So, other than that whole “pro-infanticide speaker at a “Catholic” institution” bit, how was President Obama’s speech?
Father Richard Landry on Cthe full theological ghastliness of Obama’s address:

The most audacious part of the address was when the President tried to change the meaning of the Christian faith and draw erroneous conclusions from the false notion. “The ultimate irony of faith,” the president declared, “is that it necessarily admits doubt. It is the belief in things not seen.” He seemed to be quoting from Hebrews 11:1, one of the most famous definitions of faith found in Sacred Scripture, but, whether intentional or not, he got its meaning completely wrong. The passage reads, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Faith is not a “belief” in things not seen — which would be tautological and nonsensical — but the “substance” or “evidence” of things not seen. Faith leads not to doubt, nor merely to subjective conviction, but to objective truth discoverable through revelation and grace.

The whole thing is worth a read.

I dug out a copy of a commencement speech by leading Holocaust denier Brandon Feltcz, given to the commencemetn for the class of 2006 at Yeshiva Polytechnic Institute in Eilat, Israel.

I thought the parallels were…interesting?

Now, understand — understand, Class of 2006, I do not suggest that the debate surrounding the Holocaust can or should go away. Because no matter how much we may want to fudge it — indeed, while we know that the views of most people on the subject are complex and even contradictory — the fact is that at some level, the views of the two camps are irreconcilable. Each side will continue to make its case to the public with passion and conviction. But surely we can do so without reducing those with differing views to caricature.Open hearts. Open minds. Fair-minded words. It’s a way of life that has always been the Yeshiva Poly tradition. Rabbi Dennis Diesestayn has long spoken of this institution as both a synogogue and a delicatessen.  A synogogue that stands apart, shining with the wisdom of the Jewish tradition, while the deli is where “differences of culture and religion and conviction can sit and gnosh over a knish and coffee with friendship, civility, hospitality, and especially love.” And I want to join him and Rebbe Diesestayn in saying how inspired I am by the maturity and responsibility with which this class has approached the debate surrounding today’s ceremony. You are an example of what Yeshiva is about.

Of course, people who’d dissented to Feltcz’s visit – saying that Yeshiva, a university in a nation founded by survivors of the Holocaust, should have had no interest in civilly entertaining Feltcz’s views (set forth in his books The Treblinka Fraud and Auschwitz: Hot Air, Not Zyklon), much less granting them pride of place at their commencement.

US Department of Homeland Security director Janet Napolitano noted that she’d put those dissenters on her list of potential right-wing terrorists, although critics noted that the dissenters were Israeli citizens speaking in Israel, and not subject to DHS jurisdiction.

Oh, yeah; the story is entirely fake.  But with an an aggressively pro-infanticide President speaking at “Catholic” Notre Dame yesterday, anything’s possible.

Look; I don’t disagree with the President.  People across the aisle should tolerate other points of view on issues, including abortion – when it comes to politics.

But Notre Dame isn’t (supposedly) part of our political process. It is a Catholic school. And while we as Americans have to be tolerant of many different points of view to run a civil society, “tolerance” does not extend to browbeating people into accepting things the consider absolute moral wrongs in their civil, to say nothing of religious, lives.
There are cases for using the bully pulpit to demand tolerance – tolerance of things that one can’t control, at least.  Racism, attacks on gays,things that nobody controls, certainly.

Demanding tolerance of abortion – a 99-percent-and-change-preventable thing that is only on the national agenda because a group sympathetic to the President has elevated it to full symbolhood – from a Catholic university is..

…well, I’m straining to come up with an analogy.

I feel so much safer with the new administration. Don’t you?

According to a report, while recently attending the Gridiron Club dinner in Washington, an annual event where powerful politicians and media elite get a chance to cozy up to one another, Biden told his dinnermates about the existence of a secret bunker under the old U.S. Naval Observatory, which is now the home of the vice president.

Good news for General Electric, owner of NBC: Saturday Night Live hardly needs to hire writers anymore.

