Bloodthirsty Liberal

Hanukkah, according to Wikipedia:

“commemorates the ‘miracle of the container of oil’. According to the Talmud, at the re-dedication following the victory of the Maccabees over the Seleucid Empire, there was only enough consecrated olive oil to fuel the eternal flame in the Temple for one day. Miraculously, the oil burned for eight days, which was the length of time it took to press, prepare and consecrate fresh olive oil.”

At the White House this year, the oil isn’t going to last quite that long [Hat Tip reader Judi]:

The White House’s forthcoming state dinner with the Prime Minister of India is expected to be larger than those of President Barack Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush. But another upcoming White House event will be smaller than in years past: The White House’s annual Hanukkah party.

The guest list is expected to be shrunk by more than half, according to the Jerusalem Post. “Though several Jewish leaders expressed understanding for the economic and other reasons behind the cut, they acknowledged that it would likely help feed feelings in some quarters of the American Jewish community that the White House is giving them the cold shoulder.”

The move comes on the heels of Obama’s cancellation of an appearance before the General Assembly of North American Jewish Federations last week.

The White House’s decision is likely a response to tough economic times and a desire to keep the holiday festivities reasonable.

Hey, we understand. Everybody’s playing less golf these days, going out on fewer “date nights”. Well, almost everybody.

I wonder who this was intended to offend more, Jews or oil drilling advocates. If Sarah Palin were president, we’d have enough oil to light a billion menorahs for eight, nine, ten days—however long you want. And our policy toward Israel would be a whole lot friendlier.

How low can he go?

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Friday shows that 27% of the nation’s voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Forty-one percent (41%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -14 (see trends).

Today’s results match the lowest Approval Index rating yet recorded for this President and it’s the third straight day at -14. Prior to these three days, Obama’s ratings had fallen to -14 on only one day since taking office.

The Presidential Approval Index is calculated by subtracting the number who Strongly Disapprove from the number who Strongly Approve. It is updated daily at 9:30 a.m. Eastern (sign up for free daily e-mail update). Updates are also available on Twitter and Facebook.

Overall, 47% of voters say they at least somewhat approve of the President’s performance. Fifty-two percent (52%) now disapprove.

Pelosi can go lower:

Congressional leaders don’t fare so well. Most voters have an unfavorable opinion of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and 47% say the same about Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Republican leaders have lower unfavorable ratings because they are not as well known.

Let’s all pitch in and buy Obama some scuba gear for Christmas.

- Aggie

Poor US

Charles Krauthammer tries to explain reality to the Obama White House regarding terrorism. The government is almost biblical in its failure to bring honesty to the situation. Let’s cover the basics.

Propaganda:

For late-19th-century anarchists, terrorism was the “propaganda of the deed.” And the most successful propaganda-by-deed in history was 9/11 — not just the most destructive, but the most spectacular and telegenic.

And now its self-proclaimed architect, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, has been given by the Obama administration a civilian trial in New York. Just as the memory fades, 9/11 has been granted a second life — and KSM, a second act: “9/11, The Director’s Cut,” narration by KSM.

Hypocrisy:

So why is Attorney General Eric Holder doing this? Ostensibly, to demonstrate to the world the superiority of our system where the rule of law and the fair trial reign.

Really? What happens if KSM (and his co-defendants) “do not get convicted,” asked Senate Judiciary Committee member Herb Kohl. “Failure is not an option,” replied Holder. Not an option? Doesn’t the presumption of innocence, er, presume that prosecutorial failure — acquittal, hung jury — is an option? By undermining that presumption, Holder is undermining the fairness of the trial, the demonstration of which is the alleged rationale for putting on this show in the first place.

Moreover, everyone knows that whatever the outcome of the trial, KSM will never walk free. He will spend the rest of his natural life in U.S. custody. Which makes the proceedings a farcical show trial from the very beginning.

