12 reasons unemployment is going to (at least) 12 percent

I hope not, but this does cause concern.  Via Hot Air, and read the whole thing:

James Pethokoukis

Gluskin Sheff economist David Rosenberg, formerly of Merrill Lynch, thinks the unemployment rate is going to at least 12 percent, maybe even 13 percent. Optimists, Rosenberg explains, underestimate the incredible damage done to the labor market during this downturn. And even before this downturn, the economy was not generating jobs in huge numbers. If he is right, all political bets are off. I think the Democrats could lose the House and effective control of the Senate. I think you would also be talking about the rise of third party and perhaps a challenger to Obama in 2012.

So here is what I gleaned from Rosenberg’s latest report:

1. For the first time in at least six decades, private sector employment is negative on a 10-year basis (first turned negative in August). Hence, the changes are not merely cyclical or short-term in nature. Many of the jobs created between the 2001 and 2008 recessions were related either directly or indirectly to the parabolic extension of credit.

2. During this two-year recession, employment has declined a record 8 million. Even in percent terms, this is a record in the post-WWII experience.

3. Looking at the split, there were 11 million full-time jobs lost (usually we see three million in a garden-variety recession), of which three million were shifted into part-time work.

4.There are now a record 9.3 million Americans working part-time because they have no choice. In past recessions, that number rarely got much above six million.

5. The workweek was sliced this cycle from 33.8 hours to a record low 33.0 hours — the labour input equivalent is another 2.4 million jobs lost. So when you count in hours, it’s as if we lost over 10 million jobs this cycle. Remarkable.

Jon Stewart catches Fox News’ creative editing

This was plain stupid, what was Fox thinking?

Hot Air »

Had CNN spliced footage of a sparsely-attended Capitol Hill rally to discredit the reports of large numbers of attendees to the 9/12 rally in September, conservatives would have rightly howled about media bias. What will conservatives say about Fox News splicing footage of the 9/12 rally into coverage of Michele Bachmann’s otherwise well-attended rally last week?

The Rush to Therapy

Interesting:

Op-Ed Columnist - NYTimes.com

Major Hasan was portrayed as a disturbed individual who was under a lot of stress. We learned about pre-traumatic stress syndrome, and secondary stress disorder, which one gets from hearing about other people’s stress. We heard the theory (unlikely in retrospect) that Hasan was so traumatized by the thought of going into a combat zone that he decided to take a gun and create one of his own.

A shroud of political correctness settled over the conversation. Hasan was portrayed as a victim of society, a poor soul who was pushed over the edge by prejudice and unhappiness.

There was a national rush to therapy. Hasan was a loner who had trouble finding a wife and socializing with his neighbors.

This response was understandable. It’s important to tamp down vengeful hatreds in moments of passion. But it was also patronizing. Public commentators assumed the air of kindergarten teachers who had to protect their children from thinking certain impermissible and intolerant thoughts. If public commentary wasn’t carefully policed, the assumption seemed to be, then the great mass of unwashed yahoos in Middle America would go off on a racist rampage.

Worse, it absolved Hasan — before the real evidence was in — of his responsibility. He didn’t have the choice to be lonely or unhappy. But he did have a choice over what story to build out of those circumstances. And evidence is now mounting to suggest he chose the extremist War on Islam narrative that so often leads to murderous results.

The conversation in the first few days after the massacre was well intentioned, but it suggested a willful flight from reality. It ignored the fact that the war narrative of the struggle against Islam is the central feature of American foreign policy. It ignored the fact that this narrative can be embraced by a self-radicalizing individual in the U.S. as much as by groups in Tehran, Gaza or Kandahar.

It denied, before the evidence was in, the possibility of evil. It sought to reduce a heinous act to social maladjustment. It wasn’t the reaction of a morally or politically serious nation.

Is China headed toward collapse?

Interesting:

POLITICO.com

“Purchases of U.S. consumers cannot be as dominant a driver of growth as they have been in the past,” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said during a trip to Beijing this spring. “In China, ... growth that is sustainable will require a very substantial shift from external to domestic demand, from an investment and export-intensive growth to growth led by consumption.”

That’s one vision of the future.

But there’s a growing group of market professionals who see a different picture altogether. These self-styled China bears take the less popular view: that the much-vaunted Chinese economic miracle is nothing but a paper dragon. In fact, they argue that the Chinese have dangerously overheated their economy, building malls, luxury stores and infrastructure for which there is almost no demand, and that the entire system is teetering toward collapse.

A Chinese collapse, of course, would have profound effects on the United States, limiting China’s ability to buy U.S. debt and provoking unknown political changes inside the Chinese regime.

