AmericaWantsToKnow.com

Genius and courage

2010-01-31T20:12:00.000-08:00

If the framers of the United States Constitution could have lived to see the events of last week, they would be congratulating themselves on a job well done.

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy led a 5-4 majority to rule in the case of Citizens United v. FEC that the First Amendment does not permit a law that criminalizes campaign ads paid for by corporations and similar groups.

Justice Kennedy wrote that the law in question, the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (also known as the McCain-Feingold Act), was having a "chilling effect" on political speech. The law and the regulations following from it were so complex and uncertain, Justice Kennedy wrote, that they amounted to a prior restraint on speech. "A speaker wishing to avoid criminal liability threats and the heavy costs of defending against FEC enforcement must ask a governmental agency for prior permission to speak," he wrote, exactly the sort of government power "that the First Amendment was drawn to prohibit."

The people who currently hold government power reacted to this decision with extraordinary hostility.

"This week, the United States Supreme Court handed a huge victory to the special interests and their lobbyists – and a powerful blow to our efforts to rein in corporate influence," President Barack Obama intoned in his weekly radio/Internet address. "This ruling strikes at our democracy itself," he said, "I can't think of anything more devastating to the public interest."

Over in the House of Representatives, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the decision will allow "special-interest dollars to dictate the details of public policy."

On the other side of the Capitol, Senator Chuck Schumer said he will hold hearings to look for a way to get around the Supreme Court's decision.

Speaker Pelosi said she's looking at "legislative options available to mitigate the impact of this disappointing decision."

And President Obama said he has "instructed" his administration "to develop a forceful, bipartisan response to this decision."

The president was so angry at the Supreme Court that he lashed out at the the justices during his State of the Union address, accusing them to their faces of believing that "American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities." He said he was "urging Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps to correct some of these problems." [That was milder than his written speech, which read, "to pass a bill that helps to right this wrong."]

Of course, the First Amendment can't be overturned by an act of Congress.

It was the genius of the Founders to protect our liberty by dividing and limiting government power. "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition," they wrote in Federalist No. 51, which is titled "The Structure of the Government Must Furnish the Proper Checks and Balances Between the Different Departments."

It was published in 1788, but it's still in what book dealers call "very good" condition.

Federalist No. 51, written by Alexander Hamilton or James Madison, says the "preservation of liberty" requires that each branch of government "have a will of its own," with the members of each department having "as little agency as possible in the appointment of the members of the others." The framers agreed to "some deviations" from this principle, one being the appointment and confirmation of judges. Because of "peculiar qualifications being essential in the members" of the judicial branch, the most important consideration was "to select that mode of choice which best secures these qualifications."

The safeguard of liberty was "the permanent tenure by which the appointments are held in that department, [which] must soon destroy all sense of dependence on the authority conferring them."

That's exactly what you saw on television during the State of the Union address: Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy and five of his colleagues calmly dismissing a presidential rebuke and the congressional standing ovation for it.

It's the framers' design. The Supreme Court doesn't answer to Congress or the president.

Still, it takes courage to stand up for the First Amendment in the face of withering criticism from those who find freedom of speech to be an obstacle to their plans.

"It will be that much harder to get fair, common-sense financial reforms, or close unwarranted tax loopholes that reward corporations from sheltering their income or shipping American jobs off-shore," President Obama seethed in his remarks about the Citizens United decision, "It will make it more difficult to pass commonsense laws to promote energy independence because even foreign entities would be allowed to mix in our elections. It would give the health insurance industry even more leverage to fend off reforms that would protect patients."

He's angry because the Supreme Court threw out a law that would have kept banks and insurance companies and oil companies and other corporations from running ads to give voters their side of the story when they are threatened and attacked by progressive politicians -- "men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims," in Ayn Rand's words.

Corporations are no longer disarmed in the 30 days before a primary election because Justice Anthony Kennedy took a courageous stand for freedom of speech, and not for the first time. In 2002 he led a 5-4 majority in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, striking down a law that banned "virtual" child pornography, computer-generated images created without real children.

The withering criticism of that decision came from the opposite side of the political spectrum.

Justice Anthony Kennedy deserves credit for defending freedom of speech without fear or favor.

Incidentally, Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, the 1990 decision that was overruled by Citizens United, is a good example of the trouble caused by the Incorporation Doctrine, the Supreme Court's 20th-century project of applying some parts of the Bill of Rights to the states. Prior to the invention of the Incorporation Doctrine, the state of Michigan would have had a perfect right to restrict freedom of speech.

