We have a new audio clip up:  Obama's First Month.  You can hear it here.

THURSDAY,  FEBRUARY 26,  2009

CLOSINGS - AT 6:30 P.M. ET:  From The New York Times: 

The Rocky Mountain News in Denver will cease publication on Friday.

E.W. Scripps, which owns newspaper, known locally as The Rocky, announced Thursday that it had failed to find a buyer for the daily. Scripps’s chief executive, Rich Boehne, said in a statement that The Rocky was “a victim of changing times in our industry and huge economic challenges.” Scripps said the newspaper lost $16 million last year.

The Rocky is one of several big-city newspapers that lost tens of millions of dollars in the last few years. Those papers now face a precarious future. Hearst, for example, said last week that it was considering selling or closing The San Francisco Chronicle, and it plans to close The Seattle Post-Intelligencer if it finds no buyer for that paper.

COMMENT:  No celebrating, please.  The death of a newspaper, including a newspaper whose views we might oppose, is a sad moment.  It means a lot of people out of work, and most have tried to do their jobs honestly.  But I do believe that improving the news product, and fighting bias, will go a long way toward saving many American newspapers.  Loss of credibility has been a serious problem.

A SICKENING CHOICE - AT 5:34 P.M. ET:  It's now official. Charles Freeman Jr., essentially a front man for the Saudi regime, an apologist for terrorism, an Israel hater of the first rank, and a man who expressed approval of the Tiananmen Square massacre in China, has been appointed chairman of the National Intelligence Council by Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence.

This appointment is an obscenity.  Reportedly, the White House was aware of Freeman's record, but did not want to interfere with Blair's choice.  The fact that Blair could choose a man like this calls into profound question Blair's judgment and fitness for office.  Freeman will be responsible for overseeing the National Intelligence Estimates, which guide the president. 

Let us be blunt.  In my view, Freeman is a security risk.  He is a man who represents anything but American values.  The lame White House concern about "interfering" with Blair is sickening.  Who is president, Obama or Blair? 

For years the left wing has criticized the "politicizing" of intelligence.  Now we have, in the most sensitive position, a man with profoundly disturbing political views. 

Something is very wrong here.  Our intelligence service is sliding downhill under the direction of Dennis Blair, a retired admiral, and the White House refuses to intervene. 

From The Weekly Standard:

The left has defended Freeman's views on Israel -- even when his statements seem designed only to inflame and provoke controversy. What the left is unable to do is defend Freeman's views on China, where he unapologetically supports the bloody crackdown on democracy activists who dare protest in the streets of the capital, and Saudi Arabia, which as far as Freeman is concerned is something like Berkeley in the desert. The left spent years bemoaning the close ties between the Bush family and the Saudi royals -- and it was a relationship that few on the right were eager to defend. Now the left can have their turn defending a man who is so closely tied to the Saudi Kingdom that in the weeks after 9/11 he wouldn't even consider halting his business with the bin Laden family.

It is perfectly apparent that Obama's foreign policy is courting disaster.  It favors our enemies, insults our friends, and has no love for human rights or democracy.  Change we can believe in?

DOW CLOSE - AT 5:31 P.M. ET:  The Dow closed down 89, to 7182.  By contrast, it closed at 12685 one year ago.

SAME OLD, SAME OLD - AT 5:26 P.M . ET: 

UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- President Barack Obama's administration will seek to end Iran's nuclear ambition and its support for terrorism, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations said Thursday -- drawing an immediate rebuke from Iran's U.N. envoy.

Iran has never and will never try to acquire nuclear weapons, Ambassador Mohammad Khazee said in a letter to the U.N. Security Council immediately after U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice spoke. He dismissed her allegation that Iran engages in terrorism as ''baseless and absurd.''

COMMENT:  No progress with Iran, and there won't be. 

DOW NOW - AT 3:10 P.M. ET:  The Dow is now down 65, to 7206.  Obama must have said something.

DOW SO-SO - AT 12:53 P.M. ET:  The Dow is up 31.

NOT SENATOR FROM NEW YORK ANY LONGER - AT 12:35 P.M. ET:  From the New York Post:

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton sent angry messages to Israel in the past week, complaining that humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip is being blocked by officials in Jerusalem, Israeli media reported yesterday.

