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.