Dog of an Arab Hasan Showed Many Signs of Treason

Traitor Dog of an Arab

The human piece of sh*t called bowwow Hasan who killed 13 soldiers in Ft. Hood was the subject of

A Pentagon review released Friday portrayed a systemic breakdown within the military that permitted an Army psychiatrist, now charged with killing 13 people, to advance through the ranks despite concerns from his superiors about his behavior.

The review, the first into the Nov. 5 shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Tex., concluded that the Department of Defense was poorly prepared to defend itself from internal threats well beyond the single case of the military doctor accused of the killings, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan.

The review’s findings, although they were focused only on the military and not on other agencies, are the latest signal that the government has not achieved the smooth communications and agility among intelligence agencies that has been sought since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, in comments about the review at a Pentagon news conference on Friday, said the Defense Department was still focused on fighting external threats and previous conflicts and had not paid enough attention to workplace violence and any “self-radicalization” within its ranks.

Sort of like when Janet from another Planet Napolitano said that everything had gone "smoothly" and that the system worked---is the Army as stupid and arrogant as Janet the Mutant? But wait, there's more!

A senior administration official, briefing reporters in a telephone conference call after the release of the report, described the shooting rampage as “an act of terrorism,” although the official provided no details and stopped short of saying that Major Hasan had been directed or inspired to act by any overseas militant groups. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity under the ground rules of the telephone call.

Starting in late 2008, American officials have said that Major Hasan wrote about 20 e-mail messages to a radical Yemeni-American cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, asking for guidance on religious obligations, including whether it would be justified for a Muslim American soldier to kill fellow soldiers.

A few of the e-mail messages, but not all, were intercepted and passed on to a Joint Terrorism Task Force, officials have said. But a Defense Department analyst examined them and decided the queries were part of Major Hasan’s research and warranted no further investigation.

What a wonderfully intuitive decision! I wonder if this analyst was a stupid female like Janet or Martha Coakley who knows better because, well, just because. Why not call this dog of an Arab in to ask him about the suspicious e-mails---20 are a lot and if this "analyst" had known who Awlaki was, implicated with two of the 9/11 bomber-dogs of Arab pedigree, perhaps he/she might have had a second thought, or even a first one. In fact,

Mr. Awlaki, who was born in the United States but now is in hiding in Yemen, has become an influential figure whose sermons, distributed from his popular Web site, encouraged violence to defend against what he described as attacks on Muslims. While he has not been charged for participating in any attack, his recordings and writings have been found in a dozen terrorism investigations in the United States, Canada and Britain. American intelligence officials believe he was in contact with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian accused of trying to bomb a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day.

In the months before the Fort Hood shootings, Major Hasan, 39, alarmed some colleagues by becoming increasingly outspoken against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, whose traumatized and injured veterans he was counseling. He became preoccupied with the conflict between the religious obligations of Muslims and the American military’s role in fighting in Muslim countries, but supervisors minimized the concerns

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Maybe next time these lifer nitwits in the Green Machine come across e-mails from Awlaki to US officers, they'll pay more attention. Or maybe those all-knowing "supervisors," now promoted to general officers [although I doubt it with G2 types] might agree with drunken Irish a**hole General Casey and be soooo scared that perhaps the US Army might succumb to a lesser amount of "diversity." Every army needs a few traitors, eh Casey, you rubbish brain!

“The challenge for the Department of Defense is to prepare more effectively for a constantly changing environment,” the report said. “The department’s security posture for tomorrow must be more agile and adaptive.”

The report recommends that the Pentagon work more closely with the F.B.I., which runs a terrorism task force jointly with other agencies. The task force uses investigators, analysts, linguists and others to review intelligence reports about possible links between troops and terrorist or extremist groups.

The report recommended that the Defense Department should devote the same commitment to protecting its personnel from internal threats as it does to protecting them from external dangers; develop guidance and awareness programs so that commanders can better identify risky behavior within the ranks; share information about potential internal threats across the military bureaucracy; and develop more sophisticated and agile responses to emergencies like the shooting at Fort Hood, in which 30 people were injured.......Mr. Gates said he was particularly concerned that the military does not seem to be alert to signs of radicalization in its own ranks, to be able to detect its symptoms or to understand its causes. Major Hasan’s commanders and supervisors, he suggested, may have lacked the clear authority or explicit channels for reporting any doubts they had about him. Indeed, troubling information about individuals is often withheld or filed discreetly away instead of being shared, he said.

Hasan was of Palestinian descent. One reason I no longer contribute to Middle East charities, although I speak and read Arabic at a high level, is that the Palestinians [Sirhan Sirhan] are a bunch of psychotic canines and rabid dogs. Especially the ones in Gaza.

Dalrymple on "The Best Nightmare on Earth."

After the Disaster

Haiti is a place, like many around the planet, that Dr. D knows rather well. He was a "Doctor Without Borders" before that organization came into existence for a UN organization and has seen humanity's nether parts from far too close.

By now it is a commonplace, a piece of received wisdom in every country, that the devastating consequences of the Haitian earthquake are not those of a natural disaster alone, but of a natural event interacting with extreme poverty. The causes of the poverty itself are a matter of deep ideological contention. What is beyond dispute is that so many buildings collapsed because they were so flimsily constructed in the first place.

That Haiti was a slow-moving disaster even before the earthquake was visible—obvious, in fact—from a height of 35,000 feet. When you flew from Santo Domingo to Port-au-Prince, the border was as clearly visible as on any map, a straight line drawn on the earth’s surface: on the Dominican side, verdant, on the Haitian side, brown, bare as a desert. It’s difficult to imagine now, but Haiti was once deeply forested; but 98 percent of the tree cover is gone, leaving eroded hillsides with gullies down which the rain torrentially washes whatever soil is left.

I watched a do-gooder falsification of history on PBS, where else?, last night which suggests that what happened to the Haitians since their 1804 independence was everybody else's fault, especially of course, the USA's. This is the standard Marxist trope propagated at the failing system of public institutions politely called "higher education" in this country, really a bunch of union and tenured crony-communists who never had a real job and who hope to seize more power to assuage their current impotence.

A Nigerian journalist once said of his country, “No known system of government works in Nigeria.” This is even truer of Haiti. It’s often claimed that Haiti’s desperate situation is the consequence of outside interference—principally American, of course—plus recurrent, often bizarre, dictatorship. But Haiti’s neighbor, the Dominican Republic, has suffered similar disadvantages; yet it prospers. Moreover, descriptions of Haiti after the American occupation of 1915 make clear that the country received many benefits from it, whatever the attendant humiliations. As with other forms of external help, however, the occupation’s benefits proved temporary and ultimately fruitless.

Nor does voluntary assistance seem to do much better. It’s estimated that 10,000 voluntary organizations operate in Haiti—one for every 800 residents—but the effect, globally speaking, has been minimal, whatever good work each organization does individually. The whole is less than the sum of its parts.

Disaster relief is, of course, something completely different. No one can remain unmoved by the pictures of Port-au-Prince after the earthquake (the situation outside the capital remains unknown, but one can imagine). Everything that can be done should be done: the financial resources necessary are, comparatively speaking, tiny.

But because of the very problems that contributed so much to the disaster in the first place—appalling infrastructure, absent administration—such relief will be difficult to provide efficiently, without the absurdities of supplies accumulating where they are not useful, and not reaching the places where they’re desperately needed. Terrible as the Haitian army was, and often harmful as its role was, its deliberate and total dissolution in 1994 may now be a severe handicap, an unintended consequence of a good intention.

And after the immediate crisis has passed, what? International administration? Restoration of national sovereignty under a government incapable of governing? More aid that results in little but corruption and infighting? Laissez-faire? The mind reels.

Dr. D has no solution because in the end, the only solution must come from the Haitians themselves. Their own society is the third most corrupt on the planet---the other two more corrupt are in sub-Saharan Africa---and it appears that the self-destructive system of "controle" only pauperizes the population even more tha before, if that is possible.

How Unions Run This ObamaCare Package of Bribes and Kickbacks

Rich Lowry writes an excellent description of the ultra-opaque goings-on behind Demo-rat doors as they craft a monstrosity that is 90% political and maybe 5% health specific, with 5% being reserved for Marxist theory put into practice.

The excise tax is supposed to be paid by evil insurers and employers. Except in this one case affecting their self-interest directly, the unions see through the fiction and understand that the tax will trickle down onto them. How disorienting to hear unions implicitly recognize that corporations ultimately don't pay taxes, their customers and employees do.

"While the excise tax is slated to be imposed on the insurers on so-called high cost plans, the tax will be passed on to enrollees in the form of higher premiums, co-pays or reduced benefits," a coalition of public-employee unions wrote congressional leaders. "Characterizing this tax proposal as a ‘Cadillac tax' is a misnomer. It hits the average blue collar and white collar employee."

The unions also bristled at a fairly typical trick of liberal taxation - bracket creep. The Cadillac tax affects few people when it begins in 2013. Since it's not indexed to account for the ever-rising expense of health care, though, it will catch more and more people over time.

This is why New York Times columnist Bob Herbert called it "a middle-class tax time bomb," and Nancy Pelosi made an oblique reference to Pres. Barack Obama breaking his promise not to increase taxes for anyone making less than $250,000 a year. Obama's support for the Cadillac tax not only violates that forlorn pledge, but directly contradicts one of his chief lines of attack against John McCain in the 2008 campaign.

