Criminalizing evangelism?

You've probably heard about the Christians who were arrested last Friday night in Dearborn, MI and charged with disorderly conduct for attempting to give people copies of an English/Arabic Gospel of John outside the Arab International Festival. If not, here's the video they took (though I'm not sure how, since their cameras were confiscated):

The mythical meme of “cutting waste and fraud”

A couple months ago, President Obama gave a speech in St. Charles, MO in which he argued that his health care plan would make Medicare stronger even as it cut the Medicare budget, because “There’s no cutting of Medicare benefits. There’s just cutting out fraud and waste.” As you can probably guess, I’m skeptical about that, but maybe not for the reason you think. I’m not skeptical because it’s him or his party—this is a recurring bipartisan theme. Politico’s Chris Frates put it well when he wrote,

Obama’s efforts follow those of a long line of Republican and Democratic presidents who promised to save taxpayers money by cutting fraud, waste and abuse in the government insurance programs. The sentiment is popular because it has bipartisan support and doesn’t threaten entrenched health industry interests that benefit from the spending.

“Waste, fraud and abuse have been the favorite thing to promise first because it’s a way of promising cost control while not doing any of the painful stuff,” said Len Nichols, a former senior health policy adviser in the Clinton administration. The method is “as old as the Bible,” he said.

“It’s a way of promising cost control while not doing any of the painful stuff”—that’s it right there. It’s how politicians convince us that they’ll be able to cut government spending (which we want) without cutting any of our programs (which we don’t want). After all, politicians who cut our programs—even if we elected them to cut spending, even if we know government desperately needs to cut spending—tend to become unpopular as a result, at least in the short term . . . and we know there’s nothing politicians hate worse than being unpopular.

The problem is, the idea that we can solve our budget problems (or even make a major dent in them) is a myth—a fairy tale—a chimera. It’s never happened yet, and it isn’t going to, either. That’s not to say, certainly, that we shouldn’t do everything we can to reduce waste and fraud, but we need to do so realizing that we’re fighting, at best, a holding action; we’re never going to achieve victory, and we’re never going to gain enough ground to make a significant improvement in the budget. In truth, just keeping waste and fraud from growing is an accomplishment.

That might seem cynical, but I think it’s just realistic. Waste is an inevitable part of any human activity, as we should all know from daily life. There’s always peanut butter left in the jar when it’s “empty”; there’s always shampoo left in the bottle when we can’t get any more out; there’s always some of the fruit that falls off before it’s ripe. We can and should work to reduce waste—say, the amount of energy given off by our light bulbs as heat rather than light—but we’ll never eliminate it. We’re simply too limited to ever achieve 100% efficiency.

Within large organizations, there’s an additional problem that reinforces and aggravates this reality: cutting waste isn’t to everybody’s benefit. The bureaucracy has its inevitable turf wars, which waste money, and its (often competing) agendas. What’s more, the people who control the money as it trickles down through the system have the same self-protective instinct as anyone; those who benefit from waste want to see it perpetuated, and this waste has a constituency. The people who profit by waste are there, they are connected, they have clout; those who would profit if waste were removed are abstract, theoretical, not present, not connected, and can’t prove their case, since it’s a might-have-been. Anywhere except Chicago, a voter who shows up and argues will beat a voter who isn’t there any day.

As for fraud, any time there’s a lot of money moving around, there will be those unscrupulous and clever enough to siphon some of it off. Whatever ideas you come up with to stop them, or failing that to catch them, will have only limited success; as in warfare, so in this area, the advantage is constantly shifting between offense and defense—the defense may pull ahead for a while, but the offense will always adapt and regain the advantage. What’s more, when it comes to preventing fraud, the defensive position is intrinsically harder, because the fraudster only has to find one loophole in order to succeed, while those on the other side have to keep every last loophole closed, even the ones they don’t know are there. In the end, we can only say of the fraud artist what Dan Patrick used to say of Michael Jordan: “You can’t stop him—you can only hope to contain him.”

All of which is to say, the commitment to fight waste and fraud in government is laudable, and we should certainly do everything we can to encourage our politicians in that direction—but any politician who tells you they can solve our budget problems by eliminating waste and fraud is selling you a bill of goods. The only way to significantly reduce waste and fraud is to significantly reduce the spending that produces and attracts them; if you want to cut waste and fraud, you have to cut government.

Grace in action

Thanks to Doug Hagler for tipping me off on this one—it's from a while ago, but I had indeed missed it the first time. :)

Julio Diaz has a daily routine. Every night, the 31-year-old social worker ends his hour-long subway commute to the Bronx one stop early, just so he can eat at his favorite diner.

But one night last month, as Diaz stepped off the No. 6 train and onto a nearly empty platform, his evening took an unexpected turn.

He was walking toward the stairs when a teenage boy approached and pulled out a knife.

"He wants my money, so I just gave him my wallet and told him, 'Here you go,'" Diaz says.

As the teen began to walk away, Diaz told him, "Hey, wait a minute. You forgot something. If you're going to be robbing people for the rest of the night, you might as well take my coat to keep you warm."

If you're not familiar with the story, read the whole thing to see what happened. Grace doesn't come with a money-back guarantee—people don't always respond—but when they do, God does wondrous things.

New site in the sidebar

and I do mean new—Andrew Breitbart's latest venture, Big Government.com, only launched yesterday. It launched with a splash, though, an exposé of ACORN that would have made the old 60 Minutes proud: ACORN's Baltimore office facilitating child prostitution and tax evasion. It's quite a story, and quite a scoop for the folks who pulled it together. Check out the posts.

