On September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush, while reading a book to children in Florida called “My Pet Goat,” found Andy Card whispering in his ear that America had been attacked and we were at war.

Not wanting to drop everything and flee lest he scare the children, the President calmly finished the book, then left to a profoundly changed America. Ever since then, the left has excoriated President Bush for continuing to read “My Pet Goat.” Barack Obama, careful to never have such a moment, has just failed miserably.

You can hear the audio, with Fred Thompson’s commentary over it, here. It is profoundly disturbing and disrespectful to the families of the victims and the soldiers at Ft. Hood, Tx.

Instead of acting to not alarm unsuspecting kids, Obama couldn’t be bothered to interrupt his cool-guy image and interest-group pandering.

President Obama had his press conference about the Ft. Hood incident in conjunction to an address of American Indians. Before the President could be bothered to address the grieving, the wounded, and the dead, he had to thank everyone for a wonderful conference, thank the Department of the Interior for hosting it, attribute to one attendee a Congressional Medal of Honor the attendee never won, and go on ad nauseam about the wonders of the conference. Just listen to him.

It would have been one thing to give a brief thank you and get to the pressing matter of the day. But the President had to be the cool-guy pandering to favorite interest groups. And the military is decidedly not a favorite interest group.

Today, the teleprompter should be fired.

Wow. Obama has been touring the nation making sure we know how many jobs he has saved or created. It is looking more and more like he is saving or creating the jobless.

Unemployment this morning topped 10.2%, even though the number seeking employment has declined. Many have just given up. Likewise, and more troublesome, the average hours worked in a week is at its lowest in decades — 33 hours. That suggests employers are going to just expand hours worked in the future, instead of hiring new people. So the unemployment number will stay high for a while.

On January 18, 2009, Obama’s top economics advisor Larry Summers said Barack Obama’s stimulus plan would keep unemployment below 10%.

On July 17, 2009, Larry Summers said

“Both administration and independent forecasts predicted that only a very small part of the total job creation expected from the Recovery Act would take place within six months,” he continued. “Indeed, a Council of Economic Advisers’ study predicted that only 10 percent of the total job impact of the Recovery Act would take place during calendar year 2009. Given lags in spending and hiring, the peak impact of the stimulus on jobs was expected not to be achieved until the end of 2010.”

In other words, an ever growing number of Americans have to sit on the unemployment line until next year by design. Why? So in 2010, Barack Obama and the Democrats can run on falling unemployment. They’d rather you starve now so they can have recovery happen in an election year.

We’re all political pawns to Barack Obama.

One more thing: remember, outside economists say passing the Democrats’ health care plan will slow the recovery further, stagnate wages, and increase unemployment. Do we want to do that?

The last time a Democrat was in the White House we got the Communications Decency Act (since thrown out by the Supreme Court) and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (still a weight on the neck of American innovators). This time we’re not only seeing “Net Neutrality” being used as cover for sweeping proposed regulation of the Internet like never before seen in this country, but we’re also due to expand copyright further.

The best thing about the DMCA is that its long arm can’t extend offshore, so Americans have been able to bypass it when needed by working with non-Americans who retain their rights to such technically-critical activities as reverse engineering.

But now the Obama administration is looking to promote an Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a trojan horse for a Global DMCA. Or worse actually, because the DMCA only requires ISPs to act on specific copyrightholder requests to shut down accused infringers. Says Cory Doctorow, the ACTA would require ISPs to be active nannies policing copyright, and would outright kill Flickr, YouTube, Blogger, and probably Twitter. Further, your complete access to the Internet could be shut down, without warning, just because you are accused of being a copyright infringer.

Elections have consequences. How’s teaching the Republicans a lesson working out, libertarians?

