I thought this analogy had been thoroughly destroyed, but it’s baa-aack. The One is claiming it’s no biggie that the new “health care” bills require every American to buy insurance because most states require everyone to buy car insurance. He goes back to that analogy as he downplays the fact that if you don’t buy health insurance you will eventually be sent to prison.

The President said that he didn’t think the question over the appropriateness of possible jail time is the “biggest question” the House and Senate are facing right now.

I’m thinking it’s a pretty big question for people who don’t want to buy health insurance and don’t want to pay a fine. The only way a “mandate” works is that, eventually, jail time is the punishment. Otherwise, people can ignore the mandate.

Back to the car insurance analogy:

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President Obama has pleaded for the country not to go “jumping to conclusions” about Major Nidal Hasan’s motives for his murder spree at Fort Hood, Texas. Even Army Chief of Staff General Casey has said that it’s “too soon to be drawing any conclusions about what happened or what his motivations were.”

But it doesn’t seem to early for the Imam that headed the Mosque in Virginia that Hasan and several of the 9/11 terrorists once attended. Anwar al-Awlaki, once the Imam of Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Virginia, has released a statement saying that Nidal Hasan “did the right thing” with his criminal rampage at Fort Hood. Anwar al-Awlaki is thought to be in Yemen having left the U.S. shortly after 9/11.

It is, of course, infuriating that our government refuses to see the obvious. In fact, this incident itself proves that even the Army is so afraid of being charged with political incorrectness that it allowed this jihadist Major to roil in his radical jihadism for some time without being opposed by his superiors.

This attitude of refusing to see the forest for the trees is best exemplified by Andrew Bast of Newsweek who thinks he’s got the real reason behind Major Nidal Hasan’s murderously criminal rampage at Fort Hood last Thursday. Could it be that Hasan was steadily radicalized and steeped in hateful Islamofascism? Could it be a jihad mindset that sent Hasan into that military clinic yelling Allahu Akbar as he shot at anyone that got in his way?

Nope. Ridiculously, it was a “military on the brink,” it was the “stress” an uncaring U.S. military is forcing upon its members that was at fault as far as Bast is concerned. This is his obtuse conclusion in Newsweek’s piece headlined, “Is Fort Hood a Harbinger? Nidal Malik Hasan May Be a Symptom of a Military on the Brink.”

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For anyone who thinks that big Wall Street and Big Government aren’t joined at the hip, promoting policies and laws that keep each other fat and happy often at the expense of the American taxpayer, consider the career of Robert Rubin.

Rubin, of course, is largely gone from the public scene after spending 10 disastrous years as a board member and senior executive at Citigroup, the banking giant that epitomizes all that is wrong with American finance, and before that, a largely successful run as Treasury Secretary in the Clinton Administration, which he joined after running another controversial bank, Goldman Sachs. But his legacy looms large, mainly because I believe he was one of the reasons why the financial crisis occurred in the first place.

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Happy Armistice Day!

Next year, it is possible no more veterans of the Great War will be alive. Take a moment and think what it takes to ‘go over the top’ at a place like the Somme.

From the New York Observer:

Like everybody else, when I first heard about the shootings at Fort Hood I immediately rushed to judgment, assuming that anybody opening fire on soldiers on an army base in Texas expected to die. Thus the shooter was either 1) a soldier who had cracked or 2) a priapic jihadist aroused by the thought of all those virgins in paradise. Reasoning that an armed Islamist would struggle to penetrate Fort Hood’s security, I concluded that the shooter was probably an unfortunate soldier gone berserk. A few hours later however I discovered secret option 3) that the “alleged” shooter Nidal Hasan was both a soldier and a jihadi nutbag- an entirely new hybrid, in other words.

Of course, this just goes to show the wisdom of suspending judgment until all the facts are in.  Alas, this lesson was lost on the media, who from the minute news of the shooting broke managed to get almost every detail of the story wrong. At first they told us that the killer was dead; then that there might have been more than one shooter. Soon we knew the suspect’s name, and learned that he was a Muslim convert. Then we learned that he had been Muslim since birth. Then we were told that he might have cracked as a result of exposure to combat, only he had never seen combat. Or maybe it was a response to racism he had experienced, or because as a devout Muslim he was unhappy about being deployed to Afghanistan. (And yet curiously, such a degree of sympathetic understanding was never extended to the likes of Timothy McVeigh or Seung-Hui Cho who also vented their rage by killing strangers.)

Indeed, even Mr. Obama lost his cool, by rushing to the judgment that we were all rushing to judgment, and asking us not to do it. After all Americans do love their pitchforks, don’t they? And when it got out that the suspect was not dead, and that he had shouted Allahu Akbar before opening fire, well- it became all the more important not to rush to judgment, and especially not to assume that the massacre had anything to do with terrorism or Islamic extremism.

