Pam Geller points out rightly that if this feel-good piece of House legislation introduced by Linda Sanchez back in April passes, all you have to do is offend someone and you can go to prison.

This law is unconstitutional, a blatant violation of the First Amendment. It destroys the basic tenets of the Constitution. The left is ripping it to shreds. You can view the bill here.

This represents the end of political blogging and free speech on the world wide web.

If both bills are not opposed and thrown out then the First Amendment will become nothing more than a relic of a bygone age.

That this is even being proposed speaks volumes as to how far America has fallen. Here is the language in the bill:

a) Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication, with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person, using electronic means to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.

‘(b) As used in this section-

‘(1) the term ‘communication’ means the electronic transmission, between or among points specified by the user, of information of the user’s choosing, without change in the form or content of the information as sent and received;

‘(2) the term ‘electronic means’ means any equipment dependent on electrical power to access an information service, including email, instant messaging, blogs, websites, telephones, and text messages.’.

What this means?

U.S. House of Representatives would make it a felony to offend someone online.

A felony.

Under this new law you would not just be slapped on the wrist and have to pay a fine.

You would go to big boy prison.

Episcopal High Priestess Katherine Jefferts-Schori

Addressing delegates at a recent triennial meeting of Episcopalians in Anaheim, California, Katherine Jefferts-Schori won this month’s Rand villain award by arguing passionately that the Christian doctrine of individual salvation was all wrong.

Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori told delegates to the group’s triennial meeting July 8 in Anaheim, Calif., that the overarching connection to problems facing Episcopalians has to do with “the great Western heresy—that we can be saved as individuals, that any of us alone can be in right relationship with God.”

“It’s caricatured in some quarters by insisting that salvation depends on reciting a specific verbal formula about Jesus,” Jefferts Schori, the first woman to be elected as a primate in the worldwide Anglican Communion three years ago, said. “That individualist focus is a form of idolatry, for it puts me and my words in the place that only God can occupy, at the center of existence, as the ground of being.”

Schori said countering individualistic faith was one reason the theme chosen for the meeting was “Ubuntu,” an African word that describes humaneness, caring, sharing and being in harmony with all of creation.

“Ubuntu doesn’t have any ‘I’s in it,” she said. “The ‘I’ only emerges as we connect—and that is really what the word means: I am because we are, and I can only become a whole person in relationship with others. There is no ‘I’ without ‘you,’ and in our context, you and I are known only as we reflect the image of the One who created us.”

Jefferts Schori said “heretical and individualistic understanding” contributes to problems like neglect for the environment and the current worldwide economic recession.

“The sins of a few have wreaked havoc with the lives of many, as greed and dishonesty have destroyed livelihoods, educational possibilities, care for the aged, and multiple forms of creativity,” she said. “And that’s just the aftermath of Ponzi schemes for which a handful will go to jail.”

She said in order to be faithful, “we need to be continually rediscovering that my needs are not the only significant ones.”

“Ubuntu implies that selfishness and self-centeredness cannot long survive,” she said. “We are our siblings’ knowers and their keepers, and we cannot be known without them.”

“We have no meaning, no true existence in isolation,” she said. “We shall indeed die as we forget or ignore that reality.”

Matt Drudge had fun today headlining the above photo of Barack Obama and the roguish Nicholas Sarkozy oggling the assets of 16 year old Brazilian Mayora Tavares, one of an international group of teenagers attending the G8 Summit.

Bild
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UPDATE 7/11:

Several voices on the left (examples: 1, 2, 3, 4) say, Nah! Obama was innocent.

This video provides a better view of the incident. Was President Obama really only helping another young lady descend? Or did his eyes travel a bit, too? You be the judge.

0:42 video

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Ann Althouse relishes the semiotics of girl watching.

(T)he Sarkozy ass-gawking stance says: I admire but I must not act. And Obama is caught at the moment of as-yet-unconstrained pursuit.

Sarkozy holds his arms against his chest in a closed — but not tightly closed — position. The head is turned but upright. He is smiling, but the index finger lying against his lip blocks the edge of the smile from the point of view of anyone standing in front of him, though if the woman were to turn around, she would see it easily. His hand is tipped upward at a jaunty — one is tempted to say phallic — angle. The foot closest to the woman is planted firmly on the ground in the don’t-go-that-way position, yet the other foot angles toward the object of desire. Still, the angled foot remains flat on the floor, and, at a shoulder’s distance from the other foot, it the whole figure of the man a solid immobility.

