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Another Endorsement Of Bush

Obama argues against Uigher release

Barack Obama has decided to fight the release of the 17 Chinese Uighers at Guantanamo Bay into the US, Jake Tapper reports — and he’s choosing an interesting argument to use.  While Obama has wasted no opportunity to paint Gitmo as a stain on the nation’s reputation and all but the gulag Dick Durbin called it a few years ago, the administration paints quite a different picture of it in court

In fact, the conditions at the rest of the facility also are pretty decent, compared to conditions in max-security prisons elsewhere in the US.  The military runs a tight ship at Gitmo, but the prisoners have a standard of living that — apart from their detention — exceeds anything available to them in their home countries, free or not.  They certainly don’t want to be there any more than the Uighers, but as the administration admits in this filing, they’re being detained under the “laws of war.”

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Getting Ruthless In The West Wing

White House: We’ll cut off criticism of Porkulus

Mark Tapscott notices an interesting blog post by Norman Eisen, who works for Barack Obama as Special Counsel to the President on Ethics and Government Reform.  Anticipating a deluge of criticism over the thus-far ineffectual spending plan, Eisen has a straightforward plan to deal with criticism.  He’ll simply use the power of the federal government to silence it.  Problem solved!

Silencing dissent and criticism is “necessary under the unique circumstances of the stimulus program”?  Gee, what “unique circumstances” might those be?  Perhaps the fact that it costs more than the Moon shot, and has yet to halt the economic skid.  Maybe it’s the fact that most of the stimulus package doesn’t actually stimulate anything except doctrinaire liberal dreams and the pens that check off the items from the Democratic wish list.

Remember when the Left took to the streets to declare dissent “patriotic” during wartime?  I didn’t have a problem with dissent then, but apparently the Left has a curious definition of “patriotism”.  Now, suddenly, the federal government can silence their critics at will, not to protect critical national-security programs or keep from undermining a war effort, but to protect a Democratic president intent on seizing control of private industry across a wide swath of the nation.  Suddenly, that kind of dissent threatens America.



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Bluff Called

Carl Levin: Cheney’s lying about the CIA memos that allegedly prove torture works

Really? So Cheney put his reputation on the line and started turning up on television everywhere to make the case that enhanced interrogation works, even though he secretly knows it doesn’t? And Obama has the smoking-gun memos in his possession and could destroy Cheney at any moment by declassifying them — and yet hasn’t? And Cheney knows that, and yet still he presses on?

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And Presto! Even Bigger Deficits

IRS revenues dropping rapidly

Remember those optimistic deficit estimates from the White House, and the slightly less rosy projections from the Congressional Budget Office?  Get ready for a major recalculation.  Tax revenues fell drastically in April, the AEIR reports, a month which usually brings the most money into government coffers

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No Dud This Time

Kim tests another nuke

John Bolton called it earlier this week, and Kim Jong-Il proved him right.  This time, the North Koreans got their money’s worth out of a nuclear test, setting off a device that produced a yield similar to that of the Hiroshima blast in 1945

Barack Obama issued a cautious reaction, one that Kim will find much to his liking

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Shocka

Obama: Hey, we’re out of money

Via Breitbart, an important newsflash from The One in case you hadn’t heard that we’re running trillion-dollar deficits these days. See if you can balance the nuance
of his point about Medicaid and Medicare being completely unsustainable long-term with his burning desire to nationalize most of the country’s heath-care industry.

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“I Don’t Know The Details.”

Waxman: “I certainly don’t claim to know everything that’s in this bill”

I suppose this sort of thing can be excused for bills that aren’t very important. Too bad cap and trade — which will shave trillions off of GDP, per Heritage’s estimate — isn’t one of them.

“Title IV, Subtitle B, Part 2, Section 426, of the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 states: ‘An eligible worker (specifically, workers who lose their jobs as a result of this measure) may receive a climate change adjustment allowance under this subsection for a period of not longer than 156 weeks…80 percent of the monthly premium of any health insurance coverage…up to a maximum payment of $1,500 in relocation allowance…and job search expenses not exceed[ing] $1,500.’”

If cap-and-trade is an energy and global warming bill, why is a three-year package of unemployment benefits, job training and relocation expenses buried deep within its fine print? And why is a federally subsidized “job bank” needed if laid-off workers would quickly be rehired for higher-paying “green” jobs? The fact that generous unemployment benefits are buried in the bill means that “green jobs are bunk,” the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Ben Lieberman told The Examiner.


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Stupid

RNC = Rush-Newt-Cheney? Don’t make me laugh.

Now comes Newsweek’s Howard Fineman with the same old line from the Obama White House

If Republicans had spent the last eight years telling the establishment media that the DNC was led by Keith Olbermann, Dick Gephardt and Al Gore, the media would have collectively guffawed. Accordingly, any Republican getting questioned about Limbaugh, Gingrich or Cheney should laugh at the questioner. Indeed, any “journalist” asking such questions should be mercilessly mocked as a mindless propaganda tool for Barack Obama and David Axelrod. Such people are an embarrassment to journalism and deserve to be embarrassed.

