Michael Barone, Washington Examiner.com

 

In his New York Times column last week, David Brooks contrasted "the educated class," which supports Barack Obama and his liberal worldview, with the tea party movement, "a large, fractious confederation of Americans who are defined by what they are against, ... the concentrated power of the educated class."

 

Many conservatives read Brooks as putting down the tea partiers. I think he was indicating distaste for both sides. "I'm not a fan" of the tea party movement, he wrote, but he also noted, "Every single idea associated with the educated class has grown more unpopular over the year."

 

Still, it sounds like Brooks was indulging the conceit of so many liberals that they are, well, simply smarter than conservatives.

 

But when you look back over the surges of enthusiasm in the politics of the last two years, you see something like this: The Obama enthusiasts who dominated so much of the 2008 campaign cycle were motivated by style. The tea party protesters who dominated so much of 2009 were motivated by substance. Read article.

Greg Lewis.org

 

On January 7, in his most authoritative public address to date, President Barack Obama, apparently giving presidential credibility to Press Secretary Robert Gibbs' use of the term "meaninglessness," forcefully declared that as regards the botched Christmas Day Boner Bomber incident, "the buck stops with me." In the wake of the lack of firings and resignations that followed the Flight 253 debacle, one was hoping, for a breathless millisecond, that the President was about to fire himself. No such luck, of course. He was merely mouthing, as he does in all of his many public appearances, words unconnected to any reality with which most Americans are familiar.

 

Oh, sure, the President did finally use the word "terrorist" publicly, but not until nearly two weeks after his administration had blown yet another opportunity for getting actionable intelligence from a young, scared creep, this time by mirandizing him and ushering him immediately into the warmth and comfort of the American court system. Hell, his aides didn't even wake the President until some three hours after the incident occurred. You and I knew about it before our Commander-in-Chief did. And then Obama managed to squeeze in three rounds of golf before he made his first public statement to reassure us, with another incomprehensible example of his command of the English language, that the incident was the work of an "isolated extremist."

 

It's becoming clear just how inept and unqualified pretty much everyone in the current administration is. The more we see, the more we understand that, not only are we not being protected by this administration, but that by their ineptitude they are actively assisting global jihadists to carry out their attacks. Whether it's because they're simply stooges of the American higher education system and believe that hardened criminals really can be rehabilitated and that terrorists really come from the ranks of the poor and downtrodden around the world, it's hard to say.

 

More menacingly, it may be because they're actually secretly in sympathy with terrorists' aims, so inculcated with anti-American ideas have they become. Read article.

Ed Lasky, American Thinker.com

 

Barack Obama has a problem. His polls numbers are dropping and his policies are fueling an angry backlash across America. The Democratic party is held in disrepute, and congressional Democrats are dropping like flies. This imperils Obama's radical agenda and his own 2012 prospects. What to do? Game the system and rig the future elections. That is how things are done in the streets of Chicago.

 

Signs are emerging that the Chicago Boys -- the triumvirate of Obama, Emanuel, and Axlerod -- are up to their old tricks, as I touched upon in a previous American Thinker column. My recent interest was piqued by two news items that floated across my screen in the last week.

 

One was the release of the White House visitor logs that showed visits by Anna Burger, Secretary-Treasurer of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and named by Fortune Magazine as "the most powerful woman in the labor movement. " We know Andy Stern, head of the SEIU, routinely visits the White House and has boasted of the tens of millions of dollars and man-hours the union spent in electing Barack Obama to the presidency. We can expect a repeat performance come 2012.

 

But Anna Burger is far more than an SEIU honcho; she also is the vice-chairman of a shadowy group called the " Democracy Alliance," composed of billionaire funders and savvy political operatives who set out a few years ago to change politics as we know it in America. Among their projects was something called the Secretary of States Project that set about electing secretaries of state in key battleground states. Read article.

 

Wesley Pruden, Washington Times,com

 

If it's true, as Dr. Johnson famously told us it was, that the prospect of hanging focuses the mind in a wonderful way, maybe the prospect of facing angry voters sharpens a politician's instincts (if not necessarily his mind).

 

After first treating the Detroit panty bomber as if it were merely an amusing story ("an isolated incident") that an airline passenger could dine out on for a few days, President Obama is giving a good imitation now of a man getting a late education. Maybe the education will take. It's too soon to say. He said late Thursday that he won't fire anybody. "Ultimately, the buck stops with me. When the system fails, it's my responsibility."

 

Smooth talk is easy for Mr. Obama, and he often confuses words with deeds. He's taking responsibility for what happened aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on final approach over Detroit, but it's not clear what that means. He's not likely to fire himself (perhaps to spare us Joe Biden). So nobody pays a price for some serious sleeping on the job. Sleeping on the job is serious, but not that serious. Read article.

 

James Taranto, WSJ.com

 

To the limited extent that the Geneva Conventions have been held to protect unlawful enemy combatants, the detainees would enjoy that protection at Thomson too. They would also have additional rights under U.S. law, since they would be under the jurisdiction of the local U.S. district court rather than the special federal jurisdiction created by the Military Commissions Act of 2006. As a practical matter, though, their lives are cushier at Guantanamo than they would be at Thomson, in part because the risk of escape from a military facility in the middle of nowhere is considerably less than from a prison in the American heartland.

 

Is there any argument left for closing Guantanamo? Claims of detainee abuse were mostly bunk to begin with (remember when Isikoff's magazine claimed falsely that an interrogator had flushed a Koran down a toilet?), and any irregularities have long since been remedied. The president is reduced to making the frivolous claim that the existence of Guantanamo is dangerous because it is somehow useful to al Qaeda's recruiting efforts.