McCain wanted to end the tax exemption for employer-provided insurance coverage and compensate people with a tax credit to buy their own plans, a systematic approach to controlling costs and increasing choice. Obama's plan will increase costs and reduce choice, but he needs $150 billion in revenue over ten years to try to make it look deficit-neutral, so he's - as he put it in his unrelenting anti-McCain ads - "taxing health benefits for the first time in history."

But pressure from the unions has now forced the White House to agree to raise the $23,000-per-household threshold of the tax slightly and - more importantly - exempt insurance plans that are the product of collective-bargaining agreements until 2018. This Labor Loophole stands in the finest tradition of the Louisiana Purchase and the Cornhusker Kickback. With no possible public-policy justification, it puts the awesome power to tax and spend at the service of nakedly political ends.

We know that Louisiana is a political swamp, a sort of Haiti with white people and the hooker masqerading as Senator will be re-elected. Nebraska is a different matter, and the loathesome hypocrite Ben Nelson will be sent packing in '12 when his inglorious term comes up for re-election.

But the Labor Unions have become an enormous RICO-style crime syndicate, along the lines of ACORN only with a hammerlock on the paychecks of the human robots who do the large corporate heavy lifting every day on assembly lines and long-haul distribution systems. They are the true suckers, because they can vote one way, but see their dues support invariably the Marxist candidate on the ticket.

Slow-boil Communism with a mission-creep long-term agenda---very insidious in a country built on fiscal years and quarterly reports, on which its prosperity rises or falls. Lowry closes the argument he makes with pungent force.

Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said that taxes are the price of civilization. In this case, taxes are the price of not belonging to a group that pours countless millions of dollars into the Democratic coffers. Under the Cadillac tax, there's one set of rules for the Service Employees International Union and another for everyone else.

Obama is currently haranguing the banks so he doesn't get pegged as a "Wall Street Liberal." The more dangerous rubric for him is a "Washington Liberal," a politician knee-deep in the special-interest politics of the Beltway as he pushes an unpopular agenda of rapid government expansion. Obama's style of politics has gone from inspiring to revolting in the space of a year.

Obama's revolution is truly revolting, in the great Victorian sense of that word, and even a ditz like Ruth Marcus, resident political commissar at the Washington Post, recognizes that as long as we have a free ballot, the pickininny kid is wading into areas far beyond his limited professorial skill set.

The CIA Has to Raise Its Game in Afghanistan, Pakistan

David Ignatius

The suicide-bomber catastrophe at Khost five days after the Christmas attempt on Detroit reminds us that a war based halfway around the world is inching closer to stateside. Triple Agent Dr. Balawi pulled off a horrific coup when he 'sploded himself and seven Americans plus his Jordanian Royal Family Intelligence minder in a gruesome masterpiece demonstrating the "Religion of Peace's" loathesome doctrines. Alzheimer-senile Helen Thomas keeps asking why the Al Qaeda and Taliban attack America. Maybe they are as crazy as she is demented. Or as David Ignatius would reply:

In terms of loss of life, the bombing of the CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan, may be the most costly mistake in the agency's history. So it's important to look carefully for clues about how it happened, and lessons for the future.
CIA veterans cite a series of warning signs that the agency wasn't paying enough attention to the counterintelligence threat posed by al-Qaeda. These danger signals weren't addressed because the agency underestimated its adversary, and overestimated its own skills and those of its allies. The time to fix these problems is now -- not with a spasm of second-guessing that will further weaken the CIA but through the agency's own adaptation to this war zone. As the Khost attack made painfully clear, the CIA needs better tradecraft for this conflict.

By getting a suicide bomber inside a CIA base, the al-Qaeda network showed that it remains a sophisticated adversary, despite intense pressure from CIA Predator attacks. "They didn't get lucky, they got good, and we got sloppy all over Afghanistan," says one agency counterterrorism veteran

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As Ignatius notes in detail, the CIA's reorganization in 2004 added more suet and lard, and put LESS career incentives in learning local and regional languages and dialects. For example, Robert Baer just came back from a visit to Kabul and environs and found that only two CIA officers spoke a local language, Dari, while NONE speaks or understands Pushtun, the language of most of the Al Qaeda Pathan in Afghanistan and their Taliban Punjabi brothers in Pakistan and Baluchi Taliban in Quetta converse in.

Baer said this dependence on translators makes intelligence penetration of CIA operations child's play, and the sophistication of the Al Qaeda/Taliban counterintelligence now surpasses that of the smug, self-satisfied Langley crews.

Much of the damage done to the CIA has been done stateside by Fifth Column bloggers whining that the CIA still employs Blackwater as security. Maybe the candy-ass libtards should volunteer for security duty===oops, forgot they're craven cowards. Nancy Pelosi did a bit of damage when she was Minority Chief on the Special Committee on Intelligence. And continued her damage by not giving Jane Harman, a Harvard grad with an iQ at least fifty points higher than Botox Nancy's, the job when she became Speaker. Instead she appointed an illiterate ESL who didn't know the difference between Shi'ites and Sunnis [from Texas border country, where reading isn't necessary to get through life]. Despite the disloyal leadership in this country, Ignatius notes that the Agency should save itself:

Muslim extremists are using increasingly sophisticated tools -- sometimes the very techniques that have been deployed against them. One example is the software used by Hezbollah to analyze patterns of cell-phone calling and expose an Israeli spy network in Lebanon last year. Iran, too, uses sophisticated pattern analysis to study which of its nuclear scientists might have been recruited by the West.

Despite this growing threat, the CIA has devoted only limited resources to defending itself. Within its large Kabul station, the CIA is said to have just two officers working full time on counterintelligence. There's a similar lack of resources devoted to Pakistani operations against the agency.

The 2004 intelligence reorganization added more layering and bureaucracy but not more muscle. It created a new National Counterintelligence Executive, but this group has focused on traditional targets, such as Russia and China, rather than new ones. "What good is it?" asks one CIA counterterrorism veteran. "It's overhead. It contributes little, other than additional tasking and more meetings."

The CIA's career track is another troubling part of the problem. The complex penetration and deception operations that could counter al-Qaeda take time and patience. But agency operations mirror the short, two-year tours of assignment -- or the even shorter deployments to war zones. "We live in two-year cycles," says one insider. The rational careerist looks at a penetration or deception plan and concludes: "It's too time-consuming, it won't get me promoted."

What's most troubling is that over the past year, the CIA has had what this source calls "egregious lapses of counterintelligence and security at the bases in Afghanistan."

Evidence of sloppy procedures is said to have surfaced last fall at one of the agency's bases in southern Afghanistan. One of its vehicles was stolen, but headquarters wasn't notified for several weeks. Someone was caught photographing the entry gate to the base, but he was turned over to the Afghan police initially, rather than agency operatives. An Afghan guard failed a polygraph, raising worries that he might be a double agent. Yet aggressive countermeasures weren't taken.

A final obvious problem is training. Case officers need more preparation for high-threat meetings and paramilitary challenges than they're getting now.

After any calamity, there are always haunting "what ifs." But looking in the rearview mirror isn't going to make the CIA any stronger or better. The Khost attack shows that the al-Qaeda network, though badly wounded, remains a wily and resourceful foe. The inescapable conclusion is that the CIA and its allies need to lift their game.

Now we have another disloyal coming back from the UK to replace George Stephanopoulos on Sunday mornings on ABC. A senile fool named Koppel insists that the media exaggerated the importance of the crotch bomber and shouldn't be making such a fuss, as it throws Obama off his perfect equilibrium.

Just when I was hoping the country was shedding Helen Thomas-type dementia victims, another comes to pollute ABC News.

Beginning of a mini-30 Year Ice Age At Hand?

The Daily Mail and the Telegraph and London Times are all much more Global Warming Skeptics than the politicized broadsheets like The Independent, The Guardian, and the laughing-stock BBC. These last resemble the clueless witless brain-dead US thundering herds of low-IQ, highly lazy "journalists" who remind me of the old Dylan song, "you don't have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing."

The Mail is full of actual practicing journalists, some of whom are reading one of

the most prominent of the scientists ... Professor Mojib Latif, a leading member of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has been pushing the issue of man-made global warming on to the international political agenda since it was formed 22 years ago.
Prof Latif, who leads a research team at the renowned Leibniz Institute at Germany’s Kiel University, has developed new methods for measuring ocean temperatures 3,000ft beneath the surface, where the cooling and warming cycles start.
He and his colleagues predicted the new cooling trend in a paper published in 2008 and warned of it again at an IPCC conference in Geneva last September.
Last night he told The Mail on Sunday: ‘A significant share of the warming we saw from 1980 to 2000 and at earlier periods in the 20th Century was due to these cycles – perhaps as much as 50 per cent.
'They have now gone into reverse, so winters like this one will become much more likely. Summers will also probably be cooler, and all this may well last two decades or longer.
‘The extreme retreats that we have seen in glaciers and sea ice will come to a halt. For the time being, global warming has paused, and there may well be some cooling.’
As Europe, Asia and North America froze last week, conventional wisdom insisted that this was merely a ‘blip’ of no long-term significance.
Though record lows were experienced as far south as Cuba, where the daily maximum on beaches normally used for winter bathing was just 4.5C, the BBC assured viewers that the big chill was merely short-term ‘weather’ that had nothing to do with ‘climate’, which was still warming.
The work of Prof Latif and the other scientists refutes that view. On the one hand, it is true that the current freeze is the product of the ‘Arctic oscillation’ – a weather pattern that sees the development of huge ‘blocking’ areas of high pressure in northern latitudes, driving polar winds far to the south.
Meteorologists say that this is at its strongest for at least 60 years.
As a result, the jetstream – the high-altitude wind that circles the globe from west to east and normally pushes a series of wet but mild Atlantic lows across Britain – is currently running not over the English Channel but the Strait of Gibraltar.