Now, swivel your eyes over to Obama’s feet. The foot closest to the woman, like Sarkozy’s, is planted and aimed forward, but the other steps off in the direction of the woman, bending the knee upward into a bit of a crotch-squeeze and forming the base of a dramatic tilt of the entire body into a flexible S-shape that leans toward the woman. Obama’s arms hang free, emphasizing the tilt, and either gravity or will causes the left arm to hang inches away from the torso. See how much lower the right hand is than the left? His neck is craned out and around so that the line of sight is directly at the ass. His mouth is open as if to say: That’s what I want.

AND: Yes, I have seen the video, and I stand by my analysis of the still photograph.

MacRanger doesn’t buy the innocent theory either.

“Please, oh, please, don’t build nuclear weapons and sponsor terrorist attacks against us. You can have the guys who were killing US troops with IEDs back. See? we are kneeling and grovelling.”

New York Times:

The American military unexpectedly released five Iranians on Thursday after holding them for two and a half years on charges they had orchestrated deadly attacks in Iraq. Iraqi officials promptly promised to turn them over to the Iranian Embassy in Baghdad.

The Iranians, whom the Americans accused of being senior operatives of Iran’s Quds force, an elite unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, have been a point of contention between the United States, Iran and Iraq ever since they were seized in a predawn raid in the northern Kurdish city of Erbil in January 2007. An adviser to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, Yassein Majid, confirmed the men’s release but provided no additional details. American military and diplomatic officials did not immediately comment.

The reasoning behind the timing of the release was unclear.

Anna Eshoo (Calif.), John Tierney (Mass.), Rush Holt (N.J.), Mike Thompson (Calif.), Alcee Hastings (Fla.), Jan Schakowsky (Ill.), and Adam Smith (Wash.) reopened Congressional democrats’ attacks on the CIA, releasing yesterday a letter dated June 26th directly contradicting CIA Director Leon Panetta and asserting that “significant actions” were concealed from Congress and charging the CIA with misleading Congress.

The ball is now in Leon Panetta’s court, and I think his response will be interesting.

The Politico:

A letter released late Wednesday by six (actually 7 – JDZ) Democratic House members claims that Central Intelligence Agency Director Leon Panetta testified that “top CIA officials have concealed significant actions… and misled” members of Congress since 2001 — a claim the CIA is contesting.

The letter did not specify what actions were concealed, or how members of Congress were misled.

In it, the Democrats demanded that Panetta correct a statement he issued on May 15 – just after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused the CIA of misleading her during the Bush years about the agency’s use of waterboarding techniques – stating that it is not the CIA’s “policy or practice to mislead Congress.”

The Israeli Debkafile says that a major Al Qaeda terrorist operation targeting passenger jets is currently underway.

Western anti-terror agencies have warned that a large group of 15-20 al Qaeda terrorists, trained in Pakistan and Algeria to hijack and blow up airliners, deployed secretly in at least six European and Middle East countries in early July. They are standing ready to carry out multiple terrorist attacks.

The terrorists are believed to have landed in Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Turkey and Egypt.

The dates to watch, local authorities were warned, were July 4, July 7, the fourth anniversary of the 7/7 attacks on the British transport system in which 52 people died, and July 8-9, when the G8 summit meets in the Italian town of L’Aqila. US president Barack Obama will fly in from talks with Russian leaders in Moscow. ...

The alert is still in force.

42 year old Tatiata Kozhevnikova has made her mark in the Guinness Book of Records by lifting 14 k. (30.8 lbs.) without using her hands.

News Bizarre

Daily Loaf
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Some kind of tip to Ed Modestino.

Typical ordinary Afghans commonly frivolously detained by the United States

Another of the innocent inhabitants of the Middle East, erroneously and unjustly detained by the Bush Administration at Guantanamo Bay then freed in 2007, has resumed his former life and become a prominent and effective leader in his home community.

Fox News.

A former Guantanamo Bay inmate is leading the fight against U.S. Marines in the Helmand province of Afghanistan, a senior U.S. defense official confirmed to FOX News on Tuesday.

Mullah Zakir, also known as Abdullah Ghulam Rasoul, surrendered in Mazar-e-Sharif in Northern Afghanistan in 2001, and was transferred to Gitmo in 2006. He was released in late 2007 to Afghan custody.

Now as the United States is pushing ahead with the massive Operation Khanjar in the southern province of Afghanistan, Zakir is coordinating the Taliban fighters. Some 4,000 U.S. Marines and hundreds of Afghan forces have faced some resistance as they sweep across the province, reclaiming control of districts where Zakir and his comrades were running a shadow government.

Zakir was released from Afghan custody around 2008, according to the New York Post. He re-established connections with high-level Taliban leaders in Afghanistan and Pakistan after his second release.

Taliban chief Mullah Omar appointed Zakir in mid-2008 as senior military commander, according to the newspaper.

