The U.S. Supreme Court is about is consider and then immediately dismiss a lawsuit challenging Obama’s citizenship on the basis of a bunch of half-baked conspiracy theories from the loonier fringes of the far right.  Hopefully, this will put this issue to rest among all but the black-helicopters crowd (who will be distracted as soon as the next RonPaul! campaign gets underway anyway).

Donklephant has cobbled together a fairly definitive list of all the ways in which these theories have been debunked and even Obama’s strongest critics at Hot Air don’t want any part of this nonsense.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: All comments which spew “Obama is a Muslim” nonsense are automatically deleted.  Don’t even bother.)

Glenn Greenwald reports the inevitable: Democrats’ attitude about harsh interrogation techniques has changed now that their man has been elected and is about to assume responsibility for the continued security of the free world.  It’s an unenviable job in many respects, in particular with regard the potential for being blamed for the 9/11, 7/7, or Mumbia that takes place on U.S. soil.  Not coincidentally, Indian leaders are confronted with the same question.  How hard should they press "baby-faced gunman" and murderer Azam Amir Kasab?  What rights do terrorists caught in the act of mass murder have?  And do those rights diminish because of the threat of follow-up terrorist attacks?

Read more…

Continuing in his legitimate and very personal outrage about the passage of Proposition 8 in California, Andrew Sullivan has embraced an ugly turn towards overt anti-Mormonism.  He cites the organization of the LDS Church as a potentially troubling launching pad to a rather Orwellian violation of church and state seperation, but then he moves on to inflammatory misrepresentation and steoreotyping of Mormon religious beliefs: Read more…

Oliver Hart, professor of economics at Harvard, and Luigi Zingales, professor of finance at the Chicago Booth School of Business, say that Bush administration economists have abandoned principle in their rush to bail out financial giants AIG, among others.

The government, Hart and Zingales say, should intervene in the fates of companies only when there’s an actual market failure.  Has that happened in markets such as residential real estate?  Or has the government intervened to little purpose?

Read more…

I didn’t know what to expect when I saw this cartoon from Bob Engelhart, a cartoonist for one of my state’s papers, but it displays precisely what I’ve been seeing since shortly after the election.  Lame ducks happen after every president-changing election.  So obviously, as a lame duck, President Bush’s power is limited, but I think it still says something when the most mentioned names these days besides Barack Obama are Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke.  The last I heard anything from him was at the economic summit…and I suppose the turkey pardoning.

Lets face it.  Since being elected, nobody has really cared what George Bush thinks about the economy.  As the incoming president, everybody wants to hear what Barack Obama is going to do.  Is he for bailing out the automakers (he is)?  Is he going to support raised taxes on businesses (one report says the windfall oil tax is going buy buy)?  And what about the small folks?  Is there going to be a stimulus package and how much will it be?

So, officially, George W. Bush may still be president (as Obama likes to point out), but if you want to know what the government is going to do with the economy after January 20, Barack Obama is the guy to look at.

Writing for Reason Magazine, Shikha Dalmia explains that the U.S. government should let the ‘big three’ automakers go broke since they will collapse in the long run regardless of what the government does.

Not only will these automakers cease to exist in the middle to long run, they should have collapsed years ago already. They exist only because the federal government, and other foreign governments, have helped them out time and again.

The ‘big three’ want the U.S. government to bail them out once again because, so they say, their collapse would jeopardize the entire U.S. economy. They compare themselves to the financial institutions the government bailed out weeks ago, arguing that they too are an essential part of the U.S. economy: if they would fall, millions of jobs would disappear, and the economy as a whole would collapse. Read more…

In a matter dear to the hearts of the progressive labor movement, an Obama spokesman has reaffirmed the incoming President’s commitment to support the Orwellian-named “Employee Free Choice Act”. Read more…

Congressional leaders are signaling that some form of bailout for the struggling auto industry is likely to be approved quickly.  In a turnaround from their dismal public relations efforts in November, auto industry executives are offering to make some symbolic sacrifices of their own in order to gain approval for the plan: Read more…

Significantly exceeding his performance from Nov. 4, Georgia Senator Saxby Chambliss has gained re-election to the Senate in a run-off election yesterday.  The rise in Republican fortunes could not come at a better time for the party as it struggles to rebuild after devastating and sweeping defeats last month.

