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Come to the cabaret, ol’ chum! “Obama Musical Debuts In Germany.”

What could go wrong?

The American Thinker’s Lauri B. Regan co-stars in “My Dinner With AlGore:”

This past week, I was having lunch at a restaurant in midtown Manhattan when my colleague noticed Al and Tipper Gore dining across the room with another couple. It was a frigid day, with record-breaking temperatures keeping most people indoors, and we were the last two tables in the restaurant.

As the Gore party started walking out of the room, my colleague called out, “Hey, Al, how’s all that global warming working out for you?” Gore turned around and stared at us with a completely dumbfounded look on his face. He was speechless. With a smile, my colleague repeated the question, again to a hapless look of dismay.

Finally, Gore mumbled under his breath, “Wow, you sound awfully angry.” I responded with a thank you, explaining to him that we were actually extremely amused. The encounter concluded with Gore’s friend mouthing a very animated “f— you” at us, and they skulked away. My only regret is that no one at the table asked Gore, “What’s the matter? The polar bear’s got your tongue?”

“Wow, you sound awfully angry” — this from a guy who compares global warming to the Holocaust and dubs his ideological opponents “Digital Brownshirts.”

Meanwhile, decline itself is pretty cheesed off right about now! Tim Blair spots “Decline on the Rampage:”

Britain is totally snowed:

Michael Dukes, the forecast manager at Meteogroup, says the Nasa satellite image of Britain shows snow over almost the entire country.

Indeed it does. But what precise area is the source of this extraordinary coldening?

He says that the swirl of cloud over East Anglia is the cumulus cloud system that caused snow showers today.

East Anglia? Oh, my. The massive cold is coming straight from Hide-The-Decline Central! Britain has evidently called upon itself a Gore Effect of terrifying power.

Meanwhile, Accuweather has this headline: “Worldwide Cold Not Seen Since 70s Ice Age Scare.” An earlier era predicting climatic armageddon — who knew?

Speaking of eschatological concerns,  many in the media are currently angry at a prominent journalist using his employer’s facilities as a powerful soapbox to unfairly proselytize his religion.

I am of course, talking about Time magazine’s Joe Klein and his self-professed “enviro-theistic” worldview.

And faith can cause men to make strange and mystical decisions, particularly when logic and Gaia’s mighty will conflict. Or as Deceiver.com puts it: “Richard Branson, airline magnate, attacks global shipping.”

Elsewhere, it’s nice of Rolling Stone to start the year off calling their core subscribers by name:

Finally, at Big Journalism, a look at “The Top Twelve Faux Media Scares of the Past Decade.”

Two guesses as to what made number one.

Update: Back in 2007, former BBC journalist Robin Aitken asked “Can We Trust The BBC” — evidently, as sort of an inverse of Spinal Tap envying itself, the BBC answers in the negative and launches its own internal envirotheistic-focused investigation.

Just a minute — the BBC investigating itself? Oh sure, that would be like trusting without verifying, as the Gipper would say; the equivalent of allowing America’s ACORN to investigate itself.

Oh wait…

Update: Also in England, “‘Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past,’ claimed the Independent, back in March 2000.”

Despite finding saarin, mustard gas, and other chemical weapons, and despite various prison sentences for those who used them in Iraq or those who sold them, apparently, the only thing that would have satisfied the left that Saddam had WMDs would have been discovering a giant SPECTRE-sized Ken Adam-styled laboratory with men in white lab coats hard at work caught in the act. But as Elizabeth Blackney, AKA “Media Lizzy” notes on her Facebook page, my how the definition of WMDs has changed:

Just read Abdulmutallab charging docs. He’s charged w/having a Weapon of Mass Destruction. Hmm. So, since we’re using the ‘criminal’ standard, shouldn’t all those thousands of pounds of mortars, bombs, missiles, etc in Iraq as WMDs? (leaving yellowcake out of it, since that was sold to Canada for energy)

WMDs — they’re anything you want them to be. And less.

Update: On Twitter, “SeeDubya” notes hand grenades were once judged to be WMDs, having been almost used in a foiled 2006 Christmastime terrorist attack on an Illinois mall.

Update: The left’s flexible definition of WMDs brings to mind this passage from near the end of Orwell’s 1984:

‘What are the stars?’ said O’Brien indifferently. ‘They are bits of fire a few kilometres away. We could reach them if we wanted to. Or we could blot them out. The earth is the centre of the universe. The sun and the stars go round it.’