That's because the Bill of Rights was intended to apply only to the federal government, not to the states.

It was 1925, in the case of Gitlow v. People of State of New York, when the Supreme Court first suggested that the U.S. Constitution required the states to guarantee freedom of speech and the press. As late as 1922 the Court held that the Constitution "imposes upon the States no obligation to confer...the right of free speech."

Over time, the Supreme Court developed its theory that certain rights are so fundamental to the concept of due process of law that they must apply to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment, which bars any state from denying due process to any person.

It gets a little tricky when the Court tries to explain which rights are "fundamental" and which ones are not. It gets even trickier when the justices cut the states some slack and allow that there may be a "compelling state interest" justifying the law, and as long as it's "narrowly tailored" it's probably constitutional.

In the now overruled Austin case, the Supreme Court held that "Section 54(1) of the Michigan Campaign Finance Act," which prohibited corporations from using their general treasury funds for campaign ads, did not violate the First Amendment because there was a "compelling state interest" in "preventing corruption" and the law was "sufficiently narrowly tailored to achieve its goal."

When the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act in the 2003 McConnell v. Federal Election Commission case, the Austin decision was cited as a precedent.

The made-up balancing tests that the Supreme Court uses to apply the First Amendment to the states -- fundamental rights, compelling state interests, narrowly tailored laws -- were being applied to a law made by Congress, even though the First Amendment says that when it comes to freedom of speech, "Congress shall make no law."

That's the muddle that has been made by the Supreme Court's ever-evolving and constitutionally unauthorized Incorporation Doctrine.

"The biggest stretch that the Court has made was interpreting the Fourteenth Amendment to apply the Bill of Rights to the states," Justice Antonin Scalia told an audience at the American Enterprise Institute in February, 2006. "Nobody ever thought the Bill of Rights applied to the states. It begins 'Congress shall make no law.'"

But Justice Scalia would rather not talk about it.

"I'm not about to tell the people of New York state or of any state that their state government is not bound by the First Amendment," he said. "Okay?"

He's not really asking.

If we were following the Constitution as written, Michigan could ban corporate spending on campaign ads, and New York could require terrorists to testify against themselves, and California could ban jury trials, and Alabama could segregate its public schools. That's our federal system, as written, and as it used to be before the Incorporation Doctrine.

We have spent the last 75 or so years allowing the Supreme Court's decisions to substitute for constitutional amendments. That's why you hear about "test cases" going to the Supreme Court instead of "ratification debates" going on in state legislatures.

It's a risky practice. We're always just a 5-4 decision away from somebody's freedom being overruled.

Constitutional rights are most secure when they're in the plain language of the Constitution.

And even then it takes a Herculean effort to keep them.

Thanks, Justice Kennedy.

Copyright 2010

Source note: The Ayn Rand quotation is from Atlas Shrugged; it can also be found in her book, For the New Intellectual, in "The Meaning of Money."

Editor's note: You might be interested in the earlier post, "Rewriting the First Amendment." For more information and complete source notes on the history of the Incorporation Doctrine, read "How the First Amendment Came to Protect Topless Dancing," free online at http://www.ExtremeInk.com/appendix.htm and also published as the appendix to the novel, The 37th Amendment

.

Janteenth

2010-01-19T17:33:00.000-08:00

Mark the day. January 19, 2010, is the day American taxpayers went to the polls and declared that they are not slaves to everybody else's needs.

It was October, 2007, when candidate Barack Obama told a small child in Durham, North Carolina, "We've got to make sure that people who have more money help the people who have less money."

That statement was at odds with the Constitution, which protects an individual's right to his own life, liberty and property. The U.S. government does not have the power or the responsibility to even out the distribution of wealth in the United States.

Now that Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown has defeated Democrat Martha Coakley for the Senate seat held by Ted Kennedy, it's clear that the tea party protests in April and the town-hall meeting protests in August were not "Astroturf" demonstrations, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi insisted again and again. They were the genuine article.

A lot of Americans don't want the government ramming through new entitlement programs and running up record-breaking debt; and then lecturing the country about shared responsibility, otherwise known as higher taxes and mandatory payments.

Freedom means the right to enjoy the fruits of your own efforts, what Abraham Lincoln called the right to eat the bread earned with one's own hands.

That's not going to change.

Copyright 2010

.