COMMENT:  We still await a single angry message from this administration directed at an enemy of the United States.  But of course, Barack Hussein Obama may have a different definition of "enemy" than we do.

DEFENSE CUTBACKS - AT 11:59 A.M. ET:  The administration's new budget is out.  We look first to defense funding, but details are scarce.  The New York Times reports:

But some clues have emerged, and defense consultants say it seems clear that expensive missile defense systems and parts of the Army’s vast modernization effort will be cut back. Some also say that plans for a new Navy destroyer are likely to be scrapped.

COMMENT:  We're going back to the 1970s, when we almost wrecked national defense.  With the trillions being spent to bail out various sectors of the economy, you'd think critical defense programs could be kept intact, especially at a time when Iran is building its offensive capability and Russia is resurgent.  I hope we don't pay a price.

DOW UP - AT 11:53 A.M. ET:  The Dow is up 50, to 7321.

WHY DO THEY HATE US?

Posted at 11:20 a.m. ET:

No, no, no, I'm not referring to other "cultures" (which of course are equal), that are living in the 10th century.  I'm referring to liberals.  I've held this piece until I had time to address it carefully because it's one of the best articles on the subject of the liberal mind that I've read in years.  It's by William Voegeli, of Claremont McKenna College, in The Wall Street Journal:

John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin to be his running mate set off a fiercely contemptuous reaction. The chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party said Mrs. Palin's sole qualification for high office was that she had never had an abortion...

...The denunciation of Palin took place 45 years after William F. Buckley Jr. wrote: "I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University."

From Richard Nixon's invoking the "silent majority" to Mrs. Palin's campaigning as a devout, plainspoken hockey mom, conservatives have claimed that they share the common sense of the common man. Liberals—from Adlai Stevenson to Barack Obama to innumerable writers, artists and academics—have often been willing foils in this drama, unable to stop themselves from disparaging the very people whose votes are indispensable to the liberal cause. The elephant-in-the-room irony is that the liberal cause is supposed to be about improving the prospects and economic security of ordinary Americans, whose beliefs and intelligence liberals so often enjoy deriding.

Buckley explained his "two thousand faculty members" quote this way:

I greatly fear intellectual arrogance, and that is a distinguishing characteristic of the university which refuses to accept any common premise. In the deliberations of two thousand citizens of Boston I think one would discern a respect for the laws of God and for the wisdom of our ancestors which does not characterize the thought of Harvard professors—who, to the extent that they believe in God at all, tend to believe He made some terrible mistakes which they would undertake to rectify...

Well said, as always.  Voegeli explains:

What sets the people in the phonebook apart from the professors, according to this argument, is that they believe in and defer to profound truths existing outside of history. They are willing, furthermore, to accept that the "democracy of the dead," incorporating the cumulative judgment of people long gone and forgotten, might well have grasped those truths better than people, even very smart people, who happen to be alive at this moment.

The professors, by contrast, expect to be deferred to, not to be the ones deferring.

And...

Our age has seen political disdain become seamlessly integrated into cultural disdain. The prominent novelist E.L. Doctorow showed the way in 1980 when he wrote that Ronald Reagan had grown up in "just the sorts of places [small towns in Illinois] responsible for one of the raging themes of American literature, the soul-murdering complacency of our provinces. . . . The best and brightest fled all our Galesburgs and Dixons, if they could, but the candidate was not among them...

...A third-rate student at a fifth-rate college could learn from the stage, the debating platform, the gridiron and the fraternity party the styles of manliness and verbal sincerity that would stand him in good stead when the time came to make his mark in the world."

And...

Achieving success in his first job out of college, as a radio announcer in Des Moines, Reagan made a number of local speaking engagements, "giving talks to fraternal lodges, boys' clubs and the like, telling sports stories and deriving from them Y.M.C.A. sorts of morals."

Oh, that inferior, unfortunate man.  You know, if we all had YMCA sorts of morals, the world would be a much better place.