President Obama campaigned on the promise he would end earmarks, one of the political lead balloons that brought Republicans from the sky and confused the electorate as to who the conservative party is.

Obama promised to change…

Mr. Obama had campaigned against earmarks, even saying he would cut them back to levels before 1994, the start of the Gingrich-GOP interregnum. Now here was Obama as president signing a bill soaked in earmarks.

…his mind. Again.

The Teleprompter-in-Chief offers this unmasked subterfuge:

“Individual members of Congress understand their districts best, and they should have the ability to respond to the needs of their communities.”

In a short 100-some days and counting, the President has broken promise after promise, putting a spit shine on and extending Bush policies he rallied voters against and clearly establishing his status as a another garden-variety liberal politician (save the magnitude), making chumps of those who voted for him and leaving the rest of us wondering:

Where is the rage now? Where is the outcry?

And…where’s the Change^®?

Obama is going to keep the military tribunals. The ones he campaigned against.  The ones the hard-left took out second loans on the Volvo to try to bring pressure against.

Obama administration officials — and Mr. Obama himself — have said in the past that they were not ruling out prosecutions in the military commission system. But senior officials have emphasized that they prefer to prosecute terrorism suspects in existing American courts. When President Obama suspended Guantánamo cases after his inauguration on Jan. 20, many participants said the military commission system appeared dead.But in recent days a variety of officials involved in the deliberations say that after administration lawyers examined many of the cases, the mood shifted toward using military commissions to prosecute some detainees, perhaps including those charged with coordinating the Sept. 11 attacks.

“The more they look at it,” said one official, “the more commissions don’t look as bad as they did on Jan. 20.”

And we have a “Most Transparent Administration Ever!” alert:

Several officials insisted on anonymity because the administration has directed that no one publicly discuss the deliberations.

Prediction: when lefties say they’ll discontinue military tribunals, it means that halfway into their term they’ll have Citizens Committees carrying out drumhead trials and executions on the street.

I run into this over and over again; Democrats in debates or discussions who accept as a matter of faith that “republicans are the party of the rich, and the tics are the party of the working people”.

I ask them why, then, that the Plains states and the West – which are, demographically, very disproportionally “working people” – vote so reliably Republican.  They usually respond by calling me a racist and a sexist and asking why I hate children.

But I digress.

The claim, of course, beggars all the evidence.  My favorite factoid; in the 2002 Senate campaign, the average Coleman contribution was about a fifth that of the average Wellstone donation – but they raised about the same total.

Of course, plutocrats like Warren Buffet, George Soros and Bill Gates, to say nothing of a uniform cross-section of Hollywood’s super-wealthy, have long supported the Democrats; for the fantastically wealthy, a regulated society is a predictable (and, for currency speculators like Soros, exploitable) one.

And in the last election, Wall Street contributors backed Obama over Mac.

There might be a bit of morning-after remorse from that last, though:

Wealthy Wall Street financiers and other business figures provided crucial support for Mr Obama during the election, backing him over the Republican candidate John McCain as the right leader to rescue the collapsing US economy.But it is now dawning on many among them that Mr Obama was serious about his campaign trail promises to bring root and branch reform to corporate America – and that they were more than just election rhetoric.

A top Obama fundraiser and hedge fund manager said: “I’m appalled at the anti-Wall Street rhetoric. It was OK on the campaign but now it’s the real world. I’m surprised that Obama is turning out to be so left-wing. He’s a real class warrior.”

The bad news is that people on Wall Street seem to be very stupid.

The good news?  Michelle Obama’s campaign claim that our best and brightest go into hedge funds rather than teaching and nursing would seem to be wrong.

“These big companies are based in New York Boston, Seattle and Silicon Valley, where Democrats dominate,” [Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute] said. “Obama’s tax plan is already cleaving him from his big corporate supporters,” he said.Mr Obama made no secret of his plans to raise taxes on the “working rich” (individuals earning more than $200,000) by imposing a top income tax rate of almost 40 per cent, and there is little surprise that those plans remain on track, even during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

Note to self and world; next time, let the whole gabbling bunch of Brooks-Brothers-clad cretins go bankrupt.