The invention of the Black Sox

The common understanding of the Black Sox scandal was fixed in the public mind by Eliot Asinof's 1963 book Eight Men Out and the subsequent movie adaptation of the same title by John Sayles. As it turns out, that may be a highly unfortunate thing, as an article in Chicago Lawyer magazine by Daniel J. Voelker and Paul A. Duffy reveals. Having gained access to Asinof's files, the two discovered that his book is not in fact supported by his research; indeed, from their research, they've concluded that the book is, to a significant degree, fiction.

Those whose reputations seem to have been blackened the worst by Asinof's fictionalization are the team's owner, Charles Comiskey, who has been unfairly smeared as a skinflint whose miserliness drove his players to throw the 1919 World Series, and the biggest star among the banned players, Shoeless Joe Jackson, who always insisted on his innocence. Given his stellar performance in the Series that year—he led all qualifying hitters, on both teams, in batting average and slugging percentage, finished second in on-base percentage, hit the Series' only home run, and seems to have played the field well (at least, he didn't commit a single error)—I've always been inclined to believe him. Given the work by Voelker and Duffy, I think I've been justified in that.

Here's hoping this article is the beginning of a new trial for Shoeless Joe, not just in the court of public opinion but also before the Lords of Baseball; and here's hoping that the result is the clearing of his reputation and his long-overdue inclusion in the Hall of Fame.

We're all Chicagoans now

So, let's see. The Inspector General for the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS), which among other things runs AmeriCorps, starts investigating the mayor of Sacramento, Kevin Johnson, and his nonprofit foundation, St. HOPE Academy; the foundation had applied for AmeriCorps money for a project called the Hood Corps. When Gerald Walpin audited the program,

The IG audit found that the program misused virtually all its funds and did little of what was outlined in its grant proposal.

Specifically, the audit found that Johnson and other officials of Neighborhood Corps used AmeriCorps volunteers to recruit students for a charter school run by its parent program, improperly paid at two school employees with AmeriCorps funds for duties they did not perform, improperly used volunteers to perform personal errands for Johnson (including washing his car and driving him to personal appearances) and used the AmeriCorps volunteers to engage in political activities in connection with a board of education election.

Rooting out abuse of government funds—clearly he's doing his job well; that deserves a raise, or at least a pat on the back, right? Nope—because you see, Johnson isn't just a former NBA star or a mayor, he's a friend and supporter of Barack Obama. As a result, Walpin didn't get a commendation, he got a pink slip.

Of course, that's not the only case IG Walpin has investigated; he also found significant problems in an AmeriCorps project at the City University of New York. Despite his findings, however, the CNCS decided it didn't feel like doing anything about it.

Funding for the largest AmeriCorps program—the Teaching Fellows Program, run by the Research Foundation of the City University of New York—is in abeyance pending resolution of widespread problems identified in a recent audit. Although Walpin recommended that funding be curtailed and that previous funds (perhaps as much as $75 million) be repaid to the corporation, the corporation has said it will take no action on that matter.

Walpin concluded that nothing was being gained by the grants to CUNY and that the money was simply being used to subsidize an existing and funded program.

That's not to say, of course, that the administration isn't doing anything about this—they did, after all, remove the embarrassing IG who insisted on making an issue out of it. What's more, to ensure that nothing so disturbing happens again, Michelle Obama is kindly donating the services of her chief of staff Jackie Norris, who was appointed as a senior advisor to the CNCS. In the absence of a CEO (the last appointee for that slot having withdrawn her name last month), Norris will have particularly great influence; and word is that Michelle Obama is taking the lead in the selection of a new CEO for CNCS as well. After all, we have to make sure that whoever runs this corporation is willing to toe the administration's line.

Which isn't how it's supposed to be, especially when it comes to IGs; these folks are supposed to be insulated from executive pressure, as Byron York notes:

Last year Congress passed the Inspectors General Reform Act, which was designed to strengthen protections for IGs, who have the responsibility of investigating allegations of waste, fraud and abuse within federal agencies, against interference by political appointees or the White House. Part of the Act was a requirement that the president give Congress 30 days' notice before dismissing an IG. One of the co-sponsors of the Act was then-Sen. Barack Obama.

The Act also requires the president to outline the cause for his decision to remove an IG. Beyond saying that he did not have the “fullest confidence” in Walpin, Obama gave no reason for his action.

There are two big questions about the president's actions. One, why did he decide to fire Walpin? And two, did he abide by the law that he himself co-sponsored?

According to Republican Sen. Charles Grassley, a strong advocate of inspectors general, Walpin received a call from the White House Counsel's office on Wednesday evening. Walpin was told that he had one hour to either resign or be fired. Senate sources say Walpin asked why he was being fired and, according to one source, “The answer that was given was that it's just time to move on. The president would like to have someone else in that position.” Walpin declined to resign.

Grassley fired off a letter to the president on Thursday saying that, “I was troubled to learn that [Wednesday] night your staff reportedly issued an ultimatum to the AmeriCorps Inspector General Gerald Walpin that he had one hour to resign or be terminated,” Grassley wrote. “As you know, Inspectors General were created by Congress as a means to combat waste, fraud, and abuse and to be independent watchdogs ensuring that federal agencies were held accountable for their actions. Inspectors General were designed to have a dual role reporting to both the President and Congress so that they would be free from undue political pressure. This independence is the hallmark of all Inspectors General and is essential so they may operate independently, without political pressure or interference from agencies attempting to keep their failings from public scrutiny.”

Ed Morrissey offers an interesting comment on this:

Congress gave IGs this level of protection precisely to avoid this kind of action by the White House. Obama doesn’t want IGs investigating his cronies and political allies, and the evidence for this is rather clear from the way the White House handled it. Instead of going to Congress, which the lawyers in the White House should have known was the correct procedure, they attempted to intimidate Walpin out of his job first. Apparently they didn’t have a good enough case for the proper procedure.

