The new and improved recess at Broadway Elementary School in Newark.

Photo: Richard Perry/The New York Times

Great news today from the New York Times—if you happen to believe, that is, that every minute of your waking life requires intervention of one kind or another by the government or quasi-government forces. An article, by Winnie Hu, assures parents of enrollees at Broadway Elementary School across the river in Newark that there’ll be “no more sitting around after lunch. No more goofing off with friends. No more doing nothing.” Wow, are you feeling that tingling sensation up your leg?

Before Barack Obama’s election, his wife promised that Obama would “never let you go back to your lives as usual.” And Alejandro Echevarria, principal of Broadway Elementary, seems hell-bent not only on keeping Michelle Obama’s threat but making it a reality from the tenderest ages on.

In case you were worried that enforced play at recess was free of charge—or as Obama himself is fond of saying, “won’t cost you [the taxpayers] a dime—the cost of the program is $23,500 a year.

And just how much are the little darlings at Broadway enjoying their newfound playground imprisonment? The article answers that question with a frank exchange between 11-year-old Esmeilyn Almendarez and 28-year-old Brandi Parker, the “recess coach with a whistle around her neck, corralling children behind bright orange cones to play organized games.”

Esmeilyn: I don’t like to play.

Brandi: Why do I have to go through this every day with you? There’s no choice.

What is Spanish for dolce far niente?

But surely some of the children like the new regime, right? Well, not Jose Salcedo, a fourth grader, who misses the old recess when “nobody would tell us what to do.” And not Khizeeq Murphy, aged 10, who used to enjoy just running and dribbling a basketball. Or Kazmir Payne, a second grader, who “wishes he could have his free time back.” At least Kazmir’s mother, Kizzy, is on board. She is quoted as saying “I think the more supervision, the better.”

Presumably, in the interests of fairmindedness, the article even goes so far as to cite a study from the journal Pediatrics which found that “children still benefit most from recess when they are let alone to daydream, solve problems, use their imagination to invent their own games and ‘be free to do what they choose to do.’”

Not to worry, though. Brandi Parker knows better. “These are the things that matter in life: who you are as a human being at the core,” the article quotes her as saying. Never too soon to take the weight of adult responsibility on your shoulders. Or put it on the shoulders of children in their formative years.

Howell Raines: Would you trust this man to do anything?

It sounds like something straight out of The Onion: A critique of FOX News by one of the most biased, least open-minded individuals ever to sully the profession of journalism, Howell Raines. If the name is unfamiliar, Raines (whose mugshot appears at the left) is a former executive editor at the New York Times, another bastion of journalistic fairness and honesty. His most notable achievement at this newspaper was hiring professional liar and plagiarist Jayson Blair.

Raines’s rant against Roger Ailes and FOX, which appears in today’s Washington Post, is certain to come away with honors as the decade’s unintentionally funniest commentary on the state of the modern fifth estate. Just take this quote alone: “Through clever use of the Fox News Channel and its cadre of raucous commentators, Ailes has overturned standards of fairness and objectivity that have guided American print and broadcast journalists since World War II.”  Standards of fairness and objectivity? Raines couldn’t be more of a stranger to fairness and objectivity.

Raines’s disquisition on the alleged unfairness of FOX centers on one beef: its biased treatment of the current health care fiasco. In support of his claim, Raines relies on an unattributed quote he ascribes to FOX: “The American people do not want health-care reform.” Crack journalist that he is, Raines probably should name the FOX employee whom he is quoting, but remember—this is the man who gave the world Jayson Blair.

But never mind any of that. Raines, oblivious to blunt self-contradiction, shoots himself in the journalistic foot a paragraph later by noting “It is true that, after 14 months of Fox’s relentless pounding of President Obama’s idea of sweeping reform, the latest Gallup poll shows opinion running 48 to 45 percent against the current legislation.”

You have to hand it to the Washington Post for publishing this bit of self-righteous drivel and, in so doing, demonstrating that they are willing to hire, if only on a freelance basis, the handicapped.

The first came from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who in a typically belligerent, typically high-handed fashion gave utterance to the lie that the American people can’t afford to have Congress start the process over because they’ve reached the last straw.  She went on to recite sob stories of voters who have written to her(!), claiming they are using food money to buy medicine they can’t otherwise afford. What Pelosi conveniently overlooked is that none of the legislation in the package her house passed will go into force before 2013.  By that time, the poor souls she was describing will have started devouring each other.

The next untruth came from Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, who insisted the root of the problem is the “vulturous” insurance companies, who prey on the public. I wonder if Rockefeller was listening when his fellow Senator Lamarr Alexander of Tennessee pointed out that the combined profits of the entire insurance industry would cover exactly two days of health care for the country out of 365. I wonder if any of the Democrats is aware that the health insurance industry’s profit margin is among the lowest of any current active industry.

But far and away the funniest line of the day had to be Obama himself admonishing John McCain that the time for campaigning is past. Lucky Obama didn’t add that the time for exaggeration and egotism are past, which probably would drawn lightning bolts to Blair House.

Obama, who had the floor more than all the representatives of either party combined, concluded the side show by throwing up his hands and saying we can’t afford “baby steps,” adding that in a few weeks the final determination on the bill will be made. His final words were “That’s what elections are for.”

Precisely, Mr. President. You want to start cleaning out your desk now, or do you need the weekend?

So who do you think is responsible for that divide? Yo! That’s right — according to Newsbusters, the subject was the focus of a discussion on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” this morning, and all present were in agreement that politically oriented  media websites are the culprit.

Besides Joe Scarborough, the panel included Mika Brzezinski, Pat Buchanan, Time’s Peter Beinart, and NBC’s Savannah Guthrie. A video of the exchange appears below.

Although this seems like an outrageously fatuous claim in light of the show that Reid, Pelosi, and Obama himself have put on this past year, there is a bright side. At least they didn’t blame the mood on George W. Bush.

First, he was prepared to allow his misbegotten health care proposal to die quietly so that he could turn his attention to the real problems besetting the American people. Then ObamaCare was back “on.” Then it was “off” again. Now. . . it’s frankly hard to keep track without a scorecard.

What a ride this presidency has been for dimwits like Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post. These people, who will remain dedicated to the myth of Barack Obama long after the bad taste of his presidency has vanished from the collective American palate, have done their best to run interference for Obama, but his constant “head fakes” have to be giving them a pain in a neck.

Robinson has a column today, the title of which — “On Health Care, Do It” — pretty well sums up the viewpoint of Obama’s loony left loyal base. “Pass the thing, and quickly,” Robinson importunes, “or risk becoming the loyal minority.” Apparently, on Robinson’s planet, the Democrats will remain in the majority if they pass this monstrous bill. Yeah, right.

Robert Reich, who should frankly know better, has a piece in Salon pushing for the use of reconciliation to pass the bill. Using reconciliation on a massive piece of legislation that will effectively hand one-sixth of the economy off to the government will spark a popular revolt in a country that has been sickened by the blatantly partisan deal-making it has witnessed over the last year.

The Democrats seem unwilling to accept that the dream scenario they all bought into a short year ago has crashed and burned. Obama’s approval ratings have been hovering around 47 percent — the point of no return for past presidents. Why any of them believe that forcing an unwanted, bloated, health care package down the throats of the American people is going to change any of that will be one of the mysteries for the ages. Call it ObamaClueless?

What Kilgore invites readers to contemplate is the type of alternate “what if” reality familiar to those who have “been watching the cult TV show ‘Lost.’” I have to confess, I am not one of them, and knowing that the show attracts great thinkers like Ed Kilgore, I have no deep regrets about spending my time otherwise. I am, at the same time, a huge fan of the Frank Capra Christmastime classic It’s a Wonderful Life, which addresses the same question, which reworded to fit the present situation is “How different would the U.S. be today if Barack Obama had not been elected president?”

“On a variety of fronts,” Kilgore writes, “the Obama administration is suffering from an inability to show Americans the parallel universe in which its past policies were not enacted.” I don’t what flavor of Kool-Aid Kilgore (I keep wanting to call him “Trout”) is drinking, but I think we already know what that wasteland would look like. Obama himself painted a vivid portrait of it in January of 2009, when he announced that a failure to pass his mammoth spending package would lead to unemployment levels above 8 percent. And we all know how well things have turned out since that bill was passed.

After some suitable Obama-esque talking points about jobs saved, Trout takes his what-if scenario to the next level, to ObamaCare:

Critics savage Obama for a health care plan that doesn’t do enough to limit costs. Obama responds that health care costs are going up anyway, without a plan. But it’s not easy to convince people that the status quo is riskier than a large and complicated series of changes in how Americans obtain health insurance.

Okay, this one is so simple that even a cave man could figure it out. (My apologies to Trout, who apparently can’t figure it out.) Obama’s plan for health care reform originally had two objectives:

1. To insure the then-47 million Americans without health insurance.
2. To lower (yes, lower; talk of deficit neutrality came later) the overall cost of health insurance.

If that sounds pie-in-the-sky it is because it is. You can’t possibly provide more of a good or service at a lower cost. Unless, of course, the government steps in as the seller of that good or service, in which case. . .