After running a campaign that harped on “vision”, Obama’s administration desperately lacks it:

President Barack Obama is about as visionary as the guy who invented Dippin’ Dots, Ice Cream of the Future. Far from sketching out a truly forward-looking set of policies for the 21st century, as his supporters had hoped, Obama is instead serving up cryogenically tasteless and headache-inducing morsels from years gone by.On issue after issue, Obama has made it clear that instead of blasting past “the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long,” (as he promised in his inaugural address), he’s moving full speed ahead toward policy prescriptions that already had less fizz than a case of Billy Beer back when Jimmy Carter was urging us all to wear sweaters and turn down our thermostats. Instead of thinking outside the box, Obama is nailing it shut from the inside.

My theory – and I’ll stand by it – is that much of Obama’s electorate is too young or too complacent about politics to know that “different from Bush” isn’t really “different” in the great scheme of things.

Obama’s big schtick so far seems to be counting on populist Macguffins  both vague (“hope and change”) and specific (“green jobs”, “raising taxes on the wealthy”, “high speed trains”) for his actual policy substance:

Consider the president’s recent “major” speech about transportation, yet another Castro-like exhortation in which Obama boldly rejected the failed policies of the past in favor of the failed policies of the future.

“Our highways are clogged with traffic,” he noted, before unveiling his big fix: Shiny new trains that go almost twice as fast as cars. Forget that, as urban historian Joel Garreau has long documented, our country has been decentralizing its living and working patterns for decades now, migrating from virtually all urban centers (except maybe for booming Washington, D.C.) to relatively low-density suburbs. In a big, spread-out country where individualized service at the coffee stand, on cable TV, and in your computer is the new normal, our chief visionary officer is talking about a one-size-fits-all solution that will surely bomb even bigger than NBC’s Supertrain.

It’s an axiom of economics that “making someone pay more or less for a good or service than they would on their own causes grievous unexpected consequences”.  I suspect that the same holds true for trying to chivvy, shame or coerce people into living where they ordinarily won’t would work about the same.

Remember for the past eight years?  When “Rendition” – grabbing a terror suspect and sending them quasi-legally to a country with more casual laws about coercion and suspects rights, was the subject of boundless ire?  And even a Meryl Streep JDAM of a movie?

No?

Either does The One’s Attorney General:

Cautioning Holder that any potential investigation into the Bush administration’s torture program could result in Democrats being roped in, “Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Richard Shelby of Alabama pressed Holder on the CIA’s ‘rendition’ program that moved terrorism suspects from one country to another,” reported Domenico Montanaro with MSNBC.“Didn’t that happen during the Clinton administration?

“Yes, Holder said.

“‘How many did you approve?’ they asked.

“Holder said he’d check the record.”

Despite frequent condemnation of the practice around the world, rendition — the secret capture, transportation and detention of suspected terrorists to foreign prisons in countries that cooperate with the U.S. — remains in the CIA’s playbook, thanks to a Jan. 22 executive order issued by President Obama.

Given The One’s reversals on Guantanamo, coercive interrogation and tribunals, expect to see…:

1. A media/administration campaign showing that terrorists are bad people who don’t deserve due process, and
2. Hollywood movies that show terrorists killing Americans, possibly (although this is unlikely) without the aid of secret vatican orders or groups of rural fundamentalist Christians.

Count on it.

100 Plus days in and America’s first half-African American President is proving to be everything and more of what conservatives warned he’d be…and has reneged on so many campaign promises to his liberal supporters that one loses count.

the handwriting is on the wall regarding our new leader’s game plan for America.  Spend other people’s money like a Madoff on steroids.  Let every enemy on the planet know there’s a wimp in the White House. Let every ally know the wimp in the White House will do nothing to help them when push comes to shove. Let the 50 states know there’s a power coup in play that strips them of constitutionally guaranteed liberties.  Let every company know that neither they nor their non-union employees are safe from Chicago-Way thugs and their mouthpieces in the media. Let the 300 million American citizens know that the rule of law, applied equally to all, is about to be replaced by special favoritism in the form of “empathy.”