What we're seeing here is a clear case of Chicago-style cronyism and machine politics on the national stage. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone; I certainly saw it coming, and I was far from the only one. After all, this is how Barack Obama learned to do politics; this is the system that formed him. How else is he going to govern? How else would he behave? This is a man who has repeatedly said that his formative experience as a young man was as a community organizer—with ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), which includes among its activities political intimidation and massive voter-registration fraud for political and financial profit. ACORN doesn't practice transparency and accountability—why would we expect Barack Obama to do so? Why would we expect him to govern with a high level of integrity when the people and environments that shaped him as a politician don't reward integrity?

The bald truth is that we elected as president a Chicago machine politician and community organizer for a corrupt organization that considers fraud an appropriate tool for advancing its political agenda and filling its coffers, and we now have an administration run by people who are used to operating in those ways and on those principles; we should not expect any of them to be other than what they have been. Rather, we should expect national politics to look a lot like Chicago writ large—and so far, that's what we're seeing.

We're seeing an administration that admits that the $800 billion it demanded be spent as “stimulus" is already being misappropriated, misused, and even flat-out stolen—Joe Biden went so far as to say, “Some people are being scammed already”—and can't seem to be bothered to do anything about it. After all, the money is going to liberals, isn't it? And we're seeing an administration whose preferred response to the voter-registration fraud investigations going on against ACORN in numerous states is not to launch a federal investigation, but rather to give them billions of dollars. That's why Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) has introduced the Taxpayer Protection and Anti-Fraud Act,

which would restrict access to taxpayer dollars available through the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for groups that have been indicted for violations of state or federal laws.

“No one has a right to federal funds,” she said. “We have a fiduciary responsibility as members of Congress to establish criteria by which groups can gain access to federal dollars. I believe we should be able to raise the bar above indictment and not be restricted solely to convictions. This in no way denies someone their due process rights in court.”

Under her new bill a determination would be made on a “case by case” basis to determine whether or not a particular organization should be eligible for federal support, despite indictments.

The White House, predictably, is opposed; but it seems clear to me that the government needs to be careful about giving out money, and that if there's enough reason to issue an indictment against an organization, the government should at least be required to take notice of that indictment and evaluate it carefully before giving that organization so much as one red cent. (If you agree, sign the petition.) To the current administration, giving money to groups like ACORN is just business as usual; to my way of thinking, that's precisely the sort of usual business we need to do away with. The Chicago machine is bad enough in Chicago; there's nothing we can do now to keep it out of D. C., so we need to do everything we can to keep it from putting down roots and taking over. We're all Chicagoans now; let's do our best to make sure we don't stay that way.

Sarah Palin on the murder of Pvt. William Long

Here's Gov. Palin's statement (HT:  Mel):

The stories of two very different lives with similar fates crossed through the media's hands yesterday—both equally important but one lacked the proper attention. The death of 67-year old George Tiller was unacceptable, but equally disgusting was another death that police believe was politically and religiously motivated as well.

William Long died yesterday. The 23-year old Army Recruiter was gunned down by a fanatic; another fellow soldier was wounded in the ambush. The soldiers had just completed their basic training and were talking to potential recruits, just as my son, Track, once did.

Whatever titles we give these murderers, both deserve our attention. Violence like that is no way to solve a political dispute nor a religious one. And the fanatics on all sides do great disservice when they confuse dissention with rage and death.

She's right on all counts.  Contrary to my initial expectation, the killer here wasn't a fringe anti-war activist, but rather an American Muslim convert and Yemen-trained Islamic terrorist.  My point still holds, though:  will the media and leftist pundits (but I repeat myself) treat Long's murder as a terrorist act and go after those whose hateful rhetoric encourages such acts?  So far, nope.  (Go on, tell me you're surprised.)

Update:  The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg has noticed, as has Toby Harnden of the Telegraph.

Since the Left is throwing the word "terrorism" around

when it comes to the Tiller assassination, as Michelle Malkin points out, let's see if they apply it to this guy, too; let's see if they have the intellectual honesty, consistency and integrity to paint the anti-war movement with the same brush they want to use on the pro-life movement.  On the facts, it's certainly every bit as warranted; somehow, though, I'm betting not.

Update:  Robert Stacy McCain has a great comment on this over at Hot Air's "Green Room":

The Left always wishes to distance its own utopian idealists from the injustices perpetrated in pursuit of those ideals, while the Right is forever compelled to apologize for crimes that no conservative ever advocated or endorsed. It ought not be necessary to insist on the point that free speech and political activism are different things than the murder of Dr. Tiller, a crime that Michelle Malkin rightly denounces as terrorism.

Update II:  My initial expectation that the killer was an American anti-war activist was incorrect—he was, rather, an American convert to jihadist Islam.  See above.

Sarah Palin weighs in

A couple hours ago, Gov. Palin released the following statement on the murder of Wichita abortionist George Tiller:

I feel sorrow for the Tiller family. I respect the sanctity of life and the tragedy that took place today in Kansas clearly violates respect for life. This murder also damages the positive message of life, for the unborn, and for those living. Ask yourself, "What will those who have not yet decided personally where they stand on this issue take away from today's event in Kansas?"

Regardless of my strong objection to Dr. Tiller's abortion practices, violence is never an answer in advancing the pro-life message.

For my thoughts and comments on this, see my post this morning on Conservatives4Palin.

George Tiller assassinated; may God have mercy on his soul

For those unfamiliar with Tiller, he was an abortionist in Wichita who had become over the years, as the New York Times put it, "a focal point for those around the country who opposed [abortion]," largely because his clinic "is one of just three in the nation where abortions are performed after the 21st week of pregnancy."  He was shot in his church, where he was serving as an usher.