Zakir quickly became a charismatic leader, helping establish an “accountability commission” to track spending and monitor activities of Taliban leaders in the districts where they held power and were running a shadow government, according to the Post.

Explaining why Zakir was released from Gitmo, the defense official said, “We were under incredible pressure from the world to release detainees at Gitmo. You just don’t know what people are going to do.

“He was no worse than anyone else being held at Gunatanamo Bay,” the official added. “He was not going to be tried for war crimes so we decided to release him. Either he was not thought to have committed a crime or we didn’t have enough evidence to prosecute him.”

The defense official shifted some blame for Zakir’s activities to Afghanistan. “The country which agreed to take him promised to take steps to mitigate the threat he posed.

Lifehacker tells us that Google will be be releasing its free, open-source Chrome Operating System later this year. Google says:

We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Chrome OS is going to be netbook oriented in its earliest version, and the idea apparently is ultimately to replace PC software with on-live Google applications like Gmail and Google Docs.

Persuading users to give up the familiar isn’t easy, but Microsoft has done a fine job lately, particularly with Vista, in creating a real opportunity for anyone able to offer more speed and convenience.

Accuracy in Media examines the scale of Barack Obama’s personal spin machine. It is larger than Bush’s, much more new media focused, and vastly more controlling.

Barack Obama’s White House is spending more than $80,000 a week to staff its old and new media offices. Add the price of speechwriters and the White House communications tab reaches nearly $100,000 a week, or nearly $5 million a year-and that is for salaries alone.

Based on the coverage the President has garnered so far, it is money well spent.

Accuracy In Media gathered the data from the White House’s annual salary report to Congress, which was released last week. AIM identified a total of 66 staffers with some connection to Obama’s messaging machine-press secretaries and assistants, communications directors, new media specialists, speechwriters, and the staff of the new Office of Public Engagement.

The latter group, which employs 13 people at a cost of $1,090,200 a year, organizes events like last week’s online healthcare forum in Virginia to take the White House’s message directly to the public. ...

Obama’s Office of Public Engagement replaced the more traditional Office of Public Liaison. The mission is the same-to connect the public with the White House-but the techniques are different. Obama’s team has incorporated online video, blogs and other interactive elements, including tightly managed town halls, into the outreach mix.

Obama also quadrupled the size of the public liaison staff. According to the last Bush administration staff salary report, President Bush employed three people in his liaison office at a cost of $335,500. ...

Bush’s dedicated new media team appears to have consisted of two people-a specialty media director who earned $84,000 a year and a website assistant who earned $34,000.

By contrast, Obama has the 11 employees in the Office of Public Engagement and another nine aides with titles such as new media director, new media creative director, deputy director of video and e-mail content/design lead. Those nine earn nearly $700,000 a year combined.

The White House irritated the press corps earlier this year when it prevented reporters from covering the President’s photo op with the national championship women’s basketball team from the University of Connecticut. Instead, Obama’s own media team produced a professional-style video report and released it several days after the event.

ABC News White House reporter Jake Tapper wondered, “Do Obama White House officials think their media coverage isn’t flattering enough?”

David Kahane proposes a new national holiday, resembling the British Guy Fawkes Day, celebrating the establishment left’s triumphant ejection of Sarah Palin from Alaska’s governorship.

Not only were we offended at the sheer effrontery of McCain’s pick: How dare the Republicans proffer this déclassée piece of Wasilla trailer trash whose only claim to fame was that she didn’t exercise her right to choose? Where were her degrees from Smith or Barnard, her internships at PETA, the Brookings Institution, or the Young Pioneers? We were also outraged that the Stupid Party had just nominated a completely unqualified candidate nobody had ever heard of, a first-term governor of Alaska whose previous experience consisted of a small-town mayoralty. As opposed to our guy, Barry Soetoro of Mombasa, Djakarta, and Honolulu, a first-term senator nobody had ever heard of, whose previous experience had been as a state senator (D., Daley Machine) in Illinois. After eight long, illegitimate, lawless years of &*^%BUSH$#@! tyranny, how dare you contest this election?

And so the word went out, from that time and place: Eviscerate Sarah Palin like one of her field-dressed moose. Turn her life upside down. Attack her politics, her background, her educational history. Attack her family. Make fun of her husband, her children. Unleash the noted gynecologist Andrew Sullivan to prove that Palin’s fifth child was really her grandchild. Hit her with everything we have: Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, taking a beer-run break from her quixotic search for Mr. Right to drip venom on Sister Sarah; post-funny comic David Letterman, to joke about her and her daughters on national television; Katie Couric, the anchor nobody watches, to give this Alaskan interloper a taste of life in the big leagues; former New York Times hack Todd “Mr. Dee Dee Myers” Purdum, to act as an instrument of Graydon Carter’s wrath at Vanity Fair. Heck, we even burned her church down. Even after the teleological triumph of The One, the assault had to continue, each blow delivered with our Lefty SneerTM (viz.: Donny Deutsch yesterday on Morning Joe), until Sarah was finished.