In which case what? Can Ed Kilgore or his ilk point to a single government-run program that has worked better than its equivalent in the private sector? Kilgore echoes the White House’s lament over the “gargantuan premium increases” that one insurer, Anthem Blue Cross, will impose on its California policy holders. But if it’s true that the cost of health care is rising fast, it is equally true that legitimate measures for controlling that cost — specifically tort reform and premium portability — were summarily dismissed by Democrat leaders crazed with their own power.

I could go on — Kilgore does — but this has been rehashed so many times that nothing new can be added to the argument. The nightmare that was ObamaCare is blessedly in the rear view mirror and getting more distant and smaller all the time.

One what-if Kilgore doesn’t bother to explore is how different the reality of Iran’s incipient nuclear capability might be if Obama had admitted some time early in his first year that his comments about sitting down with Iran’s leaders without precondition had been naive. Even without making this confession, if he had begged off the fatuous idea of engagement and pressured his allies to squeeze Iran back then, we might not be talking now about the reality of Iran as a nuclear power.

In the end, maybe Ed Kilgore and his fellow what-iffers should spend less time worrying about what would have been and more contemplating what is likely to be come 2010 and again 2012. They had their chance. Time to turn control of the country back over to the adults.

Maybe that bit of wisdom courtesy of Jean Baptiste Alphonse Karr should have provided fair warning to voters who supported the hope-and-change candidate in the 2008 presidential election, but apparently at least some of them have had enough. According to a Gallup poll released last week, Obama is now running just about even with the proverbial generic candidate on the Republican side.

The poll reveals that 44 percent of registered voters claim they would reelect Obama compared with 42 percent who say they would opt for any Republican candidate.

The prognosis for a second term for Obama get even worse when you take into consideration those all-important independent voters, who were a cornerstone of his victory last November. According to the poll, they now favor a Republican candidate to Obama by a 14-point margin: 45 percent to 31 percent.

The larger polling picture from Real Clear Politics paints an even grimmer picture of Obama’s chances for reelection. The aggregate as of noon today had Obama’s approval rating at 47.6, just 6 tenths of a point above the re-electability threshold. (No president has ever won a second term with an approval rating at or below 47 percent.) Some of the polls that make up that aggregate have Obama’s approval rating trailing his disapproval rating. The Marist poll, for example, his Obama with an approval rating of 44 percent and a disapproval rating of 47 percent.

Sean Bell, in case the name does not. . . er — ring a bell, was a 23-year-old black male killed by New York City police in a proverbial hail of bullets early on the morning of Nov. 25, 2006. A number of facts in the case are immutable:

1. FACT: Bell in his short life was arrested three times, twice for drug dealing and once for a firearms possession.
2. FACT: The men Bell was in the company of the night he was killed, Joseph Guzman and Trent Benefield, had themselves been arrested nine and three times, respectively. Each had been arrested at least once for illegal firearm possession. Guzman had been previously arrested for armed robbery and had served two separate terms in a state prison. Benefield had a sealed record as a juvenile for gun possession and robbery.
3. FACT: The Queens nightclub Bell and his friends were frequenting the night of the shooting was under investigation by police, who were there in plain clothes, responding to reports of a prostitution ring.
4. FACT: Bell deliberately struck a man with his car and attempted to run the same down shortly before police opened fire.
5. FACT: The police at the scene fired off 50 rounds at Bell and his associates.
6. FACT: Bell was unarmed.

It is Facts 5 and 6 alone that from the moment the case made headlines became the sole focus of black leaders, including race-baiter Al Sharpton. It is these facts alone that prompted outrage from the black community and led to charges that the police use excessive force against minorities.

If you examine Facts 1 through 4 in isolation, they hardly paint a sympathetic portrait of a respectable, upstanding citizen brutally murdered by racist police. But even if they did, would that support the claim that racial prejudice was a factor in the police’s conduct?

One of the police officers inside the club claimed he heard one of Bell’s friends say, “Yo, get my gun” as they exited the club. Plain-clothed officer Gescard Isnora, the man Sean Bell tried to run down his car and who is himself black, insists he held out his badge, identified himself as a police officer, and told Bell to stop his car. It was also Isnora who claimed he thought he saw Guzman reach for a gun while in the car, yelled “gun” to other police at the scene, and opened fire on the car. The other officers and detectives joined him in shooting at the car, firing off 50 bullets in a few seconds.

Again, depending on your reading of race relations as the subject pertains to members of law enforcement, either (a) the police made a mistake or (b) a black police officer saw a chance to kill him one o’ them darkies, and leapt at it. In the rational world, only one of those readings makes any sense whatsoever.

In 2008, two of the officers who shot Bell were acquitted of manslaughter. A third was acquitted for reckless endangerment. Federal officials then launched an investigation of their own to see whether federal charges could be applied to the situation. They interviewed witnesses and analyzed ballistics evidence in the case before coming to their final conclusion, which was published yesterday.

So, case closed? Not hardly. The Epoch Times reports that “U.S. Attorney Benton Campbell met with the family members and friends of Bell” at Al Sharpton’s Harlem headquarters. ” They said they would continue to push for the termination of the three officers’ jobs and wants the city to be held accountable.”

If these people really believe the system is out to get them, why bother? Why not do what self-preservation dictates that any living being do, and that’s to run — not walk — to the nearest border. I know if I thought it was open season on Jews here in the U.S., that’s sure as hell what I would do.

He was on the program to promote the book, whose thesis is disquieting to those, like O’Donnell, who are still trying to square the general public’s revised view of Barack Obama against the idealized version many voted for. O’Donnell became so unhinged during the interview, babbling on about how George W. Bush was responsible for 9/11, that Scarborough was finally forced to go to commercial, first assuring his viewers that he would be conducting the interview with Thiessen alone. The video follows.

Speaking more precisely, it wasn’t the editorial which brought the question to mind but a comment by one of the readers. The comment in question, posed by one “Jake, Manchester,” follows here in its entirety:

Let us also remember that he [Washington] owned many slaves (over 300 by the time he died at Mont [sic] Vernon). If not for those slaves its [sic] very possible he might not have become the man that he was.

Jake, Manchester’s comment makes it crystal clear who he hates for Presidents’ Day, though it doesn’t quite explain why. Let’s assume for the moment that Jake isn’t just engaging in some cheap, rhetorical self-righteousness — that he really believes that it was Washington’s slaves and not the man’s own military prowess that enabled him to defeat the British against great odds in the Revolutionary War. Shouldn’t Jake then — shouldn’t we all — feel gratitude to Washington and his slaves for the role they played in causing the events of history to turn out as they did? Can’t Jake join the rest of us in giving thanks for the ends General Washington achieved if not the means by which he achieved them?

But, as the editorial notes, Washington’s gifts to the nation he helped found didn’t end on the battlefield. They continued once he was elected as its first leader:

On his ride to New York City, then the capital, he was serenaded by citizens singing, ‘Welcome, mighty chief!’ Had he sought them, dictatorial powers were his for the taking. But on his inauguration, he wore a plain brown suit fitting of an average American, the first step in his plan to establish that Presidents were citizen executives, nothing more.

It is not clear from Jake, Manchester’s comment whether he read this portion of the editorial, but to accept the viewpoint that Washington’s democratic ideals somehow derived from the slaves he owned is to make a preposterously large leap.

The fact that Washington personally owned slaves is lamentable. The fact that anyone ever owned slaves is lamentable. Most lamentable of all is that that slavery continues to be practiced as a way of life in some places to this day.

The need to mention any of this in the context of paying homage to our founding fathers for the great gift they bestowed on us on a day set aside for doing precisely that is beneath contempt.

Now that it’s become clear even to sage political analysts like the Times’ Charles Blow that Barack Obama can’t be trusted to tie his own shoes, the question for Obama is who to trust. He’s getting opinions from every quarter imaginable — the extreme left (which Blow represents), the far left, the left, and the lunatic fringe.

Blow’s advice is simple and comes in two parts. The first is get America back to work. The second — and more interesting — part is shake up the staffing of the West Wing. Now this second part would be tantalizing to non-Obama supporters, who would enjoy seeing (for example) Robert Gibbs, a brutish lout, get booted out the door onto Pennsylvania Avenue with a chamois and a can of Kiwi Shoe Polish, so he can begin a career more in line with his skill set. Ditto David Axelrod, a a brutish lout, etc.

But how sound a piece of advice would it be for Obama to jettison the group that got him to 1600 Pennsylvania in the first place? He has made it clear from his appointments so far that he gravitates toward people from the above-mentioned lunatic fringe when selecting individuals to serve him in advisory roles. As his poll numbers inch ever closer to the terminal cut-off of 47 percent — a popularity rating at or below which no president was ever elected to a second term — how wise would it be to trust Obama to assemble a crew as good as the minimally acceptable staff he has now?

Okay, clearly, Obama should tell Blow to blow.