I'd missed this story earlier today, and I expect I'll be processing this for a while, but I've seen several reactions with which I agree wholeheartedly.  Most basically, Princeton's Robert George was right to say,

Whoever murdered George Tiller has done a gravely wicked thing. The evil of this action is in no way diminished by the blood George Tiller had on his own hands. . . . By word and deed, let us teach that violence against abortionists is not the answer to the violence of abortion. Every human life is precious. George Tiller's life was precious. We do not teach the wrongness of taking human life by wrongfully taking a human life. Let our "weapons" in the fight to defend the lives of abortion's tiny victims, be chaste weapons of the spirit.

Robert Stacy McCain had some equally wise and true words:

One reason I so despise such criminal idiocy is that, as a student of history, I cannot think of a single instance in which assassination has produced anything good, no matter how evil or misguided the victim, nor how well-intentioned or malevolent the assassin. . . .

Those who slew Caesar did not save the Roman republic. Marat's death only incited the Jacobins to greater terror. Booth's pistol conjured up a spirit of vengeance against the South more terrible than war itself. Assassination is an act of nihilism. Whatever the motive of the crime, the horror it evokes always inspires a draconian response, and involves other consequences never intended by the criminal.

He also notes,

Sometimes, when the stubborn wickedness of a people offends God, the Almighty witholds His divine protection, permitting those sinners to have their own way, following the road to destruction so that they are subjected to evil rulers and unjust laws. Never, however, does the wise and faithful Christian resort to the kind of lawlessness practiced with such cruelty today in Kansas.

Dan Collins at Protein Wisdom has some excellent comments as well:

This was an act of terrorism, as well as of murder. It was no more or less an act of political assassination than any of the bombings advocated by Bill Ayers. It was no more or less a violation of civil rights than the New Black Panther polling intimidation that the Obama Justice Department decided to drop ex post facto. There is either one justice for all, or there is justice for none.

Let’s ask ourselves whether there’s been a hate crime committed here. Has there? If so, aren’t Islamists guilty of hate crimes? Should the fact that they commit such crimes largely against minority believers in their own countries be cause for more stringent sanctions and severer punishments? Do the continuous legal assaults on Sarah Palin constitute a hate crime?

Donald Douglas is right to complain about Andrew Sullivan’s selective outrage. . . . This sorry episode should be an example of how absolute is the sanctity of life; unfortunately, that’s not what people will teach, and that’s not what people will learn.

The president, of course, has weighed in with a condemnation of the assassination; that's part of his job, and it's unquestionably warranted.  That said, I have to agree with the folks at Stop the ACLU about this:

On one hand, Obama is correct. We cannot solve the abortion issue, or others, through murder. We are a Nation of Law, not a Nation of Men. On the other hand, Obama never seems to work up much shock and outrage at the murder of over 2 million babies every year, many of them during the 3rd trimester. I wonder why?

Finally, go read Sister Toldjah's superb post, which I'm not going to try to excerpt.

I'm not going to try to match these folks for profundity (not at the moment, anyway), or repeat what they've written, except to say that I agree with them; what Tiller did was evil, and what his killer did was evil.  Those who argue for this sort of violence claim to be agents of justice, but that cannot be—it's a response to injustice that is itself unjust, and an action that denies its own premises; you cannot kill abortionists without undermining your argument that abortion is wrong.  It's ultimately, inherently, necessarily self-defeating—which is characteristic of nihilism, one reason I think R. S. McCain's diagnosis is spot-on.  It's also not the way of Christ, who defeated evil by surrendering to it, not by leading a paramilitary team to assassinate Herod.

And so, for whatever it may be worth, I do categorically and unreservedly reject and abhor the assassination of George Tiller; and though as a Protestant I don't believe in praying for the dead, I do honestly commit myself to hope that God will have mercy on his soul.  No, he doesn't deserve it—but then, neither do any of the rest of us.

Jihadis in US prisons = big "Hit it Here" sign

I hadn't gotten around to reading Beldar of late, so I missed his post on why moving the Gitmo detainees to the US would be a really bad idea—a post which raises a far scarier scenario than the one I considered:

The most serious risk is that the same type of terrorist organization that mounted a simultaneous four-plane multi-state flying bomb assault on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on 9/11/01 would welcome the opportunity to assault any holding facility on American soil, or whatever community was closest thereto, in an attempt to force the captured terrorists' release. Simply put, friends and neighbors: Any holding facility for radical Islamic terrorists on American soil would be a target and a potential "rescue mission" for which al Qaeda or its like would delightedly create dozens or hundreds of new "martyrs" from among their own ranks.

Right now—as has been continuously true since the first prisoners were shipped there after we began operating against the Taliban in Afghanistan—these terrorists' would-be "rescuers" can't assault Gitmo without first getting to Cuba and then defeating the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps at sea, on land, and in the air. That's not the kind of fight they want; those aren't the kind of logistical hurdles they can ever overcome. Keeping all the captured terrorists at Gitmo, in other words, has played directly to our strongest suit as a nation—our superb, unparalleled, and highly professional military strength as continuously projected in a place of our choosing without risk of collateral casualties among American civilians.

But once the scene shifts to American soil, we lose virtually all of that combination of power and flexibility, and surrender back to the terrorists all the advantages upon which they regularly depend. Getting into the U.S., or using "sleepers" already here? In a fight against some local sheriffs or prison guards armed mostly with revolvers and tasers (perhaps supplemented with shotguns or even a few assault rifles, but no heavy weaponry at all)? With the fighting to take place in or even near any American population center? Can the Obama Administration possibly be so stupid as to forfeit all of our own advantages, and give all of the terrorists' advantages back to them?