Chambliss’ re-election prevents Democrats from building a filibuster-proof majority of 60 seats in the Senate, even if Democrat Al Franken manages to scrape together enough newly-discovered ballots to win a recount in Minnesota or get the Democratic Senate leadership to overturn the Minnesota election day results.  But more importantly than reaching the magic number of 41, Chambliss’ feat provides a pointer on how Republicans can begin to rebuild their party.  Read more…

Warning, lot’s of bleeps ahead

Senator John Kyl wrote a column for Real Clear World about what he believes the U.S. could do about the threat posed by the Mullahs in Tehran.

As the good senator points out, Iran has built tremendous nuclear facilities in recent years, which would enable it to produce a nuclear bomb as soon as early next year. Of course, it could very well be that the Iranians will wait with developing one until they can develop several, which would mean that ‘the world’ has a couple of years left to force them to give up on their nuclear ambitions.

Senator Kyl advocates a diplomatic approach to Iran: he believes that the country’s religious leadership can be brought on its knees by tough sanctions. Earlier sanctions have already succeeded in hurting the Iranian economy, Kyl rightfully notes, further sanctions could weaken it so much that the regime may fall. Read more…

A Washington Post political gossip blog reports on a new piece of BDS weirdness.  Apparently, a Seattle artist received an invitation to participate in a White House contest for designing a Christmas ornament, of all things, and decided to turn it into an “impeach Bush” rant opportunity.

This raises again a question of what people who seem to have structured their entire emotional lives around their hatred of George W. Bush are going to do with themselves when he leaves office.  Their problem is exacerbated by the lack of any politically viable Republican power in the new government.  Congress is a Democratic bastion that, with luck in Georgia and a little theft in Minnesota or an election override in the Democrat-led Senate, might even be filibuster-proof.  Even after eight years of a Republican White House, the courts remain at most a 50/50 liberal/conservative split and likely to turn further leftward.

This creates a problem for the BDS brigades — they need to have people to hate in order to feed their image of themselves as “telling truth to power” or “fighting for social justice” or any of the other variations on their Manichean worldview.  Who are they going to hate now that they’ve totally won?  Railing against the excesses of some small-town school board president that has managed to evade the edicts of the courts doesn’t seem likely to fulfill their appetites, and they can keep recycling the Sarah Palin boogeywoman over and over and over only for so long.

The psychological frustration that comes from needing to hate but lacking a suitable target might produce some entertaining stuff over the upcoming months and years.

Then again, they can always repackage President Obama as the new evil liar.

The Las Vegas Sun (they have newspapers in Vegas???) reports that the incoming Obama administration may be backing quietly away from its promise to sign “card check” legislation that would revoke workers’ rights to have a secret ballot before the formation of a union and allow the union to be formed based solely on the signing of cards by a majority of workers.

Aside from the political side of the story — which is likely overblown in that the Obama administration’s backing away appears more a matter of changed timing than a shift in its supportive position — the text of the story itself gives an unusually clear window into how bias in the media works.  Read more…

In the latest in a long series of “sky is falling” reports about trends in terrorism, a Congressional task force has proclaimed that an attack using biological or nuclear weapons is likely by the end of 2013.  Of course, the threat is real in the abstract.  Groups like al-Qaeda have made no secret of their desire to obtain and use nuclear, biological, chemical, or radiological weapons.  This report, however, appears to raise more questions than it answers. Read more…

In response to continuing pirate attacks off the lawless coast of Somalia, “lawhawk” proffers a military solution:

Blockade the Somali coast and allow the navies of the world to destroy any pirate ships that attempt to cross it. At the same time, those same navies should continue to move towards the ports where the pirates operate from and conduct operations to destroy the boats used. Eliminate the means for the pirates to operate, and the piracy will end.

But leaving aside lawhawk’s surprisingly un-legalistic emotionalism about the moral need to stop pirates, the problem is simply that the costs of acting to stop them outweigh the benefits. Read more…

President-Elect Barack Obama ran as a liberal on foreign policy and domestic issues during the Democratic primaries season. He had to, of course: he had to run to the left of Senator Hillary Clinton if he wanted to win his party’s nomination. If he would have run as a centrist at that point, he would not have received the massive support from liberal activists he needed so desperately.