Emotional Hippies - Crying Over Dead Trees

This is what happens when you put Earth First: Via Big Government

The Berlin Wall Came Down

I never thought it would happen and then it started coming down, so quickly. It really was an amazing time:

Evangelical outrage over play featuring transsexual Jesus

Gee, I wonder why Christian's would find this offensive?

Times Online

A controversial play which portrays Jesus as a transsexual woman was defended yesterday by its writer who has herself crossed the gender barrier to live as a woman.

Jesus, Queen of Heaven, has caused a storm of protest from Christian evangelical groups, who picketed the Tron Theatre in Glasgow when it opened this week.

Marine Traffic of the World

Kind of cool, you can track all of the major shipping, just click on an area and you can zoom in.  You can also get information on individual ships.

Live Ships Map - AIS - Vessel Traffic and Positions

Maybe If We Apologized With Greater Deference

Hmm...

JustOneMinute:

For people determined to avoid any insight into Hasan's mindest, a great place to not look would be the mosque he attended in Maryland:

What interpretation of Islam influenced Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan? As often before, the trail leads to the official sect of Saudi Arabia -- known as Wahhabism to most of us of who denounce it.

Confronting the role of radical Islam here is not Islamophobic, but common sense -- and the first response moderate Muslims themselves will have.

Hasan, though born in America, refused to have his picture taken with women -- an attitude distinct to fundamentalist radicalism among Muslims. The Prophet Mohammed cautioned his followers that when they go to live in non-Muslim lands they must accept the laws and customs of their new home. Millions of American Muslims get their picture taken with women, even ones not their wives, and don't worry about it. To refuse such an elementary and even trivial act of courtesy sets Muslims apart -- and that is the aim of radicals.

We've also learned that, before his transfer to Ft. Hood last year, Hasan served as a psychiatrist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC, and regularly attended Friday prayer at the Muslim Community Center in Silver Spring, Md.

The Silver Spring clerics have issued formal statements condemning the carnage at Ft. Hood. But Imam Faizul Khan, long the main prayer leader at the mosque and a friend of Hasan, said he never believed Hasan capable of such an act.

Yet what docrines did Hasan absorb at the mosque? While he was a communicant, it hosted at least four talks by Enver Masud, the founder of The Wisdom Fund, the main Muslim "truther" group in America [link, link].

And Khan is a leading board member of the Islamic Society of North America -- the main Wahhabi-lobby group in the United States, established by Saudi Arabia to impose extremism on American Muslims. ISNA has a long and disgraceful record of promoting radical Islam.

...

Most interesting of all: The button on the MCC's Web site titled "Islam" takes you to a pamphlet titled "Islam Is . . ." by a person calling himself "Pete Seda."

Seda is an Iranian also known as Pirouz Sedaghaty and Abu Yunus. He was one of three officers of the US branch of a Saudi-based "charity," the Al-Haramain Foundation -- until being indicted by the Justice Department for terror financing and tax fraud. Seda and his companions still await trial.

From a ghastly act to a Saudi-backed fundamentalist imam to a Saudi-run designated terror-financing "charity" is not a long trail. It is a small coil of associations that exists in too many US mosques. American Muslims must drive these elements out of their community. The problem's not traumatic stress, much less Islam. It's the ideology, the money and the interests of the Saudi hardliners.

This sort of thing would only be relevant if Hasan had been to a tea party or had once phoned in to Rush Limbaugh.

PELOSI: Buy a $15,000 Policy or Go to Jail

Wow, get health insurance or else:

House Committee on Ways & Means - Republican

Today, Ranking Member of the House Ways and Means Committee Dave Camp (R-MI) released a letter from the non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) confirming that the failure to comply with the individual mandate to buy health insurance contained in the Pelosi health care bill (H.R. 3962, as amended) could land people in jail. The JCT letter makes clear that Americans who do not maintain “acceptable health insurance coverage” and who choose not to pay the bill’s new individual mandate tax (generally 2.5% of income), are subject to numerous civil and criminal penalties, including criminal fines of up to $250,000 and imprisonment of up to five years.

House to vote on PelosiCare bill

Want to know how to contact your Representative?  Follow this link and put in your zip code the information will come up along with talking points.  This is a good time to let our Representatives know how we feel about the health care issue.

American Family Association - Action Alert

Scientology: The Truth Rundown, Part 1 of 3

This is a long but very revealing look into the inner workings of Scientology. 

Scientology: The Truth Rundown, Part 1 of 3 in a special report on the Church of Scientology - St. Petersburg Times

The leader of the Church of Scientology strode into the room with a boom box and an announcement: Time for a game of musical chairs.

David Miscavige had kept more than 30 members of his church's executive staff cooped up for weeks in a small office building outside Los Angeles, not letting them leave except to grab a shower. They slept on the floor, their food carted in.

