"Hear our cry, Obama!"

Just when you thought it couldn't get any creepier, Naked Emperor News via breitbart.tv offers up this little gem - health care reform advocates actually praying to Barack Obama, with refrains of "Hear our cry, Obama!" and "Deliver us, Obama!".

Listen closely for the reference to "the prophet, Martin Luther King, Jr".

Since when is it OK to be a child rapist?

These are facts that are not in dispute: Roman Polanski plied a 13-year-old girl with champagne and quaaludes, forcibly had sex with her, then sodomized her for good measure, and pleaded guilty.

But, hey, he's a genius of the arts, so it's OK. So sayeth the Hollywood illuminati. I can't say anything better about this than Allahpundit at Hot Air, in rare form on this topic:

Needless to say, this reminds me of the left’s umbrage at conservatives daring to bring up Chappaquiddick after Teddy died. Yeah, he left a woman to drown and then made jokes about it afterwards; he was for universal health care, though, wasn’t he? Same with Polanski: Dare we deny the man who made “Chinatown” an occasional drugging and raping of a child? Sure, a kid gets traumatized for life, but on the other side of the scale: “Rosemary’s Baby.” It’d be sweet if the left could come up with some sort of mathematical formula by which we could tell whether an artist or liberal politician has exceeded his quotient of moral indulgence. I’m assuming “Chinatown” wasn’t so awesome that Polanski would be excused shooting a kid in the head at point-blank range, so evidently it’s “worth” less than that but more than a child-rape. Let’s figure out just how much of a liberal hero you have to be to get away with certain crimes.

Come on, you neanderthals, give Polanski a break. Do it for the children.

Boxer, Kerry to introduce Senate version of cap and trade

What could go wrong?

The Boxer-Kerry bill will build in large part off H.R. 2454, legislation approved in June by the House following several marathon months of negotiations that involved lawmakers representing coastal and industry-heavy districts. Exactly what is the same in the two bills remains to be seen. As for differences, Senate Democratic aides say they expect the legislation to divert from the House bill's 17 percent emissions target for 2020 and go with an even more aggressive 20 percent limit. The bill also will stay silent on exactly how the Senate should divide up emission allowances.

The Democrats are determined not to let this steaming pile of crap die the ignominious death it deserves.

WaPo editors note hypocrisy of the left

A Washington Post editorial today notes what bloggers on the right have grumbled about since Barack Obama took office; that the left's most despised policies under George Bush are suddenly not so bad when continued by Obama.

Like President George W. Bush, President Obama now asserts that the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force gives him the right to hold some terrorism suspects indefinitely without trial. At Guantanamo, this is expected to affect 50 or so prisoners who, the administration has determined, can be tried neither in federal court nor before a military commission but are too dangerous to release.

[ ... ]

If the administration's abdication is irresponsible, the reaction of the civil liberties community has been breathtakingly hypocritical. The American Civil Liberties Union has consistently opposed any indefinite detention regime and pushed for detainees to be charged in federal or military courts or released. So we wouldn't expect them to join us in criticizing Mr. Obama for failing to seek a new legal regime. But it is odd that the same policy which, when pursued by the Bush administration, constituted "thumbing its nose at the Constitution" and putting a "stain on America's name at home and abroad" now elicits nothing but a few measured tsk-tsks.

Kudos to the Post's editors for calling them out on this. This goes hand-in-hand with the "what if Bush did it?" complaint. For eight years, every misstep or perceived overreach on the part of the Bush administration was blared to us in BOLD FACE ITALICIZED CAPITAL LETTERS but Obama gets a pass.

"Miss me yet?"

A friend e-mailed me this pic, which got me thinking...how many George Bush detractors - whether they'd admit to it or not - do actually miss the Bush years, if not the man himself?

I'll bet it's more than we think.

Hypocrisy watch

Roger at XDA compiled a great collage of anti-Bush pictures in response to this bizarre assertion from MSNBC's Chris Matthews:

You can go to a rally and hold up a sign talking about the man in the White House being some kind of animal, that he’s a Hitler guy, the fact that somebody would know they can get away with carrying a sign like that without being shunned, pushed aside, even beaten up, tells me there’s a license out there. … You wouldn’t hold up a sign like that a few months ago.

As my blogging betters have already pointed out, one would think history began the day Barack Obama was inaugurated.

Swine Flu stalking minor celebrities

Marilyn Manson: A bit more feverish than usual

It looks like H1N1, more popularly known as Swine Flu, might become better known for pushing minor celebrities back into the news than for killing people. Besides Colombia President Alvaro Uribe, swine flu has now claimed among its victims Marilyn Manson, Rachel Maddow, Rupert Grint, and Dr. Sanjay Gupta.

I guess having failed to kill people in large enough numbers, Swine Flu needed to do something to grab some headlines. What an attention whore.

Obama's brilliant team at work

Here's what we get for electing the smartest man to ever grace an American presidential campaign:

American plans to introduce an entrance fee for Germans and other Europeans entering the US has been met by harsh criticism. At an EU meeting on Monday, Germany's Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble opposed the plans, saying the plan to charge visitors a fee didn't make sense.

[ ... ]

Washington intends to use the planned fees to finance advertising campaigns for tourism, and estimates from a travel industry lobbying group claim the campaign could create 40,000 jobs in the travel industry. Schäuble has criticized these plans. "Financing a campaign to promote tourism by charging tourists $10 may not be logical," Schäuble said.

Whoever said a Democrat-led government would be logical? Way to mend those fences abroad, sport.

E.T. go home!

