I would have let you collapse, GM. So there’s no need to thank me for your government seizure. My no doubt naive belief in basic capitalism precludes me from fully appreciating said thanks; or, indeed, appreciating them at all. How much of MY tax money went into making this self-congratulatory paean to Italian-style fascism, by the way?

Whatever it was, it was too much.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

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Rarely in our nation’s history have we been in such peril both at home and abroad. The mid term elections of November 3 which culminated in a thorough repudiation of the Obama regime were rightfully focused on its thoroughly negligent financial stewardship. Left unexamined was its equally incompetent foreign policy.

The disastrous faux diplomacy practiced by the Obama regime has increased the inherent instability along the ROK-DPRK border — there have been more border incidents under Obama than there were in the last five years of George Bush’s administration — and has seemingly tried to convert a war won in Iraq into a geopolitical disaster. These actions when coupled with Obama’s irresistible urge to bow and scrape before any and every foreign leader have not improved our standing in the world or made us safer. To the contrary, we are probably a greater risk now than we have been at any point since 1979.

Weakness and idealism are a lethal combination under all circumstances. It leads individuals to place themselves in dangerous situations for all the best reasons. When indulged in by nations it leads to war and disaster again for all the best reasons.

The US Senate has before it a proposed treaty with Russia which according to the administration is nothing more than a benign extension of Ronald Reagan’s "doveryai, no proveryai" or "trust, but verify." For reasons that are more than a little unclear, the Obama regime has chosen to make ratification of this treaty its highest priority insisting that the ratification take place during the upcoming lame duck session of Congress, an act unprecedented in our history. Far from being benign is exemplifies not only weakness and arguably some kind of a 1960s idealism it is nothing more than political desperation.

The US Senate should refuse to act upon this treaty during the lame duck session or at anytime in the future.

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(Via Hot Air Headlines) Ann Coulter is not precisely on my Christmas list - and, in the highly unlikely possibility she knows my name, I would not be on hers - but she makes a darn good suggestion here: if we’re going to randomly pornoscan and/or strip-search fliers then we should blipping well do the same to Members of Congress and their staff when they try to enter Federal buildings.  What’s that you say? They’re not likely to be suicide terrorists?

Funny about that: NEITHER AM I.  And these people work for me.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

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Here’s the latest, if you’re just tuning in…

• New Orleans Saints over the Dallas Cowboys: 30-27
• New England Patriots pounced on the Detroit Lions: 45-24
• Cincinatti Bengals vs. New York Jets: still 0 to 0 (as of this writing)

However, for the most important game of all, the battle for America, it’s half time and it will be a toss-up until the end:

[via The Blaze]

__________________

“I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as ABC, hold up truth to your eyes.”  Thomas Paine, December 23, 1776

X-posted.

For more news & views on today’s unions, go to LaborUnionReport.com

Yes, folks, the moment you’ve been waiting for … the annual “WKRP Turkey Drop Open Thread”

“With God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly”

Happy Thanksgiving, my friends. Enjoy the day, and give thanks to God today for the many blessings in your lives.

(Oh, and this is an open thread. Talk amongst yourselves…)

Interior Secretary Salazar has decided that America has serious energy needs - needs which must be addressed through an emergency effort to activate new sources quickly. Is this a sudden move to expedite offshore drilling - and reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil? Not quite.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on Tuesday said his department would propose regulatory changes to simplify and speed the leasing process for wind energy development off the Atlantic coast. In addition, the department will work aggressively to process applications to build transmission lines to move the electricity produced by offshore wind farms to consumers, he said at a news briefing in Baltimore with officials from Maryland and Delaware.

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I’m about to go get the turkey out of the brine. I’m going to cook my first turkey today — say a prayer.

I just wanted to take a minute to wish you all a very happy Thanksgiving.

I am thankful most of all for Christ who died for me and for my wife and children. I am also very thankful for the front page writers of RedState, our community of users, and you the reader.

I hope you have a restful, enjoyable, and delicious Thanksgiving.

God bless,
Erick

Happy Thanksgiving. I’ll be very brief, because it’s Thanksgiving.

