Today, in 2007, Nancy Pelosi was elected Speaker of the House of Representatives. This will be her last year in that position.

On Christmas Day, what was intended to be a far worse terrorist attack was narrowly thwarted, thanks to the prudence and bravery of a handful of airline passengers and flight crew.  No one knows yet how Nigerian terror suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (aka “Farouk1986″) made it past every airport security checkpoint, with bomb materials literally strapped to his groin, and boarded a Northwest Airlines flight ultimately headed for Detroit.  Nor does anyone know how the 23-year old made it onto one watch list but not the no-fly list.

But the now infamous PantyBomber incident has since sparked a heated debate over workers in the Transportation Security Administration that has both Democrats and Republicans fuming, and labor unions chomping at the bit to wage a war of an entirely different kind.

In October, 2008, then candidate Obama wrote a letter to John Gage, President of the American Federation of Government Employees union, promising collective bargaining rights to TSA workers and vowing to make it a priority for his administration.

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From Politico:

Democrats are turning their fire on Scott Rasmussen, the prolific independent pollster whose surveys on elections, President Obama’s popularity and a host of other issues are surfacing in the media with increasing frequency.

The pointed attacks reflect a hardening conventional wisdom among prominent liberal bloggers and many Democrats that Rasmussen Reports polls are, at best, the result of a flawed polling model and, at worst, designed to undermine Democratic politicians and the party’s national agenda.

On progressive-oriented websites, anti-Rasmussen sentiment is an article of faith. “Rasmussen Caught With Their Thumb on the Scale,” blared the Daily Kos this summer. “Rasmussen Reports, You Decide,” the blog Swing State Project recently headlined in a play on the Fox News motto.

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In an earlier post, I bemoaned the fact that very few well-educated Americans know who Montesquieu was – and I drew attention to the fact that the author of The Spirit of Laws was more often cited by the American Founding Fathers than any other figure, that his magnum opus was quickly translated into virtually every European language, and that he exercised an influence in England and on the European continent during and for a time after the second half of the eighteenth century no less profound than that which he exercised in our own country.

Needless to say, there were reasons for Montesquieu’s pre-eminence. That his thinking deserves attention today may be less obvious, but it is no less true. To begin with, Montesquieu was the first to grasp the conditions within which modern war is waged, and his insights bear on the history of our country and on its situation today.

Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu was born on the 18th of January 1689, at a time in which the Glorious Revolution was underway in England, and he came of age in the course of the War of the Spanish Succession, which lasted from 1701 to 1713. He watched from afar with dismay as England’s duke of Marlborough repeatedly annihilated the legions of Louis XIV, the Sun King of France: first at the battle of Blenheim on 13 August 1704, when Montesquieu was fifteen; then – in the brief span of years stretching from 1706, when Montesquieu was seventeen, to 1709, when he was twenty – at Ramillies, Oudenarde, Lille, and Malplaquet.

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There are, within our midst, religious believers who are, it seems, so insecure in their faith that they must threaten–and try–to kill cartoonists. (Really?? Cartoonists?) Unfortunately, most of the Western Media have cowered to these threats. We now reprint the cartoon that sparked the threats and attacks:

From Politico:

From the time he launched his campaign for president three years ago, Barack Obama had to consider how he would react to the first serious act of terrorism during the campaign, or if he won, on his watch. His fellow Democrats had been thinking about the moment even longer – since the September day in 2001 when attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon defined George W. Bush’s presidency and gave Republicans a decisive advantage on a defining political issue.

And yet the White House’s response to last week’s attempt to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight to Detroit could rank as one of the low points of the new president’s first year. Over the course of five days, Obama’s Obama’ reaction ranged from low-keyed to reassuring to, finally, a vow to find out what went wrong. The episode was a baffling, unforced error in presidential symbolism, hardly a small part of the presidency, and the moment at which yet another of the old political maxims that Obama had sought to transcend – the Democrats’ vulnerability on national security – reasserted itself.

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Over the last month or so, I have featured several posts on the Putback amendment. The Putback amendment is a proposal by an Illinois activist named John Bambenek that tries to dramatically reform the structure and procedures of our government in order, in the hopes of Bambenek, to make the government more responsive.

The Putback amendment is comprehensive and so I did three separate posts on it. It includes a mechanism to allow the rank and file within the legislature to get their bills to the floor. With this amendment, any legislator would need to get 25 legislators to sign off on a discharge petition and that would get any bill onto the floor. Currently, it only goes through the rules committee and the rules committee is manned by the leadership. It also removes so called “shell bills” which are blank bills that filter through the legislature and allow the legislature to write the meat and bones in private and quickly have it voted on.

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Writing for Forbes, Bruce Bartlett puts forth an interesting hypothesis that healthcare legislation could have been made better (hopefully he meant to write “less destructive”) if the GOP had been willing to compromise with Democrats:

Democrats desperately wanted a bipartisan bill and would have given a lot to get a few Republicans on board. This undoubtedly would have led to enactment of a better health bill than the one we are likely to get. But Republicans never put forward an alternative health proposal. Instead, they took the position that our current health system is perfect just as it is.

Bruce makes several compelling points in the article, especially when he notes that it will be virtually impossible to repeal a bad bill after 2010 or 2012, but there are good reasons to disagree with his analysis. First, he is wrong in stating that Republicans were united against any compromise. Several GOP senators spent months trying to negotiate something less objectionable, but those discussions were futile. Also, I’m not sure it’s correct to assert Republicans took a the-current-system-is-perfect position.