Winston made another convulsive movement. This time he did not say anything. O’Brien continued as though answering a spoken objection:

‘For certain purposes, of course, that is not true. When we navigate the ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often find it convenient to assume that the earth goes round the sun and that the stars are millions upon millions of kilometres away. But what of it? Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that? Have you forgotten doublethink?’

No, but I suspect most of the left internalizes it, so they don’t have to think about it. Let me check with Antonio Gramsci and get back to you.

Update: “WMD’s Are Finally Located — Is there nothing that Obama can’t do?”

Remember back in the 1980s when the New York Times berated the former actor in the White House and his proposed missile defense program, which they named, with noses in the full locked and upturned position, after a recent blockbuster science fiction movie series with knockout special effects?

Hey, that was a long time ago. These days, the Times is totally onboard with some Anti-Industrial White Light & Washington Magic. Maureen Dowd, who in 2009 compared President Obama to Star Trek’s Mr. Spock (in a column presciently titled “Put Aside Logic”), kicks off the new year with yet another science fiction-themed motif, as Newsbusters’ Lachlan Markay writes:

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd really wants a national security system that looks really nice and has lots of fancy bells and whistles, but is, beneath the shiny exterior, quite mediocre and extremely expensive.

Dowd implied as much when she asked Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano in a New Years Eve interview, “Why is it so hard for those charged with keeping us safe to be as imaginative and innovative as filmmakers like James Cameron?”

She knows it’s only a movie, right? Because there’s an Avatar-themed message board with this question on it:

I recently read on the Avatar TypePad Blog, that people are becoming depressed because of the movie. People are realizing that the dream can’t actually come true. I was trying to start a thread where people gave ideas on how to cope with it, as in reading Avatar stuff, Writing ( about avatar of course), painting, or whatever. Just give me some ideas and I’ll try and help them out. Maybe people reading might even get some good ideas that’ll help.

The message thread’s headline is “Ways to cope with the depression of the dream of Pandora being intangible.”

No word yet if the person who posted that is actually MoDo.

On the other hand, I can see why the Times would favor more Hollywood involvement in our frontline defenses, given the root causes of the nation’s current terrorist threat.

At least according to TMZ:

Jay Leno is going back to his 11:30 PM time slot, and it’s looking like Conan O’Brien is the odd man out … sources tell TMZ.

We’ve learned Jay’s 10:00 PM show will go on hiatus February 1. After the Olympics, Jay will take back his 11:30 PM time slot. What has not been decided — whether Jay’s show will be a half hour, followed by Conan, or whether Jay’s show will be an hour and NBC says sayonara to Mr. O’Brien.

We’re told Jay and Conan have both been told of the changes. As for Jay, interestingly, he’ll get what he always wanted — his 11:30 PM time slot.

At least at one point, Leno’s primetime show was being beaten by a show on Fox’s FX cable spin-off channel, too much decline for even NBC to hide.

Headline via Kate of Small Dead Animals, who spots this incident involving another unruly radical Presbyterian on another flight into Detroit:

Associated Press:

An airline passenger in Miami proclaimed “I want to kill all the Jews” before police forced him off a Detroit-bound plane, authorities said Thursday.

Mansor Mohammad Asad, 43, of Toledo, Ohio, was arrested Wednesday night, according to a Miami-Dade Police Department statement. Asad was charged with threats against a public servant, disorderly conduct and resisting an officer without violence.

FBI spokeswoman Judy Orihuela said there were no indications the disturbance was related to terrorism. The bureau was initially brought in to look into the incident but is no longer involved in the investigation. She said the FBI is treating the disruption as a matter for local authorities.

Related – another teaching moment for Al Queda.

For some thoughts on (to coin a phrase) the root causes of these incidents, Michael Totten shares a glass or three of Johnny Walker Black with Christopher Hitchens during the latter man’s visit to Totten’s hometown of Portland.

Related: “Thousands From Terror-Sponsoring Nations Entering U.S. on ‘Diversity Visas.’” But then, as General Casey said immediately after the Fort Hood terrorist attack, echoing, sad to say, the thoughts of just about everyone connected with DC, “As horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.”

Update: David Freddoso has a modest counter-proposal: “Time to abolish TSA as we know it.”

Mark Hemingway spots this “Give Peace A Chance” moment in the Gray Lady:

See if you want to read past the first line of NYT columnist Nick Kristof’s latest:

Hmmm. You think it’s a coincidence? Costa Rica is one of the very few countries to have abolished its army, and it’s also arguably the happiest nation on earth.