Tabloid update: Exploding marriages

2010-01-17T09:47:00.000-08:00

"Obama Marriage Explodes!" the National Enquirer headlined on an April 2008 cover, but at the time there was nothing inside the magazine to back it up. The story was about Michelle Obama's fears that there might be photos and love notes from women in her husband's past that could create a huge embarrassment for them just before the election.

Senator Obama reportedly told his wife that there were no love notes and no photos.

That was all there was to the story, but to a casual observer in the supermarket checkout line, the cover gave the impression of a full-blown Clinton-style scandal.

At the time, America Wants To Know speculated that the Clintons were behind the story, possibly planting it through their attorney, David E. Kendall, who had represented the National Enquirer for fifteen years.

We would like to take this opportunity to apologize to Mr. Kendall and to take another guess.

Recently we were reading up on the latest revelations about former senator and vice presidential candidate John Edwards, not in the Enquirer -- we're getting to that -- but in New York magazine, excerpted from the new book "Game Change" by political reporters John Heilemann and Mark Halperin:

Roger Altman picked up the phone in his 38th-floor office on the East Side of New York and found Edwards on the line. Altman, a former deputy Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton and a supporter of Hillary’s, was chairman of the investment group Evercore Partners. Since 1999, Evercore had owned a stake in American Media, the publisher of the National Enquirer--and it was that connection which prompted the call that day in the first week of October [2007].

There was no reason for the Clintons to pay David Kendall's hourly rate when they could just pick up the phone and call Roger Altman.

So we stand by the guess that at a critical point in the 2008 primaries, the Clintons fed a phony story to the National Enquirer, trying to neutralize the infidelity issue by making voters think the Obama marriage was no different than theirs.

Or maybe everybody was just psychic.

Because last week the Globe headlined its cover, "Obama Marriage Explodes!" and this time it appears to be true.

Back to that in a minute.

The reason John Edwards called Roger Altman on that October day was to beg him to stop an upcoming story in the National Enquirer. The story was going to allege that he had an affair with campaign videographer Rielle Hunter. Edwards told Altman the story was outrageous and untrue.

It was all true.

Roger Altman told Edwards he didn't think he could do much about it, but he would call the publisher and talk to him.

Which he did.

But it was all true and the publisher had the evidence.

Then Elizabeth Edwards called Altman. "You must do something about this, she begged," according to Heilemann and Halperin. "It's cruel, it's unfair, and it's untrue. This is way too much for me. I can't take it. It's killing our family. It's killing me."

That was the strongest card she could play but it wasn't enough to stop the National Enquirer from exposing the whole sordid story of presidential candidate John Edwards recklessly cheating on his cancer-stricken wife with a woman his aides considered a dangerous bimbo groupie.

Edwards denied the story and denounced the Enquirer as trash, which the editors didn't appreciate. They ran a follow-up story in December showing Rielle Hunter six months pregnant.

Yet Elizabeth Edwards didn't walk out on the marriage. Instead she helped to develop a damage-control strategy and continued to help her husband run for the Democratic nomination for president in Iowa. Aghast at these developments, top staffers quietly plotted to leak the whole story to the New York Times and destroy the campaign in case Edwards somehow pulled out a victory in Iowa.

But Barack Obama won Iowa and John Edwards began an effort to sell his endorsement to the highest bidder in exchange for the VP nod, or the job of Attorney General, or something appropriate to his standing in the party.

Edwards was still holding out for a deal in February, when Rielle Hunter's baby was born, and in May, when Hillary Clinton won the West Virginia primary. It was then that Obama called Edwards and offered him a prime-time speaking slot at the convention, and for that, Edwards endorsed him.

Then in July, the National Enquirer staked out a Beverly Hills hotel and caught John Edwards meeting Rielle Hunter and their baby.

Edwards decided to appear on ABC's Nightline and semi-confess to infidelity without admitting paternity, which just made everything worse. The invitation to speak at the convention was withdrawn.

"Game Change" details the screaming arguments between John and Elizabeth Edwards as well as the couple's grandiose and abusive treatment of the campaign staff.

John Edwards was very nearly elected vice president in 2004, and there was a moment in time when he looked like he might become the Democratic nominee for president in 2008.

According to "Game Change," that's the precise moment when senior Senate Democrats, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, urged freshman Senator Barack Obama to run for president.

"Edwards was regarded almost universally by his former colleagues as a callow, shallow phony," the authors write.

Former colleagues certainly didn't rush to defend him this week when the National Enquirer hit the newsstands with its cover story, "John Edwards Caught Cheating AGAIN!"

