." while White House aides admitted that the bill in its final form won't be ready to pass for at least a week or maybe more.

I don't know whether the Keystone Kops or the Three Stooges would even accept a dunce as dumb as Obungler if he can keep repeating he wants the bill passed "now" when it'll take another week to lick into shape.

Sorta reminds you of the Botox Queen telling us peons that "you'll know what's in the bill after we pass it."

Remember when O'Bozo promised to have the most "transparent" administration in US history? I guess that meant that you can look in one of those oversized ears and see daylight right through on the other side...!

Thirty-one million on eleven cable and network channels versus 27.2 on NBC all by itself. Kinda tells everybody except the hopeless libtards just how credible the First Dunce is in the eyes of the American people.

Judith Miller on the NYPD's Counterterrorism Successes

Judith Miller is a very strange and brilliant reporter whom I have met several times, always overseas and during the period when she was the chief NYT reporter/analyst for the Middle East. I even met her parents whom she was dining with during the World Economic Forum's meeting in Casablanca in 1995. Her book God Has Ninety-Nine Names: Reporting from a Militant Middle East is a useful tour d'horizon of the region in the mid-'90s. Her famous "free speech" jailing brought her front and center to the nation's headlines over the infamous scapgegoating of Scooter Libby, whose arrest and conviction on a technicalities remain blots on the history of American law enforcement.

In today's edition of the Wall Street Journal, her wonderful analysis of the NYPD's record as the nation's premier counterintelligence organization, better than the factionalized FBI & CIA whose internecine strife has almost paralyzed their cooperation in protecting the country at home & abroad ever since the treasonous Jamie Gorelick instituted the infamous "Chinese Firewall" to hamper America's international efforts to combat and prevent terrorist acts at home & abroad;
A useful book to read in conjunction with the NYPD's efforts is Andy McCarthy's The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, a top federal prosecutor up until 2003 whose encyclopedic knowledge of the Mephisophelian transaction between the statists and Islamists undertaking a civilizational war on the US Constitution and our entire concept of the liberties enshrined in The Bill of Rights:

A specter has haunted the New York Police Department during this week's torrent of 10th anniversary commemorations of 9/11—the 13 terrorist plots against the city in the past decade that have failed or been thwarted thanks partly to NYPD counterterrorism efforts.

Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly and his 50,000-strong department know that the 9/11 gatherings are an occasion not only to reflect on that terrible day. They're also a prime target for al Qaeda and other Islamist extremists who long to convince the world, and perhaps themselves, that they're still capable of killing in the name of their perverse interpretation of Islam.

Commissioner Kelly allocates some $330 million of his $4.6 billion annual budget and 1,200 of his staff to counterterrorism. He and his staff, not surprisingly, spent the week bolstering security at the remembrance gatherings throughout the city. On Wednesday, he came to the Manhattan Institute to tout the NYPD's counterterrorism record and defend his department against press allegations that his intelligence division has been spying illegally on Muslims and infringing on their privacy and civil rights.

The Muslim Brotherhood's political and legal adjunct in the US, CAIR. has influence far beyond its limited membership. The old Comintern Left conspiracy against the USA & its national interests has now shifted loyalties to the Ikhwan or Muslim Brotherhood founded by Hassan al-Banna in the twenties along the lines of Jabotinsky's Likud and Mussolini's Fascists and Hitler's National Socialists. Hamas is the most "successful" of these organizations founded as offshoots of Al-Banna's Ikhwan, but CAIR is another group of fellow travellers in this seedy crowd. Judith Miller elaborates:

The police have to factor terrorism into "everything we do," Mr. Kelly said. If that means following leads that take NYPD undercover detectives into mosques, Islamic bookstores, Muslim student associations, cafes and nightclubs, so be it. Mr. Kelly vowed to continue stationing liaisons in 11 cities abroad to "ask the New York question"—much to the occasional chagrin of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the CIA.

It was an undercover officer in an Islamic bookstore who helped stop Shahawar Matin Siraj, a homegrown Muslim extremist and self-professed al Qaeda admirer, from bombing the Herald Square subway station during the 2004 Republican convention, Mr. Kelly said. Another undercover officer prevented homegrown terrorists Ahmed Ferhani, 26, and Mohamed Mamdouh, 20, from bombing a Manhattan synagogue and trying to "take out the entire building."