Riiiiiighhhhtt. It’s like John Lennon’s “Imagine” is the template for liberal foreign policy. Is this supposed to be provocative somehow, because a good many readers probably won’t get past the rank stupidity. I’d like to think that a few years back when Kristof was watching the smoldering wreckage of the World Trade Center from the Times building in midtown Manhattan, the first thought going through his head was not, “You know, we’d all be happier if we had no army right now…”

It’s two papers in one! Didn’t Thomas Friedman just get done telling us that America should be more like China — who aren’t exactly downsizing their military, last time I checked.

Update: In the comments below, Reader “Levans” asks a great question:

If we abolish our military, how are we going to invade Israel and force a Palestinian state? Clearly, Kristof and Sullivan need to meet and devise some middle/moderate ground wherein the military is downsized and re-missioned to deal with the treasonous dissent of the tea-party movement and the fascistic desire of Israel to survive and protect its citizens.

This sounds like a conundrum for another leading Times columnist to wrestle with.

I’m happy to see Arnold up off his knees a little and feinting an attack of sorts at ObamaCare, but in her column at Real Clear Politics, Debra Saunders looks back at six years of wasted opportunities:

Mention Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger — you need only say his first name — and many Californians respond with a long sigh, then with words like “squander” or “waste” or “missed opportunity.” Those in the political class look at Schwarzenegger and see what might have been.

Close your eyes and think back in time six years. There was excitement as Schwarzenegger delivered his first State of the State address in 2004; international, Washington and Southern California media flocked to sleepy Sacramento in such numbers that Capitol workers had to put up a tent to contain the overflow. The larger-than-life action figure garnered more raw votes in the crowded recall race than ousted Democrat Gov. Gray Davis won in the anemic 2002 general election. He could not exactly pronounce Cah-lee-fornia, yet he bounded into office with so much force that even before his first State of the State, he revoked the car tax and stared down the Legislature until it repealed a recently passed law to allow illegal immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses. Democrats held comfortable majorities in the Assembly and Senate, yet six years ago, many were terrified — they lowered their voices when they talked about him — at what the muscle man might make them do.

On the right, the big fear was that Schwarzenegger’s need to be liked would keep him from doing what needed to be done. As it turned out, Schwarzenegger pushed for budget reform and a tough pension overhaul to end pricey defined-benefit pensions for new state employees. Sadly, once his plans met resistance, rather than regird his loins, the governator slinked off the set in search of a new script.

Wednesday, Schwarzenegger acknowledged that he starts the year facing a crushing $20.7 billion shortfall that will require painful cuts.

Throw in the fact that he has to work with a dysfunctional tax system and a Legislature dominated by hacks and zealots, and Schwarzenegger is back where he started six years ago.

Read the whole thing — Arnold is relying on plenty of Hollywood-style accounting to make a craptastic CA budget look marginally better than the trainwreck it truly is.

In her Newsreal column, Kathy Shaidle writes:

Media Matters (a.k.a. the George Soros Steno Pool) boasts a multi-million dollar budget and over 60 staffers — and this is the best they can do?

Just a few months ago, Media Matters delighted in mocking Fox News star Glenn Beck’s latest novelty: a red phone set up to take calls from the White House, should it ever care  to correct Beck’s alleged “falsehoods” about its Mao-loving, 9/11 Truther staffers.

Then they snorted when new Fox Business hire John Stossell “shamelessly” copied Beck, and set up a green “Al Gore phone.”

Media Matters even approvingly quoted Wall Street Journal columnist Thomas Frank assertion that Beck’s red phone “really symbolizes a new kind of ignorance”:

What Mr. Beck’s silent phone really symbolizes is a new kind of ignorance, a coming high-tech dark age in which people can choose to blow off professional standards of inquiry; in which they can wall themselves off with cable TV and friendly Web sites, dismiss what displeases as liberal bias, and demand that any contrary view be transmitted to them via telephone call from the president himself.

Uh huh.

Oh, and Media Matters just semi-famously declared Glenn Beck its “Misinformer of the Year: 2009″.

Well, guess what? Media Matters has just unveiled… it’s own Glenn Beck Phone! They want him to phone them if they say something inaccurate about him or something. Get it?! Yep, it took them three months to think of that idea.

As Mediate’s headline put it — anticipating my response and yours — yes, “this is real.”

And so very, very sad.

