James Taranto, OnlineWSJ.com

 

Last week Justice David Souter let it be known that he intends to retire this summer, giving President Obama his first Supreme Court nomination. There has been talk that Obama will look for a "liberal Scalia"--i.e., someone with unyielding principles and verbal flair. But some politicians and observers have other ideas, as the Associated Press reports:

 

"I would like to see more people from outside the judicial monastery, somebody who has had some real-life experience, not just as a judge," said Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee that will hold hearings when Obama makes his nomination.

 

Leahy seems to want not a liberal Scalia but a liberal Joe the Plumber.

Larry Elder, Townhall.com

 

Has it really been 100 days?

 

Aided by an eagerly compliant Democratic-controlled Congress, a sycophantic media, and a bunch of squishy Republicans, President Obama has taken the country on a radical, mind-boggling leap into collectivism.

 

Obama -- to use one of his favorite expressions -- doubled down, no, tripled and quadrupled down on Bush's "stimulus" and "rescue" packages, spending trillions of dollars to "bail out" financial institutions, too-big-to-fail businesses, and even deficit-running states.

 

Obama proposes spending billions (or trillions?) more on "creating or saving" -- whatever that means -- 4 million, 3.5 million or 2.5 million jobs. Pick a number. Given the government's vast business expertise, Obama proposes spending gobs of money to "invest" in green jobs. And he's just warming up. He wants taxpayers to guarantee, presumably to all who request it, a "world-class education" -- whatever that means. Read article.

 

Underlining Fears

Colonel Bob Pappas, USMC, Ret., Gulf1.com

 

It’s a sad day for freedom in America with Obama’s whirling dervish spinning its propaganda, misinformation and disinformation through CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, and MSNBC about the April 15th “Tea Parties.” Obama’s senior political advisor David Axelrod, in a CNN “Face the Nation” interview stated: "I think any time you have severe economic conditions there is always an element of disaffection that can mutate into something that's unhealthy."

 

 In addition to being an insult to what probably represents the attitudes of a majority of Americans, Axelrod’s was a tacit threat. For the Obama Administration to refer to millions of patriotic citizens who engaged in legitimate protest activity as being “unhealthy” is on its face counter-patriotic. But, if they “liked” the “Tea Parties” they are going to love July 4th.

 

During the years that the political left was busy undermining the country’s security activities with its 5th column behavior and protests, they screamed that protests were “patriotic.” However, no one should be surprised when millions of ordinary Americans protest obscene spending writ small by the Obama regime, that protest activity is now characterized as “subversive!?” Read article.

 

Gagdad Bob, One Cosmos.Blogspot.com

 

While I'm warming up here, I just want to say that Obama is the messiah of false slack. I say this because, as a coonical pslackologist, I have spent a laughtime studying the source of human slack, and Obama -- and the left in general -- embodies the opposite principle.

 

As recently as a few hundred years ago, mankind at large was mired in a slackless existence that hadn't changed all that much for the average geezer in thousands of years. It was war, famine, plague, tyranny, oppression, stupidity, poverty, illiteracy, backbreaking toil, early death, very bad smells, and repeat as unnecessary.

 

However, one place on earth took a great leap forward into the realm of slack, a realm that too many medullards take for grunted today. The engine that drove this expansion of our slack was the free market, accompanied by its enablers such as private property, civil rights (founded upon the sanctity of the human person), and the rule of law. Read article.

 

William Mehlman

 

The opacity of the Obama administration’s professed dedication to the safety and security of Israel becomes more pronounced with each passing week.

 

Former U.S. ambassador Charles Freeman’s aborted appointment to the chairmanship of the president’s National Intelligence Council is history, but its reverberations refuse to subside. By now we all know why this appointment was aborted. The question that won’t go away is why it was ever made.

 

Given Freeman’s stellar performances riding shotgun for the Saudis and the Communist Chinese, even as the “goddess of democracy” was being systematically assaulted by their regimes, by what stretch of whose imagination was the ambassador deemed fit to be sifting national intelligence data, much less presiding over the process? “Don’t ask us,” could serve as a summation of the response of the President and his inner circle, their collective arms extended full length.