If asked for a word to describe an Obama voter, there is only one that any sentient person could offer: SUCKER.

They’re the kind of voters that every crooked politician has drooling dreams about every night of the year.

Three weeks ago, hundreds of thousands of Americans, driven by a campaign that started on Twitter, drew endless defamation from the mainstream and lefty (pardon the redundancy) media; some, when not taking part in juvenile giggling, insinuated that the Tea Parties had roots and followers with various violent groups (indeed, the DHS report was released just in time for the run-up to the media’s suspiciously synchronous campaign of defamation).

Nationwide, the arrest figures were extremely low – about half a dozen, mostly for the kind of petty-drunkenness and public urination sorts of things that’ll happen anytime 600,000 people get together around a nation like this; the typical evening at “Drinking Liberally” draws more drunk and disorderly and public urination arrests.

Compare with The One, threatening a group of legal investors, with all sorts of extralegal sanctions, including siccing his mobs of drooling fanboys and fangirls on them:

A group of lenders to troubled automaker Chrysler asked a bankruptcy court judge Tuesday to keep their identities secret, saying they could face “public attack” and “threats to their safety.”The petition was filed by the group that objected to a government plan to reduce the ailing company’s debt to help create a partnership with Italy’s Fiat…Represented by lawyer Gerard Uzzi of the firm White & Case, the group said its members may be subjected to threats and intimidation in part because of comments made by President Barack Obama, who chastised the opponents of an attempted deal to keep Chrysler out of bankruptcy.

“Never before has the president of the United States announced a chapter 11 filing in a national address,” the petition said.

“The president publicly chastised these secured creditors for having the temerity to enforce their constitutional rights in this court of law…”

Hinderaker:

It is important to understand what is happening here. Many think that Obama is merely engaging in crony capitalism, favoring his political supporters (most notably the Auto Workers Union) at the expense of others. That’s true, of course, but it is much worse than that: Obama has tried to bully those who have not bought his favor–Chrysler’s non-TARP secured creditors–into giving up their legal rights by threatening to use the powers of the White House to damage their businesses. This sort of lawlessness is common in some of the more corrupt Third World countries, but it is brand new to the United States.

We just spent eight years with the left claiming conspiracies against the Constitution under every rock – and now we have an Administration that’s actually giving them to us; the DHS blacklisting Americans; the government running roughshod over the law and, let us not forget, looking for loopholes to carry out the very same policies (tribunals, “aggressive interrogation”) that the left spent the last eight years howling about.
Just remember Berg’s Seventh Law; “Whenever lefties defame conservatives’ ethics or commitment to liberty, they are projecting”.

Young Israelis Ydon’t trust Barack Obama as far as they can throw him, according to an Israeli public opinion poll.

“This poll has revealed that Israelis make a distinction between the United States and President Obama and his policies. They have less fondness for him than they have for the US, and display a certain degree of mistrust in him,” the professor said.  

 

Gilboa said the poll largely resembled a similar survey carried out in 2007 during former President George Bush’s tenure. Only 38% of the respondents in the new poll said they believe that Obama’s attitude towards Israel is a friendly one, compared to 73% in the 2007 poll regarding Bush.

Good to know that our staunchest ally is nervous about Obama’s commitment to them, huh?

The MSM are abuzz with their assessments of Brack O’Bama’s first one hundred days and as my Blog Boss so aptly pointed out, they are missing the real story here.

Ever notice how you’re not seeing as much public opinion polling about the President these days?  Especially in the MSM?