Kathy’s article is titled, “Media Matters stealing ideas from people it hates now”, but that’s not exactly new — Media Matters began in 2004 as a leftwing, reactionary clone of Reed Irvine’s 40 year old Accuracy in Media and especially, as its founder David Brock explicitly acknowledged, Brent Bozell’s 20 year old Media Research Center. Of course, as James Taranto wrote in 2004, unlike conservative sites that monitor for liberal bias in self-described “objective” news organizations:

See the problem here? Brock’s new shop is devoted to faulting conservative opinion journalists for expressing conservative opinions. What the Media Research Center does is entirely different; it analyzes liberal bias in the news media, which are supposed to be objective.If liberals are willing to spend $2 million funding a Web site that does nothing more than expose conservative commentators for engaging in conservative commentary, can we really afford to trust them with our tax dollars?

As a commenter wrote on Tim Blair’s blog when the NFL’s scandalous treatment of Rush Limbaugh broke:

How is it that when Righties quote Lefties, they have video, audio, and notarized confirmation from the Pope, but when Lefties ‘quote’ Righties, they have Wiki entries contributed by ‘Cobra’?

Which neatly sums up Media Matters’ “Fake But Accurate” approach to inventing quotes, unlike items at the MRC’s Newsbusters blog or the MRC’s main site. And Media Matters have since been revealed themselves to be remarkably dishonest, acknowledging they cooked the books on Limbaugh.

Incidentally, you just know that Beck’s going to do a segment where he tries to call the Moonbat phone. I’d suggest a tape delay or even prerecording this one, just in case the conversation turns scatological, or these gents answer:

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Happy rockin’ new year!

An earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 4.1 shook the South Bay this morning, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

The quake, which was recorded at 10:09 a.m., was centered six miles east/northeast of Milpitas and 11 miles north/northeast of San Jose City Hall, according to the USGS Web site.

The last magnitude 4 quake in the South Bay was March 30, 2009, when a 4.3 temblor struck just south of San Jose.

The last major earthquake in the Bay Area was the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake — a magnitude 6.9 quake that struck on Oct. 17, 1989, in the Santa Cruz Mountains. It killed 62 people and caused $6 billion in damages.

Sitting in my Bay Area home, today’s quake felt briefly like a plane hitting a big pocket of turbulence. Fortunately, power and Internet stayed up, which is why I’m able to post this.

On Tuesday, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs declined to answer questions about the president’s campaign commitment to hold health-care negotiations on C-Span. Gibbs said he had not seen a letter from C-Span’s Brian Lamb to congressional leaders requesting the coverage and thus could not comment on it.

On Wednesday, Gibbs was asked again about the C-Span commitment. The story had gotten pretty big in the intervening time, and presumably Gibbs had had a chance to familiarize himself with it. So reporters tried for a second day to get him to comment on the president’s commitment to holding televised health-care talks. Gibbs’ answer? “We covered this yesterday.” Gibbs referred reporters to the transcript of Tuesday’s briefing and said, “The answer I would give today is similar.”

But of course, he hadn’t answered the question at all. Here is the transcript from the Tuesday briefing:

QUESTION: C-Span television is requesting leaders in Congress to open up the debate to their cameras, and I know this is something that the President talked about on the campaign trail. Is this something that he supports, will be pushing for?

GIBBS: I have not seen that letter. I know the President is going to begin some discussions later today on health care in order to try to iron out the differences that remain between the House and the Senate bill and try to get something hopefully to his desk quite quickly….

Later in that same briefing, a reporter raised the C-Span issue again:

[Long transcript of Gibbs' endless Ron Ziegler meets Joe Lockhart-style dissembling in response to multiple journalists' questions on this topic, snipped -- Ed]

And that was the end of that. If the public wants to know why President Obama didn’t keep his pledge to hold televised health-care negotiations, they’ll have to look for answers elsewhere. The White House isn’t talking.

And why should they? They’re obviously betting that the press corps won’t pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize this topic as they did President Bush on:

• Hurricane Katrina
• Abu Ghraib
• Cindy Sheehan
• The Dubai Ports Deal
• And numerous other stories and non-stories

Is that a safe bet for the Obama administration to make? Given the worshipful treatment they’ve gotten from their fellow Democrats in the MSM, probably. Or it could be Obama’s “Read My Lips” moment, even if the legacy media chooses not to awaken from its slumber.

Back in early April, President Obama threatened bank CEOs with the portentous line, “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” Of course, the actual number of angry townspeople wielding pitchforks were pretty small.  Universal could easily round-up more extras from Central Casting to flesh out its horror films of the 1930s than those who actually rode the busses to the homes of the AIG execs:

Apparently the Working Families Party (a/k/a/ Socialists) just couldn’t scare up enough vigilantes to take part on the bus tour today. Geez, even Al Sharpton can gather up a larger rent-a-mob.