A composite photograph released last year to highlight the issue of melting ice and global warming
However, according to Prof Latif and his colleagues, this in turn relates to much longer-term shifts – what are known as the Pacific and Atlantic ‘multi-decadal oscillations’ (MDOs).
For Europe, the crucial factor here is the temperature of the water in the middle of the North Atlantic, now several degrees below its average when the world was still warming.
But the effects are not confined to the Northern Hemisphere. Prof Anastasios Tsonis, head of the University of Wisconsin Atmospheric Sciences Group, has recently shown that these MDOs move together in a synchronised way across the globe, abruptly flipping the world’s climate from a ‘warm mode’ to a ‘cold mode’ and back again in 20 to 30-year cycles.
'They amount to massive rearrangements in the dominant patterns of the weather,’ he said yesterday, ‘and their shifts explain all the major changes in world temperatures during the 20th and 21st Centuries.
'We have such a change now and can therefore expect 20 or 30 years of cooler temperatures.’
Prof Tsonis said that the period from 1915 to 1940 saw a strong warm mode, reflected in rising temperatures.

Pictures of the snow in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China, last week show the city is the coldest it has been since 1970
But from 1940 until the late Seventies, the last MDO cold-mode era, the world cooled, despite the fact that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere continued to rise.
Many of the consequences of the recent warm mode were also observed 90 years ago.
For example, in 1922, the Washington Post reported that Greenland’s glaciers were fast disappearing, while Arctic seals were ‘finding the water too hot’.

I personally remember the stories in the seventies that the advent of a new ice age was beginning and the last year i lived through a winter in Milwaukee WI, there was an accumulation of over 110 inches of snow, a new city record, back in the late sixties!

Prof Tsonis said, last week 56 per cent of the surface of the United States was covered by snow.
‘That hasn’t happened for several decades,’ he pointed out. ‘It just isn’t true to say this is a blip. We can expect colder winters for quite a while.’
He recalled that towards the end of the last cold mode, the world’s media were preoccupied by fears of freezing.
For example, in 1974, a Time magazine cover story predicted ‘Another Ice Age’, saying: ‘Man may be somewhat responsible – as a result of farming and fuel burning [which is] blocking more and more sunlight from reaching and heating the Earth.’
Prof Tsonis said: ‘Perhaps we will see talk of an ice age again by the early 2030s, just as the MDOs shift once more and temperatures begin to rise.’
Like Prof Latif, Prof Tsonis is not a climate change ‘denier’. There is, he said, a measure of additional ‘background’ warming due to human activity and greenhouse gases that runs across the MDO cycles.

'This isn't just a blip. We can expect colder winters for quite a while'
But he added: ‘I do not believe in catastrophe theories. Man-made warming is balanced by the natural cycles, and I do not trust the computer models which state that if CO2 reaches a particular level then temperatures and sea levels will rise by a given amount.
'These models cannot be trusted to predict the weather for a week, yet they are running them to give readings for 100 years.’
Prof Tsonis said that when he published his work in the highly respected journal Geophysical Research Letters, he was deluged with ‘hate emails’.
He added: ‘People were accusing me of wanting to destroy the climate, yet all I’m interested in is the truth.’
He said he also received hate mail from climate change sceptics, accusing him of not going far enough to attack the theory of man-made warming.

Sounds like on climate issues and their associated taxation implications, it is almost impossible to please ANYBODY!

The work of Profs Latif, Tsonis and their teams raises a crucial question: If some of the late 20th Century warming was caused not by carbon dioxide but by MDOs, then how much?
Tsonis did not give a figure; Latif suggested it could be anything between ten and 50 per cent.
Other critics of the warming orthodoxy say the role played by MDOs is even greater.
William Gray, emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Colorado State University, said that while he believed there had been some background rise caused by greenhouse gases, the computer models used by advocates of man-made warming had hugely exaggerated their effect.

Dr David Viner stands by his claim that snow will become an 'increasingly rare event'
According to Prof Gray, these distort the way the atmosphere works. ‘Most of the rise in temperature from the Seventies to the Nineties was natural,’ he said. ‘Very little was down to CO2 – in my view, as little as five to ten per cent.’
But last week, die-hard warming advocates were refusing to admit that MDOs were having any impact.
In March 2000, Dr David Viner, then a member of the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, the body now being investigated over the notorious ‘Warmergate’ leaked emails, said that within a few years snowfall would become ‘a very rare and exciting event’ in Britain, and that ‘children just aren’t going to know what snow is’.
Now the head of a British Council programme with an annual £10 million budget that raises awareness of global warming among young people abroad, Dr Viner last week said he still stood by that prediction: ‘We’ve had three weeks of relatively cold weather, and that doesn’t change anything.
'This winter is just a little cooler than average, and I still think that snow will become an increasingly rare event.’
The longer the cold spell lasts, the harder it may be to persuade the public of that assertion.

Anyone familiar with the British Council knows that it is a formerly highly-respected overseas agency fallen into the hands of disreputable leftist agitprop groups. The Voodoo Doctor Viner will be preaching the sort of sci fi gibberish that characterizes New Age looniness---something like Deepak Chopra blaming the USA for the Muslim terrorist attacks on hotels in Mumbai.

Al Gore got a D+ in the Divinity School science course he took---although a Harvard undergrad, this mentally-challenged hysteric couldn't get into Law School, although his daddy was a sitting US Senator! He is a fit leader for a scam that aims to tax us all for breathing.

NBC Zucks Up Its Late Night

Fatboy Zucker AKA Humpty Dumpty has ruined the Evening half of the Crown Jewels of NBC. Can the Today Show be far behind?

The network has a plan in the works to restore Jay Leno to his old spot at 11:35 each weeknight for a half-hour, while pushing the man who replaced him, Conan O’Brien, to a starting time of 12:05 a.m. Mr. O’Brien would then have a full hour.

NBC executives held extensive discussions with both Mr. Leno and Mr. O’Brien on Thursday about the future of the network’s late-night lineup. One senior executive, who declined to be identified because of the continuing talks, said that the moves were still being thrashed out by the representatives of each of the stars, but that an agreement was essentially in place. There is no timetable yet to issue a final announcement of the plan because contractual details remain to be worked out.

The change, if completed, would represent a retreat from the network’s strategy of replacing Mr. Leno, who drove “The Tonight Show” to the top of the late-night ratings, with the younger, hipper Mr. O’Brien, then trying to save money in prime time by replacing expensive dramas with Mr. Leno’s show at 10 p.m.

The moves are being driven by pressure from NBC’s affiliated stations, which have seen ratings for their late-night local newscasts plummet since September. That was when NBC began “The Jay Leno Show,” a prime-time version of Mr. Leno’s old late-night show. Mr. O’Brien succeeded Mr. Leno as host of “The Tonight Show” in June.

Zucker was the architect of this train wreck of a business model, if a terribly mixed metaphor can be used to describe a terrible network which is slowly destroying itself through Zucker's last decade of incompetent blundering eff-ups. Humpty Dumpty will probably convey over to Comcast which is such a monstrosity itself on the business side that he could conceivably stand out as above average. Over at GE, Zucker and Immelt compete in a race to the bottom in their respective industries.
As for NBC's Late Night blunders,

[b]oth experiments were being keenly watched by an industry struggling with demographic shifts, declining audiences and escalating costs. A deal was struck last month to sell NBC Universal, the parent of NBC, to Comcast, and one person with knowledge of the negotiations said that NBC’s poor performance — it languishes in last place in prime time — was a driving reason for the sale.

Mr. Leno addressed the developments on his show Thursday night. “I don’t think there is any truth to the rumors,” he said during his monologue. “See, it’s always been my experience that NBC only cancels you when you’re in first place.”

Self-destructive or suicidal, NBC remains in the death-grip of Humpty-Dumpty Zucker, an unparalleled unprecedented fuck-up in an industry riddled with mediocre third-rate fucktards, losers, and general all-round ne'er-do-wells.

Rasmussen Brings On Socialist Calls to "Shoot the Messenger!"