The FCC is going to vote on the Internet takeover next month. Defying the law and the courts, the FCC will make a power grab, or at least will try to. There’s still time to get loud, get people informed, and get enough popular opposition to this thing going that the FCC might back off. I’m not counting on it, so plan B becomes aggressive legislative action in January. So talk to your members of Congress as well.

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Well, it’s official: there will be no withdrawal from Afghanistan prior to the 2012 Presidential election. Not that there will be a withdrawal from Afghanistan after the 2012 election, either - and I invite anyone who wants to argue that point to first remember how the closing of Gitmo went, or more accurately, didn’t - but there are rules to this game, and the first is to pretend that you believe the press releases. NATO did President Obama a favor on his domestic front by endorsing a 2014 plan; I have no idea what the President gave up in exchange, but with any luck it was something that he should have been offering them anyway. That’s one of the few advantages to having an administration as weak as this one is on foreign relations; expectations are, as they say, lowered.

If one is wondering why Reuters was reporting that no decision had been reached on a 2014 timeline hours before the President himself confirmed that a 2014 timeline decision had been reached (and a week after it was reported {via @DavePoff} that a 2014 timeline solution had been reached), that’s actually easy to explain. Reuters must have talked to an administration official affiliated with the antiwar movement. Those poor unfortunates are locked out of any meaningful policy oversight and generally given the mushroom treatment; it’s no surprise that they end up with a generally skewed vision of the universe.

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Got this last night in email:

Subject: What my boyfriend is doing tomorrow

He is going to “make it hard” for the TSA. He has a new knee so he always gets pulled aside.

He is going to take an ED pill. lol!

No kidding.

Some months ago on a lively email list of which I am a member, a discussion of some controverted legal doctrines digressed into a debate over the status of the Preamble to the US Constitution. Several incisive lawyers insisted that its status, legally, is nil. They allowed that the phrase “We the People” establishes the legitimacy of the document as having been made by consent, which is of course what the Declaration of Independence lays out as the basis for the just powers of government. But what they denied is that the remaining clauses of the Preamble can have binding legal authority.

Strictly speaking we would all be alarmed if, let us say, the learned justices of the Supreme Court, taking in hand a duly-enacted piece of legislation, and scrutinizing its content, adjudged it unconstitutional on the grounds that it failed to “promote the general Welfare” or “secure the Blessings of Liberty.” That would be an open door to extraordinary mischief, which the Philadelphia Convention surely did not intend. In that sense I agree with my lawyerly interlocutors: the Preamble cannot be thought to formally bind statutory enactment as the rest of the document does.

But where I part ways with them — and part ways with the ingrained scholarly habit of what we might call, with a touch of burlesque, “latent anti-Preamblism” — is when they undertake to set aside the Preamble more comprehensively, when they commence a reading of American constitutionalism abstracted from the purposes laid out there: in fine, when they embark on an effort to understand our political tradition without including in that attempt an understanding of that complex, meandering sentence which serves to put the world on notice as to what ends “We the People” have set ourselves in the course of constituting ourselves a unified people here in these United States of America

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Yesterday the report came out that Bob Decheine, chief of staff for Rep. Steve Rothman (D, NJ), had been abruptly fired.  This came as a bit of a surprise, as Decheine has been a notable figure in NJ Democratic politics: he was a senior adviser to the Obama campaign in 2008, and as Rothman’s CoS had just shepherded his boss to another win in Congress, by fair means or foul.  In other words, a bit of a surprise, no?  Turns out Decheine got arrested last week for soliciting sex from a minor.  It was a sting operation, which means that - thank God - no kids were hurt by this guy.

This time: because unless we’re really, really lucky this creep* has been doing this for a while.  So now would be a good time for people to come forward with any evidence that they might have about this Decheine’s past activities.  Because if it turns out that there’s a history that those people didn’t talk about… well.  The longer it stays hidden, the worse it’ll smell when it’s exhumed.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*If Rothman’s office is treating this accusation as fully justified and incontestable - and an instant-firing qualifies for that descriptor - then why shouldn’t I?

PS: More details here.