We see here all the basic elements, employed for the past 28 years, of liberal condescension. Every issue of The New Yorker, Vanity Fair or Rolling Stone makes clear that the policy positions of George W. Bush, Republicans and conservatives in general are wicked and stupid. The real problem, however, is that everything about these people—where they reside, what they believe, how they live, work, recreate, talk and think—is in irredeemably bad taste. To embark on a conversation with one of them, based on straight-faced openness to the possibility of learning something interesting or important, would be like choosing to vacation in Wichita instead of Tuscany.

And...

This disdain is not only inefficacious, however, but unsatisfying. The problem with the superior attitude—either you get the joke, or you are the joke—is that the people being condescended to probably aren't smart enough to realize that they are being mocked. The novelist Jane Smiley calls this "the unteachable ignorance of the red states."

Remember that, all you unteachable people out there.

Intellectuals are the point of the spear. Richard Hofstadter devoted a book in 1963 to examining "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life." He was a war correspondent who confined his reporting to the shots fired in just one direction, however, saying nothing about anti-Americanism in intellectual life.

Ah, the unspeakable subject. 

Another part of the program is to confound the complacent assumptions of American patriotism. Not only has America's past been bloody and shameful in ways the uninstructed few must be made to realize, but the supposed depredations of America's "enemies" are, upon examination, understandable and even admirable.

Yes, those beheadings are entirely understandable.  Do you feel the righteous rage of the downtrodden masses, especially the ones running the OPEC countries?

The late Susan Sontag was forbiddingly erudite—an essayist, novelist, playwright and critic. There's not a community college dropout in America, however, gullible enough to have traveled to Hanoi and reported back, as she did in 1968, "The North Vietnamese genuinely care about the welfare of the hundreds of captured American pilots and give them bigger rations than the Vietnamese population gets, 'because they're bigger than we are,' as a Vietnamese army officer told me, 'and they're used to more meat than we are.' "

Ask John McCain for a memo on that.

By the same token, whatever the correct assessment of Sarah Palin's abilities and limitations, it's impossible to imagine that it would have taken her 20 years of close contact with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright to notice that he sincerely believes a number of toxic, lunatic ideas.

Finally...

Barack Obama's degrees from Columbia and Harvard law school may be proof of intellectual agility, but they do not guarantee good sense. For this, as William Buckley suggested 45 years ago, we are better advised to rely on graduates of the University of Idaho, or even the opinions of stewardesses.

Great piece.  Read the whole thing, and send it to a friend.

February 26, 2009.      Permalink          

GRIM - AT 8:35 A.M. ET:  If you think we've got problems, consider this, from Bloomberg:

The worst recession since 1975 is eroding the wealth of elderly Italians and forcing them to do something they had never before considered: sell family homes to strangers at a discount on the condition that they can stay on until they pass away.

But get this:

History provides a cautionary tale.

In 1965, French lawyer Andre-Francois Raffray was 47 when he bought 90-year-old Jeanne Calment’s apartment, expecting to move in with his family within a few years. Instead, she went on to become the oldest woman in history, dying at 122 in 1997. By then, Raffray had already been dead for two years.

COMMENT:  Count your blessings. 

MORE GREAT VETTING - AT 8:29 A.M. ET:  President Obama has presented his third nominee for commerce secretary, and already there's a problem.  From The Politico:

President Barack Obama on Wednesday tried for the third time to fill the vacant commerce secretary position, tapping former Washington Gov. Gary Locke for a Cabinet post that two previous nominees have backed away from.

But Locke’s post-gubernatorial efforts to drum up business for an array of companies in the rapidly expanding Chinese market may require steps to reconcile with the administration’s ethics policy...

...The problem is that Locke, a partner in an international law firm’s China division, has advocated for Microsoft, Starbucks, and banking, timber and shipping interests in recent years, raising potential conflicts for him as head of a department charged with promoting U.S. trade around the globe.

One of Obama’s first acts as president was to sign an executive order barring executive branch officials for two years from working on issues “directly and substantially related” to their former clients or employers.

COMMENT:  How many Americans do you think would easily qualify for the post of secretary of commerce?  A thousand?  Ten thousand?  A hundred thousand?  We're not talking brain surgery.  Couldn't Obama find someone who was completely clean?  What is wrong with this crew?  Can't they get past the Chicago style of politics?  I hope they examined this bird's tax returns.