Who is else is the president getting advice from? Well, there’s Joe Klein. Klein used to be a member of the extreme left, but his own craziness has driven him over the edge of the lunatic fringe. Klein thinks Obama should give the country the middle finger — figuratively speaking. He echoes a view that Obama himself occasionally gives utterance to when he is musing aloud. That is to forge ahead with his original plans for health care reform, cap and trade, the whole enchilada, and worry later that he has flouted the wishes of the people who elected him. Once they understand it was all for their own good, all will be forgiven and Obama’s likeness will begin to be hewn from the granite face of Mt. Rushmore.

The main problem with this advice is that Obama no longer has the political capital to make any of these initiatives happen. The votes simply aren’t there any longer.

So who do I think Obama should trust? I think he should trust me. I have a piece of advice for him that I believe he will eventually be receiving from his party’s leadership when it is clear that he is dragging all of their careers and the party’s very foundations down with him. Better he should act now than wait until the damage is so far along that even the most politically correct histories of his administration will paint him as an abject failure.

I think he should announce his intention to resign from the Office of President effective immediately. He should tell the American people he has learned he is sick — I don’t know: let’s say it’s some rare blood disease — and that he has decided to tender his resignation for the good of the country. He’s not actually sick, not so far as I know, but he should say it anyway.

Following that advice won’t do a whole lot to alter his tarnished image; he has already done much to hurt the country, and there’s no walking that back. But at least it will prevent his name from becoming a verb meaning “to fail.” (Tom worked night and day to make the school baseball team but ultimately he obamaed.) His children won’t have to live a life of disgrace knowing that their last name has joined the dubious ranks of Lynch, Burke, and others that aren’t coming to mind right now.

Poor hapless, hopeless, helpless Obama. He is a like a crazed man turned loose in a laboratory, the kind popularized in sci-fi B movies, where everywhere you turn are flashing lights and whirring reels of tape and levers and switches.  And there he is, the President of the United States, desperately trying one combination, then another, certain that one of them will bring back the love.

The problem, he maintains, is one of style, of form. Frankly, that is a brave admission from a man so cowardly and full of himself that to admit making any mistake is to concede the universe. But he is wrong. Or at least he is homing in on only half the problem.

Style has been an issue  — and not just for him but for all Democrats in power. Their backroom deals and shenanigans, culminating with Obama’s own wink and nod to the unions regarding a tax on cadillac health care plans, stink to high heaven. And much as Obama has tried to pretend or rationalize the public mood, the American people have been on to him and his wheeling and dealing ways.

But substance has been a problem, too. Ten percent of the willing American work force is out of work. The percentage grows much larger when you factor in those who are discouraged and have given up pounding the pavements while the White House and Congress dithered, perfecting a monstrosity no one outside of Washington really wanted.

Yet that reality still hasn’t percolated down to the Oval Office, whose current inhabitant believes that if only he had done a better job of explaining his grand scheme. If only he had pushed the right buttons, pulled the right lever.

So where to next? He is planning a health care summit at Blair House, where he will engage Democrats and Republicans on health care in the hopes of resuscitating his moribund signature agendum. But never mind the topic. The location alone tells all. He still needs a stage set behind him, something momentous so that the history books can record it: “The health care Americans had been waiting for since the days of Theodore Roosevelt became a reality at Blair House on the evening of. . .”

But do mind the topic, too. He’s back to health care. And he’s already let his Republican antagonists know that they won’t be starting from Square 1 but from where Congress left off just before Scott Brown won the seat vacated by Ted Kennedy. And he’s reading them the riot act. Bipartisanship, he said during a rare appearance at a press briefing yesterday, doesn’t mean that “I have to agree to everything they want.” Or anything they want, he would have added if he were honest about his views. The interesting thing is that he thinks he’s in a position to dictate the terms of the meeting. Remarkable.

This much he can be certain of. The history books will write about him. If he’s lucky, he will slough off this mortal coil sooner rather than later, because he isn’t going to like what they will have to say.

To appreciate how friendly this advice is, consider the source. This is the same Evan Thomas who declared during Obama’s Cairo speech last June that Obama is “sort of God.” (Thomas later tried to walk the quote back, but once those things are out there — well, just ask Chris Matthews.)

So how are God’s poll numbers today? According to the RealClearPolitics amalgam, he’s just about at par for the first time in his presidency. The spread between his approval and disapproval ratings is so small — three tenths of a point, in fact — that the lines actually kiss.

I am confident that if pressed for a comment, some White House spokesman would tell you it’s just a poll. When the lines cross, as they inevitably will, the administration will no doubt stick to their story. In other words, they will continue to lie, just as Obama will do when speaking about the success of his stimulus package and his other achievements so far in his presidency.

You don’t think liberals are watching our backs? You’re wrong, and I’ll prove it. Consider the swift and decisive action officials took last week in Staten Island, New York, in the apprehension of Patrick Timonthy. On Friday, Timonthy showed up a P.S. 52, a local elementary school, brandishing an automatic assault rifle. There is no telling what might have transpired had it not been for the quick reflexes and courage of principal Evelyn Matroianni, who at great personal sacrifice, forced Timonthy to the ground in the school cafeteria and wrested the weapon away from him.

After which she frog-marched Timonthy, by this point in tears, to her office, where she promptly phoned his mother.

Oh, did I omit the fact that Patrick Timonthy is a fourth-grade student in the school? Or that the rifle in question is two inches long and manufactured by the makers of LEGOs?

If so, I probably also neglected to mention that the New York City Board of Education enforces a strict zero-tolerance policy toward bringing weapons onto the school grounds. Now there is something in that by-law about a school employee’s use of personal discretion in sizing up a “situation” and about the disciplinary measures that follow a breach.

Now some may feel that Principal Matroianni overreacted to the threat potential of a two-inch long weapon. Others may feel that a suspension of Patrick Timonthy — which hasn’t been ruled out yet! — is perhaps extreme.

I say, “Do the crime, do the time.” I don’t care if the perp is 9 or 90. (Actually, those ages have much in common when it comes to comparative threat potential.) I say throw the book at him.

My only caveat is to be sure to read Timonthy his Miranda rights. That’s what the Justice Department under Eric Holder does when they capture someone who poses a threat to homeland security arises. And look how safe we are with that bunch watching our backs!

I know, detest is a strong word. Then again, this is a pretty hateful guy. If it weren’t for the disgraceful dereliction of the mainstream media and the fairly transparent hope-and-change snake oil routine he performed before adoring crowds, his utter self-absorption coupled with his deceitfulness and ineptitude would by now have gotten to the masses. For me, it has already reached fingernails-on-the-chalkboard proportions. The combination of his bellicose stage voice, 12th-angry-man glower, and head swivel as he moves from one teleprompter to the other are now sufficient to driving me up a wall.

Yet, the words just keep coming. Along with them comes evidence that the presidency is just one of countless jobs that are above Obama’s pay grade.

Yesterday, out on the campaign trail (?!), he gave another doozy of a speech. As Byron York notes at the Washington Examiner, the speech began with a recitation of his administration’s “accomplishments,” followed by his pledge to keep fighting for health care reform. Obama, never starved for an anecdote, shared this:

I got a letter — I got a note today from one of my staff — they forwarded it to me — from a woman in St. Louis who had been part of our campaign, very active, who had passed away from breast cancer. She didn’t have insurance. She couldn’t afford it, so she had put off having the kind of exams that she needed. And she had fought a tough battle for four years. All through the campaign she was fighting it, but finally she succumbed to it. And she insisted she’s going to be buried in an Obama t-shirt.

For some ambitious clothier, there is a marketing hook waiting to happen. “All of my men are buried in their Obama t-shirts.”

If true, this story is terribly sad — not because a woman died of cancer, but because there are so many dupes willing to put their faith in a man who is nothing but smoke and mirrors.

And sometimes even the smoke and mirrors are not enough to save him from the hapless boob he really is. At the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, Obama pronounced corpsman as “corpse-man,” not once but twice. Maybe he had thoughts of being buried in a shirt with his likeness on his mind.

Last week, the eminent and oh-so-appropriately named journalist Charles Blow diagnosed Obama’s problem as being too cerebral and failing to speak “in the plain words of plain folks.” Blow went on to offer this piece of advice: “The next time he gives a speech, someone should tap him on the ankle and say, ‘Mr. President, we’re down here.’”

What Blow fails to recognize is that Obama is standing on his head looking down.

So what exactly is it that the people of Jakarta have against Little Barry — the name by which he was known to his schoolmates at age 6? I suspect it is the same thing the people of Tehran, whom he heartlessly turned his back on during last summer’s popular revolt, have against him. It’s frankly surprising that more people aren’t disillusioned by this ludicrous caricature of a person and a leader.

As for the statue, it is not destined to be dragged through the streets and pelted with shoes a la Saddam Hussein. It is being moved to a nearby school, where it won’t be quite as visible to the 56,500 Indonesians who found it sufficiently offensive to sign a Facebook petition to have it removed. Now if only someone would start up a Facebook petition to get the real Obama removed as well, we’d really be getting somewhere.

No word on whether the statue will continue to perpetually relieve itself in its new digs.

But Bush-Monkey’s most egregious offense was stupidity. “The man is dumber than dirt,” more than one learned liberal opined. Bush was so dumb, in fact, that a poster of “Bushisms,” examples of his mangling of the English language, was published.

