Michael Novak puts B. Hussein Obama in his place.

Candidate Obama, like so many lefties, seems to believe anything bad about the United States, without even submitting it to critical thinking. He said on May 19, 2008, for example, that 3% of the world’s population (i.e., in his calculation, the United States) accounts for 25% of the greenhouse gases put into the atmosphere. In the 1970s, the lefties used to talk about 6% of the world’s population using 25% of the world’s energy. Even before Obama, they were blaming America first.

The left’s figures depend on what is meant by “energy.” Before the founding and development of the United States, “energy” meant the human back, beasts of burden, windmills, waterwheels, burning wood, coke, and coal, and the like. The United States is certainly not using 25% of the energy generated by those means today. I don’t think so, although it might be. The darn country is just so efficient.

But if we mean by “energy” only the modern sources of energy – electricity, the Franklin stove, the steam engine, the piston engine propelled by gasoline (and now by electric and/or hydrogen batteries), the processing of crude oil into gasoline, nuclear energy, the jet engine, the development of ethanol and other fuels derived from plants, and other devices – all of these except one were invented by the people of the United States, as their gift to the world. (The exception was the steam engine, invented by our cousins in Britain, and further developed here as well as there.)

In other words, the United States has invented nearly 100% of what the modern world means by “energy.” And it has helped the rest of the world to use 75%.

Depkafile reveals that China’s recent earthquake impacted a large number of Chinese facilities containing radioactive materials, including nuclear weapons plants, and a significant number of the sites impacted by the disaster remain to be secured.

Eleven days after the 7.9 magnitude earthquake struck western China, vice environment minister Wu Xiaoqing first revealed Friday, May 23, that 50 hazardous radioactive sources have been located – 35 recovered and controlled; “three more buried in rubble and 12 in dangerous buildings. At present, tests show no accidental release of radiation,” he reported as the death toll climbed past 55,000.

Two of the most badly damaged cities housed China’s secret nuclear weapons design facility – at Mianyang – and a plutonium processing facility – in Guangyuan – both close to the quake’s epicenter.

Soon after the quake struck, Chinese soldiers were sent to protect nuclear sites and preparations made for an environmental emergency.

DEBKAfile’s military sources note that the Beijing announcement did not specify the nature of the hazardous sources or disclose how they – or the secret nuclear weapons and plutonium facilities were secured – whether sealed with cement and lead like the Chernobyl reactor in Ukraine in the 80s or their contents removed to safe places.

According to the Beijing government’s official Web site, “nuclear facilities and “radioactive sources” included power plants, reactors, scientific research labs and medical treatment facilities, a big concentration of which are located in the worst hit areas.

French sources disclosed that 489 hospitals with laboratories containing radioactive materials, as well as hundreds of high-risk industries, were leveled.

Hans Kristensen, a nuclear arms expert at the Federation of American Scientists, said it was hard to believe that the military plants with nuclear materials had escaped the disaster. Other experts suspect that the damage to radioactive sites and radiation leaks may extend beyond the stricken Sichuan province.

Noah Pollak, at Commentary, notes that the blockade is on with respect to reviews of Douglas Feith’s book in the leading organs of the liberal establishment.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are the book review editor of a major newspaper, and a book has been written by someone who was a high-level public official deeply involved in what has been the biggest and most controversial story of the past half-decade.

This official has been mentioned in news stories in your paper on hundreds of occasions, your paper’s editorials have regularly railed against him and his colleagues, and your paper’s op-ed columnists have penned an entire oeuvre of scathing indictments of the policies he helped implement. The official, subjected to years of obloquy in your pages, writes an account of his involvement in the story that by any fair estimation is not just detailed and serious, but one of the most important and useful of its kind to date. Do you choose to review the book, or do you simply pretend that it was never written?

The book I’m talking about, of course, is War and Decision, former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith’s account of his role in the Iraq war. And it is being subjected to an astonishing and shameful blackout from many of America’s biggest newspapers. Noting the decision of the Washington Post and New York Times not to review the book, Rich Lowry wrote, “Apparently it’s OK to heap every failure in Iraq on Feith’s head, but then to turn around and pretend he’s a figure of no consequence when he writes a book.”

Curiosity got the better of me, so I checked to see whether the book has been reviewed by other large newspapers. The MSM does not disappoint: There has been no mention of War and Decision in USA Today, the LA Times, NY Daily News, Houston Chronicle, Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, or Miami Herald. What charming behavior from our nation’s journalism professionals. You would think the book interfered with the preferred narrative or something.

