Today there is a great post up on The Conservatives by our own Brian Faughnan displaying the absolute lack of compassion and downright cruelty of Barack Obama and his Administration.

The process will get more difficult for those who lost loved ones: Mohammed will attack and denigrate the victims. He will express pride in what he has done. Jihadists around the world will pay him tribute. The foreign and domestic press will dissect every step of the process. And in Manhattan, security will mount, and the alert level will rise, and New Yorkers will undoubtedly read that our intelligence agencies are facing more and more credible threats against the City. This will go on for years.

Even if Mohammed is eventually convicted and executed - by no means a slam dunk - could that result possibly be worth the pain?

What sort of man could fail to take into account the pain he is likely to cause for the 9/11 families, and for the people of New York?

Brian goes on to list a few bits of evidence as to what sort of man could do such a thing. Earlier today I came across another article that provided further evidence. While being greeted by our military members on Osan Air Base in South Korea the President quipped:

You guys make a pretty good photo op

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(Via Hot Air) Took him long enough:

President Obama acknowledged for the first time on Wednesday that his administration would miss a self-imposed deadline to close the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, by mid-January, admitting the difficulties of following through on one of his first pledges as president.

[snip]

On Guantánamo, Mr. Obama said that he now hoped to shut down the detention facility sometime next year, but he did not set a new deadline.

Translation: Gitmo isn’t closing in 2010, either - which means that it probably isn’t closing, period.  Which is something that I’ve known was going to be happening for months.  But then, I’m not the Fortunate Son.

Moe Lane

PS: Next time?  Run for and serve as Governor of something, Mr. President.  It helps cut down on rookie mistakes like this.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

I’ve seen a lot from the left in the last twenty-four hours that I, and conservatives in general, do not want to give Khalid Sheikh Mohammed a fair trail and that I, and the right in general, do not believe in our system of due process.

Let me be crystal clear: it is precisely because I believe in our system of due process in a civil setting that I do not want Khalid Sheikh Mohammed tried in such a setting. The left ignores this at its peril.

I have full faith in our system of justice. Criminal defendants are given every advantage and resource to ensure they do not get convicted of a crime they did not commit. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will get most of those advantages and resources. But that is all a distraction from one central fact — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is not a criminal. He is a soldier in a war captured on a battlefield. That is not something our criminal justice system was designed to handle and should not handle.

I think Eric Holder is flat out lying when he said this past Sunday that Barack Obama had no knowledge whatsoever of the KSM decision until he was headed off to China. But, to be charitable, even were that true, it ignores the fact that Eric Holder, the Attorney General, should not have been the one to make the decision. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was picked up on a battlefield, not an American street.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is not a gang member. Al Qaeda is not a gang. 9/11 was not a drive by shooting or even a gang land massacre. 9/11 was an act of war. Al Qaeda is the enemy. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is a soldier in a war. Our system of justice is not set up to try soldiers captured on a battlefield.

It is willfully naive and damnably indifferent to civilian American lives and our system of civilian justice to think otherwise.

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Remember those $400.00 and $800.00 tax credits Barack Obama gave you in his stimulus plan? And remember that $250.00 gift he gave social security recipients?

Well, Obama decided he wants them back. Yep. According to the IRS, Obama has never asked for an adjustment of the tax tables, so millions of Americans are going to get taxed for having received the tax credits back in February — typically through adjustments the federal government demanded businesses make in employees’ withholdings.

“While implementing a credit through reduced withholding is an effective way to provide economic stimulus evenly throughout the year, it is difficult to account for everyone’s circumstances,” said J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration. “More than 10 percent of all taxpayers who file individual tax returns for 2009 could owe additional taxes.”

The tax credit is also available for 2010. Russell said the problems will continue in 2010 if they are not resolved.

It has been almost 90 days since General McChrystal asked Barack Obama for more troops. No decision has been made. The General still waits as our soldiers keep dying.

But that might actually be a better alternative to any decision Obama might make.

As awful as that sounds, new information is proving Barack Obama’s got his first major military decision disastrously wrong and the repercussions to our national security will be far reaching in light of China’s growing aggressiveness.

Back up to January. Barack Obama had just been sworn in to office and the Pentagon then began reviewing whether the F-22 Raptor program should get more funding. Despite lots of talk about saving and creating jobs, the Obama administration nudged Defense Secretary Robert Gates to kill the F-22, an advanced stealth fighter for which no nation has put up a competing system.

In April, Robert Gates said he intended to kill the program. In July, Senators tried to keep the funding alive citing threats from China. But, Barack Obama’s administration said those threats were overestimated and Obama threatened to veto the entire defense budget if F-22 funding were left in.