John Fund discovers why quarter-wits like Jimmy Fallon sing against Rasmussen Polling, the newest demon on the Socialist/Communist hit list of the useful idiots on the leftest fringe of the sinister crowd:

How worried are Democrats about the mid-term voting only 10 months away? "If the election were held today, we'd lose the House," Democratic campaign consultant Tom King told the Huffington Post this week, expressing a view that HuffPo says is echoed by a number of Democratic strategists in off-the-record conversations.
Democrats are reportedly busy devising a strategy as a firewall against a citizen revolt at the polls. Rather than emphasize their party's accomplishments, they will attack Republicans for wanting to restore the discredited Bush era. "The Republican party in Washington today is no different than the Republican party that ran the Congress before," Rep. Chris Van Hollen, head of the Democratic House campaign committee, told the liberal Talking Points Memo.
Without delay, campaign strategists are advising Democratic clients to use bloggers, phone banks, direct mail and canvassers to try to create a negative impression of their GOP opponents. Labeling their GOP candidates as being part of the Sarah Palin or Tea Party wing of the GOP will be the key element. One Democratic consultant told Huffington Post that the 2010 election "basically comes down to one thing. You've got to kick the [bleep] out of somebody."
No doubt both sides intend to play rough this political year. Still, it's striking how much Democrats have pivoted away from the civility that President Obama pledged to bring to Washington.
-- John Fund

Here's another insightful take by Fund on the screeching hormonal overload that calls itself the "Progressive" wing of the Demo-rats. Or Perhaps "Regressive Wing" might be a more apt term, as it appears that the terrible twos fit the behavioral patterns of the whack-jobs who scribble obscene drivel on DailyKos and Salon by ueber-Butch Joan Walsh::

Look, a messenger! Somebody shoot him!
Confronted with their gloomy poll numbers, Democrats have decided the solution is to discredit the pollsters they blame for dragging down their standing with the public. Politico.com reports that the No. 1 target is the proprietor of Rasmussen Reports, source of widely reported polls tracking the declining popularity of President Obama and his legislative initiatives.
"Democrats are turning their fire on Scott Rasmussen, the prolific independent pollster whose surveys on elections, President Obama's popularity and a host of other issues are surfacing in the media with increasing frequency," reports Politico.com. Democratic pollster Mark Mellman complains that Mr. Rasmussen phrases polling "questions in a way that supports a conservative interpretation of the world." That's why Rasmussen's approval numbers for President Obama tend to be about five points lower than those of other pollsters, he says.
Mr. Rasmussen responds that any differences can be accounted for in large part because he screens for only those voters whom he determines are most likely to vote. This group, he says, is trending more conservative these days because they are highly motivated in opposition to Obama policies. Other firms poll adults without screening for likely voters, he told Politico, a procedure that's "always going to yield a better result for Democrats."
Most of us pay attention to polls because we want to know how upcoming elections are likely to play out and how the distribution of political power will change. On that score, Mr. Rasmussen seems to get solid results. FiveThirtyEight.com, a liberal Web site run by Nate Silver, found that Mr. Rasmussen had the third-highest mark for accuracy of any pollster in last year's elections. He predicted a six-point Obama victory; the final margin was seven points.
In 2009, Rasmussen did it again. His final survey in New Jersey had Republican Chris Christie beating Democrat Jon Corzine by three points, exactly the margin of Mr. Christie's victory. Says Mr. Silver: "Rasmussen's election polling has tended to be quite accurate in the past." He explains that "Rasmussen has a different model of what the 2010 election is going to look like, one which will feature a more conservative electorate. But that model isn't necessarily wrong, nor does it necessarily reflect bias."
Indeed, Mr. Rasmussen was in step with other pollsters charting the collapse of President Bush's approval rating. In November, 2008 it topped out at 62% disapproval in Rasmussen surveys, with a full 43% registering strong disapproval. Those numbers correctly anticipated the Democratic resurgence in that month's elections. Now that President Obama's numbers are trending downward, however, Democrats are lashing out rather than rethinking their policies. Democratic pollster Tom Jensen acknowledged as much to Politico, saying: "I don't think that what's happening with Rasmussen is unusual. It's just that sometimes when people are unhappy, sometimes you shoot the messenger."
That messenger is clearly becoming a force in politics, partly by polling more regularly and intensively than other companies such as Gallup. Pollster and blogger Mark Blumenthal says that in 2009 Rasmussen became the most searched-for polling firm on the Internet. It also apparently has become the No. 1 target for people who don't like its findings.
-- John Fund

And finally, a visit to the public library in Searchlight, NV, the hometown of local eff-up DingyHarry:

"A commotion unfolds in the tiny public library here as the staff searches for a copy of the memoir written by Harry Reid, Senate Democratic leader and Searchlight native. 'Has anyone seen Harry's book?' a librarian calls out. A local patron grabs a trash can and peers inside: 'It's not where it's supposed to be,' he says" -- Los Angeles Times reporter Peter Nicholas, writing about Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's declining popularity in his home town of Searchlight, Nev.

Even the LA Times is beginning to rediscover its journalistic roots after wandering in Death Valley for over a year of Messiah-searching.

Richard Holbrooke Shunned by Pak & Indian Foreign Ministers

My Afghanistan Foggy Bottom buddy tells me that Richard Holbrooke's personality defects have teamed up with his moral deficiencies to produce a complete rejection by the top foreign policy establishment types in India and Pakistan. Since his job there is to reconcile the Indian, Paki, and Afghan leaderships with one another, his penalty-box isolation from all of them [the Afghans simply find him a repulsive jerk] have reduced him to making sure his boss Hillary is not implicated in the soon-to-come catastrophe in South Asia.

Diane Sawyer's elevation as an ABC anchoress may or may not assist Holbrooke in his onward upward thrusting to become Secretary of State, only the second FSO to be named SecState in its long history if he could square that circle. [Larry Eagleburger was the first and only, so far.] Diane and Dick shared the Harriman digs on N St. back in the early eighties and they may have parted amicably, though with hit-and-run Holbrooke break-ups were usually accompanied by blood on the floor [metaphorically].

Eurotards Dismiss Attack on Danish Cartoonist

The Eurosnob has an intellectual arrogance which has diminished the continent's influence from worldwide to a narrow sliver of irrelevance, fingerpointing at the real world powers [USA, China, India, Russia] and verbally chastizing them for their transgressions. Long long gone are the days of gunboat diplomacy!

But the morons keep popping up, usually with French monikers, as these people are the shallowest of the shallow. A clown named Justin Vaisse got an article into Foreign Policy, that yawn-producing spawn of Richard Holbrooke back in the early '70s, condemning those misled observers who believe that the onrush of Islamic immigration into Europe isn't good for the Old Farts living therein. And then the crotch-bomber and the attack on Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard inserted a slice of reality into the Eurotard Vaisse's Pollyannish Panglossian reveries.

But author Bruce Bawer found out that the demon of PC has deep roots in Scandanavia, as the success of his friend Hege Storhaug's book But the Greatest of All is Freedom; On the Consequences of Immigration. Hege's book had outlined the horrific male chauvinist pig practices of Muslim men toward their chattel females:

females who are confined to their homes, who are denied educations and careers, and who are the victims (or potential victims) of honor killing, genital mutilation, forced marriage, and sundry forms of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.

Hege's book suddenly became a huge and controversial best seller and:

...at the time, Hege lived in a neighborhood called Kampen, a part of Oslo that brings to mind the Haight-Ashbury or East Village of the 1960s. Hege notes that after her book began to sell big—and draw harsh media attacks—her neighborhood was papered over with posters featuring a photo of her with an X drawn over her face, along with the slogan NO TO RACISTS IN KAMPEN. Then one day—as Hege revealed in a powerful account posted yesterday on the website of Human Rights Service, the small foundation where she works—one or more people broke into her home, beat her, and left her bruised and unconscious in a pool of blood on the floor. Nothing was stolen. The date was January 1, 2007—three years to the day before the attempted murder of Westergaard.

At first, Hege kept the crime secret, for fear that publicizing it would discourage other critics of Islam from speaking out. Not until a month later did she report the brutal event to the police, and then only after a lawyer friend had secured a guarantee that the report would not be made public. But the steady rise in Muslim violence in Europe, culminating in the Westergaard attack, helped changed her mind about publicly revealing the assault. She also wanted to underscore the fact that many in the media—people like Vaïsse, I might add—were by their see-no-evil approach to the subject encouraging physical attacks on people like her and Westergaard. This state of affairs, she felt, needed to be addressed publicly and its real-world consequences made clear.

As a matter of fact, Hege does not believe that she was the victim of Islamic immigrants in the brutal bloody attack that left her unconscious on the floor with no memory of the incident:

The fact is that for years Hege has been the target of a ruthless, tireless, and breathlessly mendacious campaign of criticism by the far-left Norwegian media. She’s become Public Enemy Number One among not only radical Muslims but also Communists, socialists (whose numbers in Norway’s capital are not insignificant), and what Hege calls “organized anti-racists.” These are members of Scandinavia’s many government-funded organizations who claim to be liberal opponents of racism but are in fact largely concerned with defending even the most illiberal aspects of immigrant cultures. Indeed, Hege doesn’t believe that her assailants were Muslims; she suspects that they were far leftists of the sort who proliferate in neighborhoods like Kampen and who have made common cause with European Islamists. Hege is also convinced—as am I—that the media’s concerted effort to identify her as a racist and Islamophobe influenced her attackers. This is not difficult to believe: it was, after all, the Dutch media’s demonization of Fortuyn that helped put him in an early grave instead of in his country’s prime ministership.

In her Monday post, Hege suggested that if all the influential newspapers in Europe had published the Danish cartoons, “it would have been much more difficult to build up the increasingly brutal climate we see now all over Europe: the fact that people are not just the subjects of attacks, and of attempted murder, but are denied virtually all personal freedom in their daily lives, so that Westergaard cannot set foot outside his home without the police on his heels, just as Robert Redeker is living underground in the homeland of Voltaire.” And she asked: “Will Europe manage to set its foot down strongly enough . . . that there will be no doubt that the continent never will give up its founding values? Or will the commentariat and political elite continue to give way, inch by inch . . . ?” Any of us, she warned, can end up a Kurt Westergaard if we dare to speak our minds. But don’t tell that to the “experts” at Foreign Policy.

It appears that the two World Wars of the Twentieth Century cleaned out the majority of European males [and females] with any moral courage and intestinal fortitude.

Now only cringing cowards and socialist/communist woman-beaters are left---soon the Eurotards will have morphed into Arabs themselves!!!