Why this guy was soooo stupid that not once but twice did he insult the leader of his own party by resorting to the same insulting figure of speech about the state the man hails from to exemplify wanton spending.

Oh, wait a minute. It wasn’t Bush-Monkey who did that. It was Obama. . .  Monkey? Last year, when he was trying to impress upon voters how reckless was the behavior of those money-grubbing, bonus-grabbing fat cats who spend other people’s money like — well, like Obama since taking the oath of office — he said, “You can’t get on corporate jets, you can’t go take a trip to Las Vegas or go down to the Super Bowl on the taxpayer’s dime.”

The dig at Las Vegas was not lost on the Senate Majority Leader, a Nevadan. Nor was it lost on Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman or Nevada Governor Jim Gibbons, both of whom were insulted by Obama’s comment.

Look, the comment was unfortunate. There are a bajillion metaphors in English for spending money recklessly. And not all of them (viz., drunken sailor) need be offensive. For example, “spending like there’s no tomorrow” or “spending like it’s going out of style.”

So which of those alternative locutions did Obama select for a speech last Tuesday in Nashua, N.H., in which he was trying to emphasize the dangers of uncontrolled spending? None. What he said instead was, “You don’t blow a bunch of cash in Vegas when you’re trying to save for college.” [Emphasis added]

This time Mayor Oscar Goodman wasn’t merely insulted. He was livid. According to the AP, he said that Obama is no friend to Las Vegas and would not be welcome in the city if he visits. “I’ll do everything I can to give him the boot,” Goodman said. “This president is a real slow learner.”

Slow learner? That’s pretty cruel. Is the mayor sure he wasn’t referring to George W. Bush?

Another major newspaper company that is also feeling the heat is the New York Times Company, which suffered a 3.3 percent drop in share price yesterday. Like Gannett, the Times predicted that the economy would turn around on cue if Barack Obama were elected. And, like Gannett, the Times participated in the see-nothing, hear-nothing, say-nothing coverage of Obama during his candidacy, giving no space to the Reverend Wright controversy or any of the embarrassments the administration has endured during its first year.

The tough times at the Times is nothing new. Last October, the paper cut jobs in its newsroom by 8 percent. This represented the second cut of that magnitude in two years. During the same two-year period, even deeper cuts were made in other, non-newsroom departments, where layoffs occurred several times.

One might argue that these are bad times for the news industry and that everyone is feeling the pinch. But that argument would not be valid. One media corporation had an increase in the price per share of its stock yesterday. In fact its stock value has risen by 36 percent since last March. The operation in question is News Corporation, owner of FOX News.

Is it a mere coincidence that NewsCorp is feeling its oats while its MSM competition is hurting? Or is it related to a difference in M.O.? To answer this question, it is instructive to examine the Times’ and FOX’s coverage of a single story. For a test case, let’s focus on the recent legal difficulties of reporter James O’Keefe.

Some background is essential. Last summer, O’Keefe made headlines — or at least should have — by visiting branch offices of the national “voter aid” organization ACORN, posing as a party interested in starting up a brothel that would sell the services of underage women. The exchanges, which were captured on videotape, were quite damning in some instances. FOX News did due diligence on the story. Some might argue that they went overboard in their coverage.

How did the Times treat the story? They didn’t. ACORN’s remarkable ethical and moral misconduct, as captured on the tapes, received not one word of commentary or reportage — nothing, nada, zilch.

At least such was the case until O’Keefe was charged last week with plotting to tamper with the telephone system in the New Orleans office of Senator Mary Landrieu. The Times ran a 1,000-word article on the story. By way of context not previously provided, the Times described O’Keefe as a “political activist” who “gained renown in conservative circles by poking fun at the left through pranks and undercover video.” Poking fun at the left? Prank? Imagine for a moment that O’Keefe had been a liberal and the organization he targeted in his sting videos was the NRA. Not only would the Times have covered every juicy morsel of the story, but its writers would have commended O’Keefe for his tireless and hard-hitting journalistic efforts. The paper would have followed up with no fewer than half dozen editorials demanding that the government investigate this organization. It is highly doubtful that the Times would have described O’Keefe’s videos as “poking fun at the right” or as “pranks.”

That is why the Times is hurting and will continue to do so. It also why FOX News is flourishing and will continue to do so.

Back when the nightmare that was ObamaCare threatened to become a reality, leaders in Congress were prepared to do whatever it took to pass this monstrosity into law. To make up for a lack of needed votes, some Senators were clamoring for reconciliation, a bit of parliamentary sleight of hand that would have reduced the necessary vote total from 60 to 51. Reconciliation is an ad hoc process created (by Democrats, no less) expressly for the purposes of forcing contentious budget legislation through the Senate. To use it for other purposes, as Democrats were now advoating, would have been an abrogation of justice.

Democrats seem to believe collectively that they were put on earth to make laws, but not necessarily to follow them. Just ask Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand. . . if you can get her attention. As one of her constituents, I’ve written to her and phoned her office several times, without so much as a nod back. Gillibrand’s voting record since assuming the Senate seat Hillary Clinton vacated to run for president suggests that, given the opportunity, she would regulate the number of breaths you can take. Yet when it comes to enforcing extant rules of law, count her out.

One of Gillibrand’s current political causes is overturning ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’ the policy constraining gay members of the military from revealing their homosexual identity. And one of her poster children is an army lieutenant by the name of Dan Choi. Choi is facing a discharge for announcing on the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC in March that he was gay. A New York Times article by Elisabeth Bumiller on the subject highlights Choi’s credentials, which are admirable (he graduated from West Point, for example) but quite irrelevant. The simple truth is that he broke the law, and there is no getting around that fact.

But as a liberal, Gillibrand sure can try. “This policy,” she told an interviewer, “asked him to lie every day, and it was antithetical to everything he had learned in the military.” The comment is melodramatic, but suppose for a moment that everything she said is true. The question that still arises is “What of it?”

If a law is wrong or unfair, there are steps that can be taken to overturn it. These steps do not include breaking the law in front of a TV audience, even if that audience consists of 30 people, as I assume is the case with Maddow’s show. Perhaps Lt. Choi saw his actions as an example of civil disobedience, a term much beloved by blowhards like race huckster Al Sharpton, who seems to think that inciting a bunch of losers to block traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge makes him or them anything more than the public nuisances they are.

Despite ever gloomier predictions for the mid-term elections, Barack Obama and his Democrat cronies continue to insist the solution to all of America’s woes is more regulation. They want to regulate “fat cats,” banks, and financial institutions into oblivion, while ignoring the real culprits at Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac. But the American people are getting wise to what they are doing. The electorate understands, even if Washington doesn’t, that rules are not to be broken.

One of the reasons the talk of reprinting the speeches has died is that there have simply been too many of them. The speeches he delivered on the campaign trail combined with those from his first year in office would alone fill a 12-volume set.

Another reason is their increasing vapidity. Maybe Obama no longer contemporizes on the healing of the planet, but whatever the topic these days, it is the case that the more he speaks, the less he says. He stumps at a rally for a candidate running for office on his party’s ticket and the other guy wins. Either no one’s listening or — worse — his words are beginning to have a paradoxical effect.

But maybe the problem for Obama isn’t his words but the lack of substance behind them. Or at least thought. It now appears that his plan to try the 9/11 co-conspirators in a civilian court in New York City is DOA. If he had given a moment’s thought to the idea, he would have realized how lame it was. And how unpopular it would be.

Early on, the legions of the brain-dead drew comparisons between Obama and one of his heroes, Abraham Lincoln. Obama never balked at the idea. In fact, he encouraged it — which right off the bat should have tipped off anyone to the reality that Obama is no Lincoln.

Lincoln gave a speech in 1863 to consecrate the new national military cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, hastily scribbling the words during the short train trip from Washington. In that speech, which lasted all of ten minutes, Lincoln opined that “the world will little note, nor long remember” the remarks he made on that solemn occasion. He wasn’t just being modest; he really believed this. He confided afterward to his bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon, “Lamon, that speech won’t scour! It is a flat failure and the people are disappointed.”

Lincoln was wrong. That speech is remembered and recited. It is reprinted in its entirety in schoolbooks. The fact of Lincoln’s self-effacement makes his words all the richer and worthy of memorization. And as for Obama, who fancies himself an orator but who is all style and no substance? He couldn’t pack Lincoln’s lunch.

Now along comes an offhand comment that may turn out to be the most blatant act of verbal racism yet. The perpetrator is a man, no less, down whose leg Barack Obama sends shivers. I am referring of course to MSNBC host of Hard Cheese Chris Matthews.

According to an AP dispatch, Matthews declared on the air following Obama’s State of the Union address:

I forgot he was black tonight for an hour. You know, he’s gone a long way to become a leader of this country, and past so much history, in just a year or two. I mean, it’s something we don’t even think about.

Forgot he was black! In all fairness to Matthews, apart from Obama’s having light skin, not using a Negro dialect (unless he wants to have one, which during the SOTU he obviously didn’t), and being articulate and bright and clean, the president was also not eating watermelon or collard greens at the time, so I suppose it’s easy to see where Matthews is to be forgiven.