EUROPEAN HARD-LINERS? - AT 7:50 A.M. ET:  Some stories make you blink twice.  This is one of them.  From the Jerusalem Post:

France, Germany and the UK are planning to present US President Barack Obama with a list of increased sanctions against Iran, the Financial Times reported Tuesday.

That other nations should be compiling such a list should be embarrassing to us.  But there is no embarrassment for this administration, in foreign policy, that's too great.  Consider this:

The Financial Times said that while diplomats in Europe confirmed that the EU3 (France, Germany and the UK) had compiled such a list, they gave different reasons for it. Some reportedly explained that the list aimed to beef up the current "carrot-and-stick" approach, while others said the reason was to push for "a more hard-line outcome of Washington's current review of its Iran policy."

COMMENT:  Say what?  Europe is pushing for America to be more hard-line on Iran?  What does that tell you about Obama?  The Europeans are catching on.  They may complain about us, but, in the end, they want a strong America, and the sane Europeans understand the Iranian threat - much better than the Obama crowd apparently does.

OH, SWELL - AT 7:34 A.M. ET:  From The Washington Times:

The board of governors of the world's nuclear watchdog meets next week in Vienna, Austria, to discuss Iran, but the Obama administration may not have much to say.

Focused on domestic economic issues and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the administration is still putting in place the personnel to draft policy on Iran.

COMMENT:  Doesn't that give you confidence?  Douglas MacArthur once said that all tragedies begin with two words:  Too late.  Obama was elected almost four months ago.  Iran's nuclear program can have devastating consequences far beyond the Iraq or Afghanistan problems.  Yet, personnel are still not in place.  It's the same old story:  The left-wing Democrats have no interest in national-security policy, only in domestic policy, with lots of cash flowing.  That we don't yet have an Iran policy is a disgrace.  Note the sense of outrage in the mainstream media.

WEDNESDAY,  FEBRUARY 25,  2009

DISGUSTING - AT 10:53 P.M. ET - That's the best word to describe the widely rumored impending appointment of Charles Freeman Jr. to head the National Intelligence Council, which produces the highly influential National Intelligence Estimates.  The administration could have done better with Bill Ayers or the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Freeman's sins go well beyond the fact that he's essentially a front man for the Saudi government, already reported here, and is a world-class Israel basher.  It turns out he also bashes the armed forces of the United States, and - you can't make this up - has defended China's Tiananmen Square massacre.  From the Wall Street Journal:

The specter of a Chinese threat, he remarked during a China forum at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in October 2006, is nothing more than "a great fund-raiser for the hyper-expensive advanced weaponry our military-industrial complex prefers to make and our armed forces love to employ."

Nice, huh?  Maybe someone should introduce this clown to the families of America soldiers who've died using those weapons against armed enemies of the United States.   And now this:

On the massacre at Tiananmen Square in 1989, Mr. Freeman unabashedly sides with the Chinese government, a remarkable position for an appointee of an administration that has pledged to advance the cause of human rights...

..."The truly unforgivable mistake of the Chinese authorities," he wrote there in 2006, "was the failure to intervene on a timely basis to nip the demonstrations in the bud." Moreover, "the Politburo's response to the mob scene at 'Tiananmen' stands as a monument to overly cautious behavior on the part of the leadership, not as an example of rash action." Indeed, continued Mr. Freeman, "I do not believe it is acceptable for any country to allow the heart of its national capital to be occupied by dissidents intent on disrupting the normal functions of government, however appealing to foreigners their propaganda may be."

Mr. Obama speaks of American ideals.  And this is the man he'll reportedly put in charge of one of our most sensitive intelligence units?  This is the face of American ideals?

Naturally, most of the mainstream media hasn't noticed.  But I hope enough decent Americans have noticed, and that this disgraceful appointment can be blocked. 