Hilarious Obambi Wants to Close Gitmo Because It's "Rallying Cry" for Terrorists!

Terrorist "Art Therapy" Cure

The New York Post ridicules the simpletons in the White House who are stupid beyond belief. First, the Gitmo releasees are given "art therapy" and then released to hook up with Al Qaeda in Yemen and plan the underwear bombing of Detroit, as did one former Gitmo inmate, released in November, 2007:

"Some American officials say it's all about crayons and art therapy, but the things that don't translate are the intense emotional and intellectual strides that are made," [Saudi Terrorist Enabler] Boucek told ABC.
"They make intense bonds with the sheiks and doctors they work with. The majority is a religious discussion giving them religious evidence to the contrary of why they think their beliefs are based on Islam."
Meanwhile, in the aftermath of the failed bombing of Flight 253, some US legislators have called for the White House to stop plans to release Guantanamo detainees.
There is particular concern over Gitmo inmates with ties to Yemen, where would-be underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab says he connected with al Qaeda.
However, an Obama administration aide told the Washington Post that the administration wants to close the prison because it has become a "rallying cry" for terrorist recruiters.
Another official told the newspaper that the government has no choice to release some Gitmo detainees because of challenges in federal court.

So the brain-dead WH strategy is based on Gitmo's being a "rallying cry" and that legitimizes releasing inmates to a halfway house of "art therapy" in cushy Saudi Club Royales which in turn ends with n unconditional release allowing the amused terrorists to plan new attacks on the USA!

These process-obsessed, symbolism-dazed Demo-rats are lost in a world of inside-the-beltway ideology and pleasing their Marxist hate-America base. Actual terrorists are ignored by the autistic ideologues of the Left. 9/11 was a figment of our collective imaginations and we should all submit our freedoms to an unconstitutional Obamacare staffed by SEIU and UAW thugs.

Obama is a one-term wonder like Carter and mimics Jimmy's weird obsessions with symbolism and process to an absurd degree. Like Jimmy, he's almost for sure going to be one of the worst POTUSes of his century, the 21st!

Sandra Bullock Top Box Office Draw: Try finding Out in the MSM

Sandra Bullock Biggest Box Office Draw

Sandra Bullock actually hit the top of the box office draw, matching Julia Roberts as, I believe, the only two women who have attained that status. I can remember when Roberts won, it was all over the MSM as a new day dawning for feminist libtards. The NYT buries it in "Arts, Briefly" [no picture] and their top movie critic, A.O. Scott, has preferred garbage like Precious and PC grist-for-the-mill to The Blind Side, a truly-moving and TRUE story. The Grey Lady signalling this news is barely fit to print.

Now even Drudgereport and Nikki Finke neglect to mention Bullock's edging out Johnny Depp. You can bet when the Communist Oscar selections are made, Sandra with her family-value vibe will not get any Academy Awards. Hollyweird hates the family and Sandra moved to Austin just to avoid the creeps in Tinseltown [like Finke, e.g.]

Luckily, she's the people's choice and will probably remain on top of the distaff charts despite her pedestrian affection for Christian and family values.

Living with Tax-Happy Libtards is a BUMMER!!!

The Blue States are Blue because their tax rates are high and they have to live among whining losers commonly known as liberals. Or as the WSJ's Alyssia Finley astutely points out:

The study suggests that quality of life heavily influences happiness. This may seem obvious, but until this study, social scientists have struggled to develop a model that supports this hypothesis. Now we know that people who say they're satisfied with their lives aren't just delusional or overly optimistic, and people who say they're unsatisfied aren't just pessimists. People have legitimate reasons to be happy or unhappy.

When the Gallup version of this came out, libtards dumber than the mean [or meaner than other libtards] commented that the people in red states are not smart enough to realize they should be unhappy. Or as hyper-libtard Joy Behar yelled in her bad English [despite an MA from Stony Brook], people buying Sarah Palin's Rogue don't know how to read. Behar is as unfunny and unintelligent as she is unattractive---a true triple whammy from a hazmat accident in a sewage facility.

But Ms. Finley has bigger fish to fry. Besides leaving less discretional spending after the taxman departs:

The study's authors note that people are least happy in states that impose high taxes but don't provide matching public benefits (e.g. good highways to relieve congestion and reduce commute times). It's in states where taxes disproportionately subsidize public employee pensions and entitlement programs, but don't much improve the general public's quality of life, that people are most unhappy.

This intuitively makes sense. If you're paying more than a third of your income in taxes, as many New Yorkers do, then you expect to realize the benefits from your hard-earned tax dollars. You expect quality schools, good roads, low crime rates, and quick commutes. You expect your local and state governments to be responsive to your needs, not to the cash flows of entrenched public employee unions and other special interests.

Many liberal state governments like those in Albany, Trenton and Sacramento are spending more and more on entitlement programs and public employee pensions, racking up more and more debt, and imposing more and more taxes to pay for it all---while ignoring their taxpayers' needs. Taxpayers, however, aren't just getting unhappy. They're getting out. United Van Lines' 2009 annual study shows that New York, New Jersey, Michigan and Illinois are among the states with the highest outbound migration while Alabama and Tennessee are among the states with the highest inbound migration.

This doesn't bode well for high-spending, high-tax states like New York where outbound migrants' income is 13% greater than that of inbound migrants. In 2006, this differential meant a loss of $4.3 billion in taxpayer income for the state. State governments therefore have a vested interest in keeping residents happy by reducing taxes and reigning in irresponsible spending.

Taxes may not be the root of all unhappiness, but they do result in some very sad citizens.

And ones who noisily with atrocious manners impugn smarter red state citizens who don't have to live in the vicinity of boorish libtards.

Fuad Ajami on Obama's "Recessional" or, Obama, the Cheater!

Fuad Ajami remains the spark of conscience in America's foreign policy firmament. His column in the Wall Street Journal delineates the "false dichotomy" Obama and his isolationist ideologues project:

With year one drawing to a close, the truth of the Obama presidency is laid bare: retrenchment abroad, and redistribution and the intrusive regulatory state at home. This is the genuine calling of Barack Obama, and of the "progressives" holding him to account. The false dichotomy has taken hold—either we care for our own, or we go abroad in search of monsters to destroy or of broken nations to build. The decision to withdraw missile defense for Poland and the Czech Republic was of a piece with that retreat in American power.

In the absence of an overriding commitment to the defense of American primacy in the world, the Obama administration "cheats." It will not quit the war in Afghanistan but doesn't fully embrace it as its cause. It prosecutes the war but with Republican support—the diehards in liberal ranks and the isolationists are in no mood for bonding with Afghans. (Harry Reid's last major foreign policy pronouncement was his assertion, three years ago, that the war in Iraq was lost.)

Harry Reid and the rest of the "lefty losers" personify the entitlement of those redistributors of wealth on the left who want to concentrate on domestic restructuring, weakening both our foreign and domestic establishments at the same time.

In retrospect, that patina of cosmopolitanism in President Obama's background concealed the isolationism of the liberal coalition that brought him to power. The tide had turned in the congressional elections of 2006. American liberalism was done with its own antecedents—the outlook of Woodrow Wilson and FDR and Harry Truman and John Kennedy. It wasn't quite "Come home, America," but close to it. This was now the foreign policy of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden. There was in the land a "liberal orientalism," if you will, a dismissive attitude about the ability of other nations to partake of liberty. It had started with belittling the Iraqis' aptitude for freedom. But there was implicit in it a broader assault on the very idea of freedom's possibilities in distant places. East was East, and West was West, and never the twain shall meet.
We're weary, the disillusioned liberalism maintains, and we're broke, and there are those millions of Americans aching for health care and an economic lifeline. We can't care for both Ohio and the Anbar, Peoria and Peshawar. It is either those embattled people in Iran or a rescue package for Chrysler.

Of course, Fuad doesn't directly mention the subtle condescension, not to mention racism, contained in this sort of retreat from the twentieth century legacy which has unintended consequences all across the board that faux-philosophe Obama may not be aware of, or if so, doesn't give a damn. The dumb [female] Peace Prize Cte in Oslo even was conned out of a Prize!

The joke is on the enthralled crowds in Cairo, Ankara, Berlin and Oslo. The new American president they had fallen for had no genuine calling or attachments abroad. In their enthusiasm for Mr. Obama, and their eagerness to proclaim themselves at one with the postracial meaning of his election, they had missed his aloofness from the genuine struggles in the foreign world. It was easy, that delirium with Mr. Obama: It made no moral demands on those eager to partake of it. It was also false, in many lands.

Thus Turks who loathed the Kurds in their midst, who denied them the right to their own memory and language, could identify themselves, or so they said, with the triumph of Mr. Obama and his personal history. No one questioned the sincerity with which Egyptians and other Arabs hailed Mr. Obama as they refused to be stirred by the slaughter in Darfur, and as they gave a carte blanche to Khartoum's blatant racism and cruelty. Surely there was something amiss in Paris and Berlin—the vast crowds came out for Mr. Obama, but there were millions of Muslims in France and Germany, and the gates hadn't been opened for them, they hadn't been swept into the mainstream of European life. Postracialism, rather like charity, should have begun at home, one would think.