But this time it's different. "Humiliated wife finally kicks him out," the cover promises. The story says Mrs. Edwards threw her husband out of the house after Christmas, screaming that she was finally going to sign the divorce papers that have been gathering dust since her lawyers drew them up last year.

"The Enquirer has learned exclusively that the philandering ex-senator embarked on a 'sex-and-booze bender' after what appeared to be a marriage-ending blowout fight," the tabloid reports.

John Edwards reportedly moved to the couple's vacation home on Figure Eight Island near Wilmington, North Carolina, where he crawled the local bars every night, hitting on female employees and customers. Bartender Stephanie Breshears said Edwards tried on "four consecutive nights" to get her to go home with him after her shift at the Kornerstone Bistro.

"I think he's scum," Ms. Breshears told the Enquirer.

Now THAT'S the kind of judgment we've been looking for in a president. Why don't people like this ever run for office? We'll come back to that.

But first, the Obamas' exploding marriage.

America Wants To Know suspected that the president was cheating on his wife when we saw the Secret Service's odd reaction to the gate-crashers at the state dinner for the prime minister of India.

We also thought it was a bit odd that the president's aides waited three hours to tell him that a suspected terrorist tried to blow up a plane over Detroit with an underwear bomb on Christmas Day. Three hours? Imagine for a moment that you worked for the president. Under what circumstances would you just not disturb him?

That's what we thought, too.

Three hours is about right.

The Globe says the president's marriage "has been pushed to the brink of destruction by the intense pressure of White House living. That's the word from stunned insiders who say the First Couple is fighting tooth and claw behind closed doors and their 17-year union is edging ever closer to a shocking final meltdown."

The Globe's sources say "their marriage has been like a war zone." They're "screaming at each other" and "glaring" and "stomping off in different directions."

President and Mrs. Obama were trying to patch up their marriage with the Hawaiian vacation, the tabloid says, renting a $9 million ocean-front house along with two neighboring houses for friends who joined them on the trip.

"The whole holiday was a disaster," a source tells the tabloid, "They got into a huge fight the second they were on the island."

Some of the Globe's details are corroborated by mainstream press reports. The Obamas didn't go to church on Christmas and the couple didn't exchange gifts. That's in the Globe and also in the Washington Post.

"Barack can't believe how much Michelle has been spending since she became First Lady," the Globe reports. The spending, if not the disbelief, is corroborated by the NBC TV station in Dallas with a slideshow of Mrs. Obama's designer clothes, including a pair of black flats by Maison Martin Margiela that retail for $640 (but can be had for less):

Reporters on the Honolulu trip also took note of Mrs. Obama's absence from the group of eighteen friends and family members who accompanied the president on a trip to buy shave ice, otherwise known as snow cones, on New Year's Day. "First Lady Michelle Obama didn’t make the outing," ABC News volunteered.

It doesn't prove anything.

But there have been signs of stress. There was that we-just-had-a-fight body language when the first couple arrived at the Blue Duck Tavern in Washington for an anniversary dinner last October:

And when they left:

And there were those odd comments Mrs. Obama made to a New York Times magazine reporter about "bumps" in their marriage with the president "studying the carpet as she answered."

And just this weekend the president surprised his wife with a birthday dinner at a local restaurant. The guest list included the first lady's mom, her chief of staff, presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett, two friends from Chicago, Attorney General Eric Holder and his wife.

As comedian Argus Hamilton would say, just the two of them and their food tasters.

We don't know whether Michelle Obama is the type of person who would stay or leave if her husband was revealed to be a faithless philandering egomaniac. She might be Elin Woods, packed and out of there, or she might be Hillary Clinton, staying in it for the power and the glory and the salaried make-up and hair stylists.

What we do know is that too many of our presidential candidates fit the description in "Game Change" of John Edwards' implosion: "an archetypal political tragedy in which the very same qualities that fuel any presidential bid--ego, hubris, vanity, neediness, a kind of delusion--became all-consuming and self-destructive."

Ego, hubris, vanity, neediness, a kind of delusion. The qualities that fuel any presidential bid.

This is really dangerous.

Is it an unintended consequence of thirty years of campaign finance reform?

Not so very long ago, a small group of people could donate a large amount of money and finance the candidacy of a person they believed would make a good president, or senator, or congressman.

No more.