You know what? It worked! McCain finally succumbed to his long-standing case of Stockholm Syndrome (“My friends, you have nothing to fear from an Obama presidency”), Tina Fey turned Palin into a see-Russia-from-my-house joke, “conservative” useful idiots like Peggy Noonan and Kathleen Parker hatched her, and finally Sarah cried No más and walked away. If we could, we’d cut off her head and mount it on a wall at Tammany Hall, except there is no more Tammany Hall unless you count Obama’s Tony Rezko–financed home in Chicago. And it took only eight months — heck, Sarah couldn’t even have another kid in the time it took us to destroy her. That’s the Chicago way!

Read the whole thing.

House members never bothered to read the Cap and Trade Bill, but Iowahawk did, providing in his latest an update on some key provisions provoking controversy.

The President’s landmark ‘Cap and Trade’ bill faces an uncertain fate this week, as congressional backers of the carbon-limiting legislation face mounting opposition from a myriad of interest groups angered by its controversial ritual virgin sacrifice provision.

“We are asking our members to send a strong message to Washington that this bill is wrong for America’s energy future, and wrong for the virgin community,” said Bret ‘Aslan’ Crawford, a spokesman for the Action Figure Collectors of America. “Power virgins, activate!”

The 87,492 page bill—official designated as the American Patriotic Renewal Act of 2009 for Carbon Reduction, Energy Independence, Heathy Climate, Sustainable Job Growth, Adorable Puppies, and Earthly Paradise—is a keystone in President Obama’s first year legislative agenda, and was originally anticipated to get swift congressional passage. Instead, it faced a unexpectedly tough vote in the House last week after coal state Democrats complained it would place an unfair economic burden on their home districts.

In order to secure the votes of wavering Democrats, House leaders Nancy Pelosi and Henry Waxman inserted several last minute amendments to the legislation, including provisions for national oxygen rationing, witch burnings, dousings, and phrenology research. But the one that has seemingly stoked a grassroots backlash is the controversial Sexually Inexperienced Citizen Environmental Volunteer Amendment. The wording of the amendment calls for all American virgins over the age of 21 to register with the Selective Sacrifice Board, for possible use as victims in nationally televised vivisections intended to “supplicate the Earth-Spirits.” ...

“Congress and the Administration really stirred up a hornet’s nest of virgins with this bill,” said longtime Washington-watcher Michael Barone. “The response really caught them flat-footed. I don’t think they realized just how adept the virgin community is at computers, and how much time they have between ComiCons or SpaceCons or whatever-cons. Instead of calling into sports radio shows, now they’re calling the capitol switchboard.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) defended the bill, saying that “it is critical that we do something immediately to show we are serious about solving this climate crisis. Without burnt offerings of taxes and virgins, Gaia will smite us all in her angry burning wrath. So let me just say to the corporate and virgin special interest groups—don’t come crying to us in 400 years, when our temperatures are up almost 1 degree celsius.”

Pelosi denied the bill was anti-consumer, pointing out it contains specific infrastructure and job creation funds. It specifies 500,000 unionized positions to construct a planned 300-foot tall National Eco Pyramid and Virgin Sacrifice Altar in Youngstown, Ohio, as well as funds to train over 20,000 youth volunteer earth-priests in live beating heart removal.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Contemporary Britain is competing very seriously with California in the contest for the best nonsensical ideas applied in daily life.

Newcastle’s onebestway, a small design and marketing firm facing tough economic times, took serious steps to deal with the crisis. It hired a swami, excuse me! a business psychologist, to help in improving morale.

The Telegraph reports:

David Taylor, a business psychologist, told workers at design and marketing onebestway, in Newcastle upon Tyne, that a Naked Friday idea would boost their team spirit.

He was called in to help the firm after six staff members were forced into taking redundancies at the start of the credit crunch.

Mr Taylor told them that, by stripping off their clothes, staff could also strip away inhibitions and talk to each other more openly and honestly.

He said: “Inviting an organisation to go naked is the most extreme technique I’ve used. It may seem weird but it works. It’s the ultimate expression of trust in yourself and each other.”

Despite some initial reluctance, nearly all the staff took off all their clothes – except for one man, who wore a posing pouch, and one of two female workers, who kept on black underwear.