By [inadvertently?] supporting Arab racism against non-Arab blacks and Turkic racism against non-Turkish Kurds, Obama simply slips lower in the eventual poll of historians of the presidency, if he leaves enough of that office intact for future scholarship to ponder. Fuad goes on to note that, contrary to Joe Biden's preposterous claim that Hezbollah were ousted from Lebanon, Rafik Hariri's son now has to go kiss the hem of the robe of the dictator responsible for murdering the President of Lebanon. And someone should inform Joe Gaffe-a-Minute that Hezbollah now runs Lebanon the way he incompetently used to run the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

[Now], no despot fears Mr. Obama, and no blogger in Cairo or Damascus or Tehran, no demonstrator in those cruel Iranian streets, expects Mr. Obama to ride to the rescue. To be sure, it was in the past understood that we can't bear all burdens abroad, or come to the defense of everyone braving tyranny. But there was always that American assertion that when things are in the balance we would always be on freedom's side. .... It is different today, there is a cold-bloodedness to American foreign policy. "Ideology is so yesterday," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proclaimed not long ago, giving voice to the new sentiment.

History and its furies have their logic, and they have not bent to Mr. Obama's will. He had declared a unilateral end to the "war on terror," but the jihadists and their mentors are yet to call their war to a halt. From Yemen to Fort Hood and Detroit, the terror continues.

But to go by the utterances of the Obama administration and its devotees, one would have thought that our enemies were Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, not the preachers and masterminds of terror. The president and his lieutenants spent more time denigrating "rendition" and the Patriot Act than they did tracking down the terror trail and the latest front it had opened at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen. Our own leaders spoke poorly of our prerogatives and ways, and they were heard the world over.

Under Mr. Obama, we have pulled back from the foreign world. We're smaller for accepting that false choice between burdens at home and burdens abroad, and the world beyond our shores is more hazardous and cynical for our retrenchment and our self-flagellation.

Obama and his legions of lefty losers are growing smaller and smaller in the eyes of both Americans fooled by his moondance and in the gaze of brutal thugs like Chavez, Ahmedinejad, and Putin. Not to mention wannabe-thug Bashar Assad.

Why is Hillary Clinton Not Being Roughed Up like Janet N?

The NYT has an interesting story on how the Detroit near-miss has all the overtones of the 9/11, even to the lack of data sharing. But strangely, the Dept. of State is left out of the mix.

...the flood of intelligence collected against a scattered and shadowy terrorist network continues to grow, threatening to overwhelm the system, said Matthew M. Aid, an intelligence historian whose book, “The Secret Sentry,” examines the N.S.A. The eavesdropping agency, tracking e-mail and cellphone traffic around the world, each day collects four times the volume of information stored in the Library of Congress, Mr. Aid said.

“To pluck out the important threats is an almost impossible task,” he said.

In the case of Mr. Abdulmutallab, the N.S.A. appears to have captured critical intercepts, and his father provided the name that would have allowed American agencies to take action. For Mr. Kean, of the Sept. 11 commission, it is the father’s role that should have moved even the most jaded bureaucracy.

“Think of what it took for the father, one of the most respected bankers in Nigeria, to walk into the American Embassy and turn in his own son,” Mr. Kean said. “The father’s a hero. His visit by itself should have been enough to set off all kinds of alarms.”

That "most jaded bureaucracy" would be the Dept. of State.

Ex-Guantanamo Prisoners Planned Detroit Xmas Terror

ABC has a lot of the details of the Christmas salute to Detroit planned in Yemen, according to the Nigerian terrorist nabbed in the attempt, who is now singing like a birdie. And promising to raining more death and mayhem from the skies as he has many supporters among Al Qaeda in Yemen, no matter how well Skank-in-Chief of Homeland Security Napolitano says the airline secuity works.

The Red Cross, Amnesty International and other terrorist-support groups put pressure on the US to get
.

..[t]wo of the four leaders allegedly behind the al Qaeda plot to blow up a Northwest Airlines passenger jet over Detroit .... released by the U.S. from the Guantanamo prison in November, 2007, according to American officials and Department of Defense documents

.
Hilariously, the pair was sent to the Mothership of terrorism groups.

American officials agreed to send the two terrorists to Saudi Arabia where they entered into an "art therapy rehabilitation program" and were set free, according to U.S. and Saudi officials.....Both Saudi nationals have since emerged in leadership roles in Yemen, according to U.S. officials and the men's own statements on al Qaeda propaganda tapes. Both of the former Guantanamo detainees are described as military commanders and appear on a January, 2009 video along with the man described as the top leader of al Qaeda in Yemen, Abu Basir Naser al-Wahishi, formerly Osama bin Laden's personal secretary.

I read now that Janet N has recanted on the efficacy of TSA's security and I'm sure Obambi will be coming out strong against future terrorists.

Barack Hits the Beach as Detroit & Iran Sizzle.

Iran anyway. His witless cabinet ditz Napolitano does insist that the "system worked" when the Dutch hero stopped the Nigerian nitwit from blowing up the plane.

Informed Comment insists that now is not [yet?] the time for a true revolution or counter-reformation or whatever, but has some interesting reasons why the Ahmedinejad regime and the Khamenei religious totalitarians are going to run the Islamic Republic off the road, and soon!

Hey, why not send John Kerry over to Tehran to heighten American credibility over there and get those pesky nukes taken care of---a smoothie like John would wow the mullahs and their basiji followers enough to tip the scales back to a pro-American stance.

Yeah, Kerry's the ticket!

John {Hari] Kerry Outhumbles Obama in Bowing & Scraping to Iran

The Democrats have a Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair even dumber and less morally scrupulous than the previous, the gaffe-a-day Joe-the-Joke Biden. The flip-flopper from MA about whom nothing is authentic [a fake-Catholic Jew-boy who got three purple hearts and will not authorize the paperwork behind their suspicious origins---three PH's got you out of 'Nam back when this scam-meister was operating in the Mekong Delta] now is mediating between Obama and Karzai, of whom Karzai is the lesser crook, Obama and Bashar Assad in Syria, where Obama & Bashar come out even, and Kerry is the low-point of that triangle.

This Perfect Hairdo whose empty head beneath acquired lower grades at Yale than his antagonist GWB --- Jerk-off John had a GPA of around 75, while comporting himself like some sort of Continental Intellectual. [Which brings to memory the feeble-minded Al Gore, whose HIGHEST grade in a science course at his DIVINITY SCHOOL was a D+!]

However, Teresa Heinz's husband [she dropped the Kerry moniker recently just as Rush Limbaugh had predicted back in 2004] now believes that he is the reincarnation of Talleyrand and therefore is aiming to get an invitation from Iran before the end-of-year deadline Obama set for getting more serious economic sanctions into play. The WH has no objections, of course, and will enjoy seeing this pretender come a cropper and if by some weird chance, he succeeds, it's found money for them.

Al Gore recently had to retract a misstatement of a world-famous scientist's predictions on the Arctic Ocean when that liviing scientist inconveniently showed up in Copenhagen and pointed out Lyin' Al's convenient lie.

Kerry has been able to lie his own way to the top of the Demo-rat Party by calling his fellow soldiers murderers and war criminals---which in a way, if you look at the world through his own looking glass, he himself also is in no uncertain terms.

Chris "Tingle-Up-My-Leg" Swirling Clockwise in the Porcelain Exit Tunnel?

Chris Mathews never was as obnoxious or spiteful as Keith Overbite nor a 'sport of nature' like hormone-train-wreck Maddow, but Tweety Bird let us know of his billowing clouds of emo through images best suited for a Victorian boudoir. Looks like Tweety's close to catching terminal vapors very soon and the misnomer "Hardball" will no longer disfigure the fast-fading CNN lineup of losers.

Now if the moronic 'droid David Shuster and DUI-felon Rick Sanchez would leave, MSNBC would be ready for a redo.

Urkel Strikes Again---This Time Sucking Up to Iran

What, Me Worry?

Obama's calm rhetoric doesn't prevent him from being the Steve Urkel of foreign policy presidents---Missile Shield Removed from Poland at the behest of Vlad the Empoisoner on 70th
Anniversary of Soviet '39 Invasion from the East, Sucking up to America-Hating Commie Caudillo Narcostates in Latin America, Slapping Down American allies [Honduras, Israel] at every opportunity while bowing and generally doing a "yes, sir; please, sir" step'n-fetch-it routine with Muslim tyrants and Saudi "monarchs."

And let's not forget that "reset" button famously given by Hillarious Clyntoon to her Russian counterpart Lavrov in incorrect faulty Russian!!! Did someone from Foggy Bottom get booby-trapped by a Rosetta Stone fake? Try Pimsleur next time! [Hillarious is the bimbo who also timed the missile extraction six months after Urkel claimed that GWB's anti-missile shield versus Iran was "set policy."]

Now Iran tests a missile capable of reaching Poland & the Czech Republic [and Israel] and is caught fashioning a nuclear-trigger mechanism and refusing to export the enriched uranium it is making and what does Urkel do?

Exactly what Gilly's teacher does in those tedious SNL skits they bored us with late last week with "An SNL Christmas."

Either Nothing.

Or an Urkel-like stumble-fumble.....

I for one disapprove of this Urkel dude representing our country overseas and believe he should be kept safely stateside for the remainder of his one-term administration.

State-Controlled Media Takes Direct Feedback from Obama WH Top Thugs

Morning Joe had the ultra-left feeble-minded libtard Ed Schultz on air and during commercial breaks Ed the neighing Horse was amazed to see former Repub Congresscritter and still thimblewit Joe Scarborough and his Polish sidekick Mika Brzez...... taking advice and guidance on how to handle Ed after the profit-break was over. That shocked even Ed.......

