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.

In early 2009, angered at the rapid growth of governmental interference through its “housing bailout” plan, CNBC commentator Rick Santelli stated on the air that it was time for a “Chicago Tea Party” to voice outrage against the socialization of the American capitalist system.  The subsequent nation-wide, grass-roots movement of protests has been dubbed the “Tea Party” movement, and its participants as “tea partiers”.

The Left, unable to summon an intelligent response to the tea party movement, and caught off guard by the ferocity of the reaction of conservatives to the creeping socialism of the Obama administration, followed their typical strategy - childish crudeness.  In reaction to the movement, Leftist “personalities” introduced the use of a borderline pornographic phrase to describe the participants in the movement as “teabaggers”.  So why is this a problem?  I’ll leave the details for below the fold…

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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.