Reckless:

Apart from the fact that any such trial will be a security nightmare and a terror threat to New York — what better propaganda-by-deed than blowing up the entire courtroom, making KSM a martyr and making the judge, jury and spectators into fresh victims? — it will endanger U.S. security. Civilian courts with broad rights of cross-examination and discovery give terrorists access to crucial information about intelligence sources and methods.

That’s precisely what happened during the civilian New York trial of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers. The prosecution was forced to turn over to the defense a list of two hundred unindicted co-conspirators, including the name Osama bin Laden. “Within ten days, a copy of that list reached bin Laden in Khartoum,” wrote former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, the presiding judge at that trial, “letting him know that his connection to that case had been discovered.”

Unethical:

Finally, there’s the moral logic. It’s not as if Holder opposes military commissions on principle. On the same day he sent KSM to a civilian trial in New York, Holder announced he was sending Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, mastermind of the attack on the USS Cole, to a military tribunal.

Bearing False Witness:

…Holder tried to make the case that he chose a civilian New York trial as a more likely venue for securing a conviction. An absurdity: By the time Obama came to office, KSM was ready to go before a military commission, plead guilty and be executed. It’s Obama who blocked a process that would have yielded the swiftest and most certain justice.

Indeed, the perfect justice. Whenever a jihadist volunteers for martyrdom, we should grant his wish. Instead, this one, the most murderous and unrepentant of all, gets to dance and declaim at the scene of his crime.

Holder himself told The Washington Post that the coming New York trial will be “the trial of the century.” The last such was the trial of O.J. Simpson.

As every young student eventually discovers, failure to study and learn from past mistakes leads to more failure. This is the most arrogant administration of my lifetime. They seem to have a flat learning curve. They are obsessed with world opinion, with “what will the neighbors think?” I wonder if Mr. Holder asked himself this question: What will world opinion be if KSM is acquitted but remains in US custody? Imagine the headlines in Europe!

- Aggie

He’s losing his popularity or they wouldn’t be reporting this

As experts debate the potential speed of the US recovery, one figure looms large but is often overlooked: nearly 1 in 5 Americans is either out of work or under-employed.

According to the government’s broadest measure of unemployment, some 17.5 percent are either without a job entirely or underemployed. The so-called U-6 number is at the highest rate since becoming an official labor statistic in 1994.

The number dwarfs the statistic most people pay attention to-the U-3 rate-which most recently showed unemployment at 10.2 percent for March, the highest it has been since June 1983.

The difference is that what is traditionally referred to as the “unemployment rate” only measures those out of work who are still looking for jobs. Discouraged workers who have quit trying to find a job, as well as those working part-time but looking for full-time work or who are otherwise underemployed, count in the U-6 rate.

With such a large portion of Americans experiencing employment struggles, economists worry that an extended period of slow or flat growth lies ahead.

“To me there’s no easy solution here,” says Michael Pento, chief economist at Delta Global Advisors. “Unless you create another bubble in which the economy can create jobs, then you’re not going to have growth. That’s the sad truth.”

Pento warns that forecasts of a double-dip (”W”) or a straight up (”V”) recovery both could be too optimistic given the jobs situation.

Instead, he believes the economy could flatline (or “L”) for an extended period as small businesses struggle to grow and consequently rehire the workers that have been furloughed as the U-3 unemployment rate has doubled since March 2008.

Hey! I know what we can do! Let’s raise taxes on businesses! Let’s particularly go after small businesses. I’m sure that will help.

Elections have consequences kidz. When you all lined up to vote for the Messiah, you were voting to make your future career, whatever it is you dreamt about as you slogged through college, a non-starter. Unless you dreamt of working for ACORN, that is.

- Aggie

While this administration has an attack of the vapors every time a Jew builds a potting shed anywhere near Jerusalem, it might be worth recalling exactly what the UN said at the time the Israelis and the combined armies of the Arab nations ceased hostilities.

