Army Times:

When asked how they feel about President-elect Barack Obama as commander in chief, six out of 10 active-duty service members say they are uncertain or pessimistic, according to a Military Times survey.

In follow-up interviews, respondents expressed concerns about Obama’s lack of military service and experience leading men and women in uniform.

“Being that the Marine Corps can be sent anywhere in the world with the snap of his fingers, nobody has confidence in this guy as commander in chief,” said one lance corporal who asked not to be identified.

Hat tip to Maggie Gallagher.

Scrappleface reports that, while waiting for the inauguration, Barack Obama is working on another memoir. This one will chronicle his days in the Senate.

According to a news release from the publisher, the memoir entitled 143 Days That Shaped a Nation: The Senate Career of Barack Obama, “is third in a series of biennial Obama memoirs and promises a behind-the-scenes look at the inner workings of the senate from an outsider’s perspective, along with personal anecdotes about senate colleagues whom Sen. Obama occasionally met, or heard about.”

“When you have served as long as I have,” said Mr. Obama, “I think you have an obligation to pass on some of that wisdom that comes from your experience for the benefit of the people of the world.”

Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich must now choose a replacement who has experience comparable with Sen. Obama’s — a daunting task, the governor said, “when you realize that whomever I pick as junior senator might be just one great speech away from the Democrat presidential nomination.”

Victor Davis Hanson predicts that, six months into the new administration, it will be apparent that it was not actually the policies which changed. It will be how they are being reported and described.

All the campaign talk of the Great Depression, a Vietnam-like war, and our shredded Constitution will now thankfully subside as the Obama administration assumes office and solves problems with conciliation, dialogue, and multilateral wisdom, rather than shrillness, unilateralism, preemption, and my-way-or-the-highway dogmatism. We will hear that, by historical levels, unemployment is still not that bad, that GDP growth is not historically all that low, and that deficits, inflation, interest rates, and housing starts are all within manageable parameters. “Depression” will transmogrify into “recession” which in turn by July will be a “downturn” and by year next an “upswing” on its way to boom times.

Indeed, almost supernaturally crises will be solved with the departure of the hated Bush: no more flooding streets from cracked water mains that were a result of a President’s neglect of infrastructure, and no more spontaneous crashes of Mississippi River bridges due to diversions of critical federal aid from cash-strapped states to Iraq. And when the temperatures rise or drop, the wind howls, the clouds burst forth or go away, the snow melts or piles up, it will be, well, nature that caused the havoc, not the current occupant of the White House who failed to sign Kyoto.

As we watch the innocent die from natural mayhem, it will be due to the breakdown of local responders who now suddenly kill people, not federal inaction—except perhaps for an occasional few Bush federal holdovers that have not yet been rooted out. Human nature, of course, now will be seen more culpable, more selfish, as in needlessly resisting wise and caring federal interventions, rather than being inherently noble but shunned by an uncaring Washington. Yes, when dikes collapse and planes collide on crowed runways, it will be due to a cruel and unpredictable nature, or intrinsic design flaws, or improper local use and maintenance, or the past President’s nefarious legacy, not current government policies. (But if you still must bash the government, it will be wise to do it in 1950s style of inattentive state and local officials, prone to regional and tribal prejudices, blocking the infinite wisdom of a caring federal government.)

Some military action abroad could be necessary—and necessarily reported on as measured and reluctant, rather than cowboyish and gratuitous. European whining will be a result of miscommunications or the Euros’ unfair caricatures of Americans, not Bush’s alienation of allies. If radical Islam strikes, it will be, well, radical again and sometimes even dangerous, not a figment of neocon pipe dreams. If an administration official quits, goes on 60 Minutes, and writes a nasty tell-all book about Obama’s insensitivity and his government’s directionless ennui, he will be a heretic, a whiner, a turncoat, not a truth teller or brave maverick who blew the whistle in need of a bestseller hyped from NPR to the New York Times. We will come again to hate the filibuster, obstructionist Congressional policies, and the occasional loud-mouthed Senator who voices slurs against our nation in unpatriotic fashion.

Those around Barack Obama understand that precisely those measures most derided during the campaign—wiretaps, the interrogation of prisoners in Guantanamo, the decimation of al Qaida members in Iraq and Afghanistan, overseas detentions—probably account likewise most for the absence of another 9/11-like attack. In other words, as the Obamians privately ignore the media hype about flushed Korans and hundreds of innocents caught in the cauldron of war and unfairly detained, and instead examine the sort of killers who are presently in Guantanamo, the type of intelligence gathering that led to prevention of dozens of planned attacks since 9/11, and those who turned up and were killed or arrested in Iraq and Afghanistan, they will realize how dicey it will be to follow through with campaign rhetoric about Bush, Inc. torching the Bill of Rights, fighting made-up enemies abroad, and generally alienating our allies.

So all that will change for now will be the sudden absence of shrill complaints that we live in an America without a Constitution. Static, same-old, same-old government policy will, of course, be said to have altered radically (“hoped and changed”), but it will also be refashioned in the media as “sober” and “judicious”, as the administration moves “in circumspect fashion” to probe and explore “complex” and often “paradoxical” matters of national security that “indeed at the end of the day have no easy answers”.

Read the whole thing.

Rick Moran comments on the latest liberal-manufactured controversy, defending Rush Limbaugh and song parodist Paul Shanklin.