Their assignment was to develop strategic plans for the church. But the leader trashed their every idea and berated them as incompetents and enemies, of him and the church.

Prove your devotion, Miscavige told them, by winning at musical chairs. Everyone else — losers, all of you — will be banished to Scientology outposts around the world. If families are split up, too bad.

To the music of Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody they played through the night, parading around a conference room in their Navy-style uniforms, grown men and women wrestling over chairs.

The next evening, early in 2004, Miscavige gathered the group and out of nowhere slapped a manager named Tom De Vocht, threw him to the ground and delivered more blows. De Vocht took the beating and the humiliation in silence — the way other executives always took the leader's attacks.

This account comes from executives who for decades were key figures in Scientology's powerful inner circle. Marty Rathbun and Mike Rinder, the highest-ranking executives to leave the church, are speaking out for the first time.

Tea partiers descend on Capitol Hill

This should be interesting:

 POLITICO.com

The Tea Party holds no seat in Congress, but at least 10,000 of the party’s members descended on Capitol Hill Thursday to rally against a Democratic-written health care overhaul.

A plan first hatched and heralded on FOX by iconic conservative Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) grew over the weekend as she e-mailed with a handful of colleagues. By the time activists started arriving at the foot of the Capitol around 8:30 a.m., it was clear no Republican leader could stay away.

Minority Leader John Boehner, Republican Whip Eric Cantor and Conference Chairman Mike Pence all spoke.

Inside, Democrats were working to finalize a trillion-dollar health care bill that they say will deliver insurance to tens of millions of Americans who currently lack it, improve the quality of care and rein in costs both for individuals and the government.

Top Gear Aston Martin DB5 & Jaguar E Type

Note to Andrew Sullivan: Don’t Blame Breitbart For My Thought Crimes

Fascinating article from a gay conservative on the issue of "marriage equality."

Big Hollywood

I appreciate the restraint of your posting, “A Gay Voice Against Marriage Equality,” though the title concerns me a little, as the last thing I want is for LGBTers to assume I am some kind of Anita Bryant (she was very active when I was coming out, and we don’t need a repeat of that). Few things are as terrifying as the thought of becoming the object of gay fury (which I understand you’ve had some experience with). It’s a sorry state of affairs when people within the gay community no longer feel they can speak freely without risking ostracism or threats. I sometimes wonder if there should be a hate crimes bill to protect gay people from other gay people.

That said, there are a couple of points in your piece I’d like to address.

First, one does not have to ”search high and low” to find lesbians and gays who are suspicious of the cause formerly known as same-sex marriage. Contrary to popular mythology, not all of us feel a pressing need for “marriage equality,” nor do we derive our self-worth from the state. I know gay Californians who voted for Prop 8 last year because they sincerely believe it is in the best interest of children (some of whom will grow up to be gay), and of society as a whole (which includes gay people), to uphold the ideal of the man-woman nuclear family.

And by the way, the gestapo tactics used by the gay community against Prop 8 supporters didn’t win any hearts and minds - they simply spread fear.

Second, the current term for gay marriage, “marriage equality,” is deliberately misleading. On the surface, it sounds harmless, even benign, but its bullet-proof banality is a con to nip dissent in the bud. After all, who could possibly be against something as fair-sounding as “marriage equality?”

“Marriage equality” is like “social justice” – a catch-all phrase that means everything, and nothing. But ordinary words are a powerful tool in the ongoing, subliminal campaign to disguise social revolution (the tearing down of mainstream institutions) as reasonable legal reform. It’s the oldest trick in the book.

Another good night for the Second Amendment

The Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » Another good night for the Second Amendment

NY-23: Winning Democrat Bill Owens was A-rated by NRA (as was Hoffman).

Virginia: Either Deeds (B rating) or McDonnell (A) were sure to be a big improvement over outgoing Governor Kaine. Deeds lost the NRA endorsement by supporting closing of the (non-existent) “gun show loophole.” In the Attorney General race, Republican Ken Cuccinelli (A+) handily defeated a D-rated Democrat who advertised very aggressively on the gun show issue. Incumbent Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling (A+) trounced an F-rated challenger.

In the Virginia House of Delegates, five Republican challengers with A ratings ousted Democratic incumbents rated F,F,B,B,B. A C-rated Republican also unseated an F Democrat incumbent. The House of Delegates already had a fairly solid pro-Second Amendment majority, so the major change in Virginia is a new Governor who, like former Governor and current Senator Mark Warner (Dem.), will sign rights-enhancing legislation passed by the legislature.

By far the most prominent gun control advocate on the ballot this year was Jon Corzine (F). This summer, Corzine twisted lots of legislative arms to win enactment of gun rationing (“one-handgun-a-month”), a silly law that is even sillier in New Jersey, where every handgun purchase requires advance permission from the local police chief. With Christie replacing Corzine, New Jersey gun owners can hope for benign neglect rather than active hostility. The New Jersey Assembly appears to be unchanged.