Rather than call this motley band of human debris what they are, the Associated Press calls them “working families” and “activists,” although by my definition those who work for AIG also qualify as working families since they have jobs and seemingly most of these protesters don’t.

Funny, though, after the Democrats whipped up such hysteria this week all they could get to turn out was 40 lonely protesters and they were outnumbered by the media.

A busload of activists representing working- and middle-class families paid visits Saturday to the lavish homes of American International Group executives to protest the tens of millions of dollars in bonuses awarded by the struggling insurance company after it received a massive federal bailout.

About 40 protesters — outnumbered by reporters and photographers from as far away as Germany — sought to urge AIG executives who received a portion of the $165 million in bonuses to do more to help families.

“We think $165 million could be used in a more appropriate way to keep people in their homes, create more jobs and health care,” said Emeline Bravo-Blackport, a gardener.Well, there may have been jobs created, but the Democrats are taking all that money, Emeline, or haven’t you heard? Oh well, there go those jobs.

But then, as Saul Alinsky wrote in Rules For Radicals, “The threat is more terrifying than the thing itself. ”

Turnabout is fair play:

Upping The Ante: N.H. Tea Party Coalition plans protests at N.H. homes of U.S. legislators. Well, when ACORN sent busloads — er, well, about half a busload — of protesters to AIG executives’ homes, it was evidence of genuine grassroots anger. And got sympathetic national coverage, with media outnumbering the protesters. Somehow I doubt that’ll be the story here.

And with this, as Founding Bloggers adds, the Tea Party movement and the right are once again taking a page from the Book of Saul*:

This is just one of the imperative evolutionary steps the Tea Party must take.

Let’s just hope they make enough noise to truly piss off the neighbors. That’s the main reason to do it.

UPDATE: What did Saul Alinsky have to say about this protest tactic? From Rules For Radicals [emphasis added in black]:

In its early history the organized black ghetto in the Woodlawn neighborhood in Chicago engaged in conflict with the slum landlords. It never picketed the local slum tenements or the landlord’s office. It selected its blackest blacks and bussed them out to the lily-white suburb of the slum landlords residence. Their picket signs, which said, “Did you know that Jones, your neighbor, is a slum land-lord?” were completely irrelevant; the point was that the pickets knew Jones would be inundated with phone calls from his neighbors.

JONES: Before you say a word let me tell you that those signs are a bunch of lies!
NEIGHBOR: Look, Jones, I don’t give a damn what you do for a living. All we know is that you get those goddam n****rs out of here or you get out!

Jones came and signed.
The pressure that gave us our positive power was the negative of racism in a white society.

p.144 Rules For Radicals

Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it — then ride the magic bus:

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(more…)

You know those slightly surrealistic scenes in All The President’s Men, where Woodward and Bernstein, played by Redford and Hoffman, call up various sources from the Nixon White House to verify their side of the Watergate story?

That’s the scene that Andrew Breitbart recreates to kick off Big Journalism, his latest media salon:

I couldn’t believe I was having this conversation. It felt like a scene from a movie that conveniently ties plot points together when two critical characters in the storyline share a moment of implausible significance – where the intrepid reporter finally runs his target to ground.

So at first I had trouble getting my words out. “I’m Andrew Breitbart,” I exhaled. Instead of hanging up, Bertha Lewis laughed like someone I would probably like in a different setting – but certainly not in this lifetime now that we are permanently and publicly tied to one another as media-based adversaries.

I knew the awkwardness of the moment would turn into trouble when I started asking her pointed questions and, sure enough, we soon we found ourselves in trouble.

“Did you go to the White House last year?” I asked.

Bertha Laughed heartily.  ”No,” she said.

“Really?” I pushed.

“No. One hundred per cent not. Not this year. Not last year. Not ever,” she stated firmly, all the while maintaining an awkward and ironic joviality that was likely born of the weirdness of our impromptu exchange.

“Are you aware that the White House is claiming that the proof you are not the Bertha Lewis who was given a personal tour of the White House residence in early September is that you are Bertha M. Lewis? I asked. “And the one on the visitors log is Bertha E. Lewis. In an online database I see you once had ‘Evans’ in your name.”

“That was a former husband, who is now dead,” she said.

“I’m sorry about that,” I responded sincerely, as we defied the odds that the awkwardness couldn’t get any greater.