Gates said Monday he’d heard no “substantive” argument for keeping the jet for national security reasons, pointing out that China has no planes that can compete with the more than 1,000 advanced fighter jets the U.S. will have by 2020.

Gates said that the gap between the two countries’ aerial arsenals will only widen.

Unfortunately for the United States military, that turns out to be flat out wrong.

According to Aviation Week, China not only is building a 5th generation fighter to compete with the F-22, but they’ll begin testing it this year.

Beijing’s fighter announcement suggests a serious failing in U.S. intelligence assessments, mocking a July 16 statement of U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates that China would have no fifth-generation fighters by 2020.

Note that China announced this while Obama was in China sucking up to them.

President Barack Obama admitted Monday to a group of students in Shanghai, China that, while billed as the most tech savvy President in history, he doesn’t use Twitter.

When asked by a student if he was aware of China’s firewall blocking the popular micro-blogging service, Obama forewent his tech friendly reputation, saying, “I have never used Twitter but I’m an advocate of technology and not restricting internet access.”

President Obama’s admission of his unfamiliarity of the internet tool du jour would have been an altogether innocuous acknowledgement that the President is, well, old, were it not for the dogged efforts of his campaign apparatus in portraying the young then-Senator Obama as hip and tech savvy opposite the old and inaccessible Senator John McCain.

In explicitly making the case that McCain’s simple awareness of technology was not equivalent to Obama’s superior appreciation–and use–of technology, the Obama campaign launched a web ad in September of 2008 callously assailing McCain for his inability to use a computer and send an email. Were McCain elected, their logic went, the seat of the Free World’s power would run through the 73-year-old’s car phone and computer running on MS-DOS.

Of the ad, the Obama campaign said, “‘Still’ details why John McCain would just be another out of touch president offering more of the same.”

While the Obama campaign suggested McCain’s indifference to new technology was the result of the Senator’s age, Republicans were quick to note the real reason for his perceived tech-illiteracy: Senator McCain’s battle-field wounds limit the use of his hands. The Obama campaign never apologized, insisting McCain’s failure to make use of technology was due to his age and he was therefor unfit to serve as President.

President Obama’s admission that he’s Twitter-averse is not an acknowledgment that he’s old or even out of touch, like he suggested of Senator McCain. It is, however, emblematic of the duplicitous ends to which President Obama and his allies–complicit in this and countless other deceptive electioneering offenses–will go in the name of campaigning.

Over 90,000 Americans were killed in the Pacific during World War II defending the United States and the world from Japanese aggression.  Thank God many of the survivors passed on before they had to witness the President of the United States bowing low to the Emperor of Japan.

To those veterans of the Pacific still living today, I say thank you.  And I apologize on behalf of my generation for producing a president so bent on dishonoring your service and your buddies’ sacrifices.

Mr. Obama, you are an embarrassment.

Just like on the campaign trail, no hand over his heart for our national anthem. Guess he doesn’t want to offend the muslim community.

*Sorry, got this and was told it was Veterans Day. It was actually Memorial Day.

There’s a few in this one:

• Using a bloodthirsty Communist dictator to sell T-shirts.
• Watching quite a lot of administration pushback on the socialism thing get casually subverted by some guy in China trying to sell some T-shirts.
• The Chinese kicking off a visit that’s supposed to be about mutual cultural outreach by banning the T-shirt in question.

Although I suppose that the last one is an improvement.  Back in the day, they’d just have taken the vendors out, shot them, then charged their families for the bullet.

Moe Lane

PS: They’re available for sale here, which is a site that will cheerfully pander to both sides of the spectrum when selling you overpriced President-themed junk.

Because that’s AMERICA.

James Galyean is a former federal prosecutor and former counsel on the US Senate Judiciary Committee. He helped draft both the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which dealt with the detention, interrogation, and trial of Guantanamo Bay terrorist detainees. He is currently running for Congress in the 3rd Congressional District of South Carolina.
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The administration’s decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in federal criminal court in New York shows that President Obama is not serious about our national security. 


KSM conceived, planned, and launched the attacks that killed thousands of American citizens in a war that he and other terrorists declared. He is an avowed enemy of the United States. The criminal justice system is not the proper place to determine his fate. Our criminal courts provide protections to our citizens that should not be provided to a terrorist, and may actually damage national security.


Just think about the discovery requirements that could be placed on prosecutors. For instance, in the trial of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, prosecutors were required to turn over to defense lawyers a large amount of intelligence information. Documents from that discovery production, which were never supposed to be provided to anyone outside the defense team, were later found in an al-Qaeda hideout. Let me say that again, confidential documents from a trial in New York were later found in the hands of al-Qaeda. 