In sum: A bad night for advocates of gun show restrictions. Another fine night (as were election nights 2006 and 2008) for Democrats with A ratings from NRA. And good news for Second Amendment advocates in blue New Jersey and purple Virginia.

Climate change belief given same legal status as religion

Yeesh, you have to read the whole thing:

 Telegraph

In a landmark ruling, Mr Justice Michael Burton said that "a belief in man-made climate change ... is capable, if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief for the purpose of the 2003 Religion and Belief Regulations".

The ruling could open the door for employees to sue their companies for failing to account for their green lifestyles, such as providing recycling facilities or offering low-carbon travel.

The Obama magic has faded

Yep:

The Obama magic has faded

All politics is local, they say, and Tuesday’s off-off-year elections certainly had their local angles. Jon Corzine has been a terrible governor even by the undemanding standards of terribly governed New Jersey. Creigh Deeds, though he looked good to Democratic Party recruiters not long ago, turned out to be an undistinguished campaigner, more driven by the concerns of Washington Post editorialists than of Virginia voters. And NY-23 Republican nomineee Dede Scozzafava was a bizarre choice, bizarre enough to inspire a seemingly quixotic third-party run by Doug Hoffman.

But these local angles weren’t enough to keep the Obama administration out of the races. President Obama barnstormed Virginia and New Jersey — and pumped money and Joe Biden into NY-23 in support of Democratic candidate Bill Owens. (One suspects Owens would have preferred more money and less Biden.)

And — until it started looking as if they might lose — the Obama people were suggesting that these races would seal their mandate and encourage congressional wafflers to toe the line on health-care reform. Not so much, as it turns out.

In fact, the elections underscored Obama’s political weakness just one year after his triumphant victory over Republican moderate John McCain.

The Obama invincibility that was so much in evidence then seems to have lost its power. People can argue the reasons why these elections, all in places Obama carried handily, were so close. But if he were the political marvel he was thought to be, these races wouldn’t have been contests, but walkovers. So one consequence of this Election Day is the end of his special political magic.

The Paranoid Center

Fascinating:

Reason Magazine

The Paranoid Style in Center-Left Politics

This isn't the first time the establishment has been overrun with paranoia about paranoiacs. The classic account of American conspiratology is Richard Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," a 1964 survey of political fear from the founding generation through the Cold War. A flawed and uneven essay, Hofstadter's article nonetheless includes several perceptive passages. The most astute one might be this:

"It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. The enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry. Secret organizations set up to combat secret organizations give the same flattery. The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy. The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through 'front' groups, and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy."

Hofstadter didn't acknowledge it, but his argument applied to much of his audience as well. His article begins with a reference to "extreme right-wingers," a lead that reflected the times. In the early 1960s, America was experiencing a wave of alarm about the radical right. This had been building throughout the Kennedy years and then exploded after the president's assassination, which many people either blamed directly on the far right or attributed to an atmosphere of fear and division fed by right-wing rhetoric. By the time Hofstadter's essay appeared, the "projection of the self" he described was in full effect. Just as anti-communists had mimicked the communists, anti-anti-communists were emulating the red hunters.

Color Movie of Word War II

This is really interesting:

Golden State a flop

One thing most states do not want to emulate today is California's budgetary crisis.

Hot Air

William Voegeli wrote yesterday about the collapse of California’s political class, and the end of the competition between the Golden State model of expansive benefits and taxes and red-state models of low taxes and spending. Voegeli concludes that the high-spending model isn’t worth the expense, and that he’s not the only one who has drawn that conclusion. Migration patterns show that Americans have voted with their feet in this competition between political models, and for good reason:

Cheap Grace

In every church there are people who practice “cheap grace”.

What is cheap grace? It is a “salvation experience” where someone might have recited a prayer at some point in their life, and that is all.

You may still go to church; you may go more than once a week.

You might even serve on the occasional committee; but there is no fruit and there is no life change.

Cheap grace…cheapening the salvation of Christ that you claim to have received.

How can you tell if you have cheap grace?

Look at your life.

• Has it been changed?

• Is it different from what it was before you “prayed the prayer”?

• Is it different than those outside the church?

• Are you being changed from the inside out by the power of God’s Spirit who is in you?

Tychicus

Ephesians 6:21-6:24
21Tychicus, the dear brother and faithful servant in the Lord, will tell you everything, so that you also may know how I am and what I am doing. 22I am sending him to you for this very purpose, that you may know how we are, and that he may encourage you.
23Peace to the brothers, and love with faith from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. 24Grace to all who love our Lord Jesus Christ with an undying love.