Lewis ended the call with the perfect compliment from someone accustomed to anything less than fawning attention from the media: “’You are a bad, bad, bad journalist,’ Bertha Lewis exclaimed.”

Welcome to the world of Big Journalism.

Elsewhere in his post, Breitbart notes:

The mainstream media largely ignored the ACORN story because any exploration into the tapes is bad news for the political left, President Obama and the Democratic Party. The Washington Post reporter who was forced to retract her lies about James O’Keefe even argued with me when I answered her question about seeing the ACORN tapes and thinking they were “The Abu Ghraib of the Great Society.”

“You just caught a bunch of dummies on tape!” Carol Leonnig protested after I answered her question as honestly as I could.

“That’s what Bush called the “soft bigotry of lowered expectations,” I exclaimed. “Those people were SMART and knew how to brilliantly rig the system to defraud taxpayers!”

That’s a topic that Andrew discussed with us at Western CPAC in October:

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Center-left Mediate reports that far left Media Matters “Isn’t Quite Sure How To Take Red Eye’s Robot Attack”:

Fox News’ late night comedy/news hybrid Red Eye took on liberal watchdog Media Matters last night, in a segment featuring talking robots.

Media Matters called it the “most bizarre attack on Media Matters EVER.”

And trust me Media Matters knows its way around bizarre attacks. More from Mediate:

Introducing the segment, host Greg Gutfeld said of Media Matters, “They obsessively send me and everyone else in the media thousands of press releases a week complaining about Fox News.” (As an example, a Glenn Beck-related release today.)

So Red Eye “recreated a typical day in the life of the angriest organization on the planet,” using similar technology to this Robot Theater presentation of Tiger Woods‘ ‘incident.’

Here’s a sample of the robot talk: “I want George Soros to be my dad and my mom so he could spank me and breastfeed me.” Later, Soros is involved.

The comments are all over the map. This one, from “Wildcat Progressive” kind of sums up the sentiment though: “Wow, this is like a David Lynch movie after he did a combo of coke, smack and acid.”

Which amongst midnight movie aficionados is a compliment, right?

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Flashback: “It’ll Be All Right On The Night — Political correctness has crippled the left’s sense of humour”.

At Big Government, Bob Parks, early video blogger turned New Media Alliance Television executive director, whose “Outside The Wire” videos were one of the inspirations for my Silicon Graffiti videos, reminds Chris Matthews and the rest of GE that the Tea Parties are just a bit more diversified than the anchor line-up of MSNBC.

Update: A legitimate Laphamism! Matthews leveled his charge yesterday; Andrew Breitbart rebutted it (prebutted it?) back in September during the 9/12 Tea Party in Quincy, Illinois.

Update: Further thoughts from Parks on Matthews at his Black & Right Website.

At Real Clear Politics, Tom Bevan writes, “Brian Lamb has put President Obama on the spot”:

Lamb is the CEO of C-Span, and today he wrote a letter to the leaders of Congress asking them to allow cameras in the room for the final negotiations on the health care bill. Lamb wrote:

President Obama, Senate and House leaders, many of your rank-and-file members, and the nation’s editorial pages have all talked about the value of transparent discussions on reforming the nation’s health care system. Now that the process moves to the critical stage of reconciliation between Chambers, we respectfully request that you allow the public full access, through television, to legislation that will affect the lives of every single American.

Indeed, this was one of Obama’s signature promises on the campaign trail:

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Words. Just words:

Well, it was that political genius Barack Obama. It was a dumb political move on his part to have ever suggested open negotiations, let alone promising them over and over.

Real negotiations — as opposed to questioning witnesses and debating on the floor — are never held in public. If they were, political opponents and lobbyists would be hanging on every word. The give and take, the thinking out loud, the tentative suggestions, the horse-trading that are so much a part of any negotiation would be impossible when every casual phrase, recorded on C-Span’s camcorders, might be turned into an attack ad for the next election.

When the most momentous negotiations in American history — the Constitutional Convention of 1787 — met for the first time, the members of the convention agreed to strict secrecy. Sentries were posted at all doors. The windows — in a sweltering Philadelphia summer — were kept closed, a discreet member of the convention always attended Benjamin Franklin’s convivial dinner parties to make sure the great man did not talk too much. James Madison’s notes (by far the most important source we have for what went on) were not published until 1840, after all the delegates to the convention were dead.