 

Ultimately, the case against Guantanamo can be reduced to an ad hominem attack. Obama and his supporters loathe it because it is a symbol of the hated George W. Bush. For the president of the United States, it is past time to move on from petty grievances and deal in a serious and forthright way with the demands of American national security. Read article.

 

Peter Wehner, Commentary Magazine.com

 

Sometimes in the life of a politician, a particular moment, word, or act defines them — and badly damages them. This much-viewed montage of comments by Barack Obama, repeatedly promising that he would allow C-SPAN to broadcast health-care negotiations, may well qualify. The reason is that it requires no commentary or interpretation by others; it is Barack Obama in his own words — words we now know to be false, cynical, and (quite literally) unbelievable.

 

My hunch is that this episode will do considerable harm to Obama’s standing with the public, in part because it annihilates what had been at the core of the Obama campaign and the Obama appeal: the belief that he embodied a new, uplifting kind of politics; that transparency would be a watchword of his presidency; that he would “turn the page” on the practice of cynical politics. It is not simply that the negotiations will not appear on C-SPAN; it is that the process itself has been a model of payoffs and backroom deals, of dishonest arguments and false claims, of secrecy and cynicism.

 

t turns out it was all an elaborate, beautifully packaged, wonderfully choreographed, and deeply dishonest game. Before this concern was inchoate; now, thanks to the “these negotiations will be on C-SPAN” video, it is metastasizing.

 

The health-care debate has involved pushing through massive, extremely unpopular, and incoherent legislation. In the process Mr. Obama has shattered the most appealing aspects of his image. The direct and collateral political damage of this entire enterprise on Mr. Obama and his party will be almost incalculable. Read article.

 

Veronique de Rugy, The Corner at NRO.com

 

The silver lining in the health-care-reform nightmare that is taking place in America might be the unconstitutionality of certain aspects of the bill. According to this morning's Wall Street Journal, "constitutional-law scholars say that if the health-care overhaul becomes law, it could give courts an opportunity to test the limits of congressional authority in areas that haven't been examined since the New Deal era."

 

Preeminent legal scholars have written and made this point before. Here are some very useful links compiled by Manny Klausner.

 

Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, George Mason University’s Ilya Somin asks whether Congress has the authority to enact a health-insurance mandate using its power to tax. The answer is likely no.

 

Check out also, Georgetown University’s Randy Barnett's post called "Why the Personal Mandate to Buy Health Insurance Is Unprecedented and Unconstitutional." Read article.

 

Mark B. Constantian, WSJ.com

 

Last August the cover of Time pictured President Obama in white coat and stethoscope. The story opened: "The U.S. spends more to get less [health care] than just about every other industrialized country." This trope has dominated media coverage of health-care reform. Yet a majority of Americans opposes Congress's health-care bills. Why?

 

The comparative ranking system that most critics cite comes from the U.N.'s World Health Organization (WHO). The ranking most often quoted is Overall Performance, where the U.S. is rated No. 37. The Overall Performance Index, however, is adjusted to reflect how well WHO officials believe that a country could have done in relation to its resources.

 

The scale is heavily subjective: The WHO believes that we could have done better because we do not have universal coverage. What apparently does not matter is that our population has universal access because most physicians treat indigent patients without charge and accept Medicare and Medicaid payments, which do not even cover overhead expenses. The WHO does rank the U.S. No. 1 of 191 countries for "responsiveness to the needs and choices of the individual patient." Isn't responsiveness what health care is all about? Read article.

 

Mark Steyn, OC Register.com

 

Not long after the Ayatollah Khomeini announced his fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the British novelist suddenly turned up on a Muslim radio station in West London late one night and told his interviewer he'd converted to Islam. Marvelous religion, couldn't be happier, Allahu Akbar and all that.

 

And the Ayatollah said hey, that's terrific news, glad to hear it. But we're still gonna kill you.

 

Well, even a leftie novelist wises up under those circumstances.

 

Evidently, the president of the United States takes a little longer.

 

Barack Obama has spent the past year doing big-time Islamoschmoozing, from his announcement of Gitmo's closure and his investigation of Bush officials, to his bow before the Saudi king and a speech in Cairo to "the Muslim world" with far too many rhetorical concessions and equivocations. And at the end of it the jihad sent America a thank-you note by way of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's underwear: Hey, thanks for all the outreach! But we're still gonna kill you.

 

According to one poll, 58 percent of Americans are in favor of waterboarding young Umar Farouk. Well, you should have thought about that before you made a community organizer president of the world's superpower. The election of Barack Obama was a fundamentally unserious act by the U.S. electorate, and you can't blame the world's mischief-makers, from Putin to Ahmadinejad to the many Gitmo recidivists now running around Yemen, from drawing the correct conclusion.

 

For two weeks, the government of the United States has made itself a global laughingstock. Don't worry, "the system worked," said Homeland Security Secretary Janet Incompetano. Don't worry, he was an "isolated extremist," said the president. Don't worry, we're banning bathroom breaks for the last hour of the flight, said the TSA. Don't worry, "U.S. border security officials" told the Los Angeles Times, we knew he was on the plane, and we "had decided to question him when he landed." Don't worry, Obama's counterterrorism chief, John Brennan, assured the Sunday talk shows, sure, we read him his rights, and he's lawyered up but he'll soon see that "there is advantage to talking to us in terms of plea agreements."

 

Oh, that's grand. Try to kill hundreds of people in an act of war, and it's the starting point for a plea deal. In his Cairo speech, the president bragged that the United States would "punish" those in America who would "deny" the "right of women and girls to wear the hijab." If he's so keen on it, maybe he should consider putting the entire federal government into full-body burkas and zipping up the eye slit so that, henceforth, every public utterance by John Brennan will be entirely inaudible. Americans should be ashamed by this all-fools' fortnight. Read article.

 

 

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