Now consider that KSM was captured in a lightening raid in Pakistan. The intelligence that led to that capture has been the subject of a number of reports. However, al-Qaeda would love to know for sure where that information came from and how it was obtained. In addition to that, they may be able to learn a number of other things from discovery in this trial.


Consider for a moment the constitutional strictures regarding coerced confessions. Think a liberal judge might want to explore whether waterboarding is too coercive? Or being held in one of the CIA’s black prisons? 



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Not Right Now: Real Soon Now (via AoSHQ).  Apparently the plan is to wait until after the current wave of spending, then convince the Democratic party to stop spending taxpayer money that does not, in point of fact, quite exist.  Except for funding a new jobs bill, which somehow isn’t expected to ‘count.’

But can he do it, after… oh, let Bryon York get this one:

I asked whether Obama, after presiding over the stimulus, the bailouts, the big Democratic budget, the House cap-and-trade vote, health care reform, and finally, a tripling of the already-high federal deficit, could plausibly position himself as a spending hawk. “Their principle failure is that they have allowed themselves to be defined as government interventioners and huge spenders,” the strategist told me. “If he becomes the great expander of government and the great increaser of spending, he’s going to get destroyed in 2012.”

Actually, the principal failure is that they are government interventionists and huge spenders - and have revealed this blatantly enough that independent voters have noticed. In other words, it’s not ‘If he becomes;’ it’s ‘he has become.’  That’s the primary reason why his economic marks are so poor Right Now - and why waiting for Real Soon Now is contraindicated.

Contraindicated.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Pardon me if I am seeing red this morning:

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and four others accused in the attacks will be put on criminal trial in New York, Attorney General Eric Holder is expected to announce later Friday.

WHAT IN THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE?

So, Barack Obama will be staging his own New York production of Chicago, with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as Roxy Hart (”You had it coming, you had it coming, you only have yourselves to blame….” ). We will be treated to months upon months of front page headlines giving a platform to this lunatic war criminal. The courthouses and City office buildings in lower Manhattan (City Hall, the state courts, the immigration offices, the Court of International Trade, the US Attorney’s Office, the DA’s office, and the main city office building that does marriage licenses and the like are all within about a two-block radius of the federal courthouses and the Metropolitan Correctional Center) will be snarled with massive security, as if lower Manhattan needs more traffic and more armed men. We’ll have to have pretrial hearings on the inevitable countless motions about how KSM was apprehended and the evidence against him collected, undoubtedly to the detriment of vital sources of intelligence, like when we lost the ability to track Osama bin Laden by cellphone after our tracing of his calls was revealed by a prosecution under the DOJ Criminal Division then headed by…Eric Holder. And that’s even before he starts in on the sob stories about being waterboarded. I’m not seriously concerned that KSM stands any chance of being acquitted, but a hung jury? It only takes one person with extreme political or religious views, one juror who just can’t abide the death penalty (even assuming Obama’s DOJ pursues it). Just imagine the controversy, if there are Muslims in the jury pool, over what questions prosecutors are permitted to ask them and whether they can be challenged. And of course, it sends the message to our enemies that there’s nothing you can do to us that will get you sent through a process rougher than the one we used on Michael Vick or Martha Stewart.

I know I have spoken and written many rough things about Obama, but as Michael Moore would say, most New Yorkers voted for the man - why is he doing this to us?

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This is insane.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and four others accused in the attacks will be put on criminal trial in New York, Attorney General Eric Holder is expected to announce later Friday.

There have been reports in the past month about another potential terrorist attack disrupted in New York City. Bringing these high profile terrorist leaders to New York will just put a target on New York again.

Even worse, the White House is going to subject these terrorists to criminal trials in civilian courts. They will get all the due process rights of citizens in court and potentially will be able to get access to material evidence in a civilian court that could reveal intelligence we’d prefer them not to have.

In a splitting the baby moment, though,

in the announcement Friday will be plans to hold a military tribunal for Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, alleged to have planned the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole.

So, the man who blew up New York gets a civilian trial and the guy who blew up the Cole gets a military tribunal.

Perhaps Obama is banking on a jury of New Yorkers intent on hanging Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, but remember, if he goes to a jury in New York, he gets to wind his way through the system claiming he got no right to a fair trial.

If we’re talking show trials, this is more and more evidence of the Obama Administration developing all the characteristics of a third world kleptocracy or totalitarian regime.