There’s a reason for that:

According to Gallup’s April survey, Americans have a lower approval of Mr. Obama at this point than all but one president since Gallup began tracking this in 1969. The only new president less popular was Bill Clinton, who got off to a notoriously bad start after trying to force homosexuals on the military and a federal raid in Waco, Texas, that killed 86. Mr. Obama’s current approval rating of 56 percent is only one tick higher than the 55-percent approval Mr. Clinton had during those crises.

Rasmussen Reports Daily Presidential Tracking Poll tells a very different story from what the Obama Broadcasting Network would have you believe.

Jimmy II is in trouble.

Polling among those that “Strongly Approve” of the President thus far remains relatively steady ranging from 44% at Inauguration to 35% as of today.

That’s not surprising. Liberals don’t know what’s hit them yet….the broken campaign promises, the rapid erosion of what is left of our nation’s financial resources, the vast expansion of The Entitlement Society^™, the socialization nationalization of everything within arm’s reach…they still have the “Change Has Come” commemorative plates on their mantles and are still being instructed to harbor anger for (i.e. blame) the Bush Administration for all ills domestic, foreign and individual.

The real movement underlying the erosion of Che Obama’s approval ratings is among those who “Strongly Disapprove”; doubling from an Inauguration Day low of 16% to 32% as of today. It’s only a matter of time before one spills into the other as America wakes to the leftist agenda of our President and his thugs.

Rasmussen’s daily poll tracks the differential between the “Strongly Disapprove” and the “Strongly Approve” results.

Does this movement translate into Conservatives growing some cojones or is it a groundswell of both parties’ constituents realizing the error of their choice last November? Most likely a little of both.

In any case, it would appear the pendulum is swinging back to reality.

And fast.

Change^® is coming.

Vice President Joe Biden, toughened by his years on the mean streets of Scranton and in the coal mines of Wilkes-Barre, went all Sir Robin on us:

Vice president Joe Biden said today he would tell his family members not to use subways in the U.S. and implied schools should be shuttered as the swine flu outbreak spread to 16 states. His remarks quickly caused a stir, drawing a rebuke from New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg and later leading the White House to apologize.

The World Health Organization has raised it's classification of the swine flu outbreak to Phase Five, one step away from a worldwide pandemic.

The uproar began when Biden appeared on NBC's "Today" show and said he would advise against riding the subway or taking commercial flights and implied schools should be shuttered amid confirmation of the first swine-flu relation death in the U.S.

The National Associaton of Prison Shower-Room Nancyboys released a statement in response, telling Biden to "quit being such a friggin' pansy".

Seriously - this could still mutate into a bad epidemic.  The Spanish Flu of 1918 took one relatively mild pass through the population before it mutated into one of the worst plagues ever to hit mankind, 91 years ago, killing 50 million around the world including hundreds of thousands of Americans.

But we're not there yet, and we won't be for quite some time!

Biden must, indeed, be a living insurance policy on Obama's life.

Vandal – someone who does wanton damage,and then scampers away.

Just saying:

That wasn’t me,” President Barack Obama said on his 100th day in office, disclaiming responsibility for the huge budget deficit waiting for him on Day One. It actually was him — and the other Democrats controlling Congress the previous two years — who shaped a budget so out of balance.And as a presidential candidate and president-elect, he backed the twilight Bush-era stimulus plan that made the deficit deeper, all before he took over and promoted spending plans that have made it much deeper still.

To be fair, he probably only voted “present” for all of it.

Gary Gross notes that the polls are starting to relent a little for the GOP nationally. He quotes a Rasmussen Poll:

For just the second time in more than five years of daily or weekly tracking, Republicans now lead Democrats in the latest edition of the Generic Congressional Ballot.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 41% would vote for their district’s Republican candidate while 38% would choose the Democrat. Thirty-one percent (31%) of conservative Democrats said they would vote for their district’s Republican candidate.