Now that he has won, however, Obama is quickly transforming into a different kind of future president: his foreign policy picks imply that he will most certainly not adopt a ‘dovish liberal foreign policy.’ Instead, he has surrounded himself by foreign policy realists and even liberal hawks such as Clinton, who will be his Secretary of State. Read more…

Speaking Monday, U.S. president-elect Barack Obama said that India is a sovereign country and has, as a result, every right to protect itself.

He said so in response to questions whether he would support India if it would use military force against terrorists in Pakistan.

During the election campaign, Obama said that the U.S. had the right to strike against terrorist training camps inside Pakistan if it deemed doing so necessary. Obama’s reaction to the terrorist attack in India shows that he does not merely believe that the U.S. but also others have the right to protect itself against terrorists. Read more…

Writing at USA Today, Rod Dreher confirms something that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, namely that social conservatives and Christian voters are an essential element of the Republican base and that the McCain/Palin ticket lost for reasons having little to do with deep demographic changes misidentified by pundits such as Jeffery Hart and the aforementioned Kathleen Parker.

There are of course those who would like to see Christian voters marginalized as a voting force. 

Read more…

This is a rough translation of an article that appears in today’s issue of the Dutch daily Reformatorisch Dagblad.

The main characteristic of the tragic events in Mumbai was chaos. For three days we saw the same images full of fear and disorder, and received a continuous flow of information that mostly turned out to be incorrect or incomplete. Pure angst and disarray; the terrorists scored some important points, again.

The attacks were prepared carefully and appear to have been carried out according to a well thought-out plan. The terrorists looked specifically for Western – particularly American and British – victims. It seems improbable that American and Israeli Jews – who were clearly recognizable as such, and who worked and lived in a visible and well known Jewish center – became victims by chance. Still, we should not forget that most victims were not Westerners, but Indians. Two of the first sites that were attacked were the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus and the Cama hospital. After all, terrorists hate everybody who does not subscribe to (one of) their own absolutist, nihilist brand(s) of Islam. Americans, Jews, Westerners, Hindus,Buddhists, Shi’ites or Sunnis, moderate or simply dissentient Muslims, atheists: in the Islamists’ eyes we are all Tweedledum and Tweedledee. They seize upon regional conflicts as grounds for their activities ( see for instance: Chechnya, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Lebanon ), but if such a conflict can not serve as a pretext they will effortlessly find another subterfuge: the fate of the Palestinians, American or Jewish imperialism, Western decadence, you name it and they will find a reason to sacrifice themselves or other Muslims, and to murder unbelievers.

Read more…

Writing for his blog “The Skepticians,” (which may soon be added to the utterly disgusting number of blogs in my reader), James Richardson, the Republican National Committee Online Communication Manager for the 2008 election, discusses a recent Florida ruling in which the judge ruled against a ban on gay adoption, noting that it was hypocritical to ban adoption but at the same time allow foster parenting.

Richardson, a supporter of gay adoption, argues that the GOP needs to change its attitude toward this issue or risk being marginalized.

Read more…

Today is the 20th annual World AIDS Day. Around the world there are reminders that this devastating disease continues to affect millions of people, and ravages substantial parts of the African continent. Having grown up in San Francisco in the eighties and nineties, I will never forget the feeling of the epidemic as it reached disastrous proportions in our city. I won’t forget the family friends who died, or the AIDS quilt I was taken to see, a quilt where every panel was a human life snuffed out, a quilt so large that no surface could ever accommodate it whole.

Barack Obama released a message for this years World AIDS Day. In it, he praises President Bush’s very admirable efforts on behalf of fighting AIDS in Africa, and pledges to continue his work, in addition to fighting the disease within the US.

The terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, have caused the tensions between longtime rivals India and Pakistan to rise significantly.

India believes that the terrorists were trained in Pakistan and part of a Pakistani anti-India group. Pakistan responded that there was no definite proof of a Pakistan connection and security officials informed reporters that Islamabad may pull back some troops from the Pakistan-Afghan border and deploy them to the border with India instead “if tensions continue to escalate.” Read more…

The Washington Post has an article from veteran military interrogator Matthew Alexander (not his real name).  While in Iraq, Alexander became disillusioned by some of the methods being employed to get information out of detainees there, namely: torture.  He went on to develop an alternative method where he and his team developed a rapport with the detainees in order to gain their trust and make it easier to draw information out of them.  The method worked and ended up leading to the killing of Al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in June 2006.