Now a candidate has to be willing to spend two or even three years raising small donations and shaking every hand in Iowa and New Hampshire. Now a candidate has to be the kind of person who is so driven to be famous and powerful that no indignity is too great. Instead of thoughtful and accomplished candidates who do not wish to be publicly humiliated, we've got candidates who only went into politics because their parents stopped them from running away to join the circus.

Quick, guess how many recent presidential candidates have had issues with their fathers and are desperate to prove their success in a poignant and futile effort to win their father's approval.

Did you guess ALL of them?

Maybe we should take another look at those campaign finance laws. They were based on the belief that large donations were corrupting, but there must be a better way to keep corruption out than to make our candidates run a two-year obstacle course that no completely sane person could possibly tolerate.

Copyright 2010

Editor's note: You might be interested in the earlier posts, "The case for adultery," "Hillary's shocking secret illness!" "Political marriages on the rocks," "Obama marriage explodes!" and "The strange but true source of extreme partisanship."

.

Jay Leno's winning hand

2010-01-13T18:54:00.000-08:00

Do you remember where you were on that autumn day in 2004 when you heard the shocking news that NBC was going to replace Jay Leno with Conan O'Brien in five years?

It was shocking because the Tonight Show host had just signed a new contract, because he was number one in the ratings, and because nobody gets five years' notice that they're going to be fired.

Even in a business that competes to deliver ever-younger and more gullible audiences to advertisers, it was shocking that NBC would openly insult Jay Leno's viewers by publicly declaring that they were old and unwanted.

Jay Leno's old and unwanted audience was still delivering top ratings and profits for NBC when the clock ticked to the doomsday moment, and suddenly the decrepit old viewers of 2004 looked like a potential ratings smash for a rival network, a nuclear weapon that ABC or Fox could use to blow up Conan O'Brien.

And so the very best minds in the very worst business reached a wildly extravagant and screw-proof deal for Jay Leno to stay at NBC.

If he succeeded at 10 p.m., terrific. If he didn't, they knew a secret that would allow them to push Conan out of the way and put everything back as it was before.

NBC's agreement with its affiliates allows it to start the Tonight Show as late as 12:05 a.m. to allow for those occasional half-hour special reports on tennis championships, or the Olympics, or similar big events.

And now there are reports that Conan O'Brien's contract doesn't actually specify or guarantee the Tonight Show's time slot.

So NBC is able to avoid a huge contractual penalty payment to Conan O'Brien by moving the Tonight Show out of the Tonight Show's historic time slot instead of canceling it or firing him, and perhaps they could even sue him for breach of contract if he leaves the network. Conan's management team didn't see it coming when they negotiated his NBC contract six years ago.

Conan told his viewers he won't do the Tonight Show at 12:05 a.m. and he accused the network of trying to dismantle the great Tonight Show franchise. He complained that he was not given as much time as his predecessor -- only seven months -- to develop the formerly number-one show into a ratings success.

Now Jay Leno is being blamed for undercutting Conan O'Brien by staying at NBC, by delivering weak prime-time ratings that allegedly hurt the late-night schedule, and by agreeing to move back into the 11:35 p.m. time slot.

But the larger story here is the shattered myth of the all-powerful youth audience. Back in 2004, NBC executives were terrified that Conan O'Brien would go to another network and take the future of television with him. They had no confidence that Jay Leno could hold on to younger viewers. They made a bet that in five years, the decision to replace Jay with Conan would look like a stroke of genius.

Not quite.

Maybe someday, someone will bet against the Baby Boom and win.

Don't bet on it.

Copyright 2010

.

Punch lines

2010-01-10T10:00:00.000-08:00

So there's this very old joke about a Beverly Hills gynecologist who is seeing a new patient, a 67-year-old married woman, and he is startled to discover that she is still a virgin.

Without dragging out the story, the essence of it is that there's no medical, psychological or educational problem, it's simply that she's been married for 42 years and is still a virgin.

The doctor asks her why.

"Well, doctor, it's like this," the woman explains. "My husband is a William Morris agent. Every night he sits on the edge of the bed and tells me all the wonderful things he's going to do for me."

Does anything about that joke remind you of the health care bill?

On Saturday, President Barack Obama used his weekly radio address to claim that health care reform will create "good, lasting jobs" and "shared prosperity."

He claimed that it will offer the security of "quality, affordable health care" even if "you lose your job, change jobs, move or get sick."

He claimed that "costs will finally come down for families, businesses, and our government."

Then he said this: "Here's what else will happen within the first year. Insurance plans will be required to offer free preventive care to their customers - so that we can start catching preventable illnesses and diseases on the front end."