Sam Jackson, 23, the house manager, was the only woman to go fully naked. She said: “It was brilliant. Now that we’ve seen each other naked, there are no barriers.

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The Daily Mail reports that careful preparations had to be made, but assures us that the experiment proved a grand success.

During the week leading up to the strip-off, the workers were encouraged to photocopy parts of their bodies to make them more confident about themselves.

A nude model was also brought in for the workers to sketch and talk to.

Sam added: ‘It took a week of David being in the office for us to build up courage. The first few steps were very nerve-wracking, but once I got to my desk and got used to it, I felt totally comfortable.

‘It was emotional but we found we were much more able to talk to each other honestly – and have been since. The company

Managing Director Mike Owen, 40, said: ‘We’re either brave or mad. But I did tell everyone they didn’t have to do it -only if it felt right.’

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Naked Office, a television program which filmed all this, will be aired July 9th on Virgin1.

Mickey Kaus:

‘We’ll raise your taxes and in exchange we’re going to cut your treatments.’ I mean, how could that not have widespread appeal?

Roger Simon has gloomy comments on experiencing what used to be Independence Day in the new banana republic of Obamistan. The good news is that the paint on the left’s shoddy idol is already developing visible cracks.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen my country so divided and depressed on the Fourth of July in my lifetime and – no matter what Bob Dylan dreamed up – I’m not young, forever or otherwise. That includes the Vietnam War period when both sides at least had some conviction and excitement for the future, even if wrong. Not so now. The current situation is grim.

Obama is already over. In six short months the now-spattered bumper stickers with “Hope and Change” seem like pathetic remnants from the days of “23 Skidoo,” the echoes of “Yes, we can” more nauseating than ever in their cliché-ridden evasiveness. Although they may pretend otherwise, even Obama’s choir in the mainstream media seems to know he’s finished, their defenses of his wildly over-priced medical and cap-and-trade schemes perfunctory at best. Everyone knows we can’t afford them. His stimulus plan – if you could call it his, maybe it’s Geithner’s, maybe it’s someone else’s, maybe it’s not a plan at all – has produced absolutely nothing. In fact, I have met not one person of any ideology who evinces genuine confidence in it.

On the foreign policy front, it’s more embarrassing. He switches positions every day, such as they are, while acting like a petit-bourgeois snob with our allies and then, when people with genuine passion for democracy emerge on the scene (the courageous Iranian protestors), behaves like a cringeworthy, equivocating creep. Enough of Obama.

Jay Valentine offers a likely sounding explanation and a prophecy which matches my own thinking very well.

There is a point in tournament poker where one player doesn’t have the chips to play out the next raise, but they have great cards, so they call “all in.” At that point, nobody can raise them and the hand gets played out—either to a game changing win or a total loss for the person who made the call.

It appears Sarah Palin decided she and her family could no longer deal with the thousand cuts, so she is “all in.”

Palin may well decide to stay home and make macaroni and cheese for the kids, but history may not let her. She has already established herself as a major player—candidate or not. More importantly, the wildly critical left has put her in a financial position where she has no choice but to speak out, perhaps do a book, and make the money she needs to pay legal bills for 15 unwarranted “ethics” investigations, all of which she handily won. The legal bills remain.

One doubts that when she speaks out, it will be about how to field dress a moose. Rather, she will take positions in speaking and writing about her core beliefs. That is a problem for the radical left of their own creation.

Palin enters the arena where the fight is not between liberal and conservative; nor is it between Republican and Democrat. The fight is between elite and the common person who works every day and continually asks how Washington D.C., under both parties, is so out of control.

fireworks at Chicago’s Navy Pier

Republicans believe every day is the Fourth of July, but the democrats believe every day is April 15.

-Ronald Reagan.

(PowerPoint needed for this one. Be patient. It’s a big download.)

A classmate passed along to me this PowerPoint slideshow (originally titled: CarreterasAfganistan1) of 58 photos of military operations in Afghanistan. Good 4th of July viewing featuring remarkable photos of US forces operating in spectacular terrain.

I wish I could properly credit these, but the slideshow was evidently one of those virally-distributed emails which arrives anonymously. The file and and some credits offer the clue that it came originally from a Spanish-language source.

It is very amusing today reading leftwing blogs spinning the news of Sarah Palin’s resignation like an old Victrola revolving a hot jazz 78rpm disk.

Brad Friedman has a big scoop, he claims. He just knows that it was an impending financial scandal driving her from office. It’s ugly opposing the left. Manufactured scandals come the way of someone like Sarah Palin like the moths attracted by your headlights when you drive through swampy woods at night. A lot of leftie blogs are hugging this theory to their chests and swaying side to side as they coo over it.