Random side point: How much more will the deficit balloon to pay for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s attorney? Remember, the Supreme Court has been pretty clear that taxpayers have to fork over sizable change to give criminals adequate legal representation.

The Democrat coalition may be fracturing more visibly along abortion lines in the Obamacare debate, but that’s not the only popcorn-friendly battle going on right now. ‘Minority’ groups are going after Net Neutrality now, and nobody is sparing the ‘race card.’

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During the Bush administration, leaks out of the Pentagon, State Department, and CIA that would undermine national security were routinely praised by the Democrats and mainstream media as patriotic.

Now that leaks are coming out showing just how inept Barack Obama’s foreign policy dithering has become, leakers must be shut down. The administration is insisting that the Pentagon do something about all the meddlesome leaks that show the behind the scenes indecisiveness rapidly becoming the hallmark of this administration’s foreign policy.

The Obama administration is increasingly exasperated by leaks of national-security-related information and is planning a major effort to root out and punish those responsible, top officials said Thursday.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he is “appalled” by a series of leaks surrounding the president’s deliberations about the way forward in Afghanistan and the investigation into last week’s massacre at Fort Hood, Texas.

Maybe this is why the Obama administration has decided to purge Republicans from the civil service.

Please see the update at the bottom of this post. — Erick

Via Instapundit comes word that the federal government’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM) intends to purge the federal government of Republican civil servants all in the name of purify the federal bureaucracy.

You can read the OPM memo here.

It is a typical Washington process that many political appointees are able to take jobs within the civil service once their political appointment expires — usually at the conclusion of one administration. What often happens as well is Congressional staffers, before an election or shortly thereafter, will move over to the Executive Branch placed into the civil service, in effect, by appointment.

So, for example, when George Bush became President in 2001, a number of Clinton political appointees became civil service employees. As a result, they became subject to civil service hiring and firing rules, which meant they could no longer be replaced simply for having been a Democratic appointee.

Barack Obama is changing that. He intends to purge all Republicans from the federal bureaucracy retroactive to five years ago.

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Senator Jeff Sessions is calling on his colleagues to filibuster Judge David Hamilton. Go here and call your Senator. Tell your Senator to oppose cloture on David Hamilton and filibuster his nomination to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Judge Hamilton, a district court judge, is Barack Obama’s nominee to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals.  That very court has cited Judge Hamilton for abusing his power as a judge.

In 1994, the 7th Circuit rebuked Judge Hamilton for denying a Rabbi the right to display a Menorah as part of an Indianapolis holiday display.

In 2005, Judge Hamilton prohibited the Indiana House of Representatives from praying if Jesus’s name was mentioned, but said praying in Allah’s name was perfectly fine.

He also is one of the most lenient judges in America when it comes to crime and criminals.

In United States v. Rinehart, 2007 U.S. LEXIS 19498 (S.D. Ind. Feb 2, 2007), Judge Hamilton used his opinion to request clemency for a police officer who pled guilty to two counts of child pornography. The 32 year old officer had engaged in “consensual” sex with two teenagers and videotaped his activities.

In United States v. Woolsey, 535 F.3d 540 (7th Cir. 2008), the Seventh Circuit faulted Judge Hamilton for disregarding an earlier conviction in order to avoid imposing a life sentence on a repeat offender.

Call your Senator. Tell your Senator to oppose cloture on Judge Hamilton and support a filibuster.

Good grief. Florida Governor Charlie Crist has never had to run a real primary against a real Republican and it is starting to show.

About a week or so ago, Crist lied and said he had never supported Barack Obama’s stimulus plan, despite signing a letter of support, appearing with Obama on video, and producing a personal video in favor of the stimulus.

But it gets better.

When Barack Obama headed to Florida the other day, reporters asked Charlie Crist if he was going and Crist claimed he did not even know Barack Obama was in Florida that day.

According to an Open Records Act request, Crist very much did know.

E-mails obtained by the St. Petersburg Times this week through a public records request cast doubt on that claim. The messages prove Crist’s office was aware of the visit, and it seems unlikely his aide would have dismissed Crist going to Jacksonville without checking with Crist.

He’s not commenting further. He doesn’t have to.

Patients First goes after President Obama’s broken promises of transparency in the health care reform process:

Presidential candidate Obama promised time and again not to negotiate health care reform behind closed doors, to bring all parties together and to broadcast health care reform negotiations on C-SPAN.

It is truly unfortunate that President Obama did not keep those promises, but instead, chose to meet privately with health care executives, cut a deal with drug firms in secret, and outsourced the drafting of the Obamacare legislation to the extremely partisan, Democrat-controlled Congress.