Shanklin’s stuff is mostly brilliant satire. But like all good political humor, it walks a line of good taste and decorum. In fact, by pushing the boundaries as Shanklin does, he defines for us the essence of political satire. In this respect (not in talent) Shanklin’s material is no more objectionable than Jonathan Swift or George Orwell for that matter.

That is, unless you’re a liberal seeking to make political hay and stifle free expression. You can criticize “Barack the Magic Negro” as unfunny or not in good taste. But when you use the inflammatory word “racism” to describe it, you go beyond critiquing the work and enter the world of pure politics. This liberals do on a regular basis and they get away with the sliming of political speech and speakers they disagree with because the press refuses to call them out on it.

In fact, the left has lowered the bar on what constitutes “racism” by redefining the term to suit their own political needs. And by refusing to acknowledge any set definition of the word, the left deliberately undermines free speech by cutting off debate with liberals firmly ensconced in a superior moral position while the person being unfairly smeared as a racist is unable to defend themselves. If one tries to stand up and fight the charge, they give automatic legitimacy to the left’s argument. And if they remain silent in the face of such slimeball tactics, the smear works and sticks to the accused like glue.

Having said all this, is it an appropriate Christmas message from a potential RNC chairman? It wouldn’t be my first choice but then I don’t think Saltsman the guy for the job anyway.

What is clear is that this despicable tactic by the left predates Obama and has done more to poison relations between the races in this country than all the cross burnings and hate speech delivererd by the morons in the Klan or the Skinheads. The reason is simple; the left has appropriated the word “racist” in order to define the debate on race – any issue, any time, anywhere – on their terms and their terms alone. Do you oppose Affirmative Action? You’re a racist. Do you oppose set asides for business based on race? You are a racist. Do you oppose racial quotas in college entrance requirements? You are a racist.

No debate. No exchange of ideas. No give and take on any issue that touches race unless you first accept the left’s position on these and other issues. If you don’t, the debate is closed off by simply calling you a racist – end of discussion.

So it’s no surprise they see legitimate satire as “racist.” In fact, the surprise would be if they didn’t.

Eric Alter has the song on video, and is shocked…. shocked! way back in April of ‘07.

And here’s the David Ehrenstein La Times column from March 19, 2007, which first identified Barack Obama as representing the “Magical Negro” archetype.

——————————
Hat tip to the News Junkie.

Obama has been moving at high speed to the center, at least with his appointments so far, and the democrat progressive base is disappointed. Jeff Jacoby is having a Schadefreude moment.

Can you hear the grumbling over in what Howard Dean used to call “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party?” The tolerance-and-diversity crowd is upset with Barack Obama; it seems the president-elect has been bringing people into his circle who don’t agree with them on every single issue.

The consternation on the left began with the naming of Obama’s national security team – Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, Robert Gates to continue as secretary of defense, and retired four-star General James Jones as national security adviser. “Barack Obama’s Kettle of Hawks,” they were promptly dubbed in the Guardian by the left-wing journalist Jeremy Scahill, “with a proven track record of support for the Iraq war [and] militaristic interventionism.” How could Obama possibly keep his campaign promise “to end the mindset that got us into war,” asked the The Nation, when none of his top foreign policy/national security picks had opposed the war?

There was even more distress in progressive precincts after Obama’s economic team was announced. Lawrence Summers, who will chair the National Economic Council, “opposed regulating the newfangled financial instruments that greased the way to the subprime meltdown,” wrote David Corn, the Washington bureau chief of Mother Jones magazine, in a column for the Washington Post. Obama’s choice for Treasury secretary, New York Fed president Timothy Geithner, “helped oversee the financial system as it collapsed.” Both of them, lamented Corn, are close to Robert Rubin, “a director of bailed-out Citigroup and a poster boy for . . . Big Finance.”

Add the passel of former Clinton operatives who have returned to play key roles in the Obama transition, including Rahm Emanuel, John Podesta, and Greg Craig, and Obama Girl herself could be forgiven for feeling disillusioned. Whatever happened to the fresh, progressive candidate who promised an escape from Clinton-era Democratic politics?

As if all that weren’t enough to give a fervent liberal agita, Obama has asked the Rev. Rick Warren, the evangelical pastor of Saddleback Church, to deliver the invocation at his inauguration. From many on the left, where Warren’s staunch opposition to same-sex marriage is reason enough to loathe him, responses have ranged from dismay to fury. Barney Frank labeled the pastor’s views “very offensive” and pronounced himself “very disappointed” that Obama would invite him. The blog Liberal Rapture was more pungent: “Obama throws another middle finger to liberals.

Paul Moreno, at History News Network, discusses the left’s misuse of rights language as a means of disestablishing the natural rights enshrined in the US Constitution. It’s as if the left discovered a way to apply Gresham’s Economic Law to Constitutional Law: newly invented bogus rights inevitably quickly replace real natural rights in circulation.

In a 2001 interview on Chicago public radio, Obama lamented that “the Supreme Court never ventured into the issue of the redistribution of wealth.” The problem, he said, was that the court “didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution… that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberty.”

In this perhaps unguarded moment, Obama became one of the few liberal politicians candid enough to admit that the Constitution poses a fundamental obstacle to their agenda.

This is a popular theory in academic circles. It is the fundamental argument of Cass Sunstein, a colleague of Obama’s at the University of Chicago Law School (now on his way to Harvard), who is often mentioned as an Obama adviser and potential Supreme Court nominee, and the author of The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We need it More than Ever.