Tychicus sounds like a man who could be trusted and counted on and was serious about serving God. How many of you had even noticed that there was a Tychicus in the Bible?

My point today is that there are many, many people like Tychicus serving in local churches. I want to give an example of just one regular faithful person who lived much more recently - Edward Kimball:

By all accounts, Edward Kimball was really an ordinary man. He worked at a regular job and attended a local church. He even faithfully taught a run-of-the-mill Bible study Sunday school class.

One day a young man named Dwight visited his class. It was clear that Dwight knew little about the Bible. One Saturday, as Ed was preparing his Sunday school lesson, the Lord put a burden on his heart to visit the shoe store where Dwight worked and to share the gospel with that young man.

That day, a Boston shoe clerk to surrendered his life to Jesus. The clerk, Dwight L. Moody, eventually became an evangelist. In England in 1879, DL Moody awakened an evangelistic zeal in the heart of Fredrick B. Meyer, pastor of a small church.

F. B. Meyer, preaching to an American college campus, brought to Christ a student named J. Wilbur Chapman. Chapman, engaged in YMCA work, employed a former baseball player, Billy Sunday, to do evangelistic work.

When, Billy Sunday held a revival in Charlotte, North Carolina, a group of local men were so enthusiastic that afterwards they planned another evangelistic campaign, bringing Mordecai Hamm to town to preach.

During Hamm's revival, a young man named Billy Graham heard the gospel and yielded his life to Christ. This shows that we can never know how our own small service to God will affect the kingdom of God in the future!

How very important are the Tychicus's and the Edward Kimballs in the church… But, they often do not appear to be important or significant men or women in the kingdom of God.

We often hear about the Dwight L. Moody's, the Billy Sunday's, the Billy Grahams… but the Tychicus's, the Edward Kimballs?

Well, the Tychicus's and Edward Kimballs faithfully plug away behind the scenes and out of the spotlight. There are millions of faithful servants in the church who receive little attention.

However, if you were to ask most of them living and serving in local churches today, they would say that they like it that way.

Attention is often turned to the great evangelists like Billy Graham. A great deal of time is also spent focused on mega-church pastors such as Rick Warren.

We need to remember that the servants behind the scenes are the fuel of the church. Churches are filled and fueled by the many who are faithful and can be counted upon week after week, month after month, year after year.

Falling fertility

Fascinating:

The Economist

Today’s fall in fertility is both very large and very fast. Poor countries are racing through the same demographic transition as rich ones, starting at an earlier stage of development and moving more quickly. The transition from a rate of five to that of two, which took 130 years to happen in Britain—from 1800 to 1930—took just 20 years—from 1965 to 1985—in South Korea. Mothers in developing countries today can expect to have three children. Their mothers had six. In some countries the speed of decline in the fertility rate has been astonishing. In Iran, it dropped from seven in 1984 to 1.9 in 2006—and to just 1.5 in Tehran. That is about as fast as social change can happen.

Statin Drugs Cut H1N1 Deaths

Wow!

FuturePundit:

Overall, 2.1 percent of patients taking statins died, compared to 3.2 percent of patients not taking statins. That means patients taking statins were just under 50 percent less likely to die.

We're Governed by Callous Children

The elite have no concept of the what "regular" people worry about:

Peggy Noonan:

When I see those in government, both locally and in Washington, spend and tax and come up each day with new ways to spend and tax—health care, cap and trade, etc.—I think: Why aren't they worried about the impact of what they're doing? Why do they think America is so strong it can take endless abuse?

I think I know part of the answer. It is that they've never seen things go dark. They came of age during the great abundance, circa 1980-2008 (or 1950-2008, take your pick), and they don't have the habit of worry. They talk about their "concerns"—they're big on that word. But they're not really concerned. They think America is the goose that lays the golden egg. Why not? She laid it in their laps. She laid it in grandpa's lap.

They don't feel anxious, because they never had anything to be anxious about. They grew up in an America surrounded by phrases—"strongest nation in the world," "indispensable nation," "unipolar power," "highest standard of living"—and are not bright enough, or serious enough, to imagine that they can damage that, hurt it, even fatally.

We are governed at all levels by America's luckiest children, sons and daughters of the abundance, and they call themselves optimists but they're not optimists—they're unimaginative. They don't have faith, they've just never been foreclosed on. They are stupid and they are callous, and they don't mind it when people become disheartened. They don't even notice.

Parents banned supervising children playgrounds...

Welcome to the 1984 version of England:

Mail Online

Parents are being banned from playing with their children in council recreation areas because they have not been vetted by police.

Mothers and fathers are being forced to watch their children from outside perimeter fences because of fears they could be paedophiles.

Watford Council was branded a 'disgrace' yesterday after excluding parents from two fenced-off adventure playgrounds unless they first undergo criminal record checks.