(Emphasis in the original.)  Read the whole thing, and you'll understand why such a move would amount to designating Target #1 for al'Qaeda's next attack.

Turning prisons into spring training for terrorists

After the president tried (and failed, it appears) to one-up Dick Cheney's speech at the American Enterprise Institute, the Washington Post put together a useful video combining excerpts from both speeches.

HT:  Shane Vander Hart

What conclusions one draws from this will of course depend to a great degree on what assumptions one brings to the viewing; to my way of thinking, the contrast with VP Cheney's serious, unemotional defense of his position exposes the hollowness of much of Barack Obama's language.  Your mileage may well vary, but given that President Obama has now essentially given his imprimatur to all those things that he denounces as "violating our core values," as Victor Davis Hanson points out, I don't see how one would avoid that conclusion; all that liberal angst looks an awful lot like just the same old cynical political calculation anymore.  I will also admit to wondering why the president is so concerned about the legal rights of terrorists in Guantanamo when he doesn't seem to care at all about the legal rights of Dodge dealers in Florida, but I digress.

Of greater concern is his ridiculously foolish suggestion that we move Guantanamo detainees to US prisons.  That might make sense were it not for the fact that we already have significant jihadist cells operating in our prisons now, as Michelle Malkin notes:

U.S. Bureau of Prison reports have warned for years that our civilian detention facilities are major breeding grounds for Islamic terrorists. There are still not enough legitimately trained and screened Muslim religious leaders to counsel an estimated 9,000 U.S. prison inmates who demand Islamic services. Under the Bush administration, the federal prison bureaucracy had no policy in place to screen out extremist, violence-advocating Islamic chaplains; failed to properly screen the many contractors and volunteers who help provide religious services to Islamic inmates; and shied away from religious profiling. . . . 

[President Obama's] push to transfer violent Muslim warmongers into our civilian prisons—where they have proselytized and plotted with impunity—will only make the problem worse.

The danger here is succinctly summarized by a commenter on one of Jennifer Rubin's posts on Contentions:

I wonder how long before people (besides, to his credit, Robert Muller of the FBI) figure out that having celebrity terrorists in any U.S. prison—even a super-duper max—will inevitably radicalize the prison population. We are injecting ourselves with a lethal virus, and fooling ourselves that it won’t hurt us. Like putting Napoleon on the Isle of Elba or keeping Lenin on the infamous “sealed train” through Germany, you have to keep ideological foes far at bay. Ideology seeps out. Even if no other prisoner ever comes into direct contact with one of these celebrity terrorists, their mere presence in the same facility will inspire, influence and over time radicalize the population, just like Africanized Honeybees always take over European Honeybee colonies. Obama is scoring a goal in his (our) own net. This is folly in the extreme.

We need to realize that we have a significant home-grown jihadi threat in this country already, and these people recruit in our prisons.  The last thing we need is to hook up wannabe terrorists who've been recruited on the inside with experienced terrorists who've carried out attacks on the outside; that would be nothing less than turning our maximum-security prisons into a training camp for al'Qaeda.  It's hard to imagine anything much more unwise than that.

This is an absolute crime

Read this—it's beyond belief. I don't know what part of the president's economic policy is supposed to justify the illegal seizure of a man's business, or to excuse forcing him into bankruptcy and rendering his 50+ employees abruptly unemployed, but this is completely infuriating. This goes against everything this country is supposed to be about.

Yes, Barack Obama's associations mattered

I know his apologists in the media and elsewhere didn't want people talking about Tony Rezko, the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright III, Bill Ayers, Fr. Michael Pfleger, Rashad Khalidi, Nadhmi Auchi, James Johnson, and Franklin Raines; I remember many solemn asseverations that talking about these people was just a distraction from the real issues, and a cynical attempt on the part of Republicans to play politics to bring Sen. Obama down.

Except, it wasn't, because his associations did matter. Granted, the fact that Barack Obama did business with Tony Rezko doesn't necessarily mean he's crooked, nor does his friendship with Rashid Khalidi necessarily mean that he shares Khalidi's views on the Near East; these conclusions are not inevitable, but debatable. Even given that, however, the pattern of his associations told us some important things about his judgment of people—most importantly, that his judgment of people is quite poor, which should have led to the conclusion that his personnel judgment in staffing the Executive Branch was likely to be quite poor.

And so it has proven to be. Tim Geithner was approved for Treasury despite being exposed as a tax cheat because the Senate was convinced that he was the best person for the job; instead, his performance has been abysmal, he's a millstone around the president's neck, and Washington's thousand little knives are already out for him. Of course, it would help if the administration didn't keep losing nominees for the rest of the senior positions in the Treasury Department, and particularly for the #2 slot. Equally of course, tax problems haven't just been for Treasury appointees, since failure to pay taxes was one of the things (though not the worst) that forced Tom Daschle to withdraw his nomination, and have caused problems for other appointments as well, including White House Counsel Greg Craig.

Then there's Vivek Kundra.  Kundra was President Obama's choice as Chief Information Officer for the administration; now he's taking a leave of absence after the FBI raided his old office and arrested two people, including one of his former top aides, Yusuf Acar.  According to the Washington Post,

the conspiracy, which operated for at least a year, worked like this:

Acar approved work with a vendor, such as Bansal’s AITC, to arrange the purchase of goods such as software. The vendor ordered fewer items but billed the District for a larger amount. Bansal, Acar and others then split the proceeds, FBI officials said.

Acar also approved fraudulent time sheets for nonexistent employees, [FBI agent Andrew] Sekela wrote. Acar and the others split the proceeds paid by the D.C. government, Sekela alleged.