Mark Steyn parses Obama’s best-known recent quote.

BO: We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times, whether we’re living in a desert, or living in the tundra, and then just expect that every other country’s going to say okay, you guys just go ahead and keep on using 25% of the world’s energy, even though you only account for 3% of the population.

MS: The very next line he said was that’s not leadership. In other words, Barack Obama’s definition of American leadership is you should find out what the European Union prime ministers want, and then you go ahead and do it. So he’ll go and ask them, he’ll go and ask these foreign countries what temperature would you like America’s thermostat to be set to. You can’t eat as much food as you want. We’re going to ask the foreigners how much food you think you ought to be eating. So he’s ceding McDonalds drive-thru sovereignty to the European Union. And what it cumulatively comes across as is basically the 21st Century version of Jimmy Carter malaise, that it’s the opposite of what America is – optimism, progress, and more and more bountiful good for the country and for the planet. He’s saying no, the good times are over, we’ve got to tighten our belts, even though you fat layabouts can’t actually do that.

Sandy Rios, a pro-family talk radio personality from Chicago, expresses the typical kinds of concerns ordinary American will have about the latest democrat party idol’s candidacy.

What are you so afraid of?” a caller to my Chicago radio show asked. “…

If Barack Obama is elected President of the United States, I fear our enemies will smell the blood of weakness and rise in retaliation here and abroad. While Obama makes sweeping promises to end the war in Iraq, he never projects the consequences. Radical Islam is waging a holy war against us—and they have no intent on ending their war against the West. Withdrawal will be perceived as surrender and the election of a president sympathetic to their cause will embolden them like nothing else. Iraq will recede into bloody, sectarian retaliatory violence. Iran will take advantage and wield new power in the region. Our military families will have the sacrifice of their loved ones rendered meaninglessness. And our enemies will come here.

Israel will find itself alone. Europe and the British Isles, already too overrun with Islamists, will provide little defense. A future President Obama, championed by members of Hamas in Gaza, endorsed by one of their leaders—a dear friend to PLO sympathizer and Yasser Arafat apologist—Rashid Kalidi, will, I fear, not lift a finger to defend them. It is, after all, this same future president who has sat for 20 years (until recently without objection), listening to Dr. Jeremiah Wright praise Hamas and the famous Israel despiser, Louis Farrakhan.

I fear Iran will continue to develop nuclear weapons and breathlessly rush to the annihilation of Israel which will bring war to the Middle East. Iran will gladly make these weapons available to terrorist groups who will use them in the same way they currently show their contempt for life in smaller ways with suicide bombs. President Barack Obama will be powerless to stop this. He is a man full of words, but lacking in resolve. …

I fear universal healthcare, a system that will run like Cook County Hospital in Chicago where patients wait for hours, get lousy care and—if and when they are seen—they have little recourse for the way they are treated. Government healthcare puts you at the mercy of government: no alternative if medicines or procedures are denied and no recourse if doctors botch a surgery. I fear “equality” in a system like that—we will all get equally marginal care. Managed care and HMOs will look like heaven compared to this.

I fear the loss of free speech. I am concerned talk radio and independent news sources will be regulated to the point that they are effectively silenced. I fear more cases like that of Crystal Dixon, Associate Vice President for Human Resources at Toledo University, who was recently fired for writing a column as a private citizen, making the case as an African American that homosexuality cannot be equated to race in a civil rights debate. Barack Obama has been heralded by award-winning gay journalist, Andrew Sullivan, because he embraces expanded homosexual rights through ENDA and the punishment of those who would be “intolerant” to this lifestyle through hate crimes legislation. I fear those who oppose the homosexual moral and political agenda will be further punished. I fear his embrace of homosexual marriage and the consequences to children and society.

I fear the influence of radicals like William Ayres, formerly of the Weather Underground. I fear that, in addition to his desire to violently overthrow the United States Government, his endorsement of “Queering Elementary Education” will become more prevalent in public schools. I fear children will become further prey to the sex education agenda that exposes our kids too early and too often to materials at odds with the convictions of a great majority of Americans.

I fear racial vengeance. I don’t believe Barack Obama has sat at the feet of the hate-filled black racial bigot Jeremiah Wright without having sympathy for his poisonous diatribes. He may agree that white America deserves some sort of payback.

I fear economic collapse from a talented orator but inexperienced politician who does not love the free market, but socialism, who seeks justice and “fairness” that, translated, means taking from some and giving it to those he perceives deserve it more. I am concerned that the poor will be poorer and that “equality” will mean all will be poorer—regardless of effort or merit.