That's the point where his argument went from absurdly comical to pie-throwing hilarious.

There's no such thing as "free preventive care." Somebody's going to pay for it, unless the president plans to propose the repeal of the Thirteenth Amendment so he can enslave medical professionals.

Whenever the government requires insurance plans to pay for something extra, the premiums go up to reflect the additional cost of the services.

America Wants To Know is self-employed and pays for an individual Blue Cross policy which goes up in price every single time the state or federal government mandates a new benefit. Remember the extra night in the hospital for new mothers? Premiums went up. Remember the last-minute addition to the October 2008 bailout bill, mandating coverage for mental health problems? Premiums jumped more than 30 percent the following January.

Nothing is free.

We're going to pay for it as policyholders, or we're going to pay for it as taxpayers, or we're going to pay for it in long waits and limited services caused by price controls. Or all three.

If the final health care bill really contains a provision requiring insurance plans to offer "free" preventive care, hundreds of millions of Americans are going to see their premiums and other co-payments rise to cover that extra cost. While that has happened many times before, this will be the first time that Americans can put all the blame on their elected officials.

And they will.

No joke.

There's something Shakespearean about the way the Democrats are barreling ahead to pass a health care bill before the voters can get to the polls to stop them. They're marching to their own tragic fate, unable to alter their course, doomed to fulfill the awful prophecy now revealed to have been their death sentence: Change.

Maybe it's not Shakespeare as much as it is Rod Serling.

("Mr. Chambers! Don't get on that ship! The rest of the book, 'To Serve Man,' it's... it's a COOKBOOK!")

Copyright 2010

Editor's note: You might be interested in the earlier posts, "Insanity," "Bad at math," "The midnight sausage factory," "Why health care reform will fail," and "Health Care Reform Dinner Theatre."

Source note: The quotation is from the 1962 Twilight Zone episode, "To Serve Man." Read more at The Internet Movie Database, IMDB.com.

.

Tabloid update: "Found! Bush Love Letters to Condi"

2010-01-08T17:14:00.000-08:00

Last week's Globe tabloid featured a "world exclusive" cover story promising proof that they've been right all along about former President George W. Bush's marriage-shattering affair with his Secretary of State and former National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.

While we don't doubt that they've been right all along, this story doesn't prove it.

"Intimate love notes George Bush sent to his Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have been found in a stash of missing White House e-mails," the Globe reports, "insiders believe."

It's true that a stash of missing White House e-mails have been found. On December 15, 2009, the Associated Press reported that computer technicians located 22 million missing White House e-mail messages from 94 days of the Bush administration. The AP got this information from two groups that filed lawsuits over the Bush White House's faulty electronic record-keeping system.

The two groups, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the National Security Archive, said they're settling the lawsuits, which were filed in 2007.

But the e-mails haven't been made public. "It will be 2014 at the earliest before the public sees any of the messages because they must go through the National Archives' process for releasing presidential and agency records," the AP reports.

Nobody talking to the Globe claims to have seen the e-mails personally, but "a pal of the ex-Commander-in-Chief" told the Globe, "George is absolutely panicking" because "he has confided there were a series of e-mails between Condi and him during that time frame that should never see the light of day - NEVER."

The time frame in question is between March 2003 and October 2005, "when sources say the Bush marriage was already strained," the tabloid reports.

"He says during his lowest times he reached out to Condi and talked in detail about his loveless marriage to Laura - and once he even told Condi he wanted her by his side," the Globe's insider reveals.

America Wants To Know is a little skeptical.

According to published reports, President Bush stopped using e-mail when he left Texas and moved into the White House.

In June, 2008, former deputy associate director of the White House Communications Office Jaime Sneider wrote in The Weekly Standard, "George W. Bush told a small group of friends just days before being sworn in, 'Since I do not want my private conversations looked at by those out to embarrass, the only course of action is not to correspond in cyberspace.' In the last eight years, President Bush has not sent a single message. And future presidents are all but certain to follow in his footsteps."

It's just not plausible that President Bush sent embarrassing love notes through the White House e-mail system.

Does that mean the Globe is one hundred percent wrong?

America Wants To Know doesn't think so.

If President Bush wrote embarrassing love notes to Condoleezza Rice, there's at least one person who would have copies of them.

Condoleezza Rice.