Meanwhile, over on the radio side of the ledger, Mediaweek named Rush Limbaugh the Radio Personality of the Decade---really a no-brainer by the numbers and influence wielded by the Missouri "Show Me" Pundit. Steve Jobs and Apple and Google and Rupert Murdoch dominated the other categories, with Sopranos taking the best TV show and Wired the best mag.

EuroStar Blinking Out Because of a "Snowstorm."

Eurostar is the fast [expensive] superservice between and among London, Paris, and Brussells and succeeded the Chunnel which began in the eighties.

Remember when we Yanks used to look down a wee bit on the Euros for being quaint and slightly technically retarded, but forgave them because of their marvelous railroad system and the EurailPass? Those days seem to be behind us, not that the US has a rail system above barely adequate. Verging on a national disgrace.

Eurostar virtually stopped functioning last week because of some snowstorms more or less normal for this time of year and while it coincided with the bogus St. Vitus Dance taking place in Copenhagen, the foul-ups demonstrated again that Europe shouldn't attempt assuming some sort of world political role while its own affairs are in such a tedious snarled condition.

I recall from my student days reading somewhere that a European savant of the nineteenth century of the Nietzchean mold wrote that the US was the only civilization to pass from barbarism to decadence without an intervening culture. Perhaps the Europeans can be described in a similar manner as to mastery of modern technologies dealing with civic order and convenience.

Monkey Jumping on Piano Plays First Tune!!!

The Krugboy proves that you can be dumber than Al Gore and STILL get a Nobel Prize

1] His First-Ever Accurate Prediction!
• "The big step by extremists will be an attempt to eliminate the filibuster."--former Enron adviser Paul Krugman, New York Times, March 29, 2005

• "We need to take on the way the Senate works. The filibuster, and the need for 60 votes to end debate, aren't in the Constitution. . . . So it's time to revise the rules."--former Enron adviser Krugman, New York Times, Dec. 18, 2009

This moral retardo would still be working for Enron if they hadn't had a couple of missteps---nothing to do with his economic or business advice, of course, let me be o-so-clear about that!!!

So Paul Krugman fetched up on the beach where all moral retards seem to wash up---the New York Times!

Democrat's First Principle

James Taranto in his Mencken-like way notes the what REALLY counts for Demo-rats:

Bringing ObamaCare to the floor requires an affirmative vote from every non-Republican in the Senate, which means that Reid and his men will fail in their efforts unless they persuade Nelson to vote with them. To win over Lieberman, the Dems were willing to give up government-run insurance in the form of both the "public option" and the "Medicare buy-in." It seems that abortion is more dear to them than socialism.

This is so true because even though he lost by a margin of four percent, McCain actually won a majority of male voters in the 2008 election. The Demo-rats are becoming a party of women, which makes understandable the hysterical reactions so many of its female or gay members demonstrate when confronted with reality.

That will come in 2010.

Howard Zinn Recruits More Dumbies for His Propaganda War by Book

Daniel Flynn always has a level-headed look at his blog at the History News Network at George Mason University. I was skimming through the end of the year mags at the library waiting to pick up my daughter at the doc and the Entertainment Weekly Magazine had an [unintentionally] funny piece on Matt Damon and Josh Brolin planning to read on the History Channel out loud [teleprompter? LARGE PRINT? Phonetically Spelled?] segments of Howard Zinn's Unabridged Marxist Anti-History of the USA---the stuff they don't teach you in high school.

Mainly because it's Marxist lies concocted by worms from an alien universe, or at least their moral equivalent....

Daniel Flynn asks the fundamental question that his job as Executive Director of Accuracy in Media aims at everywhere---why are deliberate distortions of historical facts on which there is a wide consensus so frequently met with in Zinn's writings? Or as Flynn puts it:

Readers of A People’s History of the United States learn very little about history. They do learn quite a bit, however, about Howard Zinn. In fact, the book is perhaps best thought of as a massive Rorschach Test, with the author’s familiar reaction to every major event in American history proving that his is a captive mind long closed by ideology.

Theory First, Facts Second

If you’ve read Marx, there’s really no reason to read Howard Zinn. The first line of The Communist Manifesto provides the single-bullet theory of history that provides Zinn with his narrative thread— “The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle.” It is the all-purpose explanation of every subject that Zinn covers. On other hand, why study history when theory has all the answers?

Thumb through A People’s History of the United States and you will find greed as the motivating factor behind every act of those who don’t qualify as “the people” in Zinn’s book. According to Zinn, the separation from Great Britain, the Civil War, and both World Wars all were the result of base motives of the “ruling class” -- rich men to get richer at the expense of others.

But the greed gets zanier and Zinn's mind must be addled by some of that good dope Eddie Vedder and other rock stars slip him which put his imaginative powers into a virtually hallucinagenic warp-speed:

Here we come to the real secret of the commercial success of A People’s History. It is a case of simple ideas for simple minds – a broken record for the tone deaf. When we come to World War I, it sounds very much like the Civil War. “American capitalism needed international rivalry—and periodic war—to create an artificial community of interest between rich and poor,… supplanting the genuine community of interest among the poor that showed itself in sporadic movements.” Yet another conspiracy to distract the proletariat from its destined revolution.

The account of World War II made slightly more interesting by author’s preposterous account of its origins. According to Zinn, suggests that America, not Japan, was to blame for Pearl Harbor, provoking the Empire of the Sun and forcing it to attack us. It’s the devil made them do it theory of history, which is great fallback position of the left when confronted with the imperialistic aggressions of “people of color.” Like the war to end slavery, the fight against fascism was an optical illusion. It was really a struggle by American capitalists to rule the world. Regarding America’s neutrality in the Spanish Civil War, which preceded World War II, Zinn asks: “Was it the logical policy of a government whose main interest was not stopping Fascism but advancing the imperial interests of the United States? For those interests, in the thirties, an anti-Soviet policy seemed best. Later, when Japan and Germany threatened U.S. world interests, a pro-Soviet, anti-Nazi policy became preferable.”

Thus is reality inverted or more accurately twisted. Zinn – a pro-Communist supported Stalin’s monster regime at the time, elides the fact that it was the Soviet Union that pretended to be anti-fascist in Spain, then signed a pact with Hitler and then – when Hitler double-crossed his Communist ally and invaded the Soviet Union became anti-fascist again. The United States was isolationist in 1936 and until Pearl Harbor. But it was always anti-fascist. Zinn projects the Soviet Union’s schizophrenic policies (and his own schizophrenic allegiances) onto America. While the Hitler-Stalin Pact is awkwardly excused, Zinn all but invents a Hitler-Roosevelt Pact to serve his social aims

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Yes, you can always wrongfoot a leftie and watch him stumble and lurch to the ground over that Ribbentrop [throw in the Count Herr Von just to rub in ironic strokes of proletarian hypocrisy] and Molotov Pact in August 1939, which even the witless pair Hillary and Barack-O completely forgot about seventy years later when they pulled out the rug under Poland --- not that the witless propagandist media in the USA would say peep except Anne Applegate of the Washington Post , who found it difficult to keep silent since her husband was the Polish Foreign Minister.

But Howard Zinn, ever the faithful Emmanuel Goldman, Howard would have found a way. Just like

“...when the Scottsboro case unfolded in the 1930s in Alabama,” Zinn writes in an even more egregious fit of historical amnesia, “it was the Communist party that had become associated with the defense of these young black men imprisoned, in the early years of the Depression, by southern injustice.” Perhaps the Party had become “associated” with the defense of the Scottsboro Boys, but in reality the Communists merely used the embattled youngsters. Richard Gid Powers points out in Not Without Honor that the Communists had raised $250,000 for the Scottsboro Boys’ defense, but had put-up a scant $12,000 for two appeals. At the time, a black columnist quoted a candid Party official who stated, “we don’t give a damn about the Scottsboro boys. If they burn it doesn’t make any difference. We are only interested in one thing, how we can use the Scottsboro case to bring the Communist movement to the people and win them over to Communism.” As a fellow-traveler, Zinn has the identical view. He is only interested in history so long as it serves as a weapon of socialist ideology.

And sells more of his "textbooks" by fellow-traveller instructors too lazy to think for themselves. Any way, no TIVO for the History Channel and here's a final send-off from Flynn:

“Unemployment grew in the Reagan years,” Zinn claims. Statistics show otherwise. Reagan inherited an unemployment rate of 7.5 percent in his first month in office. By January of 1989, the rate had declined to 5.4 percent. Had the Reagan presidency ended in 1982 when unemployment rates exceeded 10 percent, Zinn would have a point. But for the remainder of Reagan’s presidency, unemployment declined precipitously

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Not that a simpleton like Damon would know, but Zinn is a chronic serial liar and a P.O.S.

Rubio Overtakes Crist

Charlie Crist was counting his chickens long before they hatched, showing his porkie-stimulus inclinations and a tendency to support Obama, which now that that ship is heading out into stormy weather, he denies ever happened.

Luckily, there's plenty of video evidence that he like his hero John Kerry was for the stimulus package before he was against it. And his proxy-Senator LeMieux's first move in Congress was to put a hold on offshore drilling already agreed upon.

Showing his hand was for the fruitless environmental crusade rather than garner low-hanging fruit from taxes and royalties paid by oil companies operating one-hundred miles offshore, Crist may have a silent partner. [Cuba drills & explores offshore closer to Florida in gas & oil fields run by Venezuelan, Chinese, and Russian operating companies than LeMieux would allow the US to operate.] Is Charlie Crist a friend of Chavez and his [ex-] Commie pals?