Read more…

Iraq has a Ministry of Human Rights that is working to end gender discrimination in that country.  That’s a tall order in a country in which Islam-inspired honor killings - the ultimate form of misogyny - are common and on the rise.  The Guardian reports that 81 known honor killings have occurred in Basra alone in 2008.  That there’s no honor whatsoever in killing your daughter or wife is lost on these fools.  One interesting tidbit is that Iraqi men, lacking the courage of their perverse morality, have begun to turn to murder for hire in these killings.

Read more…

So argues Bill Kristol in a recent article for The Weekly Standard:

Bush should consider pardoning–and should at least be vociferously praising–everyone who served in good faith in the war on terror, but whose deeds may now be susceptible to demagogic or politically inspired prosecution by some seeking to score political points. The lawyers can work out if such general or specific preemptive pardons are possible; it may be that the best Bush can or should do is to warn publicly against any such harassment or prosecution. But the idea is this: The CIA agents who waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and the NSA officials who listened in on phone calls from Pakistan, should not have to worry about legal bills or public defamation. In fact, Bush might want to give some of these public servants the Medal of Freedom at the same time he bestows the honor on Generals Petraeus and Odierno. They deserve it.

To say I disagree is an understatement.  I can’t speak for the views on torture of the people who did it, but rewarding them for their participation would only be a signal that the United States does indeed endorse torture.  It’d be a national security nightmare.  It wouldn’t protect the troops at all.  Oh, and did I mention it would put the lives of those agents in jeopardy?  What is Kristol thinking?

I have nothing to like about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed; he did, after all, plan the acts that killed over 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001.  I certainly don’t wish him well.  But endorsing the act of torture is counter-intuitive to American interests.

That Kristol can speak so enthusiastically about it is a little disturbing.

A British jurist is proposing the establishment of an international tribunal to enforce environmental agreements as well as a broader vision of environmental rights. The proposal is a classic example of the kind of overreaching that has come to define the global climate change movement. Read more…

The latest polls of Republican and all voters indicate that the conservative Republican base favors candidates voters in general do not think too highly of. 

For instance, 24.4% Republican voters want Governor Sarah Palin to be the Republican candidate for president in 2012. Only 13.4% of all voters agree. 

At the same time, Governor Mitt Romney ranks second among all voters, six points behind Palin, but leads among all voters (be it barely). Read more…

Writing for Hurriyet, Muslim columnist Mustafa Akyol expresses anger and frustration with the terrorist attack last week in Mumbai, India, carried out by Muslim extremists.

As Akyol points out, these individuals kill in the name of Islam. By doing so, they disgrace this religion. The far majority of Muslims oppose terrorism and extremism, even fundamentalism (not all the same things), strongly. Akyol is no different.

Yet, his column is important for three reasons:

1. It once again rebuffs those who claim that “moderate Muslims never condemn Islamic terrorism.” They (we) do. Constantly. When moderate Muslims speak out against extremism in general and terrorism specifically they are often ignored, however. I am one of the few who link to Akyol’s piece, while Akyol is a prominent Muslim political commentator, writing for a prominent Turkish newspaper (in English). Read more…

Tory leader David Cameron stepped up his attacks against Prime Minister and Labor leader Gordon Brown in recent weeks, after several controversies involving Labor leaders broke out.

After shadow immigration minister Damian Green was arrested, Cameron urged the Prime Minister to speak out against the arrest which he deems purely political.

Writing in News of the World Cameron said: “When it comes to vigorous opposition, if this approach had been in place in the 1990s, then Gordon Brown would have spent most of his time under arrest. Read more…

Chinese President Hu Jintao told his fellow communists that his country was losing its competitive edge and that the worsening financial crisis will push the country’s growth down tremendously in the coming months and year.

Where China’s economy grew with 11.9% last year, it is only expected to do so with 9% this year. That still makes China the fastest growing major economy on earth, but Chinese leaders nonetheless fear that the drop in growth could very well signal a new era. An era in which the Chinese have to struggle, like most others, to grow their economy. Read more…