Tired of listening to all the non-judgmental judgments, on Saturday I visited Fort Hood for myself.

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In true Orwellian fashion, our pals at Media Matters demonstrate today that not only are some hate crimes more equal than others, but so too, some police reports are more equal than others.

After waiting a full 24-hours to react to yesterday’s release of the 24-page police report of the Kenneth Gladney incident of August 6^th (24-hours?  I thought you guys were supposed to “post(s) rapid-response items as well as longer research and analytic reports documenting conservative misinformation throughout the media”) they give us this beautiful example of leftist equivocation: (more…)

Last week, Washington News Observer in collaboration with Big Government attended a speech by former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar. Prime Minister Aznar illustrated the fact that while “not all Muslims are Jihadists, all Jihadists are Muslims.” Prime Minister Aznar’s party lost the 2004 election, only 3 days after the tragic events of the Madrid train bombing. His successor has since withdrawn all Spanish troops from Iraq.

Earlier this year as I was filling up at the gas station I noticed a faded bumper sticker- vintage Bush 43-on the car next to me: “Dissent is Patriotic.” When I pointed to the bumper and asked the driver if she still believed that, she suggested I do something to myself which I am certain is physically impossible. I just laughed and said, “I’ll take that as a no.”

At the time, our Marine son and his men were deployed to a remote Forward Operating Base in Afghanistan. As I reflected on my experience at the Shell station, I wondered if this woman had any idea the sacrifices so many had made so she could exercise her 1^stAmendment rights during the previous administration or this one.

I wondered if she knew about Belleau Wood, the Chosin Reservoir, Hue City, Fallujah, or the Helmand Province? Was she aware that at Tarawa, 1,020 Marines were killed in the seventy-six hour battle? She may have seen the photo but did she know at Iwo Jima, the thirty-six day assault left more than 26,000 Americans wounded and 6,800 Marines dead?  Did she have any clue as to the sacrifices others have made throughout this nation’s history so she could live free?

My wife and I recently spent a week on the Marine Corps base where our son is stationed. As we walked up and down the residential street where he and his family live we realized almost half of the homes had husbands deployed to a combat zone. The other half had spouses who recently returned or were about to leave. It was humbling to see parking lots with so many cars displaying Purple Heart license plates or seeing the injured frequenting the PX. Did the woman know about these recent sacrifices?

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On October 15th, local ACORN spokesman David Lagstein was the special guest of the East County Democrat Club in El Cajon, CA. Lagstein is ACORN’s chief organizer in the San Diego area. The meeting was held at Coco’s Restaurant, a very public venue. Because of ACORN’s close ties to the Democrat party, Mr. Lagstein clearly felt he was among friends. These two clips suggest  the investigation of ACORN announced by California Attorney General Jerry Brown already has a pre-determined outcome.

First Clip: Attorney’s General Office Visits ACORN

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Second Clip: Fault Will Be Found With Filmmakers

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Lagstein notes that the Attorney General is a “political animal.” He states that he has been in communication with Brown’s office and assures the crowd that “the fault WILL be found with the people that did the video — not ACORN.”

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According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), the government-run healthcare plans in the House and Senate will reduce budget deficits. To use a technical phrase, this is utter nonsense. A giant new entitlement program will be a budget buster. This new video from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity provides 12 reasons in less than 6-1/2 minutes – including real-world evidence showing how Medicare and Medicaid cost far more than originally forecast.

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So it seems that both the House-passed Waxman-Markey bill House bill and Senate EPW Committee-passed version of Kerry-Boxer both have buried in them what the Washington Examiner’s Mark Tapscott describes, in revealing the measure, a “nasty bureaucratic provision that requires President Obama to act like Venezuelan strong man Hugo Chavez.” Requires might seem strong, in that you would assume a moderate president or simply one not engaged in an effort to “fundamentally transform America” would feel no obligation to seize a loophole installed for such an activist leader.

But you would be wrong, on both counts. The provision is quite clearly installed for green pressure groups to sue to force the chief executives’ hands to seize all manner of power otherwise unavailable to him under our system but desired by the greens and whatever they can convince the federal court’s 9th Circuit is in our interests. That is, the bill actually does mandate that a “climate emergency” be declared by the federal government when global greenhouse gas concentrations – which are not something which the bill or the United States can control and over which we have a decreasing influence each day – reach 450 parts per million. Which the bill’s authors knew would already be the case by the time the bill was adopted.

At that point President Obama, using powers he worked to craft and signed into law, would “direct all Federal agencies to use existing statutory authority to take appropriate actions…to address shortfalls” in achieving needed greenhouse gas reductions. Again, it isn’t in the U.S.’s power to bring global concentrations to any particular level, and even if we disappeared off the face of the earth no global warming computer model relied upon by the alarmist industry even says that it would detectably impact the climate.