Would he continue sending NYPD officers across the Hudson into deepest, darkest New Jersey? Yes, he declared, if that was what was needed to keep tabs on the likes of Carlos Almonte and Mohammed Alessa—al Qaeda sympathizers arrested en route to Somalia at JFK Airport in 2010 "who were determined to receive terrorist training abroad only to return home to kill us here."

Michael Sheehan, a former NYPD deputy commissioner for counterterrorism, says that the NYPD has succeeded thanks to its collection and sharing of domestic and foreign intelligence through "humint" (human sources) and "sigint" (signals intelligence) such as electronic intercepts and the monitoring of Internet, cellphone and other communications. Tip-offs from concerned family or community members have also been vital.

The successes of the NYPD often fly under the radar of the sensationalist tabloids, or are forgotten after a day of blaring publicity which is the diverted to the NEXT BIG THING in our society of "divertissements." A singular success in NYPD's Sigint was the 2006 "Liquid Bomb Plot":

Sigint was key in disrupting at least two of the most serious al Qaeda plots targeting New York since 9/11: the 2006 "Liquid Bomb Plot," or "Operation Overt," in which 25 British citizens of Pakistani descent targeted some seven transatlantic commercial flights from London to North America; and Operation Highrise, an attempt to use suicide bombers to blow up New York City subways in 2009.

The homegrown Islamist in that plot was Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan immigrant with al Qaeda ties who grew up in New York City and staged his operation from there and Colorado. In Zazi's case, investigators say, officials were initially tipped off by the intercept of an email he sent from Colorado to an address in Pakistan that was associated with another group of terrorists who had been arrested earlier that year in Manchester, England.

The "link man," or coordinator in Pakistan, writes Mitchell D. Silber, director of Intelligence Analysis for the New York Police Department, in his forthcoming book, "The Al Qaeda Factor," was corresponding with operatives in three different al Qaeda plots. Zazi's New York subway plot took off only after he contacted the coordinator, identified only as "Ahmad," and informed him that the "wedding," or suicide operation, "was ready to proceed," writes Mr. Silber.

Miller lists more successes by Internet intercepts:

Another serious plot that was disrupted thanks to Internet intercepts was a 2006 scheme by Assem Hammoud, a 31-year-old Lebanese al Qaeda member, and several other still unnamed Islamists—all overseas—to flood Lower Manhattan by setting off explosives in the PATH railway tunnels under the Hudson River. While no arrests in America were made, several suspects have been detained in Lebanon and other Arab states.

Mr. Silber argues that humint has proven even more valuable than sigint in detecting and thwarting homegrown threats—the fastest-growing category of militant Islamist terror. This explains Mr. Kelly's determination to preserve the NYPD's vast intelligence capabilities, even if he's forced to scale back elsewhere in the department due to budget cuts.

With Osama bin Laden dead and al Qaeda under pressure, some terrorism experts argue, as does Peter Bergen, author of the book "The Longest War," that al Qaeda, or at least its "core," "no longer poses a national security threat" to America "that could result in a mass-casualty attack anywhere close to the scale of 9/11."

Mr. Kelly isn't buying it. He's fixated on the recent jump in homegrown extremist plots throughout the country—to 10 in 2009 and 12 in 2010 from four in 2007 and just one in 2005. The increase, says John Miller, a former deputy director for analysis for the Director of National Intelligence, is most likely due to the influence of Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-American cleric now hiding in Yemen whose stirring Internet sermons have inspired many of the would-be jihadis detained in recent plots.

Mr. Kelly also knows that in too many cases, New York has been lucky. Faisal Shazad, a middle-class Pakistani–American resident of Connecticut, failed last year to detonate a bomb in Times Square only because he received too little training in Pakistan.

Mr. Kelly calls the killing of bin Laden "success with complications." Those include the numerous references to New York found in his documents in Abbottabad, all of which suggest that bin Laden never abandoned his dream of striking the city again. The discovery on Thursday night of a specific and "credible" al Qaeda linked plot tied to the 9/11 commemorations suggests that Mr. Kelly's concern is justified.

Vigilance by the NYPD and thoughtful and alert political actors like Raymond Kelly are necessary to continue the combination of luck [the Pakistani schmuck was caught in a First Class seat moments before takeoff when his Times Square SUV failed to explode on cue] and applied skill sets hard-won in the fight on terror over the last several decades are required to head off Awlaki in Sana'a and the Fifth Column outlined by Andy McCarthy in The Grand Jihad.