Authorities traced more than $200,000 in payments last year from Bansal’s firm to a private company, Circle Networks Inc. The firm is co-owned by Acar, even though he is prohibited from having an interest in any company doing business with the city, Sekela wrote. Circle Networks generated about $2.2 million in revenue through D.C. government contracts, the agent wrote.

As Ed Morrissey notes,

Kundra himself hasn’t been implicated in wrongdoing, but it does raise the question of exactly what Kundra did as the head of DC’s technology office. Acar worked as Kundra’s aide, and at best one can say that Acar managed to run this ring right under Kundra’s nose. Kundra had to approve, explicitly or tacitly, the payroll for the agency, which employed less than 300 people. Any competent chief executive of a firm that size would know how many employees worked for him and how much they cost; in fact, it would be one of the primary issues on their agenda. . . .

The best we can say about Vivek Kundra in this episode is that he’s incompetent as an executive.

And then there's the saga of Chas Freeman:  a paid apologist for the House of Sa'ud who's changed his views on the Near East and Middle East for the sake of the Sa'udi oil money in his pockets; a man with financial ties to the Chinese government who defended the Tiananmen Square massacre—or more accurately, argued that the Chinese didn't respond strongly enough to protestors.  Matt Welch of Reason examined Freeman's views and concluded,

This is the definition of clientitis; it exhibits not a "startling propensity to speak truth to power" but rather a startling propensity to lob bouquets at dictators.

As such, though Freeman's trying to blame his withdrawal on the Israel lobby, there were far broader concerns about his appointment, raised by Democrats such as Charles Schumer and Jonathan Chait as well as Republicans, than just the anti-Israel views he evolved during his years on the Sa'udi payroll.  Anyone willing to change his positions to suit foreign governments willing to pay him, whether liberal or conservative, is the wrong person to put in charge of writing the National Intelligence Estimates on which so much of our foreign policy is based.

These aren't the only problems with the administration's appointment process, either—we've also seen the appointment and unappointment of Anthony Zinni, dubious nominations at Labor and Energy, and a press secretary who's Scott McClellan redux and has done the administration no good coping with the blowback.  All in all, it's hard to argue with Billy Hollis' summary of the situation:

In Chicago, the birds are singing

The jailbirds, that is—starting with Barack Obama's old neighbor and associate Antoin "Tony" Rezko. Hard to say for sure, but it looks to me like Rezko started singing for his supper (and a reduced sentence) in order to make sure he got the best deal he could before Rod Blagojevich starts talking. There is no honor among thieves, and Blagojevich appears to be a particularly dishonorable specimen. (As well as, if Michael Barone is right, a particularly stupid one.)

The interesting thing about this situation is that while U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald has made it very clear that there's no evidence that the president-elect was even aware of anything improper, he hasn't made the same statement about Obama's staff. The person of concern here appears to be the designated White House Chief of Staff, Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL), who has suddenly ceased to be a fixture at the president-elect's press conferences; as the Chicago Tribune's John Kass points out, there are good reasons to think that if Blagojevich wanted to work a deal with the incoming Obama administration, he'd work through Rep. Emanuel; or rather, there's one good reason: Rep. Emanuel's state senator, the powerful Democratic politician James DeLeo. According to Kass,

DeLeo is also considered by some to be the real governor of Illinois. Blagojevich is the nutty guy who makes the speeches and gets the federal slap. They're so close that if Jimmy suddenly stopped walking, Rod would chip his teeth on the back of Jimmy's head.

It's reasonable to assume that if there's one fellow Rod would talk to about the Senate seat, it's Jimmy. And given their relationship, Jimmy could talk to Rahm.

(Kass further suggests, interestingly, that DeLeo's quid pro quo for setting that up might well have been appointment to Rep. Emanuel's House seat. Welcome to Illinois politics.) Given that we know that Rep. Emanuel talked multiple times with Blagojevich (see video below), it seems quite possible that he could be the next Illinois politician in the crosshairs. This, obviously, would not be a good start for the Obama administration, in a lot of ways.

HT: Scott Johnson

I hope there are no skeletons in the Obama closet

because Rod Blagojevitch is going down, and he's going down hard; and unlike Tony Rezko, who kept his mouth shut after his conviction when the government tried to roll him, I don't think Blagojevitch has the necessary selflessness or nobility of character to take whole hit himself. Indeed, as Rosslyn Smith notes,

Blagojevich may have more reasons that the obvious reduction of sentence to offer additional political scalps for Patrick Fitzgerald's trophy wall. Hell hath no fury like a sociopath who sees himself on the losing end of a power struggle.

If he thinks Barack Obama can be one of those scalps, I have little doubt Blagojevich will wave it in Fitzgerald's face, for whatever he can get out of it, and just for the sheer pleasure of the thing; in fact, even if he doesn't have anything on the president-elect, I suspect Blagojevich may try to bring him down anyway. I hope he doesn't, but this is Illinois politics, and particularly Chicago politics . . . you just never know for sure. Let's hope Senator Obama did indeed come through the Chicago machine clean, and that his former colleague doesn't have anything to use against him; if not, we're all in for a really bad time.

Obama's Senate seat up for auction—get your bids in now

Even by the standards of Illinois politics, this is a big one: this morning the FBI arrested Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and his chief of staff, John Harris, on federal corruption charges. Perhaps the most staggering part of the indictment is that, as U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald put it, “Blagojevich put a ‘for sale’ sign on the naming of a United States senator.”

Blagojevich is accused of a wide-ranging criminal conspiracy, including alleged attempts by the governor to try to sell or trade the U.S. Senate seat left vacant by President-elect Barack Obama in exchange for financial benefits for the governor and his wife. Blagojevich also is accused of obtaining campaign contributions in exchange for other official actions.

