Sad but true:

Members of Congress have demanded that President Obama present concrete plans for dealing with the over 200 dangerous detainees currently held at the Guantanamo Bay detention facilities before Congress funds its dismantling.

Obama responded to those demands yesterday with an extended speech in which he described in fine detail the complex structure of the sentences he will use, and the deep thought process he will employ, when dealing with Guantanamo and other national security issues.

The nightmare of the Obama presidency rolls on with the government takeover of GM.

The rationale for keeping GM out of bankruptcy was two-fold: no available financing and the potential damage to consumer confidence. But the government is providing financing and is offering to guarantee warranties. So what is the excuse now?

It's all politics now.

Now that the Obama presidency is nearing the 60-day mark, it’s time to thank those fastidious scribes on the left and the right who worked so hard to warn us against Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, and the dire things that would surely occur if she ever got close to executive power.
How right they were to insist that she was unfit for high office. Let’s just imagine what she might have done:

As president, she might have caused the stock market to plunge over 2,000 points in the six weeks after she assumed office, left important posts in the Treasury unfilled for two months, been described by insiders as ‘overwhelmed’ by the office, and then gone on to diss the British Prime Minister on his first state visit, giving him, as one head of state to another, a set of DVDs plucked from the aisles of Wal Mart, a tasteful gift, even if they can’t be played on a TV in Britain. (Note, the Prime Minister, who is losing his eyesight, may even be blind in one eye).

As vice president, she might have told Katie Couric that when the stock market crashed in 1929, President Franklin D. Roosevelt went on TV to reassure a terrified nation. Or on her first trip abroad as Secretary of State, she might have, as the AP reported, “raised eyebrows on her first visit to Europe...when she mispronounced her “EU counterparts names and claimed U.S. democracy was older than Europe’s,” then gave the Russian minister a gag “reset” button, on which the word “reset” was translated incorrectly.

What a good thing that Palin, whom Christopher Buckley called “an embarrassment, and a dangerous one,” wasn’t in office to cause such debacles, and that we have Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton instead.

So much time explaining why sending Obama to the Oval Office was a terrible idea, all wasted on an electorate that fell in love with buzzwords and catchphrases. This is going to be a long, expensive four years.

The American foreign policy consensus of the last sixty years — in contrast to the consensus of the hundred seventy before that — is marked by a belief that the projection of American power abroad inures to America’s benefit at home, a belief honed in recent times into the idea that a de facto benign American imperium would, without real imperialism, result in a more peaceful, orderly, and prosperous world, and the data bears this out. President Obama is actively retreating from this consensus. But he is not retreating in an orderly way, consistent with his promise to improve America’s image abroad during the campaign. He is leaving the old, decades-long consensus in bloodied ribbons, with no real substitute except for what appears to be a deliberately amoral interaction with the world.

The question that has to be on any serious observer's mind: After rushing Congress to act, why did he wait for days to sign the "emergency" stimulus bill?

We're just now seeing this? I'm actually more inclined to think that major media organs like the LA Times are now willing to admit what has been obvious forever to anyone with common sense, largely because of the change in the occupant of the White House.

...to keep from crying.

The Tale of Obamacles:

"I bid thee welcome to the White House
where your true test now begins:

Markets deaf to happy buzzwords
Blind to Shepard Fairey's art,
Heeding laws of economics,
Not the wishful laws of man;

A world of of evil filled with monsters,
who are unmoved by flowery talk,
Invulnerable to race cards
or leftwing blogger insults,
Who Hope for Change in megatons.

Do not despair! For look before you,
The noble army who brought you here:
Thespians and hiphop moguls,
Graphic artists, hipster twats,
The academic scribes of Athens,
basic cable sycophants.

These are the arrows in your quiver,
for the coming epic tests;
Use them well, but first remember:
They're waiting on those magic tricks.

Good luck with that, well-spoken hero,
I think I'll grab a snack and watch."

The same way we were united in 2000 and 2004, and the same way California is united right now over Prop 8. But don't let reality intrude on a good story:

It's all kind of confusing: 46 percent of the country voted against Obama. You would think that people in business might want to avoid potentially antagonizing such a big chunk of consumers.

The mad genius behind this is, of course, Iowahawk.

Ace:

Bear in mind, of course, Sarah Palin was a moron for taking on the less-spectacularly corrupt Alaskan political machine. See, if she had been as brilliant as Obama, she wouldn't have needed to respond with crude measures like fighting corruption and defeating corrupt politicians; she could have employed nuance and smarts to finesse around it, and even profit from it.

[sigh]

This is the culture from which our great new political messiah emerged. Hope everyone who voted for Obama is ready for Illinois-style politics on a national level:

Illinois Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich and his Chief of Staff, John Harris, were arrested today by FBI agents on federal corruption charges alleging that they and others are engaging in ongoing criminal activity: conspiring to obtain personal financial benefits for Blagojevich by leveraging his sole authority to appoint a United States Senator; threatening to withhold substantial state assistance to the Tribune Company in connection with the sale of Wrigley Field to induce the firing of Chicago Tribune editorial board members sharply critical of Blagojevich; and to obtain campaign contributions in exchange for official actions – both historically and now in a push before a new state ethics law takes effect January 1, 2009.

I seem to recall a certain party campaigning against a "culture of corruption" in Washington a few years back. They'd better HOPE that Obama wasn't corrupted by the ultimate culture of corruption - Chicago, where he learned the game and earned his political stripes. I'd say hope is all they have at this point.

God save America.

from Dennis Prager...