Maybe. Then again, I’m not so sure. The AP article had another quote, this one by Dr. Imani Perry, a professor at Princeton’s Center for African American Studies. Quoth Dr. Perry, “As a black American I want people to remember who I am and where I come from without attaching assumptions about deficiency to it.”

Say what? You want people to notice your race? I believe the good professor has a touch of racism, too. I can appreciate that Perry wants to be respected, and with that I have no problem. But if being judged by the content of one’s character is insufficient — if in order for her to consider herself a hail fellow well met, I have to openly acknowledge that she is black — then, Houston, we have a problem.

Racial justice has a short menu. Either you’re seen as different or you’re seen as equal. No ethnicity, regardless of its history, gets a special dispensation in this regard.

What’s more, this type of demand breeds hard feelings, thereby leading to a lose-lose situation, too. The minute members of any ethnic group start setting rules of conduct for all other people, then the chances of remarks like Chris Matthews’ increases. Think about it: Matthews thought he was doing good. In point of fact, he was doing precisely what Imani Perry is advocating. He was going out of his way to acknowledge the specialness of Obama by virtue of his being black. Is this really something any reasonable, thinking person wants?

The news for Ford doesn’t get any better within his own party. Polling data has him trailing Gillibrand 41% to 17%. Perhaps he spoke a little too soon when he renounced his conservative views in preparation for a run for the Senate. Or maybe he should have consulted with Scott Brown who seems increasingly to have read the political mood of Americans of late better than the Democrats.

The irony that Gillibrand was appointed to the seat Hillary Clinton vacated to run for president should not be lost on Democrats. The same pattern was reflected in the Brown victory in Massachusetts and appears poised to happen in other key races, not the least of which involves the Senate seat in Illinois that Barack Obama gave up (after sitting in it for about 35 seconds) to run for president.

The data reported here was gathered before Obama’s bizarre State of the Union address. It’s anybody’s guess how dramatically the poll numbers will shift in favor of the Republicans now that the president has effectively declared war on the American electorate.

Now, maybe the misunderstanding is all mine. Maybe he means Washington State (a pox on them)! Or maybe he means a different Washington. According to this disambiguation page at Wikipedia, there are Washingtons in some two dozen-plus states.

Surely, the president doesn’t mean Washington, DC — which is epitomized first and foremost by the head of the executive branch, the president himself. Then again, I’m pretty sure that’s exactly the Washington he had in mind.

But what frustrates the American people is a Washington where every day is Election Day. We can’t wage a perpetual campaign where the only goal is to see who can get the most embarrassing headlines about the other side — a belief that if you lose, I win. Neither party should delay or obstruct every single bill just because they can. The confirmation of — (applause) — I’m speaking to both parties now. The confirmation of well-qualified public servants shouldn’t be held hostage to the pet projects or grudges of a few individual senators. (Applause.)

Did you notice that warning to both benches? That was kinda neat. He understands that it’s not the Republicans alone who are mucking things up, though it’s mainly them. He also took a shot at the third branch of government, the Judicial, by dressing down the Supreme Court, while its members sat there in the chamber.

But I digress. Look again at that quote. He feels our pain, he says. He understands that what frustrates us, the People, is “a Washington where every day is Election Day.” He is right. I for one am sick to death of some idiot getting up on stage day after day, campaigning for an office he already won. But I can think of only one individual among all the presidents in my lifetime to do that, and it was the speaker of those words.

This was also the first time I’ve seen a president call out the Supremes during a SOTU, but what does he care? What’s the worst thing that bunch of clowns can do to him? Oh, that’s right.

If there were any lingering doubts that this is a man teetering on the brink of derangement, last night he erased them all. I know there was a limousine outside the Capitol waiting to spirit him back to his living quarters at the White House. Given the current state of emotional stability of Barack Obama (SOES), it won’t be long before that vehicle is replaced by a rubber truck spiriting Obama off to his new digs, which will be padded for this safety.

So what are the “brains” behind the scenes counseling The One to do? Here is a cross-section of the best advice the Democrats have to offer:

• Paul Begala is advising Obama to attack Republicans. (How Begala sees this as a new strategy is something you’d have to be Begala to understand, and I wouldn’t wish that even on Begala.)
• Jonathan Freedland of The Guardian offers up some advice on what Obama shouldn’t do. That is, he shouldn’t move back to the center. (Back to the center? Wouldn’t he have had to be at the center at one time in order to move back to it? And if so, when does Freedland imagine that was? Never mind. The opening sentence of his article — “Part of me hopes Barack Obama does not deliver yet another soaring, masterful speech for his maiden state of the ­union [emphasis added]” — answers that question.]
• Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic similarly has mixed emotions over whether Obama should knock us off our sofas without another brilliant speech (“the speech of his life,” Cohn calls it) or simply lower his ambitions going forward. My question is whether Cohn was in a coma or something until this morning. If not, how else could he possibly have missed Obama’s 419th speech of his life, which put half of the electorate to sleep? (The other half switched to M*A*S*H reruns.)
• Last but not least, Kevin Drum of Mother Jones advises the president to stay the course. He should double down on his efforts to pass health care reform legislation regardless of what the American public says or thinks. After all, what do those idiots know? Nothing, if you ask Joe Klein. They don’t even deserve the gift of ObamaCare on accounta they’re such ignoramuses. (It’s sort of amusing to attempt to reconcile Klein’s current contempt for the electorate’s lack of intelligence with his views on that topic around the time Obama was elected.)

What do I think Obama should do tonight? I think he should resign and let the American people figure out what to do with President Biden. Since that scneario is as likely as Obama’s accepting blame for the many mistakes he made, I think he should kick a surprise third-down punt and attempt to pin his opponents close to the goal line. Oh, I’m sorry: My mind was wandering. Reading so much liberal “wisdom” will do that to you.

The cost of the trial is the least of the problems New Yorkers and Americans in general have with the decision to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed, mastermind of 9/11, here rather than in a military tribunal. The bigger issue is the Obama administration’s weak stance on national security, a dramatically candid glimpse of which was provided on by the botched handling on Christmas Day of the underpants bomber. After 50 minutes of interrogation by the FBI, in which Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab freely admitted that other attacks were in the works, the interview was cut short on orders from the Justice Department. The terrorist was promptly read his Miranda rights and then permitted to lawyer up after which he clammed up.

Although the administration has tried lamely to defend this decision — by, for example, having spokesman Robert Gibbs appear on FOX News Sunday to claim that “useful intelligence was gotten” — the incident made it abundantly clear that Obama and his Attorney General, Eric Holder, subscribe to a pre-9/11 mentality. This is a recipe for disaster.

Which is why New York Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Lazio drafted a letter of his in response to McMahon’s that highlights the sheer lunacy of proceeding as planned with the 9/11 trials. The letter, addressed to Congress, noted the duty of “representatives of the people to stand up not just for our own personal ideology, but for the basic views and values we swore to protect. This decision runs anathema to those basic views and values.” The letter is reprinted in its entirety at Human Events, which has also drafted a petition to Holder that currently has over 118,000 signatures. You can add your own by visiting this link.

With three quarters of the American populace now opposed to giving suspected terrorists the rights of U.S. citizens, which include the right to a “trial by one’s peers,” this misguided decision now becomes the latest in a succession of damned-if-he-does, damned-if-he-doesn’t decisions confronting Obama. As with his benighted health care agenda, if he goes forward with the plans to conduct the 9/11 trials a few blocks from ground zero, he will be viewed as resisting the will of the people. If he relents, he will lose even more political currency with his dwindling far-left base, while telegraphing the message to the entire electorate that he botched a critical decision in the first place.

What can one deduce from this anecdote? One explanation, advanced in an article in today’s Washington Times, is that his grip on reality is beginning to slip.

The evidence for that position is beginning to build. As the article also notes, he believes he hasn’t “reached out enough to the American people.” Is that to suggest he thinks he needs to make more speeches?

If so, he’s further gone that anybody realizes. By mid-July of last year, halfway through his first year in office, he had already given 200 speeches. The number has risen astronomically since then. He has given 28 speeches on health care alone.

Obama has long been in denial about the relative merits of his “stimulus” package. Never mind that he has relied on invented statistics about jobs “saved and created.” He can’t even get his handlers on the same page as to the number of jobs supposedly save or created. This past weekend, adviser Valerie Jarrett claimed the administration had “saved thousands and thousands of jobs.” On another network, at almost the same instant, David Axelrod was putting this mythical number at a million.

One of his latest stated agendas — to step up his fight to push health care reform through in spite of growing opposition from the American people — is among the hardest of all to fathom. In a TV interview(!) with Diane Sawyer of ABC, Obama allowed as how he’s that he’d “rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president.” This was Obama’s way of saying that if he pushed his signature campaign agenda through against the will of the people, it might cost his re-election but that in the long run they would admire him for bestowing this great gift on them.

At the rate at which he is drifting away from reality, a more likely scenario is that he will be remembered as the first president in history to be delivered from the Oval Office in a strait jacket.

Berry recounted meetings with White House officials, reminiscent of some during the Clinton days, where he and others urged them not to force Blue Dogs ‘off into that swamp’ of supporting bills that would be unpopular with voters back home.