They may not have offered a full alternative (they did have a few good reforms such as allowing the purchase of insurance across state lines), but their main message was that the Democrats were going to make the current system worse. Strikes me as a perfectly reasonable position, one that I imagine Bruce shares. But let’s further explore Bruce’s core hypothesis: Would compromise have generated a better bill? It’s possible, to be sure, but there are also several reasons why that approach may have backfired:

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The current state of the economy has placed a large burden on private business, especially on small businesses and the self-employed. Subscribing to a Keynesian tenet of financing debt and increasing government spending to boost output, lawmakers are repeatedly giving themselves cover for splurging.  After the first bailouts came the massive $787 billion stimulus bill, an urgent remedy that Congress and the White House insisted was all about “Jobs, Jobs, Jobs.”

And as spending has increased, so has the size of the public employment sector. Meanwhile, the private sector will soon be close to earning a coveted placement on the endangered species list.

As the union leaders’ plundering of the private sector has continued, this doesn’t mean that they have abandoned unionizing private sector workers altogether.  In fact, while the number of private sector jobs overall is down, the number of unionized private sector jobs is trending upward, right alongside the public sector growth.

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Today, in 1492, Granada, the last Moorish stronghold in Spain, fell to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. The Alhambra, the citadel of power in Granada, became a palace of the Spanish Monarch.

Richard Nixon had advertising executive H.R. Haldeman; Ronald Reagan had image master Mike Deaver; Barack Obama has public relations guru David Axelrod.

(The Oval Office, December 29, 2009. Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)

All three men understood the power of visuals in communicating the strengths of the presidents they served on the campaign trail and in the office of the presidency.

I don’t know where David Axelrod has been since President Obama began his ten-day Christmas vacation in Hawaii, but it is safe to say he is goofing off as much as his boss.

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From Bloomberg:

The Mayo organization had 3,700 staff physicians and scientists and treated 526,000 patients in 2008. It lost $840 million last year on Medicare, the government’s health program for the disabled and those 65 and older, Mayo spokeswoman Lynn Closway said.

Mayo’s hospital and four clinics in Arizona, including the Glendale facility, lost $120 million on Medicare patients last year, Yardley said. The program’s payments cover about 50 percent of the cost of treating elderly primary-care patients at the Glendale clinic, he said.

“We firmly believe that Medicare needs to be reformed,” Yardley said in a Dec. 23 e-mail. “It has been true for many years that Medicare payments no longer reflect the increasing cost of providing services for patients.”

Mayo will assess the financial effect of the decision in Glendale to drop Medicare patients “to see if it could have implications beyond Arizona,” he said.

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In 1983, President Ronald Reagan issued an Executive Order which gave permission to the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL) to operate within the boundaries of the United States.  Reagan’s EO put INTERPOL under the same basic guidelines as the CIA, FBI, ATF and other Federal law enforcement agencies.

Two weeks ago, without any announcement, debate, discussion or inquiry from journalists charged with “speaking truth to power” President Obama issued an amendment to this EO.  The amendment removed part of Reagan’s order that kept INTERPOL from having full diplomatic immunity while operating within the United States.  In other words:  Under Reagan and right up until two weeks ago, INTERPOL was authorized to operate within the USA but they did not have full diplomatic immunity and had to adhere to certain laws set forth for investigative agencies.  Laws that prohibit authorities from violating our constitutionally protected rights.

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In November BigGovernment.com, sounded the warning – here’s the update.

As 2009 fades away, President Obama has decided to let disclosure of hundreds of millions of dollars in forced-union-dues disclosure fade away too. Under current law and regulations valid until December 30th, union bosses were supposed to carefully document the billions of dollars they extract from workers as a condition of employment that they in turn pour into front groups and other “funds” each year.

A large part of the billions were about to be made public and reported on a Department of Labor disclosure form known as the Form T-1 Annual Report. But, that won’t happen now!

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This year saw the birth of the tea party movement, the rise of administrative radicalism, and a suppression of information unlike ever before seen. Were it not for the new penny presses, blogs and the investigative citizens who author them, much of this information would be six feet under. When the media goes state and becomes nothing more than an echo chamber for the government, the task of sharing truth falls to the original keepers of liberty: the American people.

These are the most Underreported Stories of 2009:

1. CLIMATEGATE
Al Gore needs something to sustain him and his big pimpin’ life down at his ginormous, energy-sucking mansion in Tennessee. Thus the green market was born, a made-up market chock full of products like carbon credits and other Willy Wonka (but not as cool) ish items for people to buy as a way to feel good about themselves and their contribution to the planet without having to actually do anything. They don’t need a God! They need a Prius!

Celebrities Botoxed within an inch of their lives began popping up in PSA’s about global warming, about how we need to drive inefficient clown cars that run on electricity (which is still produced in coal-powered plants but hey, whatever) to save the planet. Musicians like Sheryl Crow crowed about using just a square of toilet paper to remove waste that has a greater street value than her latest album. All the hubris manifested in regulations handed down from Congress upon the automobile industry, the coal industry, et al., until finally! Cap’n Trade appeared in the House.

Cap’n Trade will rape and pillage your energy bills and even boss you around when it comes to remodeling or rehabbing a home. It’s almost like … congress has nothing better to do.

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Happy New Year! It is 306 days until the Mid-Term elections.