NB: I don’t give a [bleep] what the UN said—then, now, or ever—but since so many other people seem to put so much stock in what a pack of anti-Semitic tyrants has to say, we might as well see what the pack of anti-Semitic tyrants actually said:

Israel held that the withdrawal phrase in the Resolution was not meant to refer to a total withdrawal. Following are statements including the interpretations of various delegations to Resolution 242:

…

Lord Caradon, sponsor of the draft that was about to be adopted, stated, before the vote in the Security Council on Resolution 242:

“… the draft Resolution is a balanced whole. To add to it or to detract from it would destroy the balance and also destroy the wide measure of agreement we have achieved together. It must be considered as a whole as it stands.

…

It was not for us to lay down exactly where the border should be. I know the 1967 border very well. It is not a satisfactory border, it is where troops had to stop in 1947, just where they happened to be that night, that is not a permanent boundary… “

Mr. Michael Stewart, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, in a reply to a question in Parliament, 9 December 1969:

“As I have explained before, there is reference, in the vital United Nations Security Council Resolution, both to withdrawal from territories and to secure and recognized boundaries. As I have told the House previously, we believe that these two things should be read concurrently and that the omission of the word ‘all’ before the word ‘territories’ is deliberate.”

Mr. George Brown, British Foreign Secretary in 1967, on 19 January 1970:

“I have been asked over and over again to clarify, modify or improve the wording, but I do not intend to do that. The phrasing of the Resolution was very carefully worked out, and it was a difficult and complicated exercise to get it accepted by the UN Security Council. “I formulated the Security Council Resolution. Before we submitted it to the Council, we showed it to Arab leaders. The proposal said ‘Israel will withdraw from territories that were occupied’, and not from ‘the’ territories, which means that Israel will not withdraw from all the territories.”

…

Mr. Arthur Goldberg, US representative, in the Security Council in the course of the discussions which preceded the adoption of Resolution 242:

“To seek withdrawal without secure and recognized boundaries … would be just as fruitless as to seek secure and recognized boundaries without withdrawal. Historically, there have never been secure or recognized boundaries in the area. Neither the armistice lines of 1949 nor the cease-fire lines of 1967 have answered that description… such boundaries have yet to be agreed upon. An agreement on that point is an absolute essential to a just and lasting peace just as withdrawal is…”

President Lyndon Johnson, 10 September 1968:

“We are not the ones to say where other nations should draw lines between them that will assure each the greatest security. It is clear, however, that a return to the situation of 4 June 1967 will not bring peace. There must be secure and there must be recognized borders. Some such lines must be agreed to by the neighbours involved.”

There’s reams more, none of it tyrannical or anti-Semitic, all documented, all genuine.

The demand that Israel return all land the stupid, [bleeping] Arabs lost after trying to ambush Israel is based on fiction.

FIC-TION.

Which makes the obsession by the Obama administration on ghettoizing the Jews either pure ignorance or pure something else—and we’d better pray for ignorance.

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Thursday shows that 27% of the nation’s voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Forty-one percent (41%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -14. That matches the lowest Approval Index rating yet recorded for this President.

…

Overall, 46% of voters say they at least somewhat approve of the President’s performance. Fifty-three percent (52%) now disapprove.

The number of people who strongly approve of President Obama is now sinking to about a quarter of likely voters. I know why I’m smiling.

And the people further prove their wisdom with this opinion:

By a 3-to-1 margin, voters believe that tax cuts will create more jobs than additional government stimulus spending.

He’s so far removed from the American mainstream, I’m beginning to wonder if Obama’s American at all.

No! No, I don’t mean that. No Birthers, please!

He preaches violence in American English

In nearly a dozen recent terrorism cases in the United States, Britain and Canada, investigators discovered the suspects had something in common: a devotion to the message of Anwar al-Awlaki, an eloquent Muslim cleric who has turned the Web into a tool for extremist indoctrination.

Mr. Awlaki, 38, the son of a former agriculture minister and university president in Yemen, has never been accused of planting explosives himself. But experts on terrorism believe his persuasive endorsement of violence as a religious duty, in colloquial, American-accented English, has helped push a series of Western Muslims into terrorism.

