Hands down, the ’00s were the worst political decade at least since the 1990s.

Reason.tv celebrates the (lack of) personalities, the scandals, and the screw-ups that made us all want to forget the first 10 years of the 21st century.

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This fascinating news segment produced by al-Jazeera (aka Jihad TV) highlights how the US drone war in Yemen has inspired a renewed front in the Jihad against America.

This report is interesting because even as it parrots the Jihad narrative, it provides more in depth background information and perspective on American, Saudi, and Iranian involvement in Yemen than anything we have seen from just about any US “news” outlet.

What a sad comment on the state of US/Western media, that “Jihad TV” is a better source of information pertinent to this aspect of the world war we are engaged in.

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Much is being made of the fact that mini-Madoff Scott Rothstein, the Fort Lauderdale lawyer who the government and his victims claim ran a $1.2 Billion Ponzi scam in South Florida was a major fundraiser for Republicans John McCain, Governor Charlie Crist, Senator John Ensign and the Republican Party of Florida.

Dem FL Gov Candidate Alex Sink and Rothstein, her "Judicial Nominating Committee"

What the media has missed is that Rothstein switched to the Democrats after McCain’s loss, giving to Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and endorsing Florida Democratic candidate for Governor Alex Sink while giving the Florida Democratic Party $200,000.

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It isn’t often that matters of art enter the political news cycle. The Obama administration is determined to change that. Over the holiday week, Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government drew its readers’ attention to the ornamentation on the White House Christmas tree–in particular, an ornament featuring a picture of the Chinese dictator Mao Zedong.

This season’s Christmas decorations, recycled and reappropriated by “community groups” with ornaments from previous White House installations, were the brainchild of Simon Doonan, the Pop Art gadabout tapped by the White House for the occasion. Doonan is most well known for his controversial window displays at the Barneys New York department store, which have included dioramas of Margaret Thatcher in dominatrix wear and Dan Quayle as a ventriloquist’s dummy.

The news of the White House’s holiday hijink reached around the globe. The most interesting commentary came out of the smackdown between the art critic for the Los Angeles Times Christopher Knight and Breitbart. I have had my run-ins with Knight myself. On this occasion, Knight thought he outdid the right-wing commentators by making a distinction between any old portrait of Mao and “Andy Warhol’s ‘Mao ‘”—from which the White House ball derived.

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Today, in 1937, the Irish Free State adopted a new constitution and evolved into a new nation, Ireland.

In the ongoing fight over proposed rules that would institute net neutrality, a major proponent of the policy is taking fresh heat from critics.  Google, arguably the world’s biggest name in tech, a major source of campaign donations to President Barack Obama, and one of the most prominent advocates of an “open internet,” is taking heat for alleged hypocrisy and rent seeking.

The criticism comes as the company continues to advocate for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to impose net neutrality rules that would target internet service providers (ISPs) while opposing so-called “search neutrality” that would impact both the company and its revenues in a manner that observers of the debate say could be particularly adverse to Google.

Last week, in a post on the official Google blog, the company’s senior vice president for product management, Jonathan Rosenberg, wrote that while Google’s “goal is to keep the Internet open,” it opposes the concept of “openness” where it would apply to its own search and ad products.

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Earlier today, while guest hosting on The Dennis Miller Show, Andrew Breitbart interviewed Kurt Haskell from Taylor, Michigan.  Mr. Haskell was a passenger on the now infamous Flight 253 on Christmas day from Amsterdam to Detroit.  We all know now how this flight ended (with the Flying Dutchman careening across multiple seats to stop a would-be-suicide bomber from exploding the plane and hundreds of innocent lives).  But, Mr. Haskell shared his story of what he witnessed before anyone even boarded the plane.

While waiting in the holding area in the Amsterdam airport, in a room designated for only the passengers of Flight 253, Mr. Haskell saw a well-dressed man of apparent Indian descent accompany a young, poorly attired man of African descent to the boarding gate.  What Mr. Haskell saw and heard next is of seemingly great significance:

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From Guantanamo to Health Care, Obama is certainly seeking to Change America – or more accurately -to accelerate the pace of change from a private enterprise-freedom based civilization to a Big Government-run society.  According to Thomas Paine, “It is the duty of a patriot to protect his country from his government.”  I realize that is a slightly different definition than Joe Biden would use, but nevertheless, in that light, here is my listing of the worst of his policy decisions:

6. Bailing Out GM.  “His policy of public investments prevented necessary liquidations.  The businesses he hoped thus to save either went bankrupt in the end, after fearful agonies, or were burdened . . . by a crushing load of debt.  [He] undermined property rights . . .pushed federal credit into the banks and bullied them into inflating . . .” Historian Paul Johnson wrote that of Herbert Hoover.  You can almost substitute Obama’s name for Hoover’s  in every detail.   By the way, Government Motors sales are declining at 3 times the rate of the industry as a whole.  Hoover would be proud.