‘I’ve been doing that with this White House, and they just don’t seem to give it any credibility at all,’ Berry said. “They just kept telling us how good it was going to be. The president himself, when that was brought up in one group, said, ‘Well, the big difference here and in ‘94 was you’ve got me.’ [Emphasis added]

Absolutely breathtaking! There is no other way to characterize it — even though Taranto tries: “In fairness, one can see why Obama might have been overly impressed with himself. Here’s a guy who became president of the United States just four years out of the Illinois Senate, and along the way developed a cultlike following. It sounds as though Obama became a follower as well as figurehead of his own cult of personality. He overestimated the degree to which he was special as opposed to lucky — a very human failing.”

It now seems clear to everyone except Obama that has luck has run out. Not to worry, though. He has plans. He now intends to “fight” for the American people. “So long as I have some breath in me,” he told a crowd in Elyria, Ohio last Friday, “I will not stop fighting for you.” (There’s a line in there I’m not going to touch.)

This should be fun to watch. He was scared feckless by the leadership of his own party in Congress, but he is going to be a crusader against big business. What a guy!

Clinton’s now-famous reaction was guided by pragmatism. Following the old adage about joining ‘em when you can’t beat ‘em, he abandoned his lofty liberal ambitions and tacked politically right — and won a second term two years later.

The similarities between then and now are inescapable. Clinton, like Obama, was trying to push a massive health-care reform through Congress and down the throats of the American people. Obama, like Clinton, has now failed. By any intelligent reckoning, ObamaCare is dead. What’s more, the future of Democrat control of one or both houses is in peril, owing to their leadership’s ham-handed and devious approach to get their agenda passed.

The question everyone now seems to be asking is “Will Obama tack right in an effort to salvage his party’s damaged reputation and possibly earn himself a second term?” That question is the wrong one to ask. The correct question is “Can Obama tack right?” The answer, I am convinced, is no. The facts as they are known suggest otherwise.

First, consider Obama’s political upbringing. He was raised in the Chicago political machine. His friends include a number of shady far-left characters whose names are so well-known that repeating them here would be an act of redundancy. Anyone that far left on the political spectrum has no clue where the center is. In Obama’s world, he probably fancies himself to be close to the center right now. And he’ll be damned if he’s going to become some blanking conservative.

Second, look at Obama’s personality. I understand that many Americans when polled profess to like him as a person, though I can’t for the life of me understand why. The constellation of personality traits he has revealed — haughtiness, think skin, readiness to heap blame on others (or at least “other”) for his shortcomings, unwillingness to accept responsibility for mistakes, ingenuousness, naivete, and rigidity — do not add up to a flattering picture. Perhaps I am discounting the power of his silver-tongued oratory, but I think it is more accurate to assume that people formed an image of him early on that they were eager to accept and that old habits die hard. In any case, the last of the character traits cited, rigidity — coupled with his massive ego — does not suggest a man who will change even when political expedience recommends that he do so.

Obama has already made it clear, most recently in his town hall yesterday in Elyria, Ohio, that he plans to dig in. Consider this statement he made:

Now, here’s the message I want you to take away — and we’re going to have a lot of time for questions, but I want to make this absolutely clear. I did not run for President to turn away from these challenges. I didn’t run to kick these challenges down the road. I ran for President to confront them — once and for all.

And what was one of the challenges he doesn’t intend to run away from? He gave utterance to it in his next comment: “to deal with the problem of runaway health insurance costs that are breaking family budgets and breaking business budgets and breaking our national budgets.”

Yessir, that’s what the American people want to hear their president talk about right now — runaway health insurance costs. If it were anybody besides this guy, you might actually feel sorry for him.

In an old Gahan Wilson cartoon in Playboy, two men standing at the stern of a boat stare at the water, out of which emerges the middle finger of their companion who moments earlier drowned. “Young Smithers,” one of the men says. “Bitter to the end.” Keep that image in mind this coming week, when Obama delivers his first State of the Union, during which that raised middle finger will be prominently displayed in his words and demeanor. Keep it in mind again in November of 2012, when Democrats stare down at the water and lament, Young Obama, bitter — and clueless — to the end.”

However their behavior might be explained, earlier this week the American populace responded with a clarifying gesture of their own. Suddenly, a Senate majority so eager to exclude Republicans for a year because they had exactly the numbers needed to pass a gigantic piece of legislation the people did not want finds itself exposed to the rude light of day. They now speak in conciliatory terms of bipartisanship and the need to work with Republicans to make this needed reform a reality.

Which brings me back to Krugman. In his column in today’s Times, which like his blog is also pretty funny, he appeals to his political base thus:

A message to House Democrats: This is your moment of truth. You can do the right thing and pass the Senate health care bill. Or you can look for an easy way out, make excuses and fail the test of history.

Wow, talk about not getting it! Here’s a guy who apparently still believes that one-way mirror exists. His message is to House Democrats? Why not just address the House janitorial staff, which has at least as much political sway right now as Nancy Pelosi and her group of partisan thugs?

To the truly deluded, like Krugman, this is still the Democrats’ battle to win or lose. All they need to do is mollify those silly Republicans on the other side of the aisle — you know, pretend to be their best friend, invite them over after school, share your baseball cards with them. Then once you get something that the president can claim as his signature landmark legislation, you drop the pretense and go back to business as usual.

What Krugman and his ilk in the mainstream media don’t seem to grasp is that the definition of business as usual now has a different meaning. “There is,” to quote the Speaker of the House, “a new sheriff in town” — and it is the American people, who can’t really stomach either party but find the Republicans at least palatable. Which gives Republicans the decide edge. They don’t just think “they’re on a roll,” as Krugman writes. They hold the cards right now. They have the power to stick it to the majority party bigtime.

And they should. Sure, the nation needs health care reform; has for a long time. But now that Obama and his Democrat cronies have squandered a year on some half-baked effort to wrest away control of an enormous chunk of the American economy — all the while ignoring rising joblessness — why should Republicans lift a finger to help them? Instead, why not let the message sink in over this coming year, so all Americans can absorb and savor it? The Democrats and their beloved president screwed all of us. And now the screw has turned.

It might be tempting for the Republican leadership to want to negotiate, to win tort reform and insurance portability for their constituents, but Democrats had their chance to negotiate and we all know how that went down. So why throw them a bone now? I say, wait until the 2010 elections. Republicans should use their new-found voice to persuade their colleagues in Congress to start genuine efforts to jump-start the economy — by, for example, cutting corporate taxes and fighting Obama’s idiotic bank tax, which will only slow down lending and growth.

For now, the issue of health care reform can be relegated to a back burner — which is where most voters, according to the polls, have placed it anyway. Once Republicans get a few more congressional wins under their belt, they can begin work toward giving the American people the real health reform they deserve.

Pelosi–is she inhuman or is she duncer?

Almost immediately after Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts, the world’s most disagreeable sexagenarian (who, N.B., is on the verge of becoming the world’s most disagreeable septuagenarian) assured her lunatic base that “One way or another, we’ll pass health care” — meaning full speed ahead in Congress and the administration’s efforts to ram an unpopular agenda down the throats of the American electorate.

That was then, and today is now. And what is the Speaker of the House saying? According to Ed Morrissey, she can’t get the votes needed to pass the Senate version of the health care bill. “I don’t see the votes for it at this time,” Pelosi told reporters in a briefing.

So wha hoppened? Was Pelosi just beating her chest when she made her pronouncement yesterday morning? Or was she just being the same lunkhead who defended her position that abortions should be encouraged by claiming “I’m trying to save the planet”?

I’d say a little from Column A, a little from Column B. All I know is that for all the Democrat spin doctor’s claims that “she gets things done,” Pelosi is the nastiest and most morally corrupted individual ever to occupy the post of Speaker. I hope that she is remembered for rudely declaring when George W. Bush left office that “it was like a great weight has been lifted.” I also hope when she finally and belatedly takes her leave from American governance that everyone will be sure to phone and write to let her know that the feeling is mutual.

In point of fact, he has done something no administration before him succeeded in doing. He has managed, albeit inadvertently, to reverse completely the winds of political change that had swept him into office just a year earlier. His achievement, dubious though it is, will be one for the record books.

Why Massachusetts saw red last night should be obvious now even to the most self-deluded Obamaphile — including Obama himself. Which is why this morning’s MSM headlines are mostly of the “Don’t Count Us Out Yet” variety rather than the “Full Speed Ahead on Obamacare” ilk.

The question now is what does Obama do next. Right now he has enough egg on his face to make brunch this Sunday for the entire White House staff. His first State of the Union is just around the corner, and now instead of rubbing Republicans’ noses in his success at moving the nation a giant step closer to a socialist democracy, he is faced with a major dilemma. Does he go out there and try to take a business-as-usual approach, pretending to be unscathed by Scott Brown’s—and the American people’s—victory in Massachusetts? Or does he begin to scale back his ambitious agenda and address the still-flagging economy?