The second bill of rights idea derived from two famous speeches that Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave—one at the San Francisco Commonwealth Club during the 1932 campaign and his 1944 annual message to Congress. In the Commonwealth Club address, he spoke of the advent of “enlightened administration,” which would redistribute resources in accordance with an “economic declaration of rights.” In his 1944 message to Congress, Roosevelt said that “our rights to life and liberty”—the negative liberty to which Obama referred, had “proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.” He claimed that “In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights.” This bill of rights included the right to a job, the right to food and recreation, the right to adequate farm prices, the right to a decent home, the right to medical care, and the right to a good education.

Of course, these are not “rights” at all—not in the sense that the framers and ratifiers of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution used the term—but entitlements. From the founding until the twentieth century, the American regime assumed that government’s purpose was to secure pre-existing natural rights—such life, liberty, property, or association. Everyone can exercise such rights simultaneously; nobody’s exercise of his own rights limits anyone else’s similar exercise. Your right to life or to work or to vote does not take anything away from anyone else. We can all pursue happiness at once. Entitlements, on the other hand, require someone else to provide me with the substantive good that the exercise of rights pursues. The right to work, for example, is fundamentally different from the right (entitlement) to a job; the right to marry does not entitle me to a spouse; the right to free speech does not entitle me to an audience.

The New Deal is often described as a “constitutional revolution.” In fact, it was much more than that. It involved a rejection not just of the structure and principles of the Constitution, but those of the theory of natural rights in the Declaration of Independence—that, as Jefferson put it, governments are instituted in order to secure our rights. Roosevelt envisioned not a new constitution, but a new idea of what Sunstein calls “a nation’s constitutive commitments.”

As to this problem, Sunstein says that “The best response to those who believe that the second bill of rights does not protect rights at all is just this: unembarrassed evasion.”

Former CIA officer Reuel Marc Gerecht predicts that Barack Obama, faced with the same threats, will wind up making the same choices as George W. Bush for the same reasons.

President-elect Barack Obama has promised to ban waterboarding and other pain-inflicting soliciting techniques, as well as rendition. He has also promised to close the Guantánamo Bay prison.

More broadly, liberal Democrats in Congress intend to deploy a more moral counterterrorism, where the ends — stopping the slaughter of civilians by Islamic holy warriors — no longer justifies reprehensible means. Winning the hearts and minds of foreigners by remaining true to our nobler virtues is now seen as the way to defeat our enemies while preserving our essential goodness.

Sounds uplifting. Don’t bet on it happening.

Mr. Obama will soon face the same awful choices that confronted George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and he could well be forced to accept a central feature of their anti-terrorist methods: extraordinary rendition. If the choice is between non-deniable aggressive questioning conducted by Americans and deniable torturous interrogations by foreigners acting on behalf of the United States, it is almost certain that as president Mr. Obama will choose the latter. ...

Rendition… is what Americans do when they realize that active counterterrorism against jihadists prepared to use mass-casualty weapons is an ethical, juridical and operational tar pit. It isn’t an ideal solution — American intelligence officers have no control of the questioning, and Washington can become beholden to foreign security services — but it’s a satisfactory compromise. Just ask Samuel R. Berger, the national-security adviser for President Bill Clinton, who no doubt worked through all the pitfalls when he first approved extrajudicial rendition.

In addition, the C.I.A. is able to guard the secrecy of foreign-liaison operations more effectively, especially from Congressional prying, than it can its own activities. It has also certainly paid close attention to how the press tracked some of its clandestine international flights carrying terrorism suspects after 9/11, and will in the future undoubtedly make it much harder to sleuth out who is going where.

A dense bipartisan moral fog surrounds rendition. Former senior Clinton officials can still deny that they sent anyone away in order that he be tortured. Few are as honest and frank as Walt Slocombe, a Clinton undersecretary of defense who once remarked that the difference between Democratic and Republican rendition was that Democrats “drilled air holes in the boxes.”

Jonah Goldberg gleefully deconstructs all the shades of meaning in the Blagojevich indictment.

There are so many things to love about the Rod Blagojevich scandal it’s hard to know where to begin.

Wait. That’s not right. There are so many bleeping things to love about this bleeping-bleep Blagojevich scandal it’s hard to know where to begin.

For starters, the folks at the Chicago Tribune are Christmas Pony Happy because Blago tried to strong-arm the Trib’s owners to fire members of the editorial board. Instead, Trib editors will get to have a big tailgate party outside Blago’s cell window.

Newspaper people love that sort of thing. ...

For partisans, there’s the schadenfreude that comes with watching the Democrats — self-proclaimed anti-corruption zealots in recent years — explain why Blagojevich shouldn’t be lumped in with Congressmen Charlie Rangel (cut himself sweetheart deals), William Jefferson ($90,000 in his freezer) and Tim Mahoney (tried to bribe an aide he was sleeping with not to sue him — and you thought romance was dead) as part of a new Democratic “culture of corruption” storyline.

There’s the enormous I-should-have-had-a-V8! moment as the mainstream press collectively thwacks itself in the forehead, realizing it blew it again. The New York Times — which, according to Wall Street analysts, is weeks from holding editorial-board meetings in a refrigerator box — created the journalistic equivalent of CSI-Wasilla to study every follicle and fiber in Sarah Palin’s background, all the while treating Obama’s Chicago like one of those fairy-tale lands depicted in posters that adorn little girls’ bedroom walls.

Read the whole thing.