 

It was Freeman himself who let the cat out of the bag. Withdrawing his name from further consideration for the National Intelligence Council chairmanship, he issued what the Washington Post described as a “two-page screed “ in which he cast himself as the victim of an “Israeli lobby” whose “tactics plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency” and which is “intent on forcing adherence to the policies of a foreign government. The aim of this lobby,” he continued, “is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of their views…and the exclusion of any and all options for decisions by Americans and our government, other than those that it favors.”

 

While never having been mistaken for a member of Israel’s “amen” corner, even the Washington Post found all this a bit much to bear. “Yes, Mr. Freeman was referring to Americans who support Israel,” it declared in a March 12th editorial entitled “Peddling a Conspiracy Theory, “and his statement was a gross libel.” Read article.

 

Director Blue.Blogspot.com

 

THE PRESIDENT: So that’s where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues. But that’s also a huge driver of cost, right?

 

I mean, the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here.

 

So how do you — how do we deal with it?

 

THE PRESIDENT: ...you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It’s not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And that’s part of what I suspect you’ll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now.

 

In other words, faceless bureaucrats in Washington -- not your family -- will decide whether your grandparents live or die. Read article.

 

Quinn Hillyer, Spectator.org

 

Yes, it is indeed similar to fascism.

 

Authoritarianism is not totalitarianism, though. There is a big difference -- a difference educated people once understood. We are not talking about pure evil, not talking about genocide, not talking about brutal attempts at foreign conquest, not talking about Mengele-like experiments and deliberate killing of "defectives." What we are talking about is the beginning of a tendency toward authoritarianism (so far minus the thuggishness), especially in the economic realm. And we darn well ought to be able to make sober, factual, valid historical analogies, by way of warning without being accused of foaming at the mouth.

 

This is a question of freedom. It's a question of free enterprise, free markets, and free minds. When an administration takes over banks and car companies, and makes moves to force through a takeover of the entire health care industry without the ordinary procedural safeguards, and (even under Bush) forces banks to buy other banks against their will, then this isn't the America we know and love. This is instead a country ruled by a top-down, command-and-control, invasive, barely accountable, self-selected elite.

 

And that is dangerous. Read article.

 

IBD Editorials.com

 

The president on Wednesday night, April 29 assured Americans that he doesn't like "meddling in the private sector." We agree. A good place to begin a nonmeddlesome approach would be health care reform.

 

Washington's unprecedented power grabs, from banks to the auto industry, will pale in comparison with the "meddling" of getting government into the health insurance business.

 

The signals aren't reassuring. During the same press conference this week in which President Obama expressed sadness about government meddling with companies in the wake of the financial crisis, he also strongly suggested that a government-operated health care option was in the cards.

 

He recalled telling Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, "look, on health care reform you may not agree with me that we should have a public plan. That may be philosophically just too much for you to swallow." Read article.

 

Arnold Ahlert, Political Mavens.com

 

In its latest sop to the far left, the Obama administration is going to release hundreds of photos showing U.S. troops ostensibly mistreating prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. The true number of pictures runs into the thousands. Why release some, but not all? According to Fox News, “(the Pentagon) is choosing not to include the substantial number of additional photos submitted as evidence, many of which did not lead to disciplinary action.” Translation: pictures which don’t show America in the worst possible light don’t make the cut.

 

I have a far better idea. Create two giant columns of pictures. In Column A, post every picture which reinforces the America-bashers’ view that our country is: the scourge of the modern world; its former leaders are “war criminals;” our soldiers and intelligence agencies are “out-of-control terrorists,” or mind-numbed robots “only following orders;” or any other photos which reinforce the Hate America crowd’s worldview.