She's writing a book, you know. The Associated Press reported last February that Crown Publishers, a division of Random House Inc., will pay her $2.5 million to write three books, starting with "a memoir about her years in the administration of President George W. Bush," due out in 2011. "Rice will combine candid narrative and acute analysis to tell the story of her time in the White House," Crown's press release promised.

Could she be the source for this story? Is she the "pal of the ex-Commander-in-Chief" who talked to the tabloid?

It's not impossible.

Previous stories in the Globe have featured photos of former first lady Laura Bush looking glamorous and lovely, but this one has just one small photo of Mrs. Bush, and she looks like a witch.

The former president, who in the past has been pictured in the Globe looking like a wreck, looks impish and cute in this issue. There are four photos of Mr. Bush and Dr. Rice looking affectionate, two in which he's kissing her cheek, one that shows his arm around her shoulder as they both wave to cameras, and the cover photo, which shows them exchanging knowing looks as if they share an amusing secret.

Even if the former Secretary of State is not the source for the Globe's story, it's plausible that former President Bush is panicked over what might come out in her book, or in the book his wife Laura is writing. A year ago the New York Times reported that Mrs. Bush signed with Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, to write a memoir which will be published this year.

Scribner said the book will offer "an intimate account of Mrs. Bush's life experiences."

So, this much of the Globe's story we can be sure is true: the former president is panicked. With two women in his life writing a "candid narrative" and an "intimate account," any husband would be.

Copyright 2010

Editor's note: Catch up on your tabloid reading with "Suicidal Bush in Therapy!" and "Laura Gets $15M Divorce Pay Off!"

This is serious

2009-12-31T16:51:00.000-08:00

Two travel bloggers in the United States of America were visited by special agents of the Transportation Security Administration Tuesday night and served with subpoenas demanding to know who gave them a Christmas Day TSA memo about changes in airport security procedures.

"YOU ARE HEREBY COMMANDED BY THE ADMINISTRATOR," the subpoena begins. It demanded a response by December 31.

On December 31, the TSA backed off its deadline and gave one of the writers until January 20 to respond or challenge the subpoena in federal court.

The other writer wasn't given more time because he had already surrendered his laptop computer to the federal agents. Steve Frischling was visited at his Connecticut home for several hours on Tuesday night, and the agents returned for another visit Wednesday morning.

"Frischling said the agents threatened to interfere with his contract to write a blog for KLM Royal Dutch Airlines if he didn't cooperate and provide the name of the person who leaked the memo," the Associated Press reported.

Under that threat, Steve Frischling gave the federal agents his laptop computer.

Do you understand how serious this is?

The United States government threatened to interfere with a citizen's employment in order to intimidate him.

The subpoena served by the TSA agents was not signed by a judge. "The administrative subpoena — a demand for information issued without a judge's approval — is a civil, not a criminal document. If Elliott refuses to comply, the TSA could ask a judge to hold the writer in contempt," the AP explains.

The distinction between civil and criminal penalties may not have been made clear to Chris Elliot and Steve Frischling when federal agents knocked on the doors of their homes Tuesday night. Chris Elliot called a lawyer, and Steve Frischling was intimidated into surrendering his computer.

Under the law, ill-considered as it may be, the TSA has the authority to issue an administrative subpoena. But nowhere in the law is the TSA authorized to threaten a citizen with the loss of employment.

Which part of the Constitution does this violate most egregiously? The First Amendment right of free speech? The Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures? The Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination? The guarantee of due process of law and the equal protection of the laws? The Ninth Amendment guarantee that citizens have additional rights even if they're not specifically enumerated in the Constitution? The Tenth Amendment guarantee that the federal government has only the powers delegated to it by the Constitution, and all other powers remain with the states or the people?

Everything in the Constitution prohibits the government from using its power in this way.

In Iraq, where the government owns all the major industries and nearly everybody works for the government, this kind of intimidation is built into the daily lives of Iraqi citizens.

In the United States, it should never, ever happen.

Whoever came up with the idea of threatening Steve Frischling with the loss of his contract to write a blog for KLM Royal Dutch Airlines should resign or be fired immediately, and so should everyone who signed off on that idea, and so should the agents who delivered that threat.

All year long we've watched as the government threatened auto executives and bank executives and insurance company executives with the loss of their livelihoods if they didn't go along with the administration's directives.

Now the government is coming in the night to knock on the doors of citizens' homes and threaten them with documents that say "YOU ARE HEREBY COMMANDED."

It is worth mentioning that these writers were subjected to this treatment because they published something. Not because they are suspected of breaking any law. Not because they had information about an imminent threat to anyone's safety.