Josh Marshall can’t make up his mind if she’s leaving because she’s sulking or if it’s because of recent revelations (apparently different from Brad’s), not about anything she’s allegedly actually done, but somehow nonetheless proving her bad character. Whew!

The democrat national committee is adopting the ever popular “one more example of a pattern of bizarre behavior” throwing-up-their-hands-and-giving-up non-explanation. “We knew all along she was barking mad. She’s conservative”

On the whole, I think Mark Halperin’s last suggestion seems the most likely.

If she wants to be the Republican Party’s presidential nominee in 2012, she needs to spend more time raising money, establishing her international and national expertise, and traveling the Lower 48. And she needs to start now.

The governorship was tying her down, and using up her limited time and resources battling a basically trivial shit storm of frivolous, petty, and partisan smears that no one nationally cares very much about, but which the establishment media may be relied upon to report loudly.

Leaving office allows her to cash in on a book deal and make speeches repairing her family’s finances, and to fund raise in earnest for the 2012 race while operating outside of elected office as a conservative leader addressing national rather than provincial state issues.

Yesterday, news of Sarah Palin’s action swept discussion of other events right off the aggregating pages. The left should tremble. They don’t like Sarah Palin, but they too recognize that she has the most important element in political success in the bubble-headed media-driven culture of today’s America. Sarah Palin has star power. Combine the power of celebrity charisma with conservative ideas, and you have an irresistible combination. Sarah Palin could potentially bury Barack Obama and today’s ascendant left.

James Lewis remarks upon the vanity, pretension, and obvious mendacity of the current leader of the Free World.

The President of these United States recently expressed his love for “the Urdu poets,” a piece of inspired BS that nobody in their right minds believed for a second. But then the P was narrowcasting to Pakistan, he thought, and Americans weren’t supposed to be listening. Yet character is revealed in those little snippets of Obama’s mind—his glorious fantasy life, his everlasting hope that somebody will fall for another piece of schtick, and his essential fraudulence as a human being.

Obama’s biggest audience is himself, and no doubt he preened and pranced in his mind’s eye when he told the nation of Pakistan about his deep love and understanding of Urdu. Love ya, baby! all those sixty million Pakis were shouting, marveling at our polyglot president. Waddaguy! At least in Obi’s fantasy life, that is. Because that Zeppelin-sized ego of his needs to be pumped up a little bit more every single day. ...

That’s Obama’s sore spot, his biggest character flaw. It’s right out there for the world to see. It explains everything about this administration, and foreshadows its inevitable comeuppance. Meanwhile all the shrewdies in the world, from Putin to A’jad, are getting it. They’ve seen it before. Been there, done that. All they have to do to seduce the President of the United States is to pump up that beautiful ego balloon a little more, and he will just sag over with abject gratitude. He needs his ego supplies, this guy. He’ll do anything to get just a little bit more.

If you’re China or Russia or a blood-stained mullah you’ve seen this flick before. The last Shah of Iran used to call himself “King of Kings,” a Biblical phrase that goes back to the Persian Emperor Cyrus the Great. Grandiosity is familiar to all the ancient empires of the world. So is the art of flattering kings. They’re pros at this.

It’s just Americans who don’t get it—yet.

But they will, they will. The only question is how much the country will be damaged, by the time the voters catch on.

Ilya Glazunov, Легенда о Великом Инквизиторе (The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor), 1985

David Brooks and David Frum have a new companion in the crowd of policy experts rushing to endorse the new era of Big Government.

Thaddeus G. McCotter reports in the American Spectator:

Breaking his half-a-millennium media silence from eternal damnation, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor joined a chorus of presumed conservatives to endorse President Obama’s health care reforms.

Resplendently stooped beneath a banner reading “Enslave, But Feed Us!” the Grand Inquisitor commenced with a veiled shot at former President Bush: “The present fate of men may be summed up in three words: unrest, confusion, and misery! The bulk of humanity could never be happy under the old system, it is not for them.”

Inspired that Obama has made government capable of “saving mankind a millennium of useless suffering on earth,” the Grand Inquisitor averred that “only now has it become possible to us, for the first time, to give a serious thought to human happiness.” ...

He was compelled to endorse the Obama plan because it matches his core principles for social justice: “There are three Powers upon earth, capable of conquering the conscience of these weak rebels—men—for their own good; and these forces are Miracle, Mystery, and Authority.”

Legendary as a master of abstruse statutory interpretation, the Grand Inquisitor praised the Obama plan’s specifics. “Receiving their bread from us, they will clearly see that we take the bread from them, the bread made by their own hands, but to give it back to them in equal shares. They will be only too glad to have it so.”

