What KSM Gave Up
Definitely click and read Tom Joscelyn on the lives saved and plots foiled owing to the enhanced interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
Via Stephen Hayes, who has lots more.
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August 30, 2009
August 26, 2009
Reality Rearing Its Ugly Head
Will the administration cling to the claim that it is fear-mongering partisan Republicans who are orchestrating opposition to Obamacare, now that the Washington Post has editorialized that the White House and Congress should "face the reality" that the plan, as it exists today, doesn't meet any sensible standard of revenue neutrality or cost-savings projection?
Probably.
August 25, 2009
Looking Back, Not Forward
Jen Rubin, on the decision to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate CIA operatives...
The decision, one of monumental significance to our intelligence community and national security, is announced while the president is closeted away in Martha’s Vineyard. This is political courage and transparency? Really, Obama is president—not Eric Holder—and should have the nerve to come forward, explain his decision, and tell us why we should not interpret his words to those assembled earlier at Langley as bald-faced lies. Then he pledged to the CIA employees that he intended to look forward, not back, and expressed that he would “need them more than ever.†Then he was vowing to have their backs. Now he and his attorney general have stabbed those same agents in the back.As a colleague expressed to me yesterday, “this is a form of madness.†The Obama administration sees the CIA as the enemy, not the terrorists. It chooses to employ the full force of the federal government against our own protectors, not those who seek to murder Americans. This has long been the pathology of the Left, a conviction that efforts to defend ourselves are evil and that our enemies are figments of our imagination. The difference is that now this conviction is held by the president and his attorney general.
It is therefore not simply the CIA that should feel betrayed, but all Americans. We lack leaders who are serious and committed to defending us against implacable enemies. There is no greater failing for a president.
In another post, Rubin writes...
Well, we’ve come a long way. The war on terror has become the war on the CIA.It does look that way.
More from Bret Stephens
Much more from Andy McCarthy, for folks interested in stuff like facts, law and history.
UPDATE 8/26: From Protein Wisdom
August 20, 2009
No Longer Useful
August 10, 2009
Trapasso's Fake Punt
Rookie punter A.J. Trapasso from Ohio State, on his first ever punt attempt in an NFL uniform, in the HOF Game.... now that's cool...
UPDATE 8/24: Trapasso's bizarre preseason continues....as he hits the scoreboard in the new Cowboys' stadium...
Coming next week...A.J. Trapasso takes out Osama bin Laden with a punt.
August 8, 2009
Market Reforms
Yuval Levin says there's an opportunity for conservatives to advance sensible market-based reforms as Obama fails to win over Americans to his health care plan. Well, we'll do what we can....
As they talk to constituents this month and prepare for the resumption of the legislative struggle in the fall, Republicans should stress the excessive ambition of the Democrats' effort--aimed as much at transforming the relationship between the American people and their government as at solving actual problems of health care financing--and should highlight their own more practical, affordable proposals, which need not be undertaken as a single massive transformation in a single bill too long for anyone to read.
Levin has some specifics, and others have been talking about alternative reforms for some time. In May some GOP members of Congress put forward some ideas, and James Capretta has been articulating the issues for years. Here's Rudy Giuliani from 2007. More here from John Steele Gordon.
Some of the best work making the case against the Obama plan has been done by Levin (more here and here) and Capretta, (more here, here, and here) and the two occasionally writing together,
There has been no shortage of serious, well-intentioned criticism of the President's proposals going back months now.
Seems some serious people look at what's actually in the bill and have questions.
Others are just looking for a little more honesty and a little less slander from the Pelosi-Obama team.
So with the community organizing left and their community organizing president now firmly on the record against community organizing for any other than their favored causes....and bathing in the hypocrisy of it all.... they are struggling to portray grassroots criticism of Obamacare as "manufactured" by political operatives, produced by PR men, and populated by an angry mob. And that's not going so well. Tell me again who the self-interested angry thugs are?
Some of the celebrating on the right at the possible demise of the healthcare bill is distressingly premature...because they're going to pass something. It has to be about limiting the damage they can do.
UPDATE: Shut up, the President explained.