Twtterer @betsy2go made this E.T./Nancy Pelosi montage that was too good not to put up. I'm sure this image is somehow racist, or at least sexist. Maybe it's just offensive to aliens being compared to Nancy Pelosi.

Shocker: Dems never DID support Afghan war

This was all over the righty blogs yesterday, but worth noting. The liberal blog Hullabaloo notes:

Escalation is a bad idea. The Democrats backed themselves into defending the idea of Afghanistan being The Good War because they felt they needed to prove their macho bonafides when they called for withdrawal from Iraq. Nobody asked too many questions sat [sic] the time, including me. But none of us should forget that it was a political strategy, not a serious foreign policy.

Well, duh. As if we should ever expect serious foreign policy from the Dems. As Jim Geraghty over at NRO noted:

The average Democrat doesn't like fighting wars. They don't like using military force. They don't just dislike collateral damage and civilian casualties and flag-draped coffins; they cringe at the concept of combat with citizens of another country, even when the president has declared:

Al Qaeda and its allies — the terrorists who planned and supported the 9/11 attacks — are in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Multiple intelligence estimates have warned that al Qaeda is actively planning attacks on the United States homeland from its safe haven in Pakistan. And if the Afghan government falls to the Taliban — or allows al Qaeda to go unchallenged — that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can.

That's not the last president; that's the current president, an entire six months ago.

I wanted to make some acerbic comment on the left's duplicity, but I can do no better than Ace:

You claimed to support a war in which American soldiers were fighting and dying, leaving friends and limbs on the battlefield, as a cynical political strategy?

You... um... voiced support of a real serious-as-death war to cadge votes out of a duped public?

Uh-oh: McChrystal may resign over Obama's "dithering"?

A pissing contest between General Stanley McChrystal and President Obama is about to become very public. McChrystal has had a report ready to go to the White House since late August in which he'll recommend a significant increase in troop levels in Afghanistan, but the Obama administration doesn't want to see the report. Not yet, anyway.

According to Bill Roggio at the Long War Journal, McChrystal is prepared to resign his post if the administration won't listen to him:

Within 24 hours of the leak of the Afghanistan assessment to The Washington Post, General Stanley McChrystal's team fired its second shot across the bow of the Obama administration. According to McClatchy, military officers close to General McChrystal said he is prepared to resign if he isn't given sufficient resources (read "troops") to implement a change of direction in Afghanistan...

Roggio quotes a McClatchy article, which includes this bit from SecDef Robert Gates:

On Thursday, Gates danced around the question of when the administration would be ready to receive McChrystal's request, which was completed in late August. "We're working through the process by which we want that submitted," he said.

Er...what? Working through the process of submitting a report? This ain't that hard, guys. The report's done, all you have to do is ask for it. Unless, that is, you're fully aware of what's in the report and you know the clock will start ticking on making a decision on the recommendations and they're decisions you don't really want to make because you campaigned on the premise that Afghanistan was the "good" war that must be won at all costs and now public sentiment is shifting away from that.

Yeah, that's intentionally a run-on sentence. Get over it.

A tax by any other name...

Former Clinton flack George Stephanopoulos did a good job yesterday, drawing out Obama's patented stammer and making him squirm a bit on the question of whether the provision in ObamaCare's individual mandate that allows the IRS to forcibly collect money from those who fail to purchase medical insurance constitutes a "tax". My favorite part is when Obama accuses Stephanopoulos of "stretching" when he recites the definition of a tax from Merriam's dictionary. Obama insists it's merely a "fine". Hot Air has the video, so you can go over there to see it.

To me, the punitive nature of the individual mandate might be the least defensible part of ObamaCare. If it's a tax, then Obama lied about not raising taxes on those making less than $250,000 a year. If it's a fine, then that puts the government in the constitutionally awkward position of forcing citizens to buy a service they may neither need nor want.

Allahpundit provides the perfect explanation of just how this does, in fact, constitute an additional tax:

All of which avoids the basic point: Of course that “fine” is a tax. Imagine if you were allowed to “opt out” of police protection, with your annual tax bill reduced proportionately by the cost of police services that you wouldn’t be using. Inevitably, some who opted out would have a huge (i.e. hugely expensive) police emergency and would call the cops anyway and the rest of us would be on the hook for paying for it. Solution: End the opt out and force people to cover their share of the cost of police services whether they want to or not, which is exactly what cities do. You can call that an “individual police-fee mandate” if your heart desires but most of us recognize it instantly for what it really is — namely, a tax.

Another way to look at this is that health insurance premiums become taxes paid to a third party, while those without health insurance pay the tax directly to the government. How is that not a government takeover of health care?

Corrected: Obama accused George S. of "stretching", not "reaching". If one fails to remember correctly, is that dismembering?

We'll end up thanking Obama

No, seriously. You! Yeah, you...stop laughing.

Think about it. For years now, conservatives and libertarians have been grumbling about the expansion of the federal government and the concomitant erosion of personal liberties. But it's been a gradual process, sort of a death by a thousand cuts, and a large majority of the American population either didn't notice or shrugged it off. If Big Government had a throttle control scaled 1 to 10, the lever's been generally set at 2 or 3, with occasional forays up to the 4 or 5 range.

But Barack Obama has grabbed that throttle control, slammed it up to 10 and is pushing it past the detent into full afterburner. And suddenly, people are starting to notice. And they're pushing back.

The backlash is just now starting, and the 2010 mid-term elections will be just a sneak preview of things to come. By 2012 or 2014 the sentiment against ever-expanding government control over everything will be undeniable, and we'll have Barack Obama to thank for it.