Christopher S. Carson, in Front Page Magazine, supplies background and details on Al Qaeda’s nuclear plot against America.

The latest audio message from al-Qaeda, reportedly from Osama bin Laden himself, is only the most recent confirmation that the jihadist threat to the West remains real and deadly serious. But the fact that it could take the form of nuclear terrorism should be most worrying to citizens and policy makers alike.

Where a nuclear attack once may have been beyond the capacities of stateless terrorists, that is no longer the case. …

‘Jafer the Pilot” is the nom de guerre of U.S. citizen Adnan el-Shukrijumah. Young, intelligent, fluent in multiple languages and a trained jet pilot who had apparently been in flight schools with Mohammed Atta, Shukrijumah had studied and worked with other jihadis at the 5-megawatt nuclear reactor at McMaster University in Canada. But one day all the terrorists disappeared from campus forever.

John Loftus of WABC news reported on November 7, 2003, that in the immediate wake of Shukrijumah and his fellow travelers’ disappearance, 180 pounds of uranium ended up “missing” from the reactor. Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir, who interviewed Osama bin Laden in the wake of 9/11, reported bin Laden saying that one of the founders of al-Qaeda, Anas el-Liby, had helped the Pilot haul out the stash of uranium.

McMaster U. has always insisted that no material was ever missing from the reactor, but instead claims that low-grade radiological material did turn up missing from their pharmacological/medical labs at the time. Paul Williams, author of The Day of Islam, published the Loftus-Mir assertions in his book and elsewhere. For his trouble, he was promptly sued by the University for $4,000,000. The suit is still pending. …

(Shukrijumah) was seen again in Mexico in late August 2004, near “terrorist alley” in Sonora, the main thoroughfare for illegal aliens into the United States. [The violent street gang MS-13 (Mara Salvatruchas)] was the Pilot’s new supply chain and courier of nuclear material for the bombs he was setting up. …

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has documented 15 incidents of theft and smuggling of small amounts of separated plutonium or highly enriched uranium confirmed by the nations involved. But these 15 cases represent the tip of the iceberg of what has actually occurred. So there is always just approaching the right people and buying it—not an easy task, but not an impossible one either. …

In February 2006, Russian citizen Oleg Khinsagov was arrested in Georgia (along with three Georgian accomplices) with some 100 grams of 89 percent enriched HEU, claiming that he had kilograms more available for sale. We can’t know how many thefts that occurred were never detected. Dr. Bunn told Senator Lieberman that “it is a sobering fact that nearly all of the stolen HEU and plutonium that has been seized over the years had never been missed before it was seized.”

The Pilot doesn’t need too much HEU for his seven-city destruction plan. For one “simple” gun-type design HEU bomb, roughly 50 kilograms of HEU would be needed – roughly the size of a six-pack.

The Pilot could also try hitting up a HEU-based research facility, like his old alma mater McMaster University, although McMaster apparently didn’t employ HEU per se. But some 130 research reactors around the world still do use HEU as their fuel.

Or has he already? The Washington Post, right before last Christmas, reported a strange story. Sometime in the night of November 8, 2007, two coordinated teams of armed men attacked the Pelindaba nuclear facility in South Africa, where hundreds of kilograms of weapon-grade highly enriched uranium (HEU) are stored.

One of the teams was chased off by the guards, but the other team of four gunmen disabled the perimeter alarms, went to the emergency control center and shot a worker in the chest. Bleeding out, the worker was still able to sound the first alarm.

He might not have bothered. The attack team then spent 45 minutes inside the perimeter, without anyone harassing them. What they did next is unknown to the public. The team promptly disappeared through the same hole they had cut in the fence. South African officials later arrested three individuals, but soon released them. The South African government has since been close-lipped about what really happened last November, and it has refused earlier U.S. offers to remove the HEU at Pelindaba—if indeed any remains after the attack. We don’t even know how much HEU, if any, was spirited away.

But surely the point is not whether the Pilot hit this specific facility. It is that he could well have—or dozens of others like it. We do know that if a 10 kiloton A-bomb, somewhat smaller than the bomb that obliterated Hiroshima, is set off at ground level in midtown Manhattan, the death toll would be perhaps half a million people. We could expect roughly $1 trillion in direct economic damage from this one bomb alone. Multiply this by seven bombs, and we can expect the wholesale depopulation of America’s cities in fear, incalculable economic devastation, and the end of the country as we currently know it.

Read the whole thing.

“Not ready to be president.”

1:17 video

3:43 video

Hilarious.