The Founding Fathers did a pretty good job in those secret meetings 222 years ago. They created what is perhaps the only work of genius ever produced by a committee. The attendees at the secret negotiations over health care will probably not fare as well in the opinion of history. They are not founding a republic, after all; they are trying, with increasing desperation, to get a dirty deal done.

Meanwhile, Jennifer Rubin explores Nancy Pelosi’s own C-Span problem: “Lies, Big Lies and Nancy Pelosi Press Conferences.”

(H/T: Glenn Reynolds, who adds, “They look like promise breakers because they are. They look like they’ve got something to hide . . . because they do.”)

Update: “The Tom DeLay Democrats — So much for the President’s pledge of C-Span transparency.”

Update: “Press corps grills Gibbs: Um, didn’t Obama totally shamelessly lie about C-SPAN?”

“Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon, the first woman to hold the city’s highest position, will officially resign her post as mayor”, WBAL, the city’s local CBS affiliate, reports:

A deal was reached in the case regarding her recent conviction and her future case involving perjury charges, 11 News I-Team reporter David Collins said Wednesday afternoon. Lawyers for Dixon and state prosecutors in her embezzlement trial spent time behind closed doors to discuss details of the deal.According to the deal, Dixon will get probation before judgment on the embezzlement conviction, meaning she can keep her pension that’s worth more than $80,000 a year.

She’ll also have to make a $45,000 donation to the Bea Gaddy Foundation and do 500 hours of community service with Our Daily Bread. According to the deal regarding the perjury charges, she’s agreed to sell the gifts she received from developers, including a fur coat and electronics she bought with gift cards, and give the proceeds to charity.

The mayor agreed that she would not seek office in the city or state, and she will also be on probation for at least four years.

Curiously, the article never mentions her party affiliation, a curious lapse that so rarely occurs when the MSM reports on the peccadilloes of a Democratic politician.

Update: More on Dixon’s resignation from Moe Lane.

Steve Green on “The Descent Into Madness”:

Andrew Sullivan would have the US & NATO invade Israel.

Invade. Israel.

Yes, Israel.

No, I’m not kidding. Here are his own (?) words:

My own view is moving toward supporting a direct American military imposition of a two-state solution, with NATO troops on the borders of the new states of Palestine and Israel.

You can’t counter an argument like that. All you can do is marvel that this is the same man who made so much sense in the hard, scary months after 9/11.

As I wrote late last month, perhaps off-again, on-again Obama advisor Samantha Power is ghosting for Sully from time to time, or perhaps Zbigniew Brzezinski is sitting in these days.

Meanwhile, this post by Kathy Shaidle from late October of 2004, on what drove Andrew and others who were, in retrospect, part of the first round of center-left figures to abandon the War on Terror, still very much holds true.

Update: “For someone who has spent the past few years denouncing the hubris of American military intervention in the Middle East, this is heady stuff.”

Here’s the retirement announcement by Chris Dodd (D-CT) on YouTube:

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Ed Morrissey adds, “With Dodd on the ballot, Republicans have a winning argument in the election based on Dodd’s corruption and incompetence; without him, the GOP may be punching at air just a little bit”:

Before anyone starts cheering this on the Right, keep in mind that Dodd would not have likely lost a primary challenge, but almost certainly would have lost the general election.  Whispers have come out of Washington for months that national Democrats have been quietly pressuring Dodd to retire in order to clear the field for a better candidate.  With Dodd on the ballot, Republicans have a winning argument in the election based on Dodd’s corruption and incompetence; without him, the GOP may be punching at air just a little bit.

That still doesn’t make this bad news.  Dodd’s corruption and incompetence will not be missed in the Senate regardless of how he chooses to exit.  If this is a less ignominious end than losing an election in a state that regularly elects Democrats and liberals, it doesn’t miss by much.

Besides, it doesn’t have to mean a lost opportunity for the GOP.  They have a couple of well-funded candidates vying for the nomination in Rob Simmons and Linda McMahon, while the Democrats will get a late start on the cycle, thanks to Dodd dragging this out as long as possible.  Even if Dodd’s not on the ticket, Republicans will most certainly make Dodd and his Friends of Angelo graft Exhibit A in the general election, and Harry Reid and the radical Democratic agenda Exhibits B-Z.  It will make for a tougher campaign, but not necessarily a futile one, even in Connecticut.

But how’s this for irony: who would have guessed three years ago that Joe Lieberman would have outlasted Chris Dodd?

So who will replace Dodd on the Demcrats’ ticket? That’s Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, about whom Jim Geraghty writes:

The news in Connecticut is genuinely good news for Democrats — Attorney General Blumenthal is leading the three GOP possibilities — but I suspect this race will grow more competitive once the nominees are clear.