Cancers Can Vanish Without Treatment, but How?

Miracles?

 NYTimes.com

So, Dr. Kramer said, the image was “an arrow that moved in one direction.” But now, he added, it is becoming increasingly clear that cancers require more than mutations to progress. They need the cooperation of surrounding cells and even, he said, “the whole organism, the person,” whose immune system or hormone levels, for example, can squelch or fuel a tumor.

Cancer, Dr. Kramer said, is a dynamic process.

It was a view that was hard for some cancer doctors and researchers to accept. But some of the skeptics have changed their minds and decided that, contrary as it seems to everything they had thought, cancers can disappear on their own.

“At the end of the day, I’m not sure how certain I am about this, but I do believe it,” said Dr. Robert M. Kaplan, the chairman of the department of health services at the School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles, adding, “The weight of the evidence suggests that there is reason to believe.”

'Obama Is Average'

Excellent interview:

Interview with Charles Krauthammer:

SPIEGEL: Why do Europeans react so positively to him?

Krauthammer: Because Europe, for very understandable reasons, has been chaffing for 60 years under the protection, but also the subtle or not so subtle domination of America. Europeans like to see the big guy cut down to size, it's a natural reaction. You know, Europe ran the world for 400 or 500 years until the civilizational suicide of the two World Wars. And then America emerged as the world hegemon, with no competition and unchallenged. The irony is America is the only hegemonic power that never sought hegemony, unlike, for example, Napoleonic France. Americans are not intrinsically imperial, but we ended up dominant by default: Europe disappeared after the Second World War, the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991, so here we are. Of course Europeans like to see the hegemon diminished, and Obama is the perfect man to do that.

SPIEGEL: Maybe Europeans want to just see a different America, one they can admire again.

Krauthammer: Admire? Look at Obama's speech at the UN General Assembly: "No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation." Take the first half of that sentence: No nation can dominate another. There is no eight year old who would say that -- it's so absurd. And the second half? That is adolescent utopianism. Obama talks in platitudes, but offers a vision to the world of America diminished or constrained, and willing to share leadership in a way that no other presidency and no other great power would. Could you imagine if the Russians were hegemonic, or the Chinese, or the Germans -- that they would speak like this?

Would You Hire Barack Obama?

This article is from over a year ago.  Very prescient.

Would You Hire Barack Obama?

For over a decade I worked as a headhunter specialized in placing lawyers. I've often wondered what I would have made of Barack Obama's résumé if it had come across my desk.

I'd start off being impressed--very impressed. In the legal industry, almost regardless of a candidate's seniority, the first thing anyone looks at is the candidate's education. Even 17 years after graduating from Harvard Law School, Obama's work there remains his greatest strength. Obama graduated magna cum laude, near the top of the class. This is a real achievement. Being editor in chief of the Harvard Law Review is an even greater one.

It's when Obama leaves law school in 1991 that his résumé starts raising questions. He didn't begin a full-time job until 1993. Between 1991 and 1993, Obama divided his time between lecturing at the University of Chicago Law School, writing a book, and returning to his pre-law school activity, community organizing.

In 1993, Obama went to work for the small Chicago law firm of Davis, Miner, Barnhill and Galland. He could have gotten a job with any major law firm in America. His belated selection of a boutique law firm that offered lower pay but a better lifestyle than the top firms is striking. A lot of people in the legal industry, rightly or wrongly, would infer a certain softness from Obama's chosen path.

Between 1993 and 1996, Obama was a full-time associate at Davis, Miner. On the side, he continued lecturing at the University of Chicago Law School,
and his autobiographical Dreams From My Father came out in 1995. (Initial sales of the book were poor, though they would take off years later, once Obama became a national figure.) By 1996, Obama was also running for the Illinois legislature. After winning that race, he became a part-timer at Davis, Miner and a member of the Illinois senate, also a part-time job, while continuing to lecture at Chicago.

What is striking about Obama's résumé circa 2004, as he began his U.S. Senate campaign, then, is that 13 years out of law school, he had yet to commit himself to one line of work. More important, potential employers would wonder about a gulf between the ability Obama showed at Harvard and his actual accomplishments. Obama never made it beyond lecturer at Chicago, where he wrote no scholarly articles. He wrote one book, then stopped writing for over a decade. And he was less than a force in the Illinois legislature. After roughly three years practicing law, he had turned away from that career.