Gross:

I don’t doubt that that last sentence is giving Democratic strategists gray hair. Though there’s no doubt that we’ll see fluctuations between now and Election Day 2010, there’s also no doubt that the Democrats have misread the electorate. The Democrats’ misreading the election results has helped put the GOP in better shape than we’ve been in a long time.

Yes, but there’s an asterisk there.  We’ll come back to that.

I credit the change in the generic ballot to three things: President Obama’s radical agenda, President Obama’s arrogance and the House Republicans’ principled stand against Obama’s radical agenda. Obama’s radical agenda has given conservatives something to fight against while the House Republicans’ principled stance against that agenda is giving conservatives something to fight for.

Obama’s agenda is a factor.  Congress adds the arrogance and the agenda, one that I think is going to turn out to be a drag on Obama.  And the House GOP’s battle has been a blessing.

But so far all that gives us is something to campaign against.  Until the GOP has something to campaign for – a positive message – the good news cup is only half full.

On the positive side – it can’t be that hard to craft a positive message when the executive branch is so amateurish and naive (Obama’s tongue-kiss of Hugo Chavez did not play well in middle America) and Congress is so gigantistic and arrogant.

On the negative side: I don’t know that we have anything close to a standard-bearer for that message yet.

Only seventeen months ’til the next elections!

The Wall Street Journal wants you to rate the President’s first 100 days.

Go and do it (when I voted, it was an overwhelming “F”).  I gave him a “D”, just because all of that organizing deserves some credit.

Discuss amongst yourselves.  After  you vote.  Unlike the Minnesota Senate election, the counting standards in this poll are pretty clear.

Ever notice how you’re not seeing as much public opinion polling about the President these days?  Especially in the MSM?

There’s a reason for that: 

According to Gallup’s April survey, Americans have a lower approval of Mr. Obama at this point than all but one president since Gallup began tracking this in 1969. The only new president less popular was Bill Clinton, who got off to a notoriously bad start after trying to force homosexuals on the military and a federal raid in Waco, Texas, that killed 86. Mr. Obama’s current approval rating of 56 percent is only one tick higher than the 55-percent approval Mr. Clinton had during those crises.

Given the traction of the tea party movement (and the gracelessness of the leftymedia’s response on the President’s behalf to the growing popular dissent), let’s remember what happened in 1994 (with a GOP that could focus on a message and sell it to people, naturally).

As the attached chart shows, five presidents rated higher than Mr. Obama after 100 days in office. Ronald Reagan topped the charts in April 1981 with 67 percent approval. Following the Gipper, in order of popularity, were: Jimmy Carter with 63 percent in 1977; George W. Bush with 62 percent in 2001; Richard Nixon with 61 percent in 1969; and George H.W. Bush with 58 percent in 1989.

Of course, you won’t see much about this in the MSM; they’ve got an investment to protect:

USA Today’s front page touted the April poll results as positive, with the headline: “Public thinks highly of Obama.” The current cover of Newsweek magazine ponders “The Secret of His [Mr. Obama’s] Success.”

The tail is flakking for the dog.

Sending jets over an apparently still-hinky-about-lowflying-airplanes Manhattan?

Tone deaf.

An administration official says a presidential Boeing 747 and a fighter jet flew low near ground zero in New York City Monday because the White House Military Office wanted to update its file photo of the president’s plane near the Statue of Liberty.

Sending the most expensive to build-and-run jet in the world (and a military escort plane,itself not cheap) out for what amounts to a flying Glamor Shot…:

This official said the White House Military Office told the Federal Aviation Administration that it periodically updates file photos of Air Force One near national landmarks, like the statute in New York harbor and the Grand Canyon.

…in the middle of an economic downturn?

Tone duh-f.

I mean, the Sorosphere has all sortsof Photoshop “geniuses”, right?

…as soon as I get back to the office…and find them…and appoint them…oh, and once they’re confirmed.

The Obama administration declared a “public health emergency” Sunday to confront the swine flu — but is heading into its first medical outbreak without a secretary of Health and Human Services or appointees in any of the department’s 19 key posts.

