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Roger Simon wonders how Janet Napolitano keeps her job.
… But perhaps you are a perfect match for our reactionary narcissist president who continues to say not a word as the brave demonstrators in Iran again risk their lives to overcome their brutal Islamic regime. What’s interesting about Obama and Napolitano is that they pretend to be “progressive,” but they are actually heartless.
Nile Gardiner asks in his Telegraph blog, ‘where’s Obama when the protesters in Iran need him.’
… once again huge street protests have flared up on the streets of Tehran and a number of other major cities, with several protesters shot dead this weekend by the security forces and Revolutionary Guards, reportedly including the nephew of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, and dozens seriously injured. And again there is deafening silence from the Commander-in-Chief as well as his Secretary of State. And where is the president? On vacation in Hawaii, no doubt recuperating from his exertions driving forward the monstrous health care reform bill against the overwhelming will of the American public and without a shred of bipartisan support.
This is not however a time for fence-sitting by the leader of the free world. The president should be leading international condemnation of the suppression of pro-democracy protesters, and calling on the Iranian dictatorship to free the thousands of political dissidents held in its torture chambers. Just as Ronald Reagan confronted the evils of Soviet Communism, Barack Obama should support the aspirations of the Iranian people to be free. The United States has a major role to play in inspiring and advancing freedom in Iran, and the president should make it clear that the American people are on the side of those brave Iranians who are laying down their lives for liberty in the face of tyranny.
John Fund knows why the Obami don’t want us to see the health care bill.
… It’s no wonder Congress and the White House are so determined to hide their handiwork from the public while the House and Senate versions are “reconciled.” President Obama has said the negotiations will take place in the West Wing and he will be actively involved. But when ABC’s Jake Tapper asked White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs about the president’s campaign pledge to “have the [health care] negotiations televised on C-SPAN,” Mr. Gibbs dodged the question and took refuge in his talking points, insisting that voters already “have a pretty good sense of who is battling on behalf of thousands of lobbyists that are trying to protect drugs profits and insurance profits, and who’s fighting on behalf of middle-class Americans.”
In other words, no one in the White House wants the public to be looking on as this Frankenstein monster is finally stitched together.
Mark Steyn columns on climate fads.
… As I always say, if you’re 30 there has been no global warming for your entire adult life. If you’re graduating high school after a lifetime of eco-brainwashing, there has been no global warming since you entered first grade. None. After the leaked data from East Anglia revealed that Dr. Phil Jones (privately) conceded this point, Tim Flannery, one of the A-list warm-mongers in Copenhagen, owned up to it on Aussie TV, too. Yet, when I reprised the line in this space a couple of weeks back, thinking it was now safe for polite society, I was besieged by the usual “YOU LIE!!!!!!!” emails angrily denouncing me for failing to explain that the cooling trend of the oughts is in fact merely a blip in the long-term warming trend of the nineties.
Well, maybe. Then again, perhaps the warming trend of the nineties is merely a blip in the long-term ice age trend of the early seventies. I doubt many of my caps-lock emailers are aware of the formerly imminent ice age. It was in Newsweek and the New York Times, and it produced the occasional bestseller. But, unlike today’s carbon panic, it wasn’t everywhere; it wasn’t, in every sense, the air that we breathe. Unlike Al Gore’s wretched movie, it wasn’t taught in schools. TV networks did not broadcast during children’s time apocalyptic public service announcements that in any other circumstance would constitute child abuse. Unlike today, where incoming mayors announce that as their ?rst act in office they’re banning bottled water from council meetings, ostentatious displays of piety were not ubiquitous. It was not a universal pretext for recoiling from progress: back in the seventies, upscale municipalities that now obsess about emissions standards of hot-air dryers were busy banning garden clotheslines on aesthetic grounds. There were no fortunes to be made from government grants for bogus “renewable energy” projects. Unlike Al Gore, carbon billionaire, nobody got rich peddling ice offsets. …
A couple of days ago we featured a piece from The Nation by Alexander Cockburn. It was an item from a left publication acknowledging the importance of the climategate revelations. Jonathan Tobin posts on that extraordinary event in Contentions.