It’s no secret that the president-elect wants his longtime adviser Valerie Jarrett named to his Senate seat; apparently, Blagojevich was irate that his former colleague wanted him to do so without offering him anything in return, referring to President-Elect Obama in highly profane and unflattering terms. According to the story in Politico,

Federal prosecutors allege that Blagojevich explored one possible quid-pro-quo—he’d appoint a top adviser to Obama in exchange for Obama giving Blagojevich the post as as secretary of health and human services. The indictment makes clear the Obama adviser is Valerie Jarrett, now an Obama White House aide.

“Unless I get something real good . . . I’ll just send myself, you know what I’m saying,” Blagojevich was taped saying on Nov. 3, the day before Election Day.

Blagojevich, a Democrat, added that the Senate seat: “is a . . . valuable thing, you just don’t give it away for nothing.”

None of this, as Fitzgerald was careful to point out, suggests that President-Elect Obama is in any way guilty of anything; the fact that Blagojevich was trying to wrestle some sort of benefit out of him doesn’t mean that he or any of his staff were guilty of anything, and there appears to be no reason to think they were. If anything, it appears that they responded to Blagojevich’s demand for some sort of bribe by ending the conversation. That sets them apart from some of the other people Blagojevich was considering appointing to the seat, since at least one of them offered money “up front” for the job. (Update and correction: that candidate has now been confirmed to be Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-IL), but the only evidence so far that he or any of his associates offered Blagojevitch money is the governor's own statements, which have not been independently corroborated.)

This whole fiasco certainly sheds light on the political milieu through which Barack Obama rose to power, but the real import here has nothing to do with him, but rather with his successor: with the indictment against Blagojevich, who’s going to appoint the next junior Senator from the state of Illinois?

HT: Power Line

Update: You know things are getting bad when the lolcats are laughing at you:

The last hurdle for an Obama victory

I've been working for a while on a post, which I'm planning to get up later today, on what I expect out of an Obama presidency—and at this point, that pretty much is what I expect. I believe John McCain has a chance to win, but I don't believe he'll make his case forcefully enough to do so. Still, because there are significant unanswered questions about Barack Obama, he does have the ability to do so, and as a consequence, the McCain campaign has been starting to show some signs of life again. A lot of that is due to Sarah Palin; now that they've let her off the short leash to campaign on her own and do things like local TV interviews (that one's with a Tampa station), she's once again injecting some energy into the ticket. It also helps that the MSM are finally starting to notice some of the things the Obama campaign has been trying to keep behind the curtain, as with this CNN report on the relationship between Barack Obama and Bill Ayers:

This is an issue for which the Obama campaign has no good answer, as Mark Halperin's interview with Robert Gibbs shows. All Gibbs, a senior adviser to the Obama campaign, could do was try to answer questions Halperin wasn't asking and refuse to address the question he was asking: "Does Barack Obama think it's appropriate to have professional ties to an unrepentant terrorist?" Gibbs ended up (on a question about his favorite country-music lyric) with this: "I'll say it to you, Mark, but not to your listeners: 'Here's a quarter, call someone who cares.'"

Some might say that Sen. Obama's association with Ayers shouldn't matter; if the Obama campaign wants to take up that challenge, address it straight on, and make that case, more power to them. So far, though, they're refusing to do that, trying to duck the question and hope people just don't care; and as Peter Wehner notes, that's not a responsible approach.

Some may believe it should matter a lot, some may believe it should matter a little, and some may believe it shouldn’t matter at all. But that association, like the associations with the Reverend Wright and Tony Rezko, are part of Obama’s history and deserve to be discussed in a temperate, reasonable, factual way. Mark Halperin attempted to do just that. Team Obama’s evasive and clumsy response simply raises additional doubts about its candidate and his past. If there’s a simple explanation to Obama’s past associations, it would be helpful to hear what it is.

The thing is, as Sen. Obama knows full well and most people don't realize, for him, "just some guy who lives in my neighborhood" isn't nearly as dismissive as it sounds. He lives in Hyde Park, in a fairly tight-knit community of intellectuals who range from "very liberal" to "extremely liberal"; folks like the Obamas, Ayers, and Rashid Khalidi, the radical Palestinian advocate who lived in the neighborhood until 2003, formed a much closer group, a much stronger community, than the word "neighborhood" suggests to most people these days. The folks who live in the Obamas' neighborhood, including Ayers and Khalidi, have done a lot to shape them into the people they are.

Along with these associations goes another one, Sen. Obama's ties to ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now); this is a bit of an odd case, since he likes to talk about his time as a community organizer, but doesn't want people to know about the organization that would show them what that was really all about. That might have something to do with the fact that ACORN is being investigated for voter-registration fraud (we now have, for instance, 105% of the eligible population of Indianapolis registered to vote—and it's not just happening there, it's all over the place), which is particularly troubling since the Obama campaign has paid ACORN $800,000 for voter-registration efforts. You'd think his campaign would know that this is what they mean by "getting out the vote," given his long association with them. (Earlier, during his time on the board of the Woods Fund, that fund gave ACORN almost $200,000.) Then again, in Chicago, this is just standard operating procedure, so maybe it doesn't seem unreasonable to them. Even so, you can understand Sen. Obama and his campaign not wanting people to know what "community organizing" really looks like:

Acorn’s tactics are famously “in your face.” Just think of Code Pink’s well-known operations (threatening to occupy congressional offices, interrupting the testimony of General David Petraeus) and you’ll get the idea. Acorn protesters have disrupted Federal Reserve hearings, but mostly deploy their aggressive tactics locally. Chicago is home to one of its strongest chapters, and Acorn has burst into a closed city council meeting there. Acorn protestors in Baltimore disrupted a bankers’ dinner and sent four busloads of profanity-screaming protestors against the mayor’s home, terrifying his wife and kids. Even a Baltimore city council member who generally supports Acorn said their intimidation tactics had crossed the line.