Probably not, but this is one candidate who overreached too soon and hopefully will pay the price. Or as John Fund predicts:

Mr. Crist's fall has been so precipitous that it has prompted rumors that he might abandon the Senate race and try to hold onto the governor's mansion for a second term. That would require elbowing aside GOP state Attorney General Bill McCollum, who has been running for governor for months -- but that might be an easier task than Mr. Crist trying to convince Florida's Republican primary voters that he's the man they want in Washington to resist the big-government ambitions of the Obama administration.

Bill McCollum would make a better governor, perhaps. But Crist is the sort of fellow who needs to be kept on a short leash, in Tallahassee, lest his personal national ambitions quickly take hold once he catches Potomac Fever.

Welcome Back, Carter!

The Old Scissors To A One-Term POTUS

47% is the new low of Americans who APPROVE of this on-again, off=again, now-you-see-him, now-you-don't mind changer. Hillary was right last year when she said that the POTUS job is not a calling for on-the-job training.

Seems like the American people are beginning to understand she was right all along.

Politics Trumps Policy on Health Care for Dems

John Fund at the WSJ has a nice little piece on the Dems' obsession with getting ANY healthcare bill passed, but preferably one with a public option. Fund notes:

...many [Dems] in the trenches are uneasy about the sprawling, complex bill they privately acknowledge has no bipartisan support, doesn't seriously tackle soaring costs and will increase insurance premiums. That may explain Majority Leader Harry Reid's haste—he has ordered a rare Sunday session this weekend to hurry up the debate. Public support for the bill averages only 39.2% backing in all polls compiled by Pollster.com.

But Dems who vote do care about the health care bill and polls show that in 2010, a lot of Dem Coingresscritters & especially Harry Reid might have their political careers shortened by an avalanche of Republican voters, who besides paying taxes are p-o'd:

That fear is backed up by a new poll taken for the Daily Kos, the left-wing Web site: 81% of self-described Republicans say they are certain or likely to vote in 2010 compared to 65% of independent voters and only 56% of Democrats. "Democrats have simply not been given enough of a reason to come out and vote yet," writes liberal blogger David Dayen. "The left is waiting for that long-promised 'change' they can believe in."

So in the eyes of a lot of borderline Dems who really think the colossal dead-tree dump of several thousand pages is policy gone terribly wrong don't want to lose their offices, and as a long shot, are credulous enuf to believe that the liberal base will rescue them if they pass the policy poisonous cup to all American citizens, while themselves retaining a gold-plated health benefits program of CEO Fortune 500 quality---no waiting in doctors' offices for the lawyers and lifetime career politicians the Dems recruit to represent them in Congress!

Congress is so gerrymandered and sliced/diced so that only a few swing districts will usually turn even if off-year elections. But if the Dems in Congress really think that the 20% self-professed liberals in the USA are going to re-elect them over the 35% conservative and the over-40% self-proclaimed independents---of which I am one---then I think they are completely offbase and need a little time on K Street to plot how to get back into office.

National Journal reports [Harry Reid] included a public option in the bill in part because his staff felt he "could get the liberal left off his back for a while."

Other Democrats are in a similar bind. One Senate Democrat thinks the bill is bad policy. But last month that same senator joined with all of his fellow Democrats to bring the bill to the floor. The party leadership has made it clear that anyone who votes against health care will have a difficult time passing their own bills in the future.

So the Senate death march continues. Many Democrats have grave misgivings about making the bill a top priority given the economy. But in the age of bloodthirsty partisan bloggers they dare not be fully candid. They can only hope their march doesn't lead them right over the edge of a political cliff next November.

As certifiablly chronic victims of lemming-like groupthink, the Dems' probabilities of a rock plunge range from slim to none and slim just left town.

UPDATE:

Just when you thought that Harry Reid just couldn't get any more stupid than his statement in 2007 that "the war is lost," combining ignorance and treason in a four-word expression of Demo-rat feckless incompetence as the Surge crested to an unexpected VICTORY which the treason-left of Reid/Pelosi still cannot acknowledge, Reid yesterday PLAYED THE RACE CARD WRONGLY as he accused Republicans of having been the Party which had supported slavery during the Civil War. Next thing you know, Reid will anoint Abe Lincoln as the greatest Demo-rat POTUS. Treason and ignorance make a hilarious combination!

Dr. Watson, You've Projected Yourself Live on the BBC!

A Climate Hoax "Professor" blurted out his assessment of his own behavior projected onto Marc Moreno by calling M.M. an "assh*le" live on a televised debate in the UK.

Methinks you don't need to be a Sherlock to figure out that this Dr. Watson is a complete fraud...!

NASA stateside has been dragging its heels on FOIA requests because the Chief Fraud Hoaxer is a certain Lyin' Al Gore named James Hansen. This batsh*t freak is the head of the Goddard Center in the D.C. area where he can confabulate with second-rate minds in the DNC on how to raise taxes using the AGW hoax and cap & trade [AKA "Crap & Enslave!" h/t The Other McCain] to turn the world's greatest economy into a corpse consumed by Third World Parasites like Zimbabwe. China, of course, gets away free while polluting more with its brown coal power plants than the USA does in its entire power generation emissions output.

Big Science's demise may be near as the colossal scamming by "peer review" posses restricting any contrarian input is revealing the complete falsification of the scientific method to achieve Big Government's socialist objectives. Read Dan Henninger's thoughtful article on the end of an era. And NASA, stop killing Shuttle astronauts with your bogus science, which Richard Feynman predicted in the eighties would cause "catastrophic events" every fifty launches.

Obama Fakery on Afghanistan: Both Sides of His Mouth

Karzai's Corruption is a buzzword resounding from the empty cavernous mouth of Bill O'Reilly to the shibboleth-prone Obamaniacs, the ones who still think the Won is wearing clothes---not the Weisberg reincarnation of FDR, but still more than a half-wit artful dodger.

A senior State Dept buddy just got back from Afghanistan on this diplomat's dozenth iteration of that dreary mini-slog---still living in converted aluminum cargo bins with about five US officials crammed into each rabbit warren. This diplomat has been in a position to oversee and monitor the situation in that country for most of the century so far---daily briefs to the Seventh Floor and weekly ones to the WH back in DC and a long sojourn in the region every four months or so since 2002. But this public official has come to the sad conclusion that Kabul is Baghdad all over again. Every US agency and department has its "mission staff" crammed into one or more cargo crates and the lack of oversight or even sustained US policy coherence is simply breathtaking.

So the latest pariah in Afghanistan, and Pakistan for that matter, Richard Holbrooke, has devised a mantra which might keep this careerist's hopes alive for the Chief Foggy Bottom job should Hillary slip or be thrown under a bus, Obama's normal M.O. in reaction to the slightest glitch [just ask Gregory Craig or Susan Rice]. Holbrooke has been insinuating what everyone knows, only with a foghorn -persistance, that the Karzai administration hasn't been lickety-split in cleaning house and had committed election irregularities.

But according to my Foggy Bottom correspondent, Karzai has been doing pretty much his or anyone else's best to clean the Augean stables of the accumulated graft, corruption, peculation, and war-lord kickbackism that has long been the background noise of doing political business in Afghanistan, and especially since Kabul and environs began sliding down the slippery slope into a narco-state export hub in the late sixties. However, after Holbrooke quickly alienated every single sincere or at least dedicated Afghani official with his abrasive nasty stab-in-the-back contortions, he himself decided that some sort of an exit strategy to extract his career from this dreary cul-de-sac of Kabul was in order. Ditto Islamabad and the Paks, who are more corrupt than the Afghanis if that is any solace to a bemused US regional hegemon trying to sort out the baddies from the worsies.

The constantly conniving Holbrooke appears to be positioning himself for a safe exit from his thankless task in S.E. Asia of reconciling three regional players who hate each other cordially. To do this, Dick is quietly whispering innuendoes, quietly sniping and backbiting with the downbeat subtext that Karzai and his sordid political crew might be worse than the Taliban alternative. Although this might be an exaggeration and of course is surely absurd on the face of it, but Holbrooke thereby gives a leit motif to the constantly bobbing and weaving Obama, who has already slithered from "a necessary war" to some sort of multicultural rainbow of contingencies as concerns the Afghan military quandary, and who might want to strap on this parachute should his notorious lack of consistency and will power again assert itself.

The drumbeat of empty chatter about Karzai's "corruption" fits Dear Leader's chameleon-on-plaid moral posturing in the Oval Office as it also does the hidden agenda of his regional Proconsul Holbrooke, whose devious sniping and conniving mirrors that of his boss back in DC, even though it has lost Holbrooke any real access or credibility with the powers that be in the region, including Islamabad and Kabul.

Echo chambers ranging from the NYT's editorial staff to book-hawking t-shirt salesmen like BOR all find the theme of Karzai's Bad Boyz, Bad Boyz in Kabul a useful way to undercut US efforts in the region, and to offer Obama a way out at an early opportunity once resistance to his latest juking and backpedaling becomes apparent. With the Dems as with the Repubs., foreign policy is always style and symbols and a morality play.

Except occasionally with Republicans, even though it may be wrong-headed or need strong corrective measures, the foreign policy effort is sustained for more than twelve months at a time.

Obama's weathervane spins with each new coldfront, and like his predecessor Jimmy Carter, foreign policy is not his strongest suit. Look for more Afghan policy permutations in rapid-fire order, says my Foggy Bottom buddy, in the next year or so.