Faith No More

Hitch is at it again:

What I've learned from debating religious people around the world. - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine

Ever since I invited any champion of faith to debate with me in the spring of 2007, I have been very impressed by the willingness of the other side to take me, and my allies, up on the offer. A renowned scholar like Richard Dawkins, who is quite used to filling halls wherever he goes with his explanations of biology, is now finding himself on platforms with dedicated people who really, truly do not believe that evolution is anything more than "a theory." I have been all over the South, in front of capacity and overflow crowds, exchanging views with Protestants most of the time, but also with Catholics and, in New York and the West Coast and Canada, with—mostly Reform—Jews in large and well-attended synagogues. (So far no invitations from Orthodox Jews, Mormons, or Muslims.)

I haven't yet run into an argument that has made me want to change my mind. After all, a believing religious person, however brilliant or however good in debate, is compelled to stick fairly closely to a "script" that is known in advance, and known to me, too. However, I have discovered that the so-called Christian right is much less monolithic, and very much more polite and hospitable, than I would once have thought, or than most liberals believe. I haven't been asked to Bob Jones University yet, but I have been invited to Jerry Falwell's old Liberty University campus in Virginia, even though we haven't yet agreed on the terms.

Fox News Ratings Soar After Snub From Obama

Nothing like a little controversy to push up your ratings:

Fox News Soars After Snub From Obama

Gee, do you think Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch love being The White House's least-favorite news channel? Duh, of course they do.

Here's a chart comparing network ratings from the period 9/28/2009-10/11/09, which is when Anita Dunn slammed the network, and the two weeks after that ("post feud"). The numbers on the bottom right of this chart show the sequential gain for all demos (+9%( and the 25-54 year old demo (+14%).

The Cold War Never Ended

Long but worth the read:

Reason Magazine

We don’t know the exact hierarchy of motives, but it is certain that Chris Gueffroy was willing to leave his family and friends to avoid conscription into the army. Considering the associated risks, it’s likely that the 20-year-old was also strongly motivated to escape the stultifying sameness, the needless poverty, the cultural black hole that was his homeland. In his passport photo, he wore a small hoop earring, an act of nonconformity in a country that prized conformity above all else. But Gueffroy’s passport was yet another worthless possession, for he had the great misfortune of being born into a walled nation, a country that brutally enforced a ban on travel to “nonfraternal” states.

On February 6, 1989, Gueffroy and a friend attempted to escape from East Berlin by scaling die Mauer—the wall that separated communist east from capitalist west. They didn’t make it far. After tripping an alarm, Gueffroy was shot 10 times by border guards and died instantly. His accomplice was shot in the foot but survived, only to be put on trial and sentenced to three years in prison for “attempted illegal border-crossing in the first degree.”

Twenty years ago this month, and nine months after the murder of Gueffroy, the Berlin Wall, that monument to the barbarism of the Soviet experiment, was finally breached. The countries held captive by Moscow began their long road to economic and cultural recovery, and to reunification with liberal Europe. But in the West, where Cold War divisions defined politics and society for 40 years, the moment was not greeted as a welcome opportunity for intellectual reconciliation, for fact-checking decades of exaggerations and misperceptions. Instead, then as now, despite the overwhelming volume of new data and the exhilaration of hundreds of millions finding freedom, the battle to control the Cold War narrative raged on unabated. Reagan haters and Reagan hagiographers, Sovietophiles and anti-communists, isolationists and Atlanticists, digested this massive moment in history, then carried on as if nothing much had changed. A new flurry of books timed to coincide with the 20th anniversary of communism’s collapse reinforces the point that the Cold War will never truly be settled by the side that won.

O’s (Latest) Insult

Good point:

Jay Nordlinger - The Corner on National Review Online

Do you recall President Bush insulting Democrats, as Obama has insulted us, explicitly? Sometimes our post-partisan president can be a rather nasty piece of work.

When Late Night Attacks: Left Worries Obama Becoming Punchline

The Whitehouse is becoming touchy indeed...

Big Hollywood »

A few weeks ago, a funny thing happened — call it a late night political paradigm shift. Conan O’Brien put some extra bite to his bark by featuring a tape of Sesame Street characters who earlier in the day had visited with the First Lady to talk about healthy eating. Conan overdubbed the clip and, suddenly, instead of talking about food, the muppets questioned Obama’s ‘United States birth certificate’ and his ’socialist health care agenda.’ In the past, satire like this might have been automatically assumed to be an attack on the right, but the skit ended up taking some Obama fans aback. Perhaps it struck a nerve.

Then, Saturday Night Live rolled out a skit blatantly saying Obama had accomplished nothing, and followed it up by laughing at his Nobel Prize — relatively mild in execution, but they managed to cause a stir in the press. These comedic bits, once routine against President Bush, distressed many Democrat opinion leaders. Suddenly, more than a few talking heads were calling for the White House to start making their accomplishments clear — (so it looks like they have some). Others were killing the messenger — calling SNL’s Fred Armisen, who plays Obama, “no Tina Fey.”

Touchy.

Why lefties fear strong women like Liz Cheney

Hmm.