Obviously, that sort of strategy isn't any visible part of Sen. Obama's run for the White House; but this isn't the image he wants people to have in mind when he talks about being a community organizer.

In a lot of ways, it seems to me, what the Obama campaign is really trying to do is to keep people from thinking about him as a Chicago politician, because everybody knows what that means. I think that's the big reason they want us all to forget about Bill Ayers, and Tony Rezko, and the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, and for that matter Richard Daley; because if you start thinking about him in terms of those people, and then throw in the questions about the legitimacy of a lot of the money the Obama campaign has raised (and their failure to answer those questions), then Sen. Obama stops looking like a new figure in politics and starts looking like nothing more than old-style Chicago corruption with a new face. I've said before that the McCain campaign needs to tie Sen. Obama to Nancy Pelosi (and also Harry Reid), and they do (and they've tried, at least somewhat, but so far without enough success); the other thing they need to do is tell the public that he's just another Chicago politician. Gov. Palin has started making that case; Sen. McCain needs to step up and drive it home.

HT for several of the ACORN links: The Anchoress

Down to her last fingernail

After getting clocked in North Carolina and barely eking out a victory in Indiana, by any rational calculation, Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign is all but dead. Had she gotten the best-case scenario for which she was hoping—a double-digit win in Indiana and a loss within 5-7 points in NC—she could make a rational case for herself on the basis of the political situation; what the actual results indicate is that Sen. Obama has weathered the blows, at least with Democratic voters, and is still on his feet. Barring the unexpected, her hopes for the White House are over.

The problem is, of course, in this craziest of all campaign seasons, how could we possibly have the cheek to bar the unexpected? When was the last time we had anything but the unexpected? Unless Sen. Obama completely self-destructs, he's the nominee—but his self-destruction somehow seems completely possible, even if I can't imagine anyone without Sen. Clinton's ego actually betting on it. What's more, I can even think of two completely possible ways by which that could happen.

One, while we've heard all we need to hear about the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.'s beliefs, what we haven't heard him talk about (at least in any detail) is his relationship with Sen. Obama. If someone starts asking him those questions, depending on his answers, that could torpedo Sen. Obama.

Two, final arguments open Monday in the trial of Obama associate Antoin "Tony" Rezko. As Hugh Hewitt notes, "if Rezko is convicted and is facing a long stretch in jail, won't he have to think long and hard about naming names in order to limit his years in federal prison?" Should that happen, things could get very, very messy for Illinois Democrats; the likeliest major pol to go down would seem to be not Sen. Obama but Gov. Rod Blagojevich, but the fact that Rezko did Sen. Obama large, expensive favors would tie him closely enough to the story to be fatal to his ambitions, should it end up breaking open on that scale.

What are the odds of either of these things happening? Who knows? What were the odds of any of the things we've seen so far? But if Sen. Clinton stays in the race until she's pushed out, she maximizes her chance of taking advantage if either one does. So, down to her last fingernail she may be, and there may be nothing but the strength of her blood-red polish keeping it from breaking off—but as long as it holds, she's not going anywhere.

Concerns about Obama beginning to arise

I'm not one for links posts, but between the flu and this other crud, I have very little energy for thought, and the articles that I thought I might comment on are piling up. So, thematic links post on the Obama worries and caveats that are starting to percolate. (Which doesn't mean, btw, that he's a bad guy or unworthy to be president; it just means he's human. In his domestic life, of course, his wife has never let us forget that. As a politician, though, his essential appeal has been the image that he's better than everyone else, that he can lead us into a new political age, and all that; which makes relatively small black marks look much worse than they would for everyone else, because a large part of his campaign has been that he doesn't have any.) The majority of these I found through RealClearPolitics.

Sen. Obama: all hat, no cattle?

Obama the Messiah of Generation Narcissism (Kathleen Parker)

Obama Lacks Reagan's Audacity (Blake Dvorak): To wit, where Reagan won by proudly raising the conservative banner his party scorned and carrying it all the way to the White House ("Reagan's response to the charge of being a conservative was, Yes, I am. And here's why you should be, too'"), Sen. Obama has refused to do that for liberalism, despite being more liberal than Reagan was conservative.

Would President Obama really help our image abroad?

Certainly that's one of the cases he's making for himself, that he would restore America's international popularity (something Sen. Clinton is also saying she would do). Would his pledged actions in fact accomplish that? Maybe not.

"A senior Latin American diplomat says, 'We might find ourselves nostalgic for Bush, who is brave on trade.'" This from Fareed Zakaria, one of those observers who should always be taken seriously. This one applies to both Democratic contenders, of course.

Obama's First 100 Days (Michael Gerson)

The Myth of America's Unpopularity (Michael Gerson): The fact is, as the Pew report shows, we really aren't that unpopular in most of the world. (As long as we don't send troops, anyway.) I can attest to this, at least for some countries, and I know others who would say the same about other parts of the world.

Is Sen. Obama just another Chicago pol?

I don't know, and I hope the answer is "no," but I suspect we'll know more than we want to before all's said and done.

Barack Obama and Me (Todd Spivak): The brief memoirs of a journalist who covered Sen. Obama during his days in the Illinois State Senate.

Beyond that, go here if you want to dive into the Rezko story. I had thought Sen. Obama a Democrat I could respect, even if he's far too liberal to vote for; I hope I wasn't wrong.

And . . . can he handle the scrutiny?

Folks in the media are starting to wonder.