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist charged with killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Tex., on Nov. 5, is only the latest suspect accused of perpetrating or plotting violence to be linked to the cleric.

In 2006, for example, a group of Canadian Muslims listened to Mr. Awlaki’s sermons on a laptop a few months before they were charged with plotting attacks in Ontario to have included bombings, shootings, storming the Parliament Building and beheading the Canadian prime minister.

There are days when I wake up and feel like I’m still dreaming. Isn’t the modern world surreal?

In 2007, one of six men later convicted of plotting to attack Fort Dix in New Jersey was picked up on a surveillance tape raving about Mr. Awlaki’s audio clips. “You gotta hear this lecture,” said the plotter, Shain Duka. Mr. Duka called the cleric’s interpretation of Muslim duties “the truth, no holds barred, straight how it is!”

Go to the link and read up. We in the United States are relatively fortunate, because we have so few of these bozos. But in Europe, in England, they are common and they are a bigger problem. And, as every terrorist knows, they only have to be successful once. Our FBI can make arrests and interrupt plots, and we are safe for the moment. But sooner or later they fail, as we saw in the Fort Hood case, and the bad guys win.

- Aggie

The magic doesn’t translate

One blogger even pined for the tough line taken by former President George W. Bush.

“Like a star rushing from one show to another, Obama has come and gone, without stirring the slightest ripples,” blogger Zhao Dezhu wrote in an online post.

Zhao, who writes a popular blog and twitters under the name Hecaitou, said the visit made him miss Bush who “couldn’t speak with flowery language and even made grammatical mistakes but spoke as plainly as an American farmer.”

Obama, by contrast, speaks “with sweet but empty words.”

The rest of the world is catching on. When will we?

- Aggie

With the Obama administration set to consign women in their 40s to increased rates of breast cancer, and the left-wing media objectifying Sarah Palin’s admittedly objet d’art body, I’m sure our sisters at the National Organization for Women are full of piss and vinegar at the appalling treatment of women by the left.

What are the Hot Topics today, gals? Appropriate medical care for all women? Denouncing sexism in the media? Do tell:

NOW to Rally in Pitts’ Pennsylvania District to Denounce Stupak-Pitts Amendment

Tell Your Senators to Vote Against ‘Hyde on Steroids’

NOW Urges the Obama Administration to Prosecute Roeder Under Domestic Terrorism

NOW Opposes Health Care Bill That Strips Millions of Women of Abortion Access: Says Bill Obliterates Women’s Fundamental Right to Choose

NOW Vows to Press Forward After Fairness Defeated in Maine, Cheers Victory in Washington State

Four headlines about abortion and one about gay marriage.

All they have to say about the state of women today seems to come down to rejecting and denying anything that biologically defines the female sex. I’m not saying women have to have babies, but no one else can; nor am I saying they have to marry men, but it’s the primary method of reproduction. Under the heading of reproductive rights, NOW takes a scorched shirt—sorry, scorched earth attitude toward anything to do with limits on abortion.

Which is fine, even if I disagree. But NOW is in no way a national organization for women, or anyone else; it is a national organization for abortion. To say otherwise ignores all the evidence to the contrary. Women’s rights don’t mean equal access to health care, they don’t oppose cheesecake shots on national “news” magazine covers. They just mean the free and unfettered right to abort a fetus.

You’ve some a long way, baby.

One has to go to Rush Limbaugh to get the real story:

‘I am appalled and horrified,’ says Dr. David Dershaw, director of breast imaging at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City in response to the new guidelines. ‘There is no doubt that mammography screening in women in their 40s saves lives. To recommend that women abandon that is absolutely horrifying to me.’” Hello, Obamacare. Here you have a government panel upping the age of mammograms to 50. This is the beginning of rationed care….

I am struck by the fact that there are no oncologists and no radiologists on this government advisory panel, but there is a nurse. Deciding that women do not need mammograms beginning at age 40. Despite the fact that they have been shown to save lives.

- Aggie