Sure, a lot of the anti-Dodd animosity was based on the senator’s personal failings and scandals — his sweetheart mortgage from subprime lender Countrywide under the “Friends of Angelo” program, his work to add the provision in the stimulus that allowed firms receiving bailout funds to keep giving out employee bonuses, his lie to CNN reporter Dana Bash about adding the provision, his sudden revision to Senate financial-disclosure forms about the value of his cottage in Ireland, his moving his family to Iowa in 2007 — but the same dissatisfaction that has brought down the approval ratings of incumbent senators and governors all over the country was undoubtedly at work in Dodd’s numbers, too.

Unemployment in Connecticut dipped a bit last month, to 8.2 percent, but the state still lost jobs. The state’s economy is probably going to face a rough 2010, with the drop in personal income doubling. It’s always been a state with a high cost of living, and while Blumenthal’s position as state attorney general doesn’t put him in charge of the whole state government, he’s an incumbent and part of the system as it stands. Blumenthal will be hard-pressed to paint Rob Simmons, Linda McMahon, or Peter Schiff as part of the status quo.

The message of “Had enough?” is still likely to resonate, even if it doesn’t resonate quite as much as it did when Dodd was the face of the status quo.

In early 2009, Blumenthal and Glenn Beck had a rather spirited chat debating the role and limits of the Connecticut attorney general’s office:

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Update: More on what happens next in Connecticut from Larry Kudlow, and Paul Mirengoff of Power Line.

Update: So what’s next for Dodd himself? Hey, how ’bout treasury secretary?!

Update: Mickey Kaus adds, “Now Angelo Mozilo can safely title his autobiography ‘Dodd is My Co-Pirate.’”

Update: Yid With Lid has a higher-res, but shorter clip of Beck’s interchange with Blumenthal.

As Peter Wehner writes at Commentary, “Perhaps Barack ‘No Drama’ Obama has been replaced by Barack ‘Melodrama’ Obama”:

In Howard Fineman’s column in Newsweek we read this:

President Barack Obama begins and ends each workday at the White House by going over a to-do list with his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. The two were reviewing things recently when Emanuel reminded him of the sheer size of the administration’s workload, which includes fending off the Great Recession and dealing with terrorists in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now, evidently, Yemen. “You know, Mr. President,” Emanuel said, “Franklin Roosevelt had eight years to deal with the economy before he had to lead a war. You have to do it all at once.”

Perhaps Barack “No Drama” Obama has been replaced by Barack “Melodrama” Obama. It would be beneficial to us all if the president and his staff eased up just a bit on the whining, blame-shifting, and feeling sorry for themselves (not to mention the comparisons to FDR). They should become, to borrow an old-fashioned word, more manly.

Memo to the President: You face stiff challenges, as do all presidents. But for the record, a recession is not a depression and the war in Afghanistan is not comparable to World War II. The most difficult actions that had to be taken on the economic front were ones done by your predecessor, before you were sworn in – and a good deal of the responsibility for what went wrong rests with the party you represent (see blocking reforms of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae). The Iraq war you inherited is going pretty well (no thanks to the policies you advocated when you were in the Senate); our presence there is winding down. And al-Qaeda, while still a lethal threat, has been significantly degraded and weakened thanks to the policies of the last eight years. Here is the truth you do not want to hear but need to be told: You took a difficult situation you inherited and, in several respects, made things worse rather than better.

If the burdens of the office are too much for Mr. Obama, he should never have sought it in the first place — and he might consider not seeking it next time. For now, though, the office is his. We don’t need to hear how overworked and overwhelmed and overmatched he is. Unfortunately we see evidence of that almost every day.

Jennifer Rubin adds, “So why do these Democratic presidents do it? It is the triumph they imagine of intentions over results. And it is a huge act of ego — the hubris of believing that they should be applauded for being so diligent rather than be judged on the results they achieve.”

As I may have written in 2008, while the media got carried away with themselves comparing Obama to Lincoln, and as those Time covers above illustrate, FDR,  Obama did something worse: he bought into these myths, rather than distancing himself from the hyperbole. (Recall the Lincoln-styled train ride/photo-op into DC that he chose for his inauguration.) For a guy whose aura is cynical coolness, that was recklessly naive.

All of which is yet another advantage a conservative Republican president benefits from while in office: he knows the legacy media will never give him a kind word; so there’s less need for anyone to whisper in his ear that he’s mortal.