Barack Obama’s movement in the direction of centrism via a series of prominent appointments has not gone unnoticed by the left, and Christopher Hayes, in the Nation, fires a warning shot across Obama’s bows.

There will be moments in the next four years when a principled fight will be required, and if there is an uneasiness rippling through the minds of some progressives, it arises from their doubts about just how willing Obama will be to fight those fights. When a friend of mine decided to run for office this year, someone suggested that he write down a list of positions he wouldn’t take, votes he wouldn’t cast, then put it in a safe and give someone the key. The idea was that by committing himself in writing to some basic skeletal list of principles, he’d be at least partially anchored against the slippery slope of compromise that so often leads elected officials to lose their way.

Does Obama have such a list? And if so, what’s on it?

Read the whole thing.

The Obama presidency cannot avoid all the ingredients for the perfect political storm. His nomination could only be achieved via the support of the democrat party’s activist extremist base, but once elected Obama’s freedom of action will inevitably be severely curtailed by the nation’s current circumstances, featuring economic crisis at home and war overseas, two situations in which the implementation of leftwing policy choices can only lead to full-scale disaster.

The leftwing base will not only have to endure seeing Hillary Clinton made Secretary of States and Robert Gates’s appointment as Defense Secretary renewed. Obama will have to agree to tax cuts to save the economy, and Obama will have to agree to increased military efforts to save the US from humiliation at the hands of Islamic extremism.

Sooner or later, one pragmatic policy decision flying in the face of leftwing ideology will prove to be one too many and will become the straw that breaks the camel’s back of the nutroots base’s tolerance and support. After that watershed event, the left will turn on Obama with just as much savagery as it did on Lyndon Johnson, and it will destroy his presidency.

Obama is in a no win situation. We just need to buckle our seatbelts, prepare for a wild ride, and have a candidate ready for 2012.

Obama shakes Blagojevich’s hand, December 2, 2008

According to Fox News, Obama’s future White House Chief of Staff, former congressman Rahm Emanuel, had several conversations with Blagojevich and his chief of staff related to the appointment of a replacement to Barack Obama’s forsaken Senate seat… and the FBI has those conversations on tape.

1:56 video

Ouch! No wonder Rahm Emanuel yesterday refused to take reporters’ questions.

Barack Obama has not even been sworn in yet, and the partisan dam that blocked media inquiry into his ties to corrupt Illinois politics has already started to burst. The signs of an imminent press feeding frenzy at Obama’s expense are visible.

Washington Times:

On the same day the Supreme Court declined to hear one appeal challenging Barack Obama’s right to become president because of questions about his citizenship, Justice Antonin Scalia distributed another appeal on the same issue for the court to consider.

The new case, Cort Wrotnowski v. Susan Bysiewicz, Connecticut Secretary of State, is scheduled to be discussed by the justices at their Dec. 12 private conference. They plan to decide whether to give the case a hearing – again on whether the British citizenship of Mr. Obama’s father makes the president-elect ineligible to assume the office. ...

The Supreme Court on Monday turned down the previous appeal filed by New Jersey attorney Leo C. Donofrio.

Unlike Mr. Donofrio’s appeal, Mr. Wrotnowski’s case “includes a more solid brief and a less treacherous lower court procedural history.”

Law blog

A number of prominent conservatives have recently been labeling anyone who thinks there is any possible legitimate issue here as a “kook.”

Well, personally, I think it costs real money to fight lawsuits in eight states, and multiple appeals for Supreme Court certiorari. Why would anyone bother when he could simply release the long form of his Hawaiian birth certificate?

John Kass is gloating in the Tribune at seeing some of the local sleaze facing a cleanup.

Now that Gov. Dead Meat has been arrested at his home and charged with selling Illinois by the pound—and Barack Obama’s U.S. Senate seat by the slice—let’s just savor the aroma.

I love the smell of meat over coals in the morning.

It smells like . . . victory.

The people of Illinois needed some good news and they got it. Former Republican Gov. George Ryan is in prison, and the arrest of his successor, Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich, surely means that the Illinois Combine that runs this state can stop with the rumors that U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald will be leaving town.

And, as Blagojevich most likely prepares to be Ryan’s bunkmate, let’s not forget the scores of other politicos, of all parties, who’ve gone down on corruption charges—including some of Mayor Richard Daley’s guys who helped rebuild that Democratic machine the mayor says doesn’t exist.

At a news conference in the federal building in Chicago, authorities were asked about Illinois corruption.

“If it isn’t the most corrupt state in the United States, it’s certainly one hell of a competitor,” said Robert Grant, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Chicago office. ...

Though Illinois isn’t surprised—this is after all the home of the Chicago Way—the national media must be shocked.

They’ve been clinging to the ridiculous notion that Chicago is Camelot for months now, cleaving to the idea with the willfulness of stubborn children. It must help them see Obama as some pristine creature, perhaps a gentle faun of a magic forest, unstained by our grubby politics, a bedtime story for grown-ups who insist upon fairy tales. But now the national media may finally be forced to confront reality.

Barack Obama, of course, is an intimate associate of Illinois’ current governor, shared the same political contributors (Antoin Rezko), and was, like him, a loyal servant of the Daley Machine.

Patrick Fitzgerald described Governor Rod Blagojevich’s conduct as “a new low.”

The affidavit contends Blagojevich discussed getting a substantial salary for himself at a non-profit foundation or an organization affiliated with labor unions. It also says Blagojevich talked about getting his wife placed on corporate boards where she might get $150,000 a year in director’s fees.