President Barack Obama has not yet chosen a surgeon general or the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Meanwhile, how’s the golf game, Barack?

Glen Beck and Joe Scarborough have taken an inventory of Barack Obama’s first 100 Days:

100 DAYS, 100 MISTAKES

Jeepers guys, give the man a break – what do you expect?

Barack Obama was elected to an office he was completely unprepared for, completely unqualified for, lacked any relevant experience, was elected on a platform of empty promises, many of which he has no intention or capacity to keep, and has had to go to the second or third choice in many cases in his selection of his cabinet because many prominent Democrats apparently want to keep their resume clear of any mention of The Obama Administration.

Not to mention the fact that working with Hilary can’t be that much fun – she’s not always out of the country you know, and Al Sharpton keeps getting Obama’s Blackberry address and the Secret Service can’t change the number fast enough.

Plus, I think I may have heard that the Obama’s recently got a new dog, and that can be quite disrupting to any American family.

Glen and Joe just need to set their sights a little lower.

“They” being the Obamanistas running our nation. Government doesn’t grow like grass growing on a peaceful prairie; more like a brain tumor.

Would-be Obama Administration Commerce Secretary Judd Gregg speaks out on why he turned around and walked back out the door, embarrassing the President yet gain with another failed or controversial cabinet appointment (I’ll bet he pays his taxes) and even more so with his postmortem.

[Obama] may be “a charismatic person” with “a very strong understanding of who he is and what he wants to do,” but when it comes to the substance of what Mr. Obama seeks to accomplish, Mr. Gregg is less charitable. “They have a goal,” the senator says, “and he’s very open about it. They are going to grow this government.”

Why? Because that’s what liberals do. Why? Because they got nothin’ else in their quiver. Big government is to be made bigger for its own sake. How does that bode for the future?

“We’re headed on an unsustainable path. The simple fact is these [budget] numbers don’t work and the practical implications of them are staggering for the nation and the next generation.”

And as a result of all that spending, “You see the size of government growing from 21% [of gross domestic product] to 22%, to 23%, 24%, 25% . . . toward 30%.”

For the sake of credibility let me remind you liberals, this is the guy that Obama picked for his cabinet.

We post on torture and war and our liberal readers go ape. We post on Tea Parties and liberals argue semantics rather than addressing the fiscal crisis behind them. Why aren’t both sides freaking out about what liberal politicians, both Democrat (mostly) and Republican (sadly) are doing to our country financially?

I suppose liberals aren’t enraged because they’ve been sold on all these Hopey Changey concepts like wind-powered scooters and affordable health care for everyone without weighing the costs – costs beyond what we can afford as a nation – unless we borrow. Costs that without any market forces keeping them in check will make the current health care “crisis” look like the panacea liberals are looking for. But liberals in both parties have no aversion to borrowing and spending other-people’s money so long as the cause is “noble” enough – so for them, problem solved!

For Mr. Gregg, this is like living a nightmare. He has been a hard-nosed advocate for government spending restraint since his days as a Congressman (1981-87) and governor of New Hampshire (1987-93). At times, his commitment to fiscal responsibility led him to oppose tax cuts when they weren’t matched by spending restraint. Those stances incurred the ire of his Republican colleagues, but he always stuck to his fiscal-responsibility guns. Now he’s staring down a spending explosion that makes those battles look picayune.

What hope have we that prefer our nation not become completely insolvent?

…the runaway spending and growing pile of debt, could yet set the stage for a Republican comeback, and sooner than most pundits would predict. Mr. Gregg will not run for re-election when his current term ends next year. Republicans, he says, “became very clouded as to what we stood for under the Bush presidency.” But now they’re getting their “definition” back.

Once again, liberals will have screwed up our nation’s finances so badly that conservatives will be called back in to restore confidence. When will America learn?

President Obama, in his weekly address Saturday, said the country cannot “settle for a future of rising deficits and debts that our children cannot pay.”