More importantly, does he learn from his mistakes and begin to recognize that he works for the American people, and not the other around? If the answer to this question is no—and I suspect it will be (the leopard doesn’t change its spot) maybe those “Don’t Count Us Out Yet” articles that ran this morning may prove as wrong as the ones that predicted Obama’s face would appear on Mt. Rushmore one day.

UPDATE: And then of course, after the other hand and the OTHER hand, there’s the third hand: Walking into the spinning blades of an airplane propeller.

The bigger question, though, is what this says about their commitment to Obama, who in one of his most blatantly corrupt payback arrangements to date gave the unions a special exemption from having to pay tax on Cadillac plans in the event his abysmal excuse for health care reform became law. Is this how union members are paying him back? Not that I have any problem with it, understand. I’m just attempting to clarify their position.

As for the value of Obama going to Masschusetts to stump for Coakley, the latest poll results — dubious though the polling organizations may be — are as follows:

PJM/CrossTarget, a Republican polling outfit, has Brown up by 10, with 52 percent of the voter share to Coakley’s 42. Nor does it get much better for Coakley with PPP, a Democrat polling group, which has Brown at 51 percent and Coakley 46 percent, a 5-point advantage for Brown.

I realize these results do not in all likelihood take Obama’s push this weekend into account, but maybe that’s all for the good where he is concerned. He long ago spent the last of his political capital and is now trading on borrowed time. Which is perhaps why SEIU members see no problem in taking the opposing viewpoint to his in an election where he has much to lose.

One group likely not to turn out in large numbers on Tuesday is comprised of Obama’s most ardent supporters — minorities. Their absence from the voting booth will be the result of indolence. It should be the result of outrage and betrayal. This story from the newspaper of record of America’s second most liberal city, the Boston Globe, paints a sobering portrait of the champion of the underclass. Remarkably, the article was first released in June of 2008.

The article’s teaser gives a pretty good summary of the content to follow:

The candidate [Obama] endorsed subsidies for private entrepreneurs to build low-income units. But, while he garnered support from developers, many projects in his former district have fallen into disrepair.

The dateline of the piece identifies the place where these activities occurred: Chicago, Obama’s adoptive hometown. It focuses on Grove Parc Plaza, a housing development in the inner city with 504 government-subsidized apartments — none of them safe to live in. Writes Binyamin Applebaum, the article’s author:

Grove Parc has become a symbol for some in Chicago of the broader failures of giving public subsidies to private companies to build and manage affordable housing — an approach strongly backed by Obama as the best replacement for public housing.

As a state senator, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee coauthored an Illinois law creating a new pool of tax credits for developers. As a US senator, he pressed for increased federal subsidies. And as a presidential candidate, he has campaigned on a promise to create an Affordable Housing Trust Fund that could give developers an estimated $500 million a year.

How the American public, aided by most of the mainstream media, managed to overlook the realities of electing this man is a question that needs an answer if we, the people are to avoid the same mistake in the future. The people of Massachusetts are an unlikely group to take the first step toward leading the United States back onto the right track. Will the people of Boston, the city where the first Tea Party took place, pick up the banner once again? In less than 96 hours, we’ll have an answer.

The answer in any case is provided in a column by Charles Krauthammer, who summarizes some of the “then” and “now” highlights in what has made for the most interesting first year of any president certainly in my lifetime.

His column is worth reading if for no other reason than the laugh you are sure to get from some of the predictions made by loons on the left that Krauthammer cites. Example: “A year ago, he was leader of a liberal ascendancy that would last 40 years.” The point of view is attributed to James Carville, whom the world can also thank for 8 glorious years of Bill Clinton. Another example: “A year ago, conservatism was dead,” this keen observation courtesy of Sam Tanenhaus.

What has happened to change that picture is, of course, one of the dirtiest under-the-table-deal-making administrations ever to soil the good name of the American presidency. It is still highly likely that Obama will exact his pound of flesh from the American people by imposing on them his much-loathed health care reform so that he can continue to gloat about accomplishing what every president since Teddy Roosevelt has wanted to accomplish.

It is equally likely that the American people will exact vengeance of their own in the 2010 elections, thereby doing the impossible–viz., neutering a man who lacks cojones. Anybody with a brain could have predicted that Barack Obama would make a dreadful president. Could anyone have guessed he would conduct the affairs of state in a manner so unbecoming of the high office to which he was entrusted?

Cross-posted at Manhattan Conservative Examiner

Harold Ford, Jr., is contemplating a run for the Senate in New York.

The most infamous carpetbagger in our time currently serves as Secretary of State. That politician and former rival of Barack Obama for the 2008 Democratic nomination is Hillary Clinton, who got her formal start in politics by running for and becoming junior senator from New York—within minutes, it seemed, of relocating to the state.

Now it appears Clinton will have company. Following closely in her footsteps is former U.S. representative from Tennesse and current chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council Harold Ford, Jr.

In an op-ed in today’s New York Post, Ford—whose color (light-skinned black) and dialect (not Negro) should be a source of comfort to Harry Reid—writes “It’s true: I am strongly considering running for the United States Senate.”

Then almost immediately, he goes on the defensive. What has Ford done, you might ask, that requires the vigorous appeal he makes to New Yorkers? In simplest terms, he harbors—or at least has habored—viewpoints that are squarely conservative. For shame! A Democratic politician with a brain. How dare him. Fearful that his positions on guns, gays, and abortion may turn off Democratic primary voters, Ford goes to great lengths to assure his base, writing:

I am pro-choice — have always been since I entered politics almost 15 years ago. My cumulative grade with NARAL during 10 years in Congress was right at 80 percent. Any assertions to the contrary are false.

I remain committed to promoting gun safety and handgun control, and I look forward to working with Mayor Bloomberg and Newark Mayor Corey Booker and their coalition to reduce handgun violence in cities across America.

Despite what critics say about me, I enjoyed uninterrupted support from organized labor throughout my time in Congress.

And from the moment I arrived in Congress, I supported civil unions. Like New York’s senior senator, after listening to and participating in the national conversation about full equality and fairness, I support same-sex marriage.

Most of these statement are bald-faced lies. As a member of the House, Ford supported a ban on benefits for same-sex couples, as well as the Federal Marriage Amendment (which would ban same-sex marriage). He supported some restrictions on abortion, defining himself as a pro-life candidate, including supporting a ban on partial-birth abortion.

What effect will Ford’s cleansing of his political past have on his chances in New York? My guess, and certainly my hope, is that Democrats won’t trust him. It is almost a guarantee that conservatives will disown him. Too bad. Ford seemed at one time to hold promise as a true statesman in an era when there are all too few of them on either side of the political spectrum. Now he has shown himself to be just another crass politician.

Cross-posted at Manhattan Conservative Examiner

Harry Reid, Senate Majority Leader and all-around racist

Los Angeles Times

Shortly after the first Tax Day tea party, last April, political scientist, American historian, and noted psychologist Janeane Garofalo appeared on the suitably high-brow news analysis show “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” to give her learned assessment of the protesters and their motivation.

“Let’s be very honest about what this is about,” she intoned with grave studiousness. “This is not about bashing Democrats. It’s not about taxes. They have no idea what the Boston Tea party was about. They don’t know their history at all. It’s about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up.”

And to prove her own intellectual maturity and fair-mindedness, she dismissed the protesters as “nothing but a bunch of teabagging rednecks”—borrowing a pejorative term for a rather obscene sexual act popular among some homosexuals.

Since that time, Republicans, conservatives, independents, and even, one presumes, moderate Democrats who have expressed reservations about the job Barack Obama has done as president have been branded  racists. Is it possible that those of us who claim to find fault with the Obama presidency (which increasingly is gaining such unlikely adherents as lefty commentator Maureen Dowd, who slammed Obama hard again today in her New York Times column) simply find fault with the Obama presidency? No! shout back the acolytes. You’re a racist for even asking!

How is it that Democrats are so adept at sniffing out the racism in seemingly innocent comments? Could it be that they know the brand so well because at least some of them smoke it themselves?

That theory would seem to explain as well as any the unfortunate portrait Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid painted of Barack Obama, whom Reid praised for being “light-skinned” (for a black man) and for not using a “Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” Negro? I haven’t heard that term since Samuel L. Jackson’s character used it whimsically in addressing his black boss in Pulp Fiction. I’ll bet Joseph Conrad couldn’t have gotten away with using the word Negro.

“I deeply regret using such a poor choice of words,” Reid said when called out. Blah, blah, blah. Afterward, when the cameras were off, he went on to allow as how some of his best friends were black people (although none of them dark-skinned—perish the thought).

Obama subsequently issued a statement absolving Reid of any wrong-doing. Then again, who is Obama to talk. This, you may recall, is a man who described his own grandmother as “a typical white person” and jumped to unfortunate conclusions about the Cambridge, Massachusetts police—immediately after declaring that it was too early to reach any conclusions about the case involving Obama’s friend (and fellow racist) “Skip” Gates.

When you get down to cases, it doesn’t matter whether Obama thinks Reid’s remarks were racist. Any rational observer would have trouble seeing them as anything other than racist—and the ugliest kind of racism at that that: the backhanded compliment. But not to worry. Harry plans on showing his benevolent intentions by inviting the Obamas to dinner. He has even hired for the occasion a cook famous for her fried chicken and has ordered a whole mess of watermelon for dessert.