The affidavit also quotes Blagojevich as saying “I want to make money” in one conversation.

Blagojevich and John Harris, the governor’s chief of staff, were each charged with conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud and solicitation of bribery.

The FBI affidavit alleges that Blagojevich also sought promises of campaign cash, as well as a cabinet post or ambassadorship in exchange for his Senate choice.

Blagojevich is accused of saying on November 3 that if he is not going to get anything of value for the open seat, then he would appoint himself to the post.

“I’m going to keep this Senate option for me a real possibility, you know, and therefore I can drive a hard bargain,” the affidavit quotes the governor as saying.

He noted becoming a U.S. senator might remake his image for a possible presidential run in 2016, according to the affidavit.

The affidavit quotes Blagojevich telling an adviser later that day that a Senate seat “is a [expletive] valuable thing, you just don’t give it away for nothing.”

In a conversation with Harris on November 4, the day of the election, Blagojevich is alleged to have compared his situation to that of a sports agent shopping a potential free agent to the highest bidder.

On November 5, Blagojevich allegedly told an adviser, “I’ve got this thing and it’s [expletive] golden, and, uh, uh, I’m just not giving it up for [expletive] nothing. I’m not gonna do it.”

On November 7, while talking on the phone about the Senate seat with Harris and an adviser, Blagojevich said he needed to consider his family and that he is “financially” hurting, the affidavit states.

Harris allegedly said that they were considering what would help the “financial security” of the Blagojevich family.

The complaint alleges that the governor stated, “I want to make money,” adding later that he is interested in making $250,000 to $300,000 a year.

The charges also state that in a conversation with Harris on November 11, Blagojevich said he knew that President-elect Obama wanted a specific candidate for the open Senate seat but added “they’re not willing to give me anything except appreciation. [Expletive] them.”

Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney, said the charges “allege that Blagojevich put a ‘for sale’ sign on the naming of a United States Senator.”

Actual indictment.

Many of George W. Bush’s appointments to the federal bench were successfully blocked by democrats despite the former Republican majority, thanks to RINOs like John McCain. Now Obama’s victory opens the door for those bench seats and others opening in the near future to be filled with liberals.

The Washington Post reports democrats happily predicted a return to “balance on the courts,” i.e. liberal domination.

The federal judiciary is on the verge of a major shift when President-elect Barack Obama’s nominees take control of several of the nation’s most important appellate courts, legal scholars and political activists say. With the Supreme Court’s conservative direction unlikely to change anytime soon, it is the lower courts—which dispense almost all federal justice—where Obama can assert his greatest influence.

The change will be most striking on the Richmond-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, long a conservative bastion and an influential voice on national security cases, where four vacancies will lead to a clear Democratic majority. Democrats are expected to soon gain a narrower plurality on the New York-based 2nd Circuit, vital for business and terrorism cases, a more even split on the influential D.C. appeals court and control of the 3rd Circuit, which covers Pennsylvania and New Jersey. ...

Obama has a huge opportunity,” said Arthur Hellman, a University of Pittsburgh law professor who is an authority on federal courts. “In a very short time, significant segments of the appellate courts, which are the final authority in all but a tiny handful of cases, will be dominated by Democratic nominees.” ...

Democrats, who successfully blocked some of President Bush’s 4th Circuit and other appellate nominees, said they will try to win Republicans’ support but made it clear that they will push for quick confirmations. ...

The circuit courts of appeals, which cover the nation’s 13 federal judicial circuits, decide more than 30,000 cases a year. The Supreme Court takes fewer than 100 new cases each year.

Control of the appellate courts has shifted with the party in power. Republicans controlled 64 percent of appellate judgeships in 1993, but President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, reduced that to 42 percent by 2001. Bush’s appointees have restored a 56 percent Republican majority of the total authorized judgeships.

With current and future vacancies and Congress likely to pass a bill to create 14 appellate judgeships, Obama is likely to reduce Republican appointees to 42 percent and boost Democrats from the 36 percent to 58 percent during his first term, said Russell Wheeler, a Brookings Institution scholar who studies federal courts.

Steven D. Laib argues that Obama’s birth certificate (long form) must be made public.

A person seeking much lower privileges, such a driver’s license or voter registration must produce a birth certificate; why not a candidate for the highest office in the land. Which situation implies a higher duty by government officials; state statutes or the national constitution? ...

The state of Hawaii is asserting that privacy laws forbid it from revealing the certificate. This should be considered a bogus claim. Anyone running for the presidency has placed himself in the arena of a public, rather than a private citizen. A candidate is, for all practical purposes, giving up his privacy rights, and making his or her entire life open to scrutiny by the public and the press. Their personal records should and must be part of this. ...

If the certificate is never produced, and proper birth status is never verified, one way or the other, it will likely become the core of another Great American Conspiracy Theory such as those surrounding the death of John F. Kennedy. The Kennedy assassination conspiracies have been debunked, for all practical purposes, but they haven’t gone away. We don’t need another one of these things.

Read the whole thing.