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You may have heard the UPS is in quite the political fight with FEDEX. Though both are package-delivery companies, they’re governed by totally different federal labor rules. As a result, UPS’s workforce is much more heavily unionized than FEDEX’s-and more than twice as expensive.

So now UPS is trying to get FEDEX reclassified under federal law as a way of screwing a competitor. That’s horrendous, but it also makes a sick kind of business sense. And it also reveals the real villain: A government that is big enough to absolutely, positively guarantee it can screw any business. Overnight.

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From the Nashua Telegraph:

The state of New Hampshire last week agreed to guarantee 75 percent of a $250,000 loan from an Upper Valley bank to the new owner of the Eagle Times, an unusual deal because it involves a daily newspaper and the government it covers.

The Executive Council on Wednesday unanimously approved without debate the “working capital loan guarantee,” which would be administered by the New Hampshire Business Finance Authority.

Under the deal, the BFA and the state would be liable to pay up to $187,500 to Connecticut River Bank if Eagle Printing & Publishing LLC defaulted on the $250,000 line of credit it would receive from the bank.

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The federal website that tracks the final destination of the $787 billion “stimulus” package reported more than 640,000 jobs were created or saved by the funds as of October 30. A closer look at one state’s reporting, however, should cast serious doubt on that number’s veracity.

Washington state is listed as the third-highest job-generating state, according to www.recovery.gov, which records the number of jobs created or saved as 34,517.13. The problem is that at least 24,000 of those jobs were not really in jeopardy.

You read that correctly.

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An ACORN affiliate that submitted applications totaling over $6 million in federal grant money for broadband projects has been declared ineligible as a result of guidance issued by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

The ACORN Institute, a 501 (c) 3 group founded in 2000, submitted two separate applications to the U.S. Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) earlier this year. One was in the amount of $3,172,042 and the other was for $2,999,903.

Funding for the grant program was included as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and was set up to “help bridge the technological divide and create jobs building Internet infrastructure,” according to the NTIA.

On its web site, the ACORN Institute (AI) describes itself as “a nationally respected provider of training and technical assistance in organizing principles and methods, a center for research and public policy development on issues of economic and social justice, and a provider of various services to low- to moderate-income individuals.” AI also includes an “experienced team” of “financial educators,” “tax preparers” and “benefits assistance specialists.”

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On Monday, Chicago Mayor Daley blamed the Ft. Hood Jihad Massacre on America’s love of guns!

“Unfortunately, America loves Guns. We love guns to a point where that uh we see devastation on a daily basis. You don’t blame a group.”

The Mayor is using a straw-man argument that conveniently provides him with an opportunity to politicize the terrorist attack as part and parcel with America’s love of guns.

Mayor Daley, and other politicians, like to blame gun violence on the guns themselves because that is so much easier than admitting any inconvenient (politically incorrect) truths which might be revealed if they were to place blame where it belongs.

Kids murdering each other in the inner city? That’s because of guns, not the War On Drugs which turns poor children into black market drug distributing gang members.

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A Staten Island Democrat is blaming her city council loss on ACORN.  Apparently she didn’t know her political consultant, Scott Levenson of the Advance Group, was the same Scott Levenson that has been relentlessly defending ACORN.

Levenson has served as ACORN’s crisis communications consultant and needless to say, he’s been a busy man.

Nevertheless, Janine Materna’s loss for the South Shores City Council is ACORN’s fault.  From the Staten Island Advance:

Democrat Janine Materna’s campaign is considering suing its consulting firm, the Advance Group, for $1 million, and claimed that consultant Scott Levenson’s position with the controversial ACORN group was among the reasons Ms. Materna lost the South Shore City Council race.

“It’s because of him that Janine lost the election,” said Jodi Materna, her sister’s campaign manager.

She said the campaign did not know of Levenson’s ACORN affiliation and if it had, “we never would have hired him.”

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Levenson, ACORN’s national spokesman, said it was a “true sign of political immaturity to scapegoat anyone for Janine’s loss.”

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Kari Chisholm is a (self-described) political hack in my home state of Oregon. Chisholm is so bad that even the liberal Willamette Week has called “foul on Democratic media consultant Kari Chisholm, who runs the blog BlueOregon.com, for excessive use of bullshit in his mud-slinging.” Now he has crossed the line and taken to slyly implying in this recent post that Tea Party activists may have been involved in an arson at the offices of SEIU Local 49.

Here is the guilt-by-insinuation:

I checked in today with a spokesman for Portland Fire & Rescue, Lt. Alan Oswald. He confirmed that the arson team is investigating the fire as a deliberately-set fire. Other than that, he wasn’t able to discuss any of the details, of course.

I noted for him that there’s a lot of folks asking if there’s a connection between the SEIU arson and the teabagger rally. According to Oswald, “anything and everything is on the table” for the investigators – as it always is – until they’re ready to announce their findings.

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