There will be much debate in the morning about whether or not the bad results for Democrats in the Governor’s races in Virginia and New Jersey - both states where Barack Obama campaigned for the Democrat and the Democrat sought to join himself at the hip with Obama - reflect public anger at Obama and his Administration. This is an interesting debate, but let us not miss a critical point:

Obama tried to help Deeds and Corzine, and was unable to do so. He can help nobody but himself. And that fact alone is hugely significant.

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The Obama administration and the media are together going to downplay today’s electoral victories for the GOP.

They will, to the mainstream media, not be relevant to or any sign of a rebuke against Barack Obama and his far left agenda.

In fact, the media is already beginning the narrative that we cannot see today as a referendum on Barack Obama.

Consider these facts:

New York 23

• Barack Obama sent Joe Biden to visit.
• Obama’s White House negotiated Dede Scozzafava’s endorsement of the Democrat.
• Scozzafava and Owens both supported and campaigned on supporting the stimulus.

New Jersey

• Obama sent his top pollster to take command of the race.
• Obama visited multiple times, including the day before the election.
• Obama is featured in most of Corzine’s advertising.
• The Democratic Governors Association and DNC all pumped in a ton of money.
• Corzine ran on helping Obama at the state level.

Virginia

• The Democratic Governors Association spent $4 million to get Creigh Deeds elected.
• The Democratic National Committee spent $6 millino to get Deeds elected.
• Obama campaigned for Deeds multiple times.
• Organizing for America sent a mail piece to 300,000 “surge voters”, or voters who voted for the first time in 2008, urging them to vote for Deeds.
• Organizing for America set up phone banks for Creigh Deeds.

The state owned media is going to tell us none of this matters and this was no rebuke of Barack Obama.

Don’t believe it. The facts speak for themselves.

What do you get when you combine an ISP active in Internet filtering with a left-wing group that is essentially the online ACLU? You get the broad, bipartisan opposition to the FCC’s plans for Internet regulation that are being sold as Net Neutrality.

It was remarkable enough when Governors left and right all wrote to the FCC against Net Neutrality. But now when Comcast is on the same side of a dispute as the Electronic Froniter Foundation, that’s a sign that nobody who is aware of the technical issues wants any part of what Barack Obama and FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski are planning.

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James Galyean is a candidate running for South Carolina’s 3rd Congressional District. Prior to that time, Galyean was an Assistant United States Attorney and also has some pretty direct connections to the War on Terror.

It was Galyean who helped helped write both the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006. As a result, he has a bed of knowledge and massive amounts of contacts that others do not. And his contacts are telling him that, protestations to the contrary from the Pentagon, Barack Obama has every intention of sending GTMO terrorists to the Charleston, SC Naval Weapons Station.

After all, South Carolina did not vote for Obama, so he sees no fall out in sticking terrorists there. But Galyean makes some pretty convincing points that this is a bad idea.

In August 2007, a sharp Berkeley County Sheriff’s Deputy, James Blakely, pulled over two Egyptian men not far from the station. With the guns and explosive materials found in their car, they could have killed any number of people. And the brig isn’t the only possible target at the station. There are others, both programs and personnel.

SPAWAR is a naval project headquartered at the station that provides classified engineering and other support for overseas projects. Because of that mission and others at the station, over 10,000 people pass through the station’s gates each day. Think those cars would be attractive targets during a terrorist’s military trial at the station? With the media hordes camped outside the gates? What about a nearby daycare center used by the station’s families? Think that couldn’t happen? Google “Beslan.”

There’s also a nuclear fuel transshipment facility and a jet fuel storage tank farm inside the fence. You could throw a rock from any of them and hit the brig. Did I mention there’s over 600 million pounds of explosives stored there too? And reportedly a few nuclear weapons. Anyone want to risk an inbound Gulfstream?

Unlike a lot of the kids in the Obama administration, Galyean knows what he is talking about.

Much was made of the 3.5% annualized GDP growth that was reported this week. The Bush-Blamer-In-Chief stated that the figures were “an affirmation that this recession is abating and showed the steps we’ve taken have made a difference”. Really? Have they made a “difference”? Have they accomplished anything that will last beyond the massive amount of American taxpayer money that has been thrown at the problem? Let’s look at the numbers.