Noemie Emery:

In March, when Obama was still very popular, she and her father opposed him on "torture," Guantanamo Bay, and other security issues, and sent "The One" packing. By summer, she was on so many news shows that liberal bloggers attacked the programmers who gave her exposure. This is the sign she was being effective. If she were hurting her cause (or her father) they'd want her on air all the time.

Wolff (and Maureen Dowd) try to damn her by saying she's part of some dark Cheney enterprise, but the reason they loathe her isn't dear dad. She's what they fear most, a rock star with outreach, a feminine woman who isn't a feminist, a conviction politician who crosses culture lines easily, and isn't easily set up or mocked.

Politically correct white flight

Homogeneous groups are not surprising or wrong, what I object to is the hypocrisy of so many progressives on race.

Crunchy Con

Aaron M. Renn at the indispensable New Geography site has a fascinating analysis of a curious aspect shared by progressive urban havens like Austin, Portland and suchlike: they have relatively few black people in them. Excerpt:

This raises troubling questions about these cities. Why is it that progressivism in smaller metros is so often associated with low numbers of African Americans? Can you have a progressive city properly so-called with only a disproportionate handful of African Americans in it? In addition, why has no one called these cities on it?

As the college educated flock to these progressive El Dorados, many factors are cited as reasons: transit systems, density, bike lanes, walkable communities, robust art and cultural scenes. But another way to look at it is simply as White Flight writ large. Why move to the suburbs of your stodgy Midwest city to escape African Americans and get criticized for it when you can move to Portland and actually be praised as progressive, urban and hip? Many of the policies of Portland are not that dissimilar from those of upscale suburbs in their effects. Urban growth boundaries and other mechanisms raise land prices and render housing less affordable exactly the same as large lot zoning and building codes that mandate brick and other expensive materials do. They both contribute to reducing housing affordability for historically disadvantaged communities. Just like the most exclusive suburbs.

The Condition of our Heart

When other people attack us, malign us, abuse us, gossip about us, slander us, or hurt us, the natural human response is to protect ourselves.

We each will rise up and lash back, recoil and put up a wall to shield ourselves from continued attack, or we will run in order to escape.

Whether we rise up, recoil or run, we each have a tendency to hold on to the hurt and play back in our minds the scenes of attack and hear over and over again the hurtful words that were spoken.

By holding onto those images and words, if we do not allow God to bring us healing and help, we can become bitter.

Through unforgiveness and resentment, it is possible to become so hard that our hearts are unresponsive to God’s Word and our lives never change...

Christianity is more then just sitting on the pew Sunday mornings, it’s being rooted and mentored. It’s being stretched, weeded, fertilized.

If you are only fed or expect to be fed only on Sunday mornings, you will starve spiritually. No one can only feed from a 30 minute sermon once a week and expect to grow.

We might feel emotionally uplifted for awhile because God’s Word is good every time it is heard, but no one can live without being deeply rooted...

The person with a good heart, hears the word, applies it to their life and then receives a harvest of spiritual fruit. The heart that is like good soil is fertile ground for God to use.

God wants to see His Word, His Son, produce fruit in our lives. God wants to produce change.

He is the only true Hope and Change, He desires to make our life fruitful, but it all depends on the condition of our hearts.

Every time God’s Word comes to each one of us, either in church, through reading, in prayer or by some other means, as scripture reaches us, the condition of our hearts will dictate how we respond.

Since God wants us to have a heart that is good soil for him to use, how can we cultivate a ready, rich heart of soil? In other words, how can we have a good heart for God to plant His Word in?

The Obama presidency: Where I dissent

We really don't want a President that can be rolled:

TheHill.com

Virtually every player in the Middle East has said no to the president. Banks and Wall Street say no to the president. The Europe that said yes to the Nobel Prize says no to giving more support for Afghanistan. The president even snubbed the Dalai Lama in anticipation the Chinese would say no. The list is long of those who say no and short of those who say yes.

It is time to worry when “Saturday Night Live” makes fun of the president for achieving so little. It is time for alarm when so many power players believe this president can be rolled. Even a Senate where Democrats have 60 votes shows an almost daily disrespect for the president.

The reason so many power centers, at home and internationally, say no to the president is that they do not know his bottom line. They believe he may shift with the winds. They know he accepts a tiny loaf while claiming a big victory. They believe he can be rolled.

Debacle in Moscow

Make sure and read the whole thing:

Charles Krauthammer - No Nobel Results From Obama Foreign Policy - washingtonpost.com

About the only thing more comical than Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize was the reaction of those who deemed the award "premature," as if the brilliance of Obama's foreign policy is so self-evident and its success so assured that if only the Norway Five had waited a few years, his Nobel worthiness would have been universally acknowledged.

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