Regarding the dicey issue of patients’ choices, the Grand Inquisitor was dismissive. “Oh, never, never, will they learn to feed themselves without our help! No science will ever give them bread so long as they remain free, so long as they refuse to lay that freedom at our feet.” The goal, he said, was to find a universal health care plan “all others will believe in, and consent to bow down to in a mass.”

He said he empathized with the burden Obama selflessly carries upon his strapping shoulders. He urged critics to find common ground, but the grizzled visage lashed out at a Fox News reporter: “You have no right to add one syllable to that which was already uttered before!” The wizened wag then subtly positioned Republicans as the party of “no” in the health care debate by deriding its plans for patient-centered health care: “They have saved but themselves while we have saved all.”

Hat tip to Tristyn Bloom and Will Wilson.

“Not even Nixon tried to control the press like Obama”

Geriatric old school liberal reporter Helen Thomas recently joined CBS’s Chip Reid in taking on Press Secretary Robert Gibbs at a White House Press Conference, challenging the Obama White House’s policy of controlled, programmed and pre-arranged questioning at the upcoming promised Town Hall meeting on Health Care.

Following a testy exchange during Wednesday’s briefing with White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas told CNSNews.com that not even Richard Nixon tried to control the press the way President Obama is trying to control the press.

“Nixon didn’t try to do that,” Thomas said. “They couldn’t control (the media). They didn’t try.

“What the hell do they think we are, puppets?” Thomas said. “They’re supposed to stay out of our business. They are our public servants. We pay them.”

Thomas said she was especially concerned about the arrangement between the Obama Administration and a writer from the liberal Huffington Post Web site. The writer was invited by the White House to President Obama’s press conference last week on the understanding that he would ask Obama a question about Iran from among questions that had been sent to him by people in Iran.

“When you call the reporter the night before you know damn well what they are going to ask to control you,” Thomas said.

“I’m not saying there has never been managed news before, but this is carried to fare-thee-well—for the town halls, for the press conferences,” she said. “It’s blatant. They don’t give a damn if you know it or not. They ought to be hanging their heads in shame.”

Read the actual exchange and catch the 3:50 video.

Minnesota’s new junior senator

Aided by a dishonest and partisan media, which scrupulously avoided investigating the facts and which faithfully reported the democrat party line, clown comedian and ultra-liberal Al Franken finally successfully stole last year’s close race for the senate seat from Minnesota when the Minnesota Supreme Court declined to interfere with an accomplished crime and instead declared him the winner.

The honorable exception in the major media was, as usual, the Wall Street Journal editorial page:

Mr. Franken trailed Mr. Coleman by 725 votes after the initial count on election night, and 215 after the first canvass. The Democrat’s strategy from the start was to manipulate the recount in a way that would discover votes that could add to his total. The Franken legal team swarmed the recount, aggressively demanding that votes that had been disqualified be added to his count, while others be denied for Mr. Coleman.

But the team’s real goldmine were absentee ballots, thousands of which the Franken team claimed had been mistakenly rejected. While Mr. Coleman’s lawyers demanded a uniform standard for how counties should re-evaluate these rejected ballots, the Franken team ginned up an additional 1,350 absentees from Franken-leaning counties. By the time this treasure hunt ended, Mr. Franken was 312 votes up, and Mr. Coleman was left to file legal briefs.

What Mr. Franken understood was that courts would later be loathe to overrule decisions made by the canvassing board, however arbitrary those decisions were. He was right. The three-judge panel overseeing the Coleman legal challenge, and the Supreme Court that reviewed the panel’s findings, in essence found that Mr. Coleman hadn’t demonstrated a willful or malicious attempt on behalf of officials to deny him the election. And so they refused to reopen what had become a forbidding tangle of irregularities. Mr. Coleman didn’t lose the election. He lost the fight to stop the state canvassing board from changing the vote-counting rules after the fact.

This is now the second time Republicans have been beaten in this kind of legal street fight. In 2004, Dino Rossi was ahead in the election-night count for Washington Governor against Democrat Christine Gregoire. Ms. Gregoire’s team demanded the right to rifle through a list of provisional votes that hadn’t been counted, setting off a hunt for “new” Gregoire votes. By the third recount, she’d discovered enough to win. This was the model for the Franken team.

Mr. Franken now goes to the Senate having effectively stolen an election.

As Chris Cillizza explains, the key to Franken’s successful election theft was: (1) being the first to bring in highly-paid talented legal big guns to manipulate a post-election ballot review process in his favor, and (2) media allies representing an artificially contrived and completely partisan recount as decisive and meaningful. Franken keeping his repulsive and excruciatingly vulgar personality under wraps for the duration helped a lot, too.