Cross-posted at Manhattan Conservative Examiner

It appears at the website fredericksburg.com. The author, one Kenneth P. Vogel, writes somewhat gleefully about Glenn Beck’s production company having tax problems.

As Beck evolved from a medium-market local radio personality to a one-man media empire with top-rated radio and television shows, best-selling books, a monthly magazine and a traveling one-man comedy tour, his production company, Mercury Radio Arts, has at times struggled to keep up with the heightened tax and filing demands accompanying his success.

Mercury, a private corporation that lists Beck as chief executive officer and his wife, Tania Beck, alternately as vice president or secretary, since 2007 has fallen behind on its New York City business income taxes and has been cited for filing errors related to its obligations under Texas franchise tax and New York state workers’ compensation insurance rules.

Okay, let’s stop and review so far, shall we? Beck’s company has grown rapidly and, by Ken’s own lights, “at times struggled to keep up with the heightened tax and filing demands accompanying his success.” The company, moreover, “has fallen behind on its New York City business income taxes.” All right. I think I understand the situation. But what of it?

To understand why author Vogel finds delicious irony in this turn of events, you have to read the rest of the column. Actually, the first paragraph will suffice to give you the flavor and general tenor of the rest of the article:

No one has been less forgiving than Glenn Beck when it comes to Democrats with tax problems. Not just the well-known ones like Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner but also less serious ones such as Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, whose husband only recently paid off $6,400 in tax liens on his auto repair business, and Nancy Killefer, who withdrew her nomination to be White House chief performance officer, citing a $946.69 tax lien on her Washington home.

So Vogel’s point is that Beck has made fun of employees of the federal government with greater or lesser tax problems. Obviously, any fair-minded observer will concede that Nancy Killefer’s tax lien problem is a fairly minor one. And Beck’s (“In October 2007, New York City issued a tax warrant against Mercury Radio Arts, indicating that the company had been penalized $10,927.49 for overdue 2006 general corporation taxes. . .”)—well, it’s impossible to say without knowing the company’s adjusted gross, which information Vogel does not provide.

But again, what of it? Let’s suppose Glenn Beck’s company owed $80 million. I still ask, “What of it?” Glenn Beck is not an employee of the federal government. He is a television personality. In contrast, the people he holds up to ridicule, such as Timothy Geithner, are employees of the federal government. Because they are charged with the responsibility of running some aspect of the nation’s government, they are expected to live according to a higher standard of behavior. Which part of this do liberals have trouble grasping?

Cross-posted at Manhattan Conservative Examiner

And so, evidently, did the title of a novel by Joseph Conrad, the author of Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, which prompted WordBridge, a Netherlands-based publisher, to bowdlerize not just the text itself but the title.

The work in question, The Nigger of Narcissus, has been cleansed for what FOX News calls “a new generation of readers.”

It just doesn’t get any better than this. I thought the silliness couldn’t get any more intense than when a black county commissioner in Dallas County, Texas got all wee-weed up over the use of the term black hole, used to describe paperwork that had vanished down the office rabbit hole.

Now I know that was just the tip of the racial over-sensitivity iceberg. No more Black Death, y’all. From now on the outbreak of bubonic plague that killed between 30% and 60% of Europe’s population in the fourteenth century will henceforth be known as the White Death. Or better still Whitey Death. Or best of all Honky Death.

There is much, MUCH more scrubbing to be done, but before we get to it, I have a few demands of my own. Let the disgusting term Jew’s Harp be relegated to the same scrap pile of history as Conrad’s book title. Oh, and that Shylock character Shakespeare created—you know the thieving bastard who exacted a pound of flesh? From now, he’s no longer Jewish. He’s ah . . . um—well, I don’t know. I guess once everybody gets in on this racial hypersensitivity jag, there won’t be any ethnicity about which anything negative can ever again be said or written.

Cross-posted at Manhattan Conservative Examiner

Presumably, the comment was supposed to make Americans feel all warm and cuddly inside, knowing that their leader is a man of principles—someone who is willing to take his medicine when the system goes down on his watch. That view might not ring quite so hollow if Obama hadn’t spent every day of his administration previous to this one whining about the “mess he inherited” and blaming FOX News Channel or certain pollsters for his falling approval ratings.

But whether Obama’s self-recrimination is credible is really beside the point. The more important issue about the sentiment is what does he mean by it? In the same speech, Obama allowed as how “America’s first line of defense is timely, accurate intelligence that is shared, integrated, analyzed, and acted upon quickly and effectively.” But taking quick and decisive action in the face of accurate intelligence is precisely the opposite of he ordered done when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was seized by authorities. Rather than grill the Nigerian for information on who had trained him, where he had acquired the explosive materials used in the would-be attack, and whether, where, and when other attacks were imminent, Obama’s security team read Abdulmutallab his Miranda rights and allowed him to lawyer up.

Obama also gave assurances in his speech—or at least the impression thereof—that he understood the enemy we as a nation are up against. He described al Qaeda as “a far-reaching network of violence and hatred … that offers nothing except a bankrupt vision of misery and death … while the United States stands with those who seek justice and progress.” As Charles Krauthammer has noted, this views is disingenuous for many reasons. Chief among these is that al Qaeda is not out for justice or progress. On the contrary, they deplore both, which is what they despise the West. When Osama bin Laden or other Islamofascist leaders speak, they wax nostalgic about a worldwide caliphate; they pine for the glory that was Andalusia, the Latinized version of the name Al-Andalus that Muslims gave Spain in the Middle Ages, when the entire Iberian peninsula was under Islamic control.

A second problem with Obama’s statement is his identity of al Qaeda as the enemy. Indeed al Qaeda is an enemy and perhaps a prominent one. But they are not alone in the desire to bring death and destruction to the West. There are countless other sects and splinter groups dedicated to the same fanatic ideology, which is religious in nature. In short, we are at war with worldwide jihadism. Obama’s continuing to go out of his way to excuse Islam, as he did again in this speech, is to dismiss the problem, which is squarely grounded in Islamic doctrine.

Ultimately, this speech, like virtually every other one Obama has given, reveals a man who is more interested in appearances than he is in substance. The problem we as a nation face going forward with Barack Obama as our leader is that when you peel away the layers of fluff and bravado, there may be little inside.

Cross-posted at Manhattan Conservative Examiner

Though much of her optimism amounts to whistling past the graveyard (she importunes Democrats in North Dakota to scour the countryside for a replacement for the outgoing Byron Dorgan, adding manically that “there’s got to be a potential junior senator somewhere in your 641,000 fine residents”), she is correct on one point. The likely replacement for Chris Dodd in Connecticut will be the state’s attorney general, Richard Blumenthal. Not only is Blumenthal a known quantity among Nutmeg State residents, but he is popular. According to one poll, he leads his Republican challengers for the soon-to-be-vacant seat, Rob Simmons, Linda McMahon, and Peter Schiff by margins of 59-28, 60-28, and 63-23 respectively.

But even those healthy leads are not carved in stone. No one expected the field to shift this much in a single year of the Obama presidency. Then again, no one—at least on the Democrat side—anticipated what a singularly dreadful and divisive president Obama would turn out to be.

So, is the news as good for Republicans as it seems overall? Not hardly. While aggregate polling at Real Clear Politics has Republicans overtaking Democrats by a 43.3 percent to 40.5 percent margin in a generic congressional vote, those numbers aren’t exactly cause for dancing in the street. What they reveal is that Americans are sick and tired of both major parties, the Dems slightly more so at this point.

Part of the problem is that Republicans still lack a message and leadership. And you can’t exactly point to the Republicans’ far more palatable options for health care reform as an example of a message, because they did nothing to fix the broken health care system in six years of congressional leadership and eight in control of the executive branch. Republicans are also sorely in need of a leader, a role that I am not convinced Sarah Palin will be able to fill in three years.

But there are things we can all do to widen the path for the more palatable of the two major parties. These include:

• Continued pressure on our elected officials. If you haven’t been making phone calls or writing letters to your local congressmen, what’s keeping you? They deliberately forced the health care vote through the Senate before Christmas so senators could avoid the flak they were sure to get from their constituents during the holiday break. Even so, Ben Nelson is apparently feeling some pangs of conscience or pressure from his voter base, judging from reports that he now feels the whole health fiasco was a mistake when the economy continues to founder.
• Becoming a vocal opponent of Obama and other haughty Democrats. The Tea Party movement has done much to alert the American public to what is at stake if Barack Obama’s power continues to go unchecked. These protesters have helped shape public opinion and precipitated the drop in Obama’s poll numbers. But there is still much more to be done. Frankly, the health care fiasco should never have gotten as far as it has. The next major Tea Party event is scheduled for April 15 of this year, tax day. If you can make it, join the march on Washington. Don’t be deterred by the mainstream media (a pox on them), which attempted to dismiss last year’s tax day event as a blip or an aberration. Let’s make our voices loud enough to reach across the White House lawn directly to the Oval Office and to its current and—God willing—soon-to-be-former occupant.