…and the members of OPEC would like you to conserve fossil fuels. Oh and – hee hee – Jim Cramer has a stock tip for you. Uhhh, and Dan Rather has invited you to an “Ethics in Journalism” seminar. Oooo – Madonna and Alec Baldwin are co-authoring a book on parenting.

Meanwhile Brack O’Bomba is spending your Billions.

The audacity indeed.

Hugh Hewitt on Obama’s urge to conduct a purge:

There is no serious prosecutor who would bring a charge against any of these Bush Adminstration officials. No one not from the far left side of the political spectrum can even frame the indictment or explain how the tactics less coercive than water-boarding could be considered criminal when Congress, offered the opportunity to declare water boarding a crime, refused to do so. When the left turns up a former United States Attorney or even senior prosecutor not named Ramsey Clark willing to lay out his theory of prosecution, that will be an argument worth responding to. This is a witch hunt, a political prosecution, one that should be a central issue in the campaigns of 2010.

I almost hope Obama goes ahead with it. It’d make the McCarthy years look like traffic court.

I’m a fundamentally charitable person.

I’m personally inclined to give people the benefit of a doubt. Especially someone who’s new at a job; good Lord, I have had teething pains on jobs.  I am not one to cast the first stone, generally.

But as Canada’s National Post notes, our DNS Secretary, Janet “There’s A Conservative Terrorist Under My Bed” Napolitano, is – words fail – really, really stupid:

Can someone please tell us how U. S. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano got her job? She appears to be about as knowledgeable about border issues as a late-night radio call-in yahoo.

In an interview broadcast Monday on the CBC, Ms. Napolitano attempted to justify her call for stricter border security on the premise that “suspected or known terrorists” have entered the U. S. across the Canadian border, including the perpetrators of the 9/11 attack.

Well, by all means, let’s clamp down on that border…

…presuming that she’s right:

All the 9/11 terrorists, of course, entered the United States directly from overseas. The notion that some arrived via Canada is a myth that briefly popped up in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and was then quickly debunked.

Good Lord.  We have Grace Kelly running DHS.

Informed of her error, Ms. Napolitano blustered: “I can’t talk to that. I can talk about the future. And here’s the future. The future is we have borders.”

Just what does that mean, exactly?

It means “Don’t question me.  I am associated with hope and change!  You wanna end up on a watchlist, bub?”

Just a few weeks ago, Ms. Napolitano equated Canada’s border to Mexico’s, suggesting they deserved the same treatment.

That, of course, is PC – Par for the Course – on the left; suggesting that maybe we should fence off the Mexican border brings a knowing pursing of the lips and a devastating riposte; “so what about the Canadian border?  Or aren’t we worried about white illegal immigrants?”

Right.  Because we have gangs of Quebecois shooting Afro-Americans over drug turf in Los Angeles.

Mexico is engulfed in a drug war that left more than 5,000 dead last year, and which is spawning a spillover kidnapping epidemic in Arizona. So many Mexicans enter the United States illegally that a multi-billion-dollar barrier has been built from Texas to California to keep them out.

In Canada, on the other hand, the main problem is congestion resulting from cross-border trade. Not quite the same thing, is it?

It’s called a “Nuance”, I believe.

The CIA waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed over 250 times.

As former CIA Director Michael Hayden and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey pointed out last week, half of the U.S. government’s knowledge of al-Qaida’s structure and activities is the fruit of enhanced interrogation.

…which is to say torture – let’s not mince words

That information let the U.S. and other governments foil numerous 9/11-style operations, saving hundreds if not thousands of innocent lives.

The torture of terrorists, not babies, not harp seals, not your neighbors, not your friends…saved innocent lives.

We understand that people have legitimate concerns about the U.S. being involved in torture. But enhanced interrogation — a reasonable (but now rescinded) response to the deadliest of threats to our homeland — should be seen for what it is: a tough, but effective, way to save lives.

War on Terror Scorecard: Obama 0, Terrorists 1