Of the 3.5% gain, over 2% of the gain was due to durable goods - and most of that was automobile sales, buoyed primarily by the now-ended “Cash for Clunkers” program. Without this gain, the GDP would have increased at a much lower rate of around 1.9%. What about future auto sales? In September, sales plummeted as the C4C program sucked away sales that would have occurred later.  Also, Edmunds.com reported that the overwhelming majority of these car sales would have occurred anyway, so the actual cost of the 125,000 additional vehicles that can be credited to C4C was closer to $24,000 per vehicle, rather than the $4000 average rebate. Of course the Obama administration didn’t appreciate Edmunds calling their baby ugly, so they became an official member of the White House Enemies List.

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USA Today this week ran a shocking story which revealed just how easy it was to buy one’s way into cherry appointments, reporting that 40% of his top bundlers have been awarded administration posts. Moe Lane highlights all the other perks and benefits being showered on “the money” as well.

Today Big Government highlights something worth reiterating.

USA Today goes on to report that one top-level fundraiser apparently awarded with a plum job is Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski.

The paper reports that Genachowski raised more than $500,000 for Obama—which critics charge may have helped him “buy” a position that now puts him at the center of one of Washington’s most heated policy debates, namely that regarding net neutrality.

Genachowski, a strong proponent of the policy and a darling of far left groups like Save The Internet, has recently garnered criticism for what some see as an effort to ram net neutrality through with little to no debate. The proposed policy has recently become the focus of criticism and concern from everyone from internet service providers to groups typically regarded as Obama administration-friendly, such as the Asian American Justice Center, National Council of La Raza, the League of United Latin American Citizens and the National Urban League. 72 House Democrats and three Democratic Governors have also raised concerns about the proposed policy.

And Genachowski isn’t the only net neutrality proponent buying in.

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…plotting to pass Net Neutrality.

I’ve written in this space for a while about who the real Astroturfers are in the Net Neutrality fight. Google – and its puppets like Free Press – are promoting this idea that it’s a struggle between big telecommunications firms, and the little guys. Except the little guys are actually bigger Internet firms. The corporations pressing for Net Neutrality are Fortune 500 and even Dow Jones Industrial Average firms, with billions in cash ready to be spent on Net Neutrality, trying to defeat Proposition 8, or even promoting Barack Obama.

That last one makes the FCC’s rush to regulate look bad, given all the placements of Google people within the Obama administration as well as the nearly one million dollars that Google employees gave to the Obama-Biden campaign. How do we know that the secretive Obama White House isn’t directing the FCC to pay off Google?

After all, we know he’s giving donors special treatment. In fact, it has come out that FCC Chairman Genachowski himself was a major fundraiser for Obama, pulling in over a half million for the campaign. Why shouldn’t we believe that this is all a big circle of back scratching in the Obama adminstration, when he refuses to release the kinds of information we need to determine otherwise?

The President has played political games with information all along. He dangles his birth certificate on a string in order to distract the right. He’s keeping as little of the Obamacare agenda in writing as possible, because he knows if we read it and expose his plans, we can win the fight, so we end up with ridiculous spectacles like a Senate committee voting on a bill that hasn’t been written yet. And now he’s playing footsie with donors in secret.

We must encourage and join Senator McCain and Representative Blackburn in their fresh legislative efforts to stop the Google/Obama Net Neutrality scheme. We cannot allow this kind of quid pro quo to go unchallenged.

And if you’re wondering: why, yes. I enjoyed every second that I spent making this video. It was fun.

Open thread.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

The Independent Women’s Forum has conducted a poll of 800 women with a margin of error of ± 3.5%.

The results are not good for the Democrats.

You can read the summary here (PDF).

Basically, women really don’t like the public option and they really think all of this should wait anyway.