How did Franken manage to wind up on top? ...

Marc Elias, a Democratic election attorney with Perkins Coie, was on the ground in Minnesota within days of the near-tie on election day. Elias spearheaded a series of legal victories in the early days of the recount that effectively defined the universe of votes that were counted and led to Franken going from behind on election night to ahead when they recount ended. By the time Ben Ginsberg, the Republicans’ election lawyer par excellence, got deeply involved, it was already too late. ...

When the statewide recount ended, Franken led by 225 votes. ... it’s hard to overstate how important the fact that Franken was (seemingly- JDZ) ahead was to setting public perception regarding the legal fight that ensued. Coleman was forced to be the aggressor legally, claiming that all sorts of ballots had been illegally counted (and not counted) while, through it all, the fact that Franken led by 225 votes hung over the proceedings. Voters tend to lose interest in politics quickly—particularly after an election as nasty and long as this race was—and that sort of fatigue played right into Franken’s hands. ...

Franken’s problem throughout the race was, well, himself. ... When the race ended in a tie, Franken did something very smart; he stayed out of the spotlight. He was rarely seen or heard and when he did pop into public view it was during an occasional visit to Washington when he was huddling with potential colleagues and getting briefed on issues by potential staffers.

When, oh, when will the Republican Party learn to play politics professionally against thugs, thieves, and liars? Watching Norm Coleman get rolled was like watching the team from St. Fauntleroy’s Academy for Young Gentlemen take on the Bowery Boys Reformatory team on the football gridiron. No contest at all.

Investigations of a skeleton found buried under the floor of the chapel of Stirling Castle in 1997 have dated the remains to the Midde Ages, and forensic examination has determined that the remains were those of a well-muscled male individual, who had done considerable riding, who had been wounded in battle, and who died a violent death.

The Telegraph:

Archaeologists believe that bones found in an ancient chapel… are those of an English knight named Robert Morley who died in a tournament there in 1388.

Radio carbon dating has confirmed that the skeleton is from that period, and detailed analysis suggests that he was in his mid-20s, was heavily muscled and had suffered several serious wounds in earlier contests.

He appears to have survived for some time with a large arrowhead lodged in his chest, while the re-growth of bone around a dent in the front of his skull indicates that he had also recovered from a severe blow from an axe.

He eventually died when he was struck by a sword that sliced through his nose and jaw. His reconstructed skull also indicates that he was lying on the ground when the fatal blow was delivered.

(D)espite the warrior’s relatively young age of about 25, he may have suffered several serious wounds from earlier fights.

Researchers thinks it is also possible he may have been living for some time with a large arrowhead in his chest. ...

Some research was carried out on the skeleton at the time of its discovery, but a lack of technology meant it was difficult to assess the remains in more detail.

Since then scientists have been able to perform laser scanning which revealed the wounds.

Bone regrowth around a dent in the front of the skull suggested the man had recovered from a severe blow, possibly from an axe.

The warrior had also lost a number of teeth – perhaps from a blow, or a fall from a horse.

The fatal wound, however, occurred when something, possibly a sword, sliced through his nose and jaw.

Peter Yeoman, Historic Scotland’s head of cultural resources, said: “It appears he died in his mid-twenties after a short and violent life.

“His legs were formed in a way that was consistent with spending a lot of time on horseback, and the upper body points to someone who was well-muscled, perhaps due to extensive training with medieval weapons.

“This evidence, and the fact he was buried at the heart of a royal castle, suggests he was a person of prestige, possibly a knight.”

The skeleton was excavated from beneath a floor in 1997 when archaeologists were working in an area of the castle which turned out to be the site of a lost medieval royal chapel.

Some research was carried out at the time, but only limited information was gleaned. Advances in technology and analytical techniques prompted a re-examination of the skeleton, which produced the new results.

They showed injuries suffered prior to the man’s death, including a large arrowhead in the skeleton which appears to have struck through the back or under the arm.

Gordon Ewart, of Kirkdale Archaeology, who carried out the excavation and some of the research for Historic Scotland, said: “There were a series of wounds, including a dent in the skull from a sword or axe, where bone had re-grown, showing that he had recovered.

“At first, we had thought the arrow wound had been fatal, but it now seems he had survived it and may have had his chest bound up.

In addition to the three serious wounds, the knight lost a number of teeth — perhaps from a blow, or a fall from a horse while jousting. A large arrowhead found in the skeleton appeared to have entered through his back or under his arm. Crystalised matter attached to the arrowhead may have been from flies or other insect larvae and could have been from clothing the arrow forced into the wound.

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Makes you glad you work in an office, doesn’t it?