H/t to Karen L. Myers.

I think those poor confused little moonbats need some help, so I’m linking a serious article on Obame from an ultra-left source. Adolph Reed Jr. doesn’t like him, and he knows he cannot win.

(Obama’s) campaign depends on selling an image rather than substance.

There is also something disturbingly ritualistic and superficial in the Obama camp’s young minions’ enthusiasm. Paul Krugman noted months ago that the Obamistas display a cultish quality in the sense that they treat others’ criticism or failure to support their icon as a character flaw or sin. The campaign even has a stock conversion narrative, which has been recycled in print by such normally clear-headed columnists as Barbara Ehrenreich and Katha Pollitt: the middle-aged white woman’s report of not having paid much attention to Obama early on, but having been won over by the enthusiasm and energy of their adolescent or twenty-something daughters. (A colleague recently reported having heard this narrative from a friend, citing the latter’s conversion at the hands of her eighteen year old. I observed that three short years ago the daughter was likely acting the same way about Britney Spears.) …

As many Progressive readers may know, I’m hardly a Clinton fan. I’m on record in last November’s issue as saying that I’d rather sit out the election entirely than vote for either her or Obama. At this point, though, I’ve decided that she’s the lesser evil in the Democratic race, for the following reasons: 1) Obama’s empty claims to being a candidate of progressive change and to embodying a “movement” that exists only as a brand will dissolve into disillusionment in either a failed campaign against McCain or an Obama Presidency that continues the politics he’s practiced his entire career; 2) his horribly opportunistic approach to the issues bearing on inequality—in which he tosses behaviorist rhetoric to the right and little more than calls to celebrate his success to blacks—stands to pollute debate about racial injustice whether he wins or loses the Presidency; 3) he can’t beat McCain in November.

Frankly, I suspect that Clinton can’t beat him either, but there’s no way that Obama will carry most of the states in November that he’s won in the primaries and caucuses. And, while it makes some liberals feel good to think that a majority of the American electorate could vote for a black Presidential candidate, we should keep in mind that the Republicans haven’t let one dog out of the kennel against him yet. The Jeremiah Wright contretemps is only the first bark.

Obama’s style of being all things to all people threatens to melt under the inescapable spotlight of a national campaign against a Republican. It’s like what brings on the downfall of really successful con artists: They get themselves onto a stage that’s so big that they can’t hide their contradictions anymore, and everyone finds out about the different stories they’ve told different people. And Obama’s belonging to Wright’s church in the first place was quite likely part of establishing a South Side bourgeois nationalist street cred because his political base was with Hyde Park/University of Chicago liberals and the foundation world. …

Because he’s tried carefully to say enough of whatever the audiences he’s been speaking to at the time want to hear while leaving himself enough space later on to deny his intentions to leave that impression, his record represents precisely the “character” weakness the Republicans have exploited in every Democratic candidate since Dukakis: Another Dem trying to put things over on the American people.

Obama’s campaign has been very clever in carving out a strategy to amass Democratic delegate votes, but its momentum is in some ways a Potemkin construction—built largely on victories in states that no Democrat will win in November—that will fall apart under Republican pressure.

And then where will we be?

Read the whole thing.

CBC’s Rex Murphy identifies Canada’s two billion dollar Gun Registry as a classic example of “feel good legislation” representing a pretense at solving a problem, but completely ineffective. From watching this one, I get the impression that Canada has a lot better news commentary than we do.

Hat tip to the News Junkie.

Hillary is refusing to lie down, and has –as was predicted– finally played the Florida and Michigan card. After all, as we remember from 2000, counting every vote is vitally important to democrats.

Hoist by their own petard, the democrat party left is responding this morning in characteristic fashion to Hillary’s efforts to thwart their desires… by having a cow.

Andrew Sullivan does a particularly nice job of frothing.

The Clintons know no respect for rules or propriety or restraint in the pursuit of power. But Clinton’s latest speech in Florida should cause even veteran Clinton-hating jaws to drop some more….

How do you respond to a sociopath like this? She agreed that Michigan and Florida should be punished for moving up their primaries. Obama took his name off the ballot in deference to their agreement and the rules of the party. That he should now be punished for playing by the rules and she should be rewarded for skirting them is unconscionable.

I think she has now made it very important that Obama not ask her to be the veep. The way she is losing is so ugly, so feckless, so riddled with narcissism and pathology that this kind of person should never be a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Hillary is sitting pretty, armed with the argument possessing the greatest emotive force, and as ABC NEWS reports, she is not afraid to use it.