• Fifty-one percent of women are unsatisfied and 42% are satisfied with what they have read, seen, or heard about the proposals or legislation to change the way healthcare is covered and delivered here in the United States.
• Fifty-four percent would not personally trade in their coverage for a public plan; 38% would.
• Fifty-six percent disagree and 36% agree that “women like me would be best served by a government?run healthcare plan.”
• Fifty-seven percent disagree and 34% agree that “a federally?run healthcare program is what is best formy family and me.”
• Seventy-five percent want few to no changes to their own healthcare (40% ?? be modified, but mostly left as is; 35% ?? be left as?is) while 19% want it to undergo dramatic overhaul. For healthcare generally in the United States, a plurality of women (48%) wants slight modifications, 11% hope it is left unchanged, and 35% wish for dramatic changes.

The women in the Senate might want to think twice before supporting this nonsense.

President Obama and national security team discuss Afghanistan

As we’ve discussed before, President Obama is on the horns of a dilemma. He campaigned on the idea that the “real” war on transnational terrorism is being fought in Afghanistan and has since demonstrated that, true to his roots in the far left, he can’t bring himself to pursue any policy which might strengthen US influence abroad. In the process he has carried out a series of metaphorical terrorist attacks of his own, using surrogates to attack General Stan McChrystal. discredit the general notion of winning, and, of course, blame President Bush.

Today more of Obama’s Afghan strategy becomes apparent.

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Obama spent the day golfing instead of making his long awaited decision about sending more troops to Afghanistan.

For weeks, President Obama has been indecisively dithering about whether to send more troops to Afghanistan to fight what he correctly calls a “war of necessity.” General Stanley A. McChrystal’s report, in which he requests more troops, was issued at the end of August.

The Commander in Chief, taking political heat for not having enough women in his inner circle, found golf a more important political expediency than finally making the Afghan decision. There was so much heat that an article in the New York Times began, “Does the White House feel like a frat house?” Obama apparantly needed headlines proclaiming that he golfs with a woman, more than he needed to make the life and death decision as to whether he will send more troops in support of his “war of necessity.”

Obama’s Afghan indecision has gone on for so long, some wonder if Obama has delayed his long overdo decision until after this year’s gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia in order to help struggling Democrat candidates Jon Corzine and Craig Deeds. Others have simply concluded that Obama is ignoring Afghanistan and breaking his vow to fight his “war of necessity.”

We’re all familiar with Barack Hussein Obama (mmm mmm mmm) and his fondness for expressing his condescending, arrogant, self-inflated attitude via a nose-upturned pose. It seems that his protégé, (Where In The World Is) Robin Carnahan, has adopted the same approach.

That’s all we need in Missouri - a Barry wannabe who turns her nose up at her constituents. Just like her mentor.

(Consider this an open thread…)

By the time you read this, a lot of ink and air time will have been spent on this Politico article suggesting that the Republicans tremble when conservatives like Rush, Hannity, Beck, or even me says something.

Eric Cantor went on the record saying, “We need more voices.” I and everyone else I’ve talked to read that as being critical of the present voices, but his office tells me that “The question was does Rush, Beck, and others hurt, and Eric’s point was we need their voice and others. And he furthered that in the same quote by saying the party in power is trying to demonize voices, yours, ours, Rush’s, And no matter whom, we shouldn’t let them.” Good to hear, but it really didn’t read as a defense the way it was presented by the Politico.

In fact, what the GOP needs right now is leadership. Talk radio and places like RedState are filling a void because the GOP is behaving spectacularly crapulently. Lindsey Graham is collaborating with cap and traders. Pete Sessions and the NRCC are throwing their money down the rat hole that is the Scozzafava campaign. John Cornyn tries to shut out conservative hispanics in favor of squishy, but well tanned governors. The strategy is to be more like the Democrats. It is disappointing.

A question for those who want more voices — what should they be saying?