Peggy Noonan describes conversation at a mostly Republican Christmas gathering in Occupied Virginia within the Beltway:

There was no grousing about John McCain, and considerable grousing about the Bush administration, but it was almost always followed by one sentence, and this is more or less what it was: “But he kept us safe.” In the seven years since 9/11, there were no further attacks on American soil. This is an argument that’s been around for a while but is newly re-emerging as the final argument for Mr. Bush: the one big thing he had to do after 9/11, the single thing he absolutely had to do, was keep it from happening again. And so far he has. It is unknown, and perhaps can’t be known, whether this was fully due to the government’s efforts, or the luck of the draw, or a combination of luck and effort. And it not only can’t be fully known by the public, it can hardly be fully known by the players at all levels of government. They can’t know, for instance, of a potential terrorist cell that didn’t come together because of their efforts.

But the meme will likely linger. There’s a rough justice with the American people. If a president presides over prosperity, whether he had anything to do with it or not, he gets the credit. If he has a recession, he gets the blame. The same with war, and terrorist attacks. We have not been attacked since 9/11. Someone—someones—did something right.

But here is a jittery reality: We are living through the time of two presidents. Or, if you choose to see it that way, the time of no president, with one on his way in but not arrived, and the other on his way out and without full authority. Histories will be written about this moment, and about the administration’s work with the president-elect’s office. But it is jittery because criminals calculate, they look for opportunities and vulnerabilities. This is a delicate time, with a transition of power, a profound economic crisis, and a nation feeling demoralized around the edges.

We received a reminder of the gravity of the situation this week, with the bipartisan congressional report saying the odds are high the world will see a biological or nuclear terror attack in the next five years. It said, “America’s margin of safety is shrinking, not growing,” and “the risk that radical Islamists—al Qaeda or Taliban—may gain access to nuclear material is real.”

Commission co-chairman Bob Graham, a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and an adviser to Mr. Obama’s transition team, was sober in a Q&A with Newsweek. He said he was most surprised at the risk of biological weapons because of “the ubiquitous nature of pathogens”—anthrax, or a resurrected infectious agent such as the one that produced the 1918 influenza epidemic, which has been re-created in the laboratory.

The report hasn’t received the attention it deserves, nor have its recommendations. Rep. Jane Harman, a California Democrat, accused the commission of playing the “fear card” and trying to imitate the Bush administration in alarmism and bellicosity. Mr. Graham, a Florida Democrat and former senator, would have none of it. “Our adversaries are gaining greater capabilities,” he said.

Why does Congress prepare such reports? To inform, and to win support for new plans. To show they are doing something. And to be able to say, in the event of calamity—forgive my cynicism—that they warned us. This hasn’t been the first such report. It won’t be the last. But it comes at a key moment for Mr. Obama, because it gives him a certain amount of cover to be serious about what needs to be done. What’s at stake for him is two words. When Republicans say, in coming years, “At least Bush kept us safe,” Democrats will not want tacked onto the end of that sentence, “unlike Obama.”

Chicago Tribune:

The U.S. Supreme Court will consider Friday whether to take up a lawsuit challenging President-elect Barack Obama’s U.S. citizenship, a continuation of a New Jersey case embraced by some opponents of Obama’s election.

The meeting of justices will coincide with a vigil by the filer’s supporters in Washington on the steps of the nation’s highest court.

The suit originally sought to stay the election, and was filed on behalf of Leo Donofrio against New Jersey Secretary of State Nina Mitchell Wells.

Legal experts say the appeal has little chance of succeeding, despite appearing on the court’s schedule. Legal records show it is only the tip of an iceberg of nationwide efforts seeking to derail Obama’s election over accusations that he either wasn’t born a U.S. citizen or that he later renounced his citizenship in Indonesia.

The Obama campaign has maintained that he was born in Hawaii, has an authentic birth certificate, and is a “natural-born” U.S. citizen. Hawaiian officials agree.

If Obama really was born in Hawaii, and actually has that legitimate birth certificate, why does he have a problem with producing and displaying it?

This 1:02 video has an inflammatory and partisan tone, but does summarize the questions about Obama’s citizenship succinctly.

Josh Painter remarks on the wonderful way the usually so volatile hard left has been accepting the President-Elect’s departures from campaign positions in the direction of the center. How long, one wonders, will the honeymoon last?

The hard left, I must say, has shown remarkable patience in light of the middle ground the Obama Administration-In-Waiting has cautiously taken since election day. Oh, there’s been some grumbling about all the Clintonistas the O-Team is stocking the executive branch with, The One’s realization that perhaps it might be best to let the Bush tax cuts simply expire rather than repeal them during a recession and his decision to keep SECDEF Robert Gates around for a while. But the more unhinged of those Obama supporters hoping for change haven’t rioted in the streets in large numbers. There have been no hostages taken with demands that the post of Secretary of Defense be renamed to Minister of Peace and Dennis Kucinch appointed.

It’s really a good thing that progressives have the capacity to show so much patience. It really is. Because they’re going to have to go to that well again. This time, it’s over Gitmo. Leftists have been calling for an immediate shutdown of the Guantanamo detention facility, transfer of the detainees to federal prisons on U.S. soil, and speedy trials with ACLU lawyers and soft-hearted judges for those “freedom fighters” who were only trying to kill our troops because the prisoners were defending their right to feed people into industrial shredding machines and bury the remains in mass graves. Most of those who feel the urgency of shutting down Gitmo for once and for all believe that doing so should be a simple matter.

Iowahawk reports that news of the election of a US President of color committed to peace failed to reach the relevant al Qaeda cell in time.