 

Column B? Photos of jetliners crashing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Photos of people jumping eighty stories to avoid being burned to death. Individual pictures of the three hundred-plus emergency responders who were killed trying to rescue doomed New Yorkers. Photos from the NY Medical Examiner’s Office of the charred remains which took over five years to fully identify. Pictures of innocent individuals being beheaded by terrorist thugs. Pictures of thousands of Muslims celebrating the carnage of 9/11. Read article.

 

Paul Greenberg, JWR.com

 

Here's this week's worst idea/trial balloon from the Obama administration: Convert the government's bailout loans to banks into common stock, making Uncle Sam not just the regulator of banks but their owner. So that the country's largest banks could become public-private corporations, like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and just as capable of creating the next big boom. Which would soon enough trigger the next and even bigger bust. Will we never learn?

 

The New Deal never made that mistake. FDR saved the banking system by insuring and reconstructing it; he didn't seize it. No wonder our new president has already noticed a "confidence gap" in his administration.

 

Some enterprises have earned failure. Let them have it. That's what we have Chapter 11 and bankruptcy courts for: to save the assets, pay off the creditors, reorganize those parts of the enterprise worth reorganizing, and get on with business. Read article.

 

A.J. DiCintio, NMJ.us

 

First, as background information, this description of behavior that many of us have too often experienced.

 

In a discussion about a particularly heinous murder, a liberal curiously remains calm and reasonable as he falls into platitudes about the fact that crime has always been with us etc.

 

But upon hearing the opinion that the unspeakably vicious killer ought to be hung by the thumbs to die swinging in the wind, the equanimity suddenly vanishes as Mr. Reasonable explodes with booming, red-faced denunciations of “inhuman” behavior that not only debases us but also endangers our entire culture.

 

We think, as we walk away stunned, “What an insulting perversity it is to react to a horrendous crime with apparent reason but to an expression of outrage at it (even by one directly affected) with angry, lecturing fulminations.”

 

With that background in mind, we may now turn to some facts about the current liberal anger and angst over “torture” and the punishment deserved by the “torturers.” Read article.

 

Steve Holland, UK.Reuters.com

 

Barack Obama is reveling in presidential power and influence unseen in Washington for decades.

 

Barely 100 days in office, the U.S. president and his Democratic Party have firm control over the White House and Congress and the ability to push through ambitious plans.

 

Now, with the coming retirement of a Supreme Court justice clearing the way for him to appoint a successor, Obama already is assured a legacy at the top of all three branches of government -- executive, legislative and judicial.

 

On the corporate front, the federal government's pumping of billions of dollars in bailout money into banks and auto companies has given Obama the power to force an overhaul in those industries, a remarkable intervention in capitalist industries by the state.

 

Americans are giving him leeway as well. His job approval ratings are well over 60 percent, giving him political capital to undertake big challenges. Read article.

 

Lee Cary, American Thinker

 

So many and varied were the powers of His Obamaness that with tongue alone He could change the meaning of words, as happened one day in the Realm of 57 States.

 

Once upon a time, His Obamaness, POTUS in the ninth year of the third millennium, spoke to the Realm and said,

 

“Bankruptcy is not a sign of weakness for [The] Chrysler, but rather a sign of strength.” 

 

Now, of the three ox cart makers in the Realm, The Chrysler was the one most vexed by the challenge of cart-making. Although its carts were often beautiful to behold, the people of the Realm did not always look with great favor upon them as a way to carry their soccer balls, dogs, and vegetables.

 

So few people were surprised when The Chrysler had no more coins of the Realm with which to buy wheels and wood, or to pay the workers of the Guild of Cart Makers as much as they had been accustomed to receiving.   Seeing this, His Obamaness told His Exchequer, Sir Tiny Tim of Geithner, to place many coins inside The Chrysler’s bank. Now it should be known that the Cart Makers gave His Obamaness much support during His race to become POTUS. He owed them.

 

Seeing this, His Obamaness told His Exchequer, Sir Tiny Tim of Geithner, to place many coins inside The Chrysler’s bank. Now it should be known that the Cart Makers gave His Obamaness much support during His race to become POTUS. He owed them. Read article.

 

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