It is true the Republican brand still sucks. But “conservative” is becoming quite popular. The message of freedom and liberty still resonates. What the Republicans really fear is loss of control. They do not like that conservatives from outside the Beltway are more and more in the drivers’ seat.

But there is more to this story. This is something ignored by most people today. This story is, whether intended or not, a coordinated hit out of the White House. We know the Politico does this. It runs as full stories the hit jobs of the various parties.

And not only do we see the Politico running this as a hit job for the Democrats, but we see a few Republicans willing to go on record as useful idiots.

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Thank you all very much.  It’s a pleasure to be here, and especially to receive the Keeper of the Flame Award in the company of so many good friends.  

I’m told that among those you’ve recognized before me was my friend Don Rumsfeld.  I don’t mind that a bit.  It fits something of a pattern.  In a career that includes being chief of staff, congressman, and secretary of defense, I haven’t had much that Don didn’t get first.  But truth be told, any award once conferred on Donald Rumsfeld carries extra luster, and I am very proud to see my name added to such a distinguished list.  

To Frank Gaffney and all the supporters of Center for Security Policy, I thank you for this honor.  And I thank you for the great energy and high intelligence you bring to as vital a cause as there is – the advance of freedom and the uncompromising defense of the United States.

Most anyone who is given responsibility in matters of national security quickly comes to appreciate the commitments and structures put in place by others who came before.  You deploy a military force that was planned and funded by your predecessors.  You inherit relationships with partners and obligations to allies that were first undertaken years and even generations earlier.  With the authority you hold for a little while, you have great freedom of action.  And whatever course you follow, the essential thing is always to keep commitments, and to leave no doubts about the credibility of your country’s word.

So among my other concerns about the drift of events under the present administration, I consider the abandonment of missile defense in Eastern Europe to be a strategic blunder and a breach of good faith.  

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Earlier this year I outlined the phases of the evolution of the Obama “message.” Here they are again, with another update.

Throughout the campaign and on into January of this year:

February’s phase II:

March and April “World Apology Tour” theme:

.

So now we come to the latest stage in the evolution …

October’s “Fox isn’t news” love us or else media assault:

.

Consider this an OPEN THREAD.

Another for the ‘media’s starting to get just a bit tired of the administration’s crusade against Fox News’ file. From Ruth Marcus:

Obama’s dumb war with Fox News

There’s only one thing dumber than picking a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel — picking a fight with people who don’t even have to buy ink. The Obama administration’s war on Fox News is dumb on multiple levels. It makes the White House look weak, unable to take Harry Truman’s advice and just deal with the heat. It makes the White House look small, dragged down to the level of Glenn Beck. It makes the White House look childish and petty at best, and it has a distinct Nixonian — Agnewesque? — aroma at worst. It is a self-defeating trifecta: it distracts attention from the Obama administration’s substantive message; it serves to help Fox, not punish it, by driving up ratings; and it deprives the White House, to the extent it refuses to provide administration officials to appear on the cable network, of access to an audience that is, in fact, broader than hard-core Obama haters.

A colleague of mine wondered privately what could be the reason for what is fairly clearly a counter-productive effort on the administration’s part - and when you’re getting this kind of push-back from what is generally conceded to be a core constituency of the Democratic party, you’re engaged in a counter-productive effort. My response was one word:

Pique.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

The time is coming that the left is going to begin its drive for Single Payer Internet, and so the time has come for us to fight back. Finland is gradually nationalizing the Internet and declaring use of other people’s Internet hardware a “right,” and the left is cheering. Obama’s “Internet Czar” does not hide the left’s hopes for an end to freedom and markets for Internet service.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, President Barack Obama, and the rest of the radical left want to use the Net Neutrality movement as the crisis that gives cover to sweeping big government action, allowing the FCC to pick winners and losers and dictate to private individuals and firms how their private property must be run, putting government bureaucrats in charge of the Internet.

The dangers of the administration’s Net Neutrality plans are not theoretical:

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