MUMBAI – Ajmal Amir Kasab, the sole surviving member of the 10-man team of Pakistani gunmen that left hundreds dead or wounded after a bloody three day rampage in Mumbai, today blamed the mayhem on an “email mixup” that left him and his colleagues unaware that Barack Obama had won election as President of the United States.

“What? Oh bloody hell, now you tell me,” said Kasab, as he was led away in handcuffs by Indian security forces.

Kasab, 21, apologized to Indian President Pratibha Patil, explaining that no one in his group had known about the recent U.S. election results. ...

Kasab, who is personally suspected of killing over 30 victims at point-blank range in a posh Mumbai hotel, was at a loss to explain how he and other members of the terrorist assault team remained unaware of the historic U.S. election results that many American analysts predicted would lead to an immediate and permanent outbreak of rapturous harmony and transcendent brotherly love throughout the universe. ...

Tragically, though, it appears that internet connectivity was only the tip of the iceberg in a system-wide Obama news communication failure at Al Qaeda Headquarters.

“Obama won? Seriously?” said an astonished Abdul Aziz Qasim, Senior Media Affairs Director for Al Qaeda’s Peshawar Office at an afternoon press conference announcing responsibility for the attacks. “I mean… you’re positively sure of that?” ...

“Believe me, now that Bush is out of the picture we’re just as upset about those senseless killings as everybody else, especially those of us who actually did the senseless killing,” he added. “All we ask is that the Indian judges not take it too hard on Ajmal. The poor kid feels bad enough already. It’s not his fault he didn’t find out about the infidel elections, you know how hard it is to get a decent Verizon cell in Mumbai. Now that we’re all on the same page again it would be a great time for all of us, believers and infidels alike, to put all the nonsense of the Bush years behind us and rekindle that beautiful peace and friendship thing we all had going on back in 2000.”

“I know my wife is looking forward to another Florida vacation—even though she’ll have to drop a few pounds to fit back into her beach chador,” Qasim joked. “She was only ten when we were there for our honeymoon.”

“Oh, before I forget, let me finally send our belated congratulations to President-Elect Obama,” said the Al Qaeda spokesman. “Let me also say we’re very sorry for the snafu in Mumbai, and hope this won’t put a damper on our negotiations for the peaceful return of Spain. We’re cool, right?”

The New York Times reports that Barack Obama’s leftwing position during the campaign are now running into conflicts with reality as decisions on CIA appointments and policy need to be made.

Obama can’t appoint the best choice for CIA Director for fear of offending the leftwing base.

Last week, John O. Brennan, a C.I.A. veteran who was widely seen as Mr. Obama’s likeliest choice to head the intelligence agency, withdrew his name from consideration after liberal critics attacked his alleged role in the agency’s detention and interrogation program. Mr. Brennan protested that he had been a “strong opponent” within the agency of harsh interrogation tactics, yet Mr. Obama evidently decided that nominating Mr. Brennan was not worth a battle with some of his most ardent supporters on the left.

Mr. Obama’s search for someone else and his future relationship with the agency are complicated by the tension between his apparent desire to make a clean break with Bush administration policies he has condemned and concern about alienating an agency with a central role in the campaign against Al Qaeda.

Mark M. Lowenthal, an intelligence veteran who left a senior post at the C.I.A. in 2005, said Mr. Obama’s decision to exclude Mr. Brennan from contention for the top job had sent a message that “if you worked in the C.I.A. during the war on terror, you are now tainted,” and had created anxiety in the ranks of the agency’s clandestine service. ...

The flap over Mr. Brennan, who served as a chief of staff to George J. Tenet when he ran the C.I.A., was the biggest glitch so far in what has been an otherwise smooth transition for Mr. Obama. Some C.I.A. veterans suggest that the president-elect may have difficulty finding a candidate who can be embraced by both veteran officials at the agency and the left flank of the Democratic Party.

Now that the decision-making power, and the responsibility, are theirs, democrats have to square the circle of contradiction between liberal pieties and effectively preventing terrorist attacks. Will “human and non-coercive” methods really get the villain to tell where the ticking time bomb is located, or will Jack Bauer just have to shoot him in the knee?

On Wednesday, a dozen retired generals and admirals are to meet with senior Obama advisers to urge him to stand firm against any deviation from the military’s noncoercive interrogation rules.

But even some senior Democratic lawmakers who are vehement critics of the Bush administration’s interrogation policies seemed reluctant in recent interviews to commit the new administration to following the Army Field Manual in all cases.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who will take over as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee in January, led the fight this year to force the C.I.A. to follow military interrogation rules. Her bill was passed by Congress but vetoed by President Bush.

But in an interview on Tuesday, Mrs. Feinstein indicated that extreme cases might call for flexibility. “I think that you have to use the noncoercive standard to the greatest extent possible,” she said, raising the possibility that an imminent terrorist threat might require special measures.

Afterward, however, Mrs. Feinstein issued a statement saying: “The law must reflect a single clear standard across the government, and right now, the best choice appears to be the Army Field Manual. I recognize that there are other views, and I am willing to work with the new administration to consider them.”

Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, another top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said he would consult with the C.I.A. and approve interrogation techniques that went beyond the Army Field Manual as long as they were “legal, humane and noncoercive.” But Mr. Wyden declined to say whether C.I.A. techniques ought to be made public.

C.I.A. officials have long argued that publishing a list of interrogation techniques only allows Al Qaeda to train its operatives to resist them. But they say the secrecy has led to exaggeration and myth about the agency’s detention program.

