Left, Right, and Centered

Steyn On The SOTU January 31, 2010

Here

I’m From The Government And I’m Here To Help You January 31, 2010

From RCP:

January 29th, 2010
Obama’s Stunning Admission
Posted by Tom Bevan | Email This | Permalink | Email Author
There’s been a remarkable amount of coverage of President Obama’s appearance at the House Republican retreat today, but I haven’t seen anyone focus on the President’s rather stunning admission about the Democrats’ health care legislation (Video):
The last thing I will say, though — let me say this about health care and the health care debate, because I think it also bears on a whole lot of other issues. If you look at the package that we’ve presented — and there’s some stray cats and dogs that got in there that we were eliminating, we were in the process of eliminating. For example, we said from the start that it was going to be important for us to be consistent in saying to people if you can have your — if you want to keep the health insurance you got, you can keep it, that you’re not going to have anybody getting in between you and your doctor in your decision making. And I think that some of the provisions that got snuck in might have violated that pledge. [emphasis added]
If we take this statement at face value, President Obama is admitting the the health care bills passed by either the House or Senate (or both) contained provisions which were “snuck in” – presumably by Democratic members and perhaps on behalf of certain lobbyists – that would have in fact prevented people from keeping their current insurance and/or choosing the doctor they want.
This was one of the core debates on health care throughout last year: Would President Obama and the Democrats’ legislation allow government to come between citizens and their choice of doctors and insurers? Obama promised it wouldn’t. Republicans said it would, and this was one of the aspects of the legislation that led them to characterize it as a government takeover of health care – the same characterization that Obama chastized the GOP for today.
So it’s a bit of shock to find out now – from the President himself, no less – that one or both of the bills that passed Congress late last year (the House passed its version in late November, the Senate on Christmas Eve Day) contained language that would have violated this pledge.

John Edwards Primer January 30, 2010

Here

And then There’s This January 30, 2010

Here

Message to Obama – stay off the sports pages and govern the country

I Have Finally Lost It With Obama -Dick Vitale For President January 30, 2010

He had an 18 month grace period with me- I wanted to be fair.
THAT’S OVER
I am watching the Duke Georgetown basketball game and who comes on to announce?????
OBAMA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Enough- I don’t need, want or care for my President announcing basketball games.
If I want a basketball announcer I’ll call Johnny Most (I know he’s dead -I’m being metaphoric)
What next Dick Vitale for PResident??????

Get back to governing the country and stop parading around like you’re goddam Jack Nicholson.
No more quarter for Obama
Bring the damn deficit down and get some jobs together.

East Side, West Side, All Around The Town January 30, 2010

It looks like no trial for KSM in New York City.
We;;, if they can make it there, they;lll make it anywhere.

What Else Do You Need To Know? January 29, 2010

Krauthammer on NRO:

JANUARY 29, 2010 12:00 A.M.
Soft on Terror
Islamist terrorism is not a law-enforcement issue.
The real scandal surrounding the failed Christmas Day airline bombing was not the fact that a terrorist got on a plane — that can happen to any administration, as it surely did to the Bush administration — but what happened afterward when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was captured and came under the full control of the U.S. government.
After 50 minutes of questioning him, the Obama administration chose, reflexively and mindlessly, to give the chatty terrorist the right to remain silent. Which he immediately did, undoubtedly denying us crucial information about al-Qaeda in Yemen, which had trained, armed, and dispatched him.
We have since learned that the decision to Mirandize Abdulmutallab had been made without the knowledge of or consultation with (1) the secretary of defense, (2) the secretary of homeland security, (3) the director of the FBI, (4) the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, or (5) the director of national intelligence (DNI).
The Justice Department acted not just unilaterally, but unaccountably. Obama’s own DNI said that Abdulmutallab should have been interrogated by the HIG, the administration’s new High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group.
Perhaps you hadn’t heard the term. Well, in the very first week of his presidency, Obama abolished by executive order the Bush-Cheney interrogation procedures and pledged to study a substitute mechanism. In August, the administration announced the establishment of the HIG, housed in the FBI but overseen by the National Security Council.
Where was it during the Abdulmutallab case? Not available, admitted National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair, because it had only been conceived for use abroad. Had not one person in this vast administration of highly nuanced sophisticates considered the possibility of a terror attack on American soil?
It gets worse. Blair later had to explain that the HIG was not deployed because it does not yet exist. After a year! I suppose this administration was so busy deploying scores of the country’s best lawyerly minds on finding the most rapid way to release Gitmo miscreants that it could not be bothered to establish a single operational HIG team to interrogate at-large miscreants with actionable intelligence that might save American lives.
Travesties of this magnitude are not lost on the American people. One of the reasons Scott Brown won in Massachusetts was his focus on the Mirandizing of Abdulmutallab.
Of course, this case is just a reflection of a larger problem: an administration that insists on treating Islamist terrorism as a law-enforcement issue. Which is why the Justice Department’s other egregious terror decision, granting Khalid Sheikh Mohammed a civilian trial in New York, is now the subject of a letter from six senators — three Republicans, two Democrats, and Joe Lieberman — asking Attorney General Eric Holder to reverse the decision.
Lieberman and Sen. Susan Collins had written an earlier letter asking for Abdulmutallab to be turned over to the military for renewed interrogation. The problem is, it’s hard to see how that decision gets reversed. Once you’ve read a man Miranda rights, what do you say? We are idiots? On second thought . . .
Hence the agitation over the KSM trial. This one can be reversed and it’s a good surrogate for this administration’s insistence upon criminalizing — and therefore trivializing — a war on terror that has now struck three times in one year within the United States, twice with effect (the Arkansas killer and the Fort Hood shooter) and once with a shockingly near miss (Abdulmutallab).
On the KSM civilian trial, sentiment is widespread that it is quite insane to spend $200 million a year to give the killer of 3,000 innocents the largest propaganda platform on earth, while at the same time granting civilian rights of cross-examination and discovery that risk betraying U.S. intelligence sources and methods.
Accordingly, Sen. Lindsey Graham and Rep. Frank Wolf have gone beyond appeals to the administration and are planning to introduce a bill to block funding for the trial. It’s an important measure. It makes flesh an otherwise abstract issue — should terrorists be treated as enemy combatants or criminal defendants? The vote will force members of Congress to declare themselves. There will be no hiding from the question.
Congress may not be able to roll back the Abdulmutallab travesty. But there will be future Abdulmutallabs. By cutting off funding for the KSM trial, Congress can send Obama a clear message: The Constitution is neither a safety net for illegal enemy combatants nor a suicide pact for us.

Here’s the Grading Rationale January 29, 2010

From RCP:
Obama’s Strange State of the Union
Was last night’s State of the Union address the sort we’d expect to be delivered by a President:
-whose job approval is under 50%,
-whose party is historically overexposed in the upcoming congressional elections,
-whose party was unable to hold a Senate seat in one of the bluest states, previously held by the party’s most iconic post-war leaders,
-whose major domestic initiative has just crashed-and-burned as a consequence of that failure,
-and who heads into a midterm election with unemployment close to 10%?
I’d say not.
Implication: either this White House knows more than the rest of us, or it knows less.
Any takers for the “more” side of the ledger?