BULLETIN - AT 10:15 P.M. ET:  From the horse's mouth, from the main oracle, from the very top, from the chief of spookdom - we are authoritatively informed that there's still a war on terror.  I'm so glad to know we weren't wrong here.  From a Politico story on CIA Director Leon Panetta, although you'll have to dig deep into the story to find it:

The phrase “war on terror,” a hallmark of President George W. Bush’s White House, is rarely used in the Obama administration, but Panetta that “there’s no question this is a war.”...

...“There’s no question this is a war,” he said. “There are those who threaten us to come here and kill Americans. … CIA is engaged on the front lines to try to develop the intelligence necessary to make sure that that doesn’t happen.”

COMMENT:  Does this mean Panetta won't be invited to the next Daily Kos convention?  Or even to the White House?

HUH? - AT 7:16 P.M. ET:  From Abe Greenwald at Contentions:

The AP reports that Eric Holder was impressed with Guantánamo Bay.

Attorney General Eric Holder said Wednesday the Guantanamo detention center is a well-run, professional facility that will be difficult to close-but he’s still going to do it.

Well, naturally. The Obama administration is only interested in keeping poorly run enterprises going. There’s more:

He said he did not witness any rough treatment of detainees, and in fact found the military staff and leadership performing admirably.

“I did not witness any mistreatment of prisoners. I think, to the contrary, what I saw was a very conscious attempt by these guards to conduct themselves in an appropriate way,” he said.

Talk about being a “coward.” The head legal advisor of the United States government witnesses our most important detention facility being run efficiently, legally, and humanely, and can’t even bring himself to question its gratuitous closing.

From Reuters:

LONDON (Reuters) - Abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay has worsened sharply since President Barack Obama took office as prison guards "get their kicks in" before the camp is closed, according to a lawyer who represents detainees...

...Admiral Patrick Walsh, the review's author, acknowledged on Monday that reports of abuse had emerged but concluded all inmates were being treated in line with the Geneva Conventions.

"We heard allegations of abuse," he said, asked if detainees had reported torture. "And what we did at that point was to go back and investigate the allegation... What we found is that there were in some cases substantiated evidence where guards had misconduct, I think that would be the best way to put it."

Walsh said his review looked at 20 allegations of abuse, 14 of which were substantiated, but he did not go into details. Generally he said the abuse ranged from "gestures, comments, disrespect" to "preemptive use of pepper spray."

COMMENT:  Gestures, comments and disrespect?  That's abuse?  Talk to John McCain about abuse. 

Will someone please reconcile these two stories?  Please.  Will someone try to get at the truth?  Please.  Will someone give us a mature, adult definition of abuse?  Please.   The scandal here may not be Gitmo, but the reporting of Gitmo.

DOW CLOSE - AT 4:40 P.M. ET:  The Dow closed down 80 points, at 7271.

JOB FRONT PAINFUL - AT 1:01 P.M. ET: 

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Employers took a large ax to their payrolls in January, the government said Wednesday, and the cuts are likely to get worse over the next few months.

The Labor Department reported that mass layoffs, or job cuts of 50 or more by a single employer, increased to 2,227 in January, up almost 50 percent from the same month last year. More than 235,000 workers were fired in last month's cuts.

COMMENT:  One huge flaw in the Obama stimulus package is that it hasn't given employers the confidence to keep people on the payroll.  That flaw can be economically fatal.

DOW NOT WOWED - AT 12:53 P.M. ET:  The Dow is down 147 points, to 7204, as Wall Street signals that it was less than wowed by the president's speech to Congress.

IN THE REAL WORLD - AT 9:23 A.M. ET: 

BUSHEHR, Iran (AP) -- Iran's nuclear chief says the country has increased the number of centrifuges enriching uranium to 6,000, the latest show of defiance to U.N. demands it halt the enrichment program.

In November, Iran said it had 5,000 centrifuges running at its enrichment plant in the central city of Natanz.

COMMENT:  Note the absence of any reference to Iran in the president's speech last night.  We are asleep, and the president is feeding us more sleeping pills.

RESPONSE TO OBAMA - AT 9:14 A.M. ET:  From The Politico:

Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-La.) hoped to step into the national spotlight Tuesday night to sound a hopeful yet defiant note in countering President Barack Obama as the GOP’s fresh and exciting face.

Instead, he got panned.