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In 2009, America’s meddlers worked overtime minding other people’s business.

Nanny of the Month winners have targeted everything from fish pedicures to feeding the homeless.  But there can be only one Nanny of the Year.

Who took home top honors as the year’s biggest buttinsky? Click the video to find out.

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Here’s a concept I never thought we’d be exporting: governments taking over markets to act as the “competition.” 

News is Venezuelan brute Hugo Chavez has created a “new chain of government-run, cut-rate retail stores that will sell everything from food to cars to clothing from places such as China, Argentina and Bolivia,” according to Breitbart.com:

Chavez said the Comerso chain of stores will include “a network of subsidiaries” that will sell new vehicles directly imported from China and Argentina, “without capitalist intermediaries.”

“We’re going to defeat speculation. Private individuals in sales can still sell, but they’ll have to compete with us and with a people who is now fully aware,” Chavez said.

Gee, where have I heard that before?  Oh yeah!  That kind of sounds like the talking points from the Democrats government-option proposal.

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Just what every 7th grader needs to know…

Obama’s Safe Schools Czar’s organization, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) held teen conferences where not only did they talk about fisting and hand out fisting kits but they distributed needle handling instructions.

Mass Resistance posted this pamplet from a 2000 GLSEN conference. Barack Obama’s “Safe” Schools Czar founded GLSEN in and was the director:

And the pamplet also included safe d*ld* instructions for your young curious male/female teen:

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There is on YouTube an hilarious video, drawn from C-SPAN2, of Max Baucus on the Senate floor denouncing his Republican colleagues and even more emphatically the Republican leadership for squelching attempts at what he piously describes as bipartisan healthcare reform.

The senior Senator from Montana has obviously had a snootful; he is having considerable difficulty in managing the English language; and he is evidently as mad as a wet hen.

I do not blame Baucus – neither for the excessive imbibing nor for being angry. He is now in a pickle. He was the point man for the Democrats’ healthcare initiative in the Senate, and for perfectly predicable reasons his constituents out in Montana are none too happy with him.

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President Obama in on vacation in Hawaii all week…and most of next week.

Michigan Live is reporting a shocking claim by a passenger aboard Flight 253:

Kurt Haskell of Newport, Mich., who posted an earlier comment about his experience, talked exclusively with MLive.com and confirmed he was on the flight by sending a picture of his boarding pass. He and his wife, Lori, were returning from a safari in Uganda when they boarded the NWA flight on Friday.
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President Bill Clinton should be cut a lot of slack when it comes to 9/11. Sure the attack was planned under his watch, and sure President Clinton cowardly avoided taking custody of Osama bin Laden when Sudan offered him on a platter.

The truth of the matter is that prior to the 9/11 Jihad attack, there was no way in the world the American people would have stood for the large scale war that was necessary in order to fight this new kind of Jihad army.

Think about it this way, even after the Jihadis have murdered thousands upon thousands of people all around the world, including here in America on 9/11, the American Left still think it’s all America’s fault and that we deserved it, and therefore we have no legitimate right to fight back. Just image how much resistance there would have been toward going into Afghanistan prior to 9/11.

Add to the whack-o Left the fact that the Right would have accused Clinton of simply trying to distract attention away from his perjury case, and it should be obvious that Clinton didn’t have much political capital in reserve to convince the country that a preemptive war was necessary to avoid a large scale attack against an American city.

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Martin Wolf, columnist for the great Financial Times, has a must-read column this weekend:

The only truly global power was in rapid relative decline. Not long before, it had won a pyrrhic victory in a costly colonial war. New great powers were on the rise. An arms race was under way, as was competition for markets and resources in undeveloped areas of the world. Yet people still believed in the durability of the free trade and free capital flows that had nurtured prosperity and, many believed, had also underpinned peace.

That was how the world looked to many at the end of the “noughties” of the 20th century. Yet catastrophe lay ahead: a world war; a communist revolution; a Great Depression; fascism; and then another world war. The world order – built on competing great powers, imperialism and liberal markets – proved incapable of providing the public goods of peace and prosperity. It took calamity, the cold war and the replacement of the UK by the US as hegemonic power to re-establish stability. That then facilitated decolonisation, unprecedented economic expansion, the collapse of communism and yet another epoch of market-led global integration.

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From UK’s Telegraph:

Tough questions need to be asked of not just the US security agencies – such as the CIA and the FBI – but also of Britain’s MI6, MI5 and the Metropolitan Police’s counter-terrorist unit.

How can a Muslim student, whose name appears on a US law enforcement database, be granted a visa to travel to America, allegedly acquire an explosive device from Yemen, a country awash with al-Qaeda terrorists, and avoid detection from the world’s most sophisticated spy agencies?

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Today, in 1945, the World Bank was created.