There are some people who are so odious that when you find yourself on the same side of an issue with them, your first instinct must be to question whether you were right in the first place. Alexander Cockburn is certainly such a person. He is a rabid leftist, apologist for totalitarians and a vicious hater of Israel. From his perch as editor of his own rag CounterPunch and as a columnist for the Nation, he has spewed forth nonsense and bile for a long time. But like the proverbial blind squirrel, it appears as though even Cockburn is capable of finding an acorn. That is the only way to explain the utterly rational and completely on-target attack on the Copenhagen Global Warming jamboree and the entire Climategate cover-up that he has written for the Nation and which can be read for free at RealClearPolitics.com. …
Michael Barone wrote on the similarity between the recent Senate battle for health care and the one fought in 1854 for the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Turns out a blogger had made the comparison a few days before him, so Barone pays obeisance in another post. Of course, we have that blog post from Streetwise Professor. The three items are a good history lesson.
It’s time to blow the whistle on two erroneous statements that opponents and proponents of the health care legislation being jammed through Congress have been making. Republicans have been saying that never before has Congress passed such an unpopular bill with such important ramifications by such a narrow majority. Barack Obama has been saying that passage of the bill will mean that the health care issue will be settled once and for all.
The Republicans and Obama are both wrong. But perhaps they can be forgiven because the precedent for Congress passing an unpopular bill is an old one, and the issue it addressed has long been settled, though not by the legislation in question.
That legislation was the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Its lead sponsor was Stephen A. Douglas, at 41 in his eighth year as senator from Illinois, the most dynamic leader of a Democratic Party that had won the previous presidential election by 254 electoral votes to 42. …
Here’s Barone’s second post.
I thought my comparison of Democratic health care legislation with the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 in my Wednesday Examiner column was an original idea. After all, even David Broder and Lou Cannon weren’t around to cover Stephen Douglas’s brilliant floor managing of this disastrous legislation. But fewer of our ideas are original than we suppose. Blogger Streetwise Professor, who in non-blog life is Craig Pirrong, a professor at the University of Houston’s Bauer College of Business. …
And, introducing … The Streetwise Professor as he tries to find something to compare to the Senate bill.
… I struggle to find a historical parallel. The closest thing that comes to mind is the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas was fixated on the creation of a transcontinental railroad. Southern senators blocked the advancement of Douglas’s dream, so he proposed a bill that, to gain Southern support, completely undermined the careful (and yes, imperfect) compromises over slavery and the territories that had been crafted in the previous two generations (extending back to the Missouri Compromise of 1820). In so doing, he set in motion a train of events (no pun intended) that culminated in the Civil War.
Perhaps you consider the parallel hyperbolic. And no, I am not forecasting civil war. But if this bill, or anything close to it, passes, the results will convulse the country. The fault lines will not be sectional, as they were in the 1850s, but generational and socio-economic. And perhaps the most important fault line will be between citizen and state as it will completely revolutionize the relationship between the government and the governed. …
WSJ has an interview with Robert Morgenthau.
In the criminal justice system, the people of Manhattan have been represented for 35 years by New York County District Attorney Robert Morgenthau. This is his story.
Mr. Morgenthau, who inspired the original D.A. character on the television program “Law and Order,” will retire on Thursday at age 90. Much of the barely fictitious drama is set in his office in Manhattan’s Criminal Courts Building. This week, amid half-filled boxes and scattered personal mementos, he sat down to discuss his life’s work.
Even though he knows I’m wearing a wire—actually an audio recorder placed on the table between us—America’s D.A. speaks candidly, including about his public blowups with New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Mr. Morgenthau says this is the first mayor he hasn’t gotten along with, and that the relationship went south when his office started investigating the city’s role in the death of two of New York’s bravest in an August, 2007 fire. Among other mistakes, city inspectors had failed to note that the water had been turned off at the old Deutsche Bank building opposite Ground Zero. The blaze resulted in 33 “mayday” calls from firefighters, and the D.A. is amazed that only two lost their lives.
Mr. Morgenthau soon got a call from a city lawyer telling him that “the mayor wanted me to tell you that he’s surprised that you’re looking at the Deutsche Bank case.” Mr. Morgenthau says he told the mayor’s minion, “You tell the mayor that I’m surprised that he’s surprised.”
Why would the mayor encourage such a call? Because, says Mr. Morgenthau, Mr. Bloomberg “thinks all lawyers work for him” and “doesn’t want anybody around who doesn’t kiss his ring, or other parts of his body.” …