“I think he had a really poor performance tonight, I’m sorry to say,” National Public Radio’s Juan Williams said on a Fox News panel immediately following Jindal’s remarks. Williams went on to call the governor’s remarks “sing-songy” and said Jindal looked “childish” compared to Obama.

“This was not the best from the young man from Louisiana,” he said.

COMMENT:  The story makes the point that responses to presidential addresses almost never work.  They're too hurried and it's impossible to match the grandeur of the presidency.  But Jindal was particularly disappointing.  He clearly needs a speech coach - he swallows his words - and the braininess and dynamism of the man didn't come through.  A Rhodes scholar, he's easily the intellectual equal of Obama.  However, we weren't allowed to see it.   There's an old definition of a Rhodes Scholar - someone who's got a great future behind him.  I hope that's not the case with Bobby Jindal, who's a rare talent. 

THE PRESIDENT'S SPEECH III - AT 8:13 A.M. ET:  From Bill Kristol in the Washington Post: 

This was not the speech of a man who even contemplates the possibility of using force within the next year to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. This was not the speech of a man who thinks America needs to be reminded about the dangers out there in the world, because Americans might have to be summoned to deal with them. This was not the speech of a man who thinks of himself as a war president.

But he is.

COMMENT:  Absolutely true, and chilling.  It is foreign policy that is my greatest worry.  Obama can wind up making Jimmah Carter l ook like a hard- liner.

February 25, 2009.       Permalink          

THE PRESIDENT'S SPEECH II - AT 7:50 A.M. ET:  I sent the following thought to a colleague last night:  The president is a great speaker, but not a great speechmaker.  Have you noticed that you never remember anything that he says?  Great speechmakers - Churchill, FDR, Reagan - always leave you with something etched in your mind, usually a memorable phrase.  Obama, like Bill Clinton, leaves you remembering how good he sounded.

THE PRESIDENT'S SPEECH I - AT 7:38 A.M. ET:  Given the AP's in-the-tank-for-Barack history, this is surprising: 

President Barack Obama knows Americans are unhappy that the government could rescue people who bought mansions beyond their means.

But his assurance Tuesday night that only the deserving will get help rang hollow.

Even officials in his administration, many supporters of the plan in Congress and the Federal Reserve chairman expect some of that money will go to people who used lousy judgment.

COMMENT:  As analysts pick apart Obama's speech, they're likely to find a number of sleight-of-hand tricks.  It was too good to be true.  Read the whole AP piece.  It exposes a number of gimmicks.  Praise to AP. 

AL QAEDA ON THE ROPES? - AT 7:07 A.M. ET:  From The New York Times:

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — American missile strikes have reduced Al Qaeda's global reach but heightened the threat to Pakistan as the group disperses its cells here and fights to maintain its sanctuaries, Pakistani intelligence officials said.

The officials acknowledge that the strikes and raids by the Pakistani military are proving effective, having killed as many as 80 Al Qaeda fighters in the past year. But they express growing alarm that the drone strikes in particular are having an increasingly destabilizing effect on their country.

COMMENT:  I can't comment on the effect on Pakistan, but it's good to know that Al Qaeda's global reach is being weakened.  These attacks were begun under President Bush.  Let's see if President Obama gives his predecessor any credit at all.  Thus far, he's refused to acknowledge that the former president did anything right.

STILL AROUND - AT 6:53 A.M. ET:  From the New York Daily News:

The Rev. Al Sharpton was still not satisfied Tuesday after New York Post owner Rupert Murdoch issued an unprecedented personal apology over a controversial cartoon that was branded racist.

Standing on the steps of City Hall, flanked by several City Council members and civil rights leaders, Sharpton continued his calls for a boycott over the illustration, which critics say compared President Obama to a chimpanzee.

He also demanded that the billionaire businessman explain how he will ensure that a similar gaffe will not occur in the future.

COMMENT:  Sharpton has been eclipsed by Barack Obama and doesn't like it.  The man has contributed nothing to society, but much to Al Sharpton.  The cartoon was in poor taste, but the apology has been issued.  Sharpton just wants to stay in the spotlight.  I wish the media would ignore him.