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Labels

Laura Ingraham: Notre Dame’s no longer a viable Catholic institution

Via Gateway Pundit, a stemwinder from last night’s Factor that’s most remarkable for her assumption that it was a viable Catholic institution until this past weekend. William McGurn begs to differ

The real question here isn’t whether Notre Dame is still Catholic in any meaningful sense, it’s what it means to be “Catholic” in America today. 54 percent of Catholics voted for The One last fall and 67 percent approved of his job performance as of three weeks ago; majorities approve of torture in at least some circumstances and say they’re more likely to consider common sense and experienceallowed to marry. Even on abortion and stem cells, those calling themselves Catholic are almost indistinguishable from non-Catholics (although there are sharp differences between non-Catholics and Catholics who attend mass regularly). And of course the Vatican itself is as squishy as can be when it comes to taking on Obama for his stances. The Church, ironically, seems to have the opposite problem from the GOP these days: They’re so comfortable with “centrists” that it’s no longer clear what American Catholicism stands for. Which puts Notre Dame squarely inside the mainstream.
when making decisions than Church teachings; a narrow plurality think priests should be
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Liar

Sy Hersh did claim Cheney ran “an executive assassination ring”

Hersh is denying the story

But Hersh’s denial is untrue in part. While there is no record that I’m aware of in which Hersh claimed that Cheney had Bhutto assassinated, there is a recorded statement by Hersh, given during a speech at the University of Minnesota, in which Hersh claimed that the Bush administration had “an executive assassination ring” that reported directly to Cheney

Update (AP): The definitive piece about Hersh’s habit of lying, especially when speaking to an audience, is right here.

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A New Plan

Alternative to Obamacare
The Burr-Coburn legislation would not guarantee “universal” insurance coverage, but it would make quality health insurance and care more affordable and accessible.
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The Challenge Facing Notre Dame

Prestige or Truth?
Nothing has happened to Notre Dame. The decision to honor Obama and the way the university has handled the fallout have been completely in character.
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Another Liar

Gore to Cheney: I waited two years to attack Bush!

Well, no, he didn’t. And in all likelihood, the only reason he waited as long as he did was because it would have been bad form to knock Bush while he was dealing with 9/11. And, as Ace notes, unlike Cheney, Gore wasn’t being threatened with prosecution by Bush for his actions while in office. And also unlike Cheney, Gore’s criticisms of Bush were gratuitous policy disagreements, not matters about which he had inside information and felt obliged to correct the record as Cheney does vis-a-vis whether torture works.

But aside from those things, it’s exactly the same situation. Hey, let me know when Cheney shows up in Saudi Arabia to pummel Obama in front of the Wahhabis, okay?

Audio flashback: Gore rips Bush’s terror policies in September 2002

Via Don Surber, a memory refresher to follow last night’s post about what a liar he is. Be sure to listen all the way through or you’ll miss him calling Bush’s detention policies “un-American,” which of course is A-OK when used by a liberal to criticize a conservative but an outrageous slur vice versa. The more I think about his “I waited two years to complain!” defense (which, again, is a lie), the more profoundly stupid it seems. If, as he says here, he considered Bush’s policies to be an attack on constitutional rights, why on earth would he wait to speak up about it? Is he actually suggesting that the respectful silence owed to a new president by the previous administration means they should shut up and watch while he does something as grave as tearing up the Bill of Rights? And if he’s not suggesting that, what’s his beef with Cheney chiming in about a matter as grave as terrorist interrogations and national security? The “logic” here is downright Pelosi-esque.

Exit question: When’s St. Al going to speak out about Obama retaining most of Bush’s counterterror infrastructure? Or is he too consumed with weeping at the moment to formulate his thoughts properly?
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No Kidding

Suddenly, business leaders fear Obama

Barack Obama won an extraordinary amount of support from the business world in his presidential campaign, helping to tamp down accusations of redistributionist aims, at least until Joe the Plumber caught Obama off-guard.  They campaigned for him, raised money to get him elected, and celebrated when Obama won.  Now they’re in a much less celebratory mood after seeing him in action, the AP reports (via The Corner)

That changed with TARP, however, and the credit companies now have reason to fear the imposition of wide-reaching regulation.  But that’s not what worries businessmen, at least not for the most part.  The big worry comes from the Obama administration’s disregard for contract law via the TARP leverage they bought with taxpayer money.  Chrysler’s senior creditors and their attorneys — many of whom voted for Obama and supported his candidacy with cash — discovered this the hard way when the administration started threatening them with bad publicity via the White House press corps and the “madman theory of the presidency”.  George Will called this a “tincture of lawlessness,” which is kind of like saying that Mafia policy rackets are a “tincture of extortion”.

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Just Don’t Torture … Dictionaries?

Matthews: Sometimes, you gotta torture

Even if you have to torture logic to do it. Chris Matthews tries to explain that of course he would torture under extreme circumstances.  The real crime, as Matthews explains, is changing the definition of torture (via Radio Vice Online)

Ah, the hilarity that Nancy Pelosi hath wrought.  After issuing condemnations for the last several weeks of enhanced interrogation techniques as an absolute repudiation of America, now the Left has to figure out an attack on the Bush administration that lets Pelosi and fellow Democrats in Congress who knew and approved the techniques off the hook.

We can have a debate over what techniques work and what cross the line, which is the honest debate to have, as long as we have all of the information on what was done, what was gleaned, and what was stopped as a result.  Matthews isn’t interested in honest debate.  He’s parsing madly to keep as much blame as possible on Bush for doing less than Matthews suggests here, while absolving Democrats for their participation.  It’s not just hopeless bias, it’s hackery of the lowest order.



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