Mark Whitaker, NBC News Senior Vice Presideny, recently, on the Chris Matthews Show, repeated a sentiment often heard from the left during the campaign. Contrary to Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous speech, to the mainstream media and the liberal establishment, what really matters isn’t the contents of someone’s character, it’s the color of his skin.

Newsbusters:

The number two man at NBC News believes Barack Obama’s skin color gives him more legitimacy around the world than possibly any American leader in history.

For those unfamiliar, Mark Whitaker is the Senior Vice President that succeeded the late Tim Russert as NBC’s Washington Bureau Chief, and currently oversees national and international reporting for all the network’s news programs including the “Nightly News,” the “Today” show, MSNBC, and “Meet the Press.”

As part of the panel on Sunday’s “The Chris Matthews Show,” Whitaker said the following about Barack Obama:

I think it goes beyond the Middle East, and I think it’s a bigger phenomenon which is the leader of the biggest democracy in the world is now a person of color and that is going to give him what political scientists would call a legitimacy in the street around the world that I don’t think an American leader has had, ever perhaps.

Imagine that. Because Obama is black, before he even steps into the White House and accomplishes one darned thing he already has more legitimacy around the world than possibly every American president that came before him.

The New York Times announces the intended shift in President-Elect Obama’s future foreign policy resources from arms to Danegeld, but also hints that, Obama being democrat, he’ll probably just spend a lot more on both.

When President-elect Barack Obama introduces his national security team on Monday, it will include two veteran cold warriors and a political rival whose records are all more hawkish than that of the new president who will face them in the White House Situation Room.

Yet all three of his choices — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as the rival turned secretary of state; Gen. James L. Jones, the former NATO commander, as national security adviser, and Robert M. Gates, the current and future defense secretary — have embraced a sweeping shift of priorities and resources in the national security arena.

The shift would create a greatly expanded corps of diplomats and aid workers that, in the vision of the incoming Obama administration, would be engaged in projects around the world aimed at preventing conflicts and rebuilding failed states. However, it is unclear whether the financing would be shifted from the Pentagon; Mr. Obama has also committed to increasing the number of American combat troops. Whether they can make the change — one that Mr. Obama started talking about in the summer of 2007, when his candidacy was a long shot at best — “will be the great foreign policy experiment of the Obama presidency,” one of his senior advisers said recently.

Christopher Booker expresses well-justified alarm at President-Elect Obama’s continuing expressions of commitment to the Global Warming fantasy.

If the holder of the most powerful office in the world proposed a policy guaranteed to inflict untold damage on his own country and many others, on the basis of claims so demonstrably fallacious that they amount to a string of self-deluding lies, we might well be concerned. The relevance of this is not to President Bush, as some might imagine, but to a recent policy statement by President-elect Obama.

Tomorrow, delegates from 190 countries will meet in Poznan, Poland, to pave the way for next year’s UN conference in Copenhagen at which the world will agree a successor to the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. They will see a video of Mr Obama, in only his second major policy commitment, pledging that America is now about to play the leading role in the fight to “save the planet” from global warming.

Mr Obama begins by saying that “the science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear”. “Sea levels,” he claims, “are rising, coastlines are shrinking, we’ve seen record drought, spreading famine and storms that are growing stronger with each passing hurricane season.”

Far from the science being “beyond dispute”, we can only deduce from this that Mr Obama has believed all he was told by Al Gore’s wondrously batty film An Inconvenient Truth without bothering to check the facts. Each of these four statements is so wildly at odds with the truth that on this score alone we should be seriously worried. ...

Alarming though it may be that the next US President should have fallen for all this claptrap, much more worrying is what he proposes to do on the basis of such grotesque misinformation. For a start he plans to introduce a “federal cap and trade system”, a massive “carbon tax”, designed to reduce America’s CO2 emissions “to their 1990 levels by 2020 and reduce them an additional 80 per cent by 2050”. Such a target, which would put America ahead of any other country in the world, could only be achieved by closing down a large part of the US economy.

Mr Obama floats off still further from reality when he proposes spending $15 billion a year to encourage “clean energy” sources, such as thousands more wind turbines. He is clearly unaware that wind energy is so hopelessly ineffective that the 10,000 turbines America already has, representing “18 gigawatts of installed capacity”, only generate 4.5GW of power, less than that supplied by a single giant coal-fired power station.

He talks blithely of allowing only “clean” coal-fired power plants, using “carbon capture” – burying the CO2 in holes in the ground – which would double the price of electricity, but the technology for which hasn’t even yet been developed. He then babbles on about “generating five million new green jobs”. This will presumably consist of hiring millions of Americans to generate power by running around on treadmills, to replace all those “dirty” coal-fired power stations which currently supply the US with half its electricity.

If this sounds like an elaborate economic suicide note, for what is still the earth’s richest nation, it is still not enough for many environmentalists. Positively foaming at the mouth in The Guardian last week, George Monbiot claimed that the plight of the planet is now so grave that even “sensible programmes of the kind Obama proposes are now irrelevant”. The only way to avert the “collapse of human civilisation”, according to the Great Moonbat, would be “the complete decarbonisation of the global economy soon after 2050”.

For 300 years science helped to turn Western civilisation into the richest and most comfortable the world has ever seen. Now it seems we have suddenly been plunged into a new age of superstition, where scientific evidence no longer counts for anything. The fact that America will soon be ruled by a man wholly under the spell of this post-scientific hysteria may leave us in wondering despair.

Read the whole thing.