Sen. Hillary Clinton continued to push her popular vote argument. As an example, Clinton mentioned what happened in the elections in Zimbabwe to illustrate what can happen when the popular vote is not observed.

Speaking in Sunrise, Fla., Clinton said: “You heard Diana talk about coming from a country where votes don’t count. People go through the motions of an election only to have it discarded and disregarded. We’re seeing that right now in Zimbabwe — tragically an election was held, the president lost, they refused to abide by the will of the people. So we can never take for granted our precious right to vote.”

Clinton gave an abreviated version of her earlier speech, but made her argument for the popular vote to be the most important factor in this election again.

“Many of us believe that the candidate who got fewer votes was inaugurated president (in 2000),” Clinton said. “And we know that of all states, this state should have extra attention to make sure your votes are counted.”

How dare she! bleats Newsweek’s Jonathan Chait:

Hillary Clinton’s rhetoric today about counting the results in Florida and Michigan is simply incredible. Her speech compares discounting the Florida and Michigan primaries to vote suppression and slavery. …

They supported this “disenfranchisement.” Here’s a New York Times story from last fall, headlined, “Clinton, Obama and Edwards Join Pledge to Avoid Defiant States.”

Moreover, it’s obviously true that Obama not campaigning, organizing, or advertizing in those states hurt him, and helped the more familiar candidate in Clinton. She decided to campaign to change the rules only after it became her interest to do so.

This gambit by Clinton is simply an attempt to steal the nomination. It’s obviously not going to work, because Democratic superdelegates don’t want to commit suicide. But this episode is very revealing about Clinton’s character. I try not to make moralistic characterological judgments about politicians, because all politicians compromise their ideals in the pursuit of power. There are no angels in this business. Clinton’s gambit, however, truly is breathtaking.

If she’s consciously lying, it’s a shockingly cynical move. I don’t think she’s lying. I think she’s so convinced of her own morality and historical importance that she can whip herself into a moralistic fervor to support nearly any position that might benefit her, however crass and sleazy. It’s not just that she’s convinced herself it’s okay to try to steal the nomination, she has also appropriated the most sacred legacies of liberalism for her effort to do so. She is proving herself temperamentally unfit for the presidency.

It’s a pretty darn depressing election, what with no actual Republican running. At least we are getting some entertainment out of it, as the Clintons and their party’s leftwing base do the Vote Count two-step, hopping back and forth on “counting every vote” depending on exactly who is benefiting.

The nutroots left is adding another variation to its performance: the Clinton two-step. What fun it is to see the MoveOn.Org crowd which so passionately defended the Clintons through scandal after scandal, and then through Monica-gate and Impeachment, suddenly awake and discover the Clinton’s dark side.

We may have tragedy in November, but we’ve got comedy today.

Don’t think that saying “Gay Marriage isn’t real marriage” could get you into trouble one day?

Just give it time. Over in Europe, where political correctness is always just a step or two ahead, the Guardian reports that calling Scientology “a cult” is currently treated as a crime in Britain.

A teenager is facing prosecution for using the word “cult” to describe the Church of Scientology.

The unnamed 15-year-old was served the summons by City of London police when he took part in a peaceful demonstration opposite the London headquarters of the controversial religion.

Officers confiscated a placard with the word “cult” on it from the youth, who is under 18, and a case file has been sent to the Crown Prosecution Service.

A date has not yet been set for him to appear in court. …

The incident happened during a protest against the Church of Scientology on May 10. Demonstrators from the anti-Scientology group, Anonymous, who were outside the church’s £23m headquarters near St Paul’s cathedral, were banned by police from describing Scientology as a cult by police because it was “abusive and insulting”.

Writing on an anti-Scientology website, the teenager facing court said: “I brought a sign to the May 10th protest that said: ‘Scientology is not a religion, it is a dangerous cult.’

“‘Within five minutes of arriving I was told by a member of the police that I was not allowed to use that word, and that the final decision would be made by the inspector.”

A policewoman later read him section five of the Public Order Act and “strongly advised” him to remove the sign. The section prohibits signs which have representations or words which are threatening, abusive or insulting.

The teenager refused to back down, quoting a 1984 high court ruling from Mr Justice Latey, in which he described the Church of Scientology as a “cult” which was “corrupt, sinister and dangerous”.

After the exchange, a policewoman handed him a court summons and removed his sign.

In Germany, on the other hand, they’ll probably arrest you if you say that Scientology isn’t a cult.

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Hat tip to Little Baby Ginn at DBKP.