The United States is not automatically a free country because we shoot off fireworks on the Fourth of July.

We have to work at this.

Call your congressman and your senators. Tell them you want the federal government to stop governing through intimidation. Tell them you expect the federal government to protect your freedom, not to trample on it.

U.S. House of Representatives main switchboard: 202-224-3121. Click here to find contact information for your representative.

U.S. Senate main switchboard: 202-225-3121. Click here to find contact information for your senators.

Copyright 2009

.

Going down

2009-12-28T17:18:00.000-08:00

If you were President of the United States and your poll numbers were heading toward the earth's core, how would you celebrate Christmas?

Would you dress up your beautiful family and go to church? Would you tell reporters cute stories about the kids opening their presents on Christmas morning as you and your wife looked on with pride and love? Would you go to a homeless shelter or hospital and help serve Christmas dinner?

That's not how President Obama did it.

"The president and his wife, Michelle, started their day at 6:40 a.m. by going to the gym -- a feat unimaginable to most parents of young children eager to open presents on Christmas morning," the Washington Post reported on Saturday.

If you were president, would you give your wife a beautiful gift that would make all the married female voters in America think you're a wonderful husband?

"The first couple did not swap presents," White House aides told the Post, "and the Obamas did not attend church services, instead spending the day at the oceanfront home they are renting in Kailua, on the island of Oahu."

Later in the day, the Obama children opened presents with their cousins, the Post reported.

President Obama is tenaciously pursuing an unpopular agenda, and he does himself no favors by missing the easy lay-ups.

A week from now, when pollsters call people at dinner time and ask if they approve or disapprove of President Obama, no one will attribute the drop in popularity to the president's decision to skip church services and family gift-giving in favor of working out and playing golf. There will be so many other things to blame by then.

But keep an eye on the answers to questions like "Does President Obama share your values?" and "Do you trust President Obama to pursue the right policies for our country?"

That's where the Ghost of Christmas Past will rattle his chains.

Copyright 2009

.

Cracking the e-books

2009-12-27T01:56:00.000-08:00

It can take years to write a book but it takes only a week to read one, so the question a writer is asked most often is probably, "When's your next book coming out?"

Recently there has been an even more annoying question, if that's possible.

"When's your book coming out as an e-book?"

The reason that's an annoying question is that it takes longer to read this sentence than it takes to download an entire book from an overseas file-sharing site that is conveniently making e-books available at absolutely no cost whatsoever.

E-books are making suckers out of authors and publishers, who are currently on the phone screaming at each other over how to divide the royalties from e-book sales.

E-books are also making suckers out of consumers who pay hundreds of dollars for the latest e-book reading devices. Hackers cracked the proprietary code of Amazon's Kindle before the Christmas trees were even up and e-books are now available in the ubiquitous PDF format that can be read on any computer running Adobe's Acrobat Reader.

Which is a free program, by the way.

So in about twenty seconds you can find and download the brand-new book of your choice. And don't worry, there are no security cameras or mall cops to catch you.

Don't be afraid that this is too technical or difficult. Let's try it together. What should we steal? How about Sarah Palin's new book?

First, we'll go to Google and search for "Rapidshare" (that's a file-sharing site "in another land," as comedian Robert Klein used to say) and the title of Governor Palin's book, "Going Rogue."

Why, look at that, we can steal the audio book, too. Isn't that nice. So convenient.

But for now, let's just click on the second search result, fileshunt.com/rapidshare.php?file=going+rogue.

Well, that didn't take long. Here are four different links to take us to free pirated copies of Governor Palin's book. Good thing she didn't spend six years writing it or she'd really be aggravated. Let's click the "trusted download." As Senator McCain can attest, it's best to deal with someone who's been fully vetted.

This link has brought us to download-zzz.com, where we can see that the book is available in an assortment of formats. Number seven on the list is in PDF format, which any computer running Adobe Acrobat Reader can open with a single click of a mouse.

It's easy to print, too, in case you're one of those people who doesn't like to read on a screen.

Of course, then you'd have to pay for paper and toner. Unless you're at work. Hey, why not, you're done with your Internet shopping, right?

Okay, let's click on the PDF link and see what happens.

Here the web site asks us to select our country from a list. Is that because the laws in some places don't allow us to steal Governor Palin's book? Don't be silly. They just want to give us better service. "Choosing the download server closest to you will result in faster download speeds," the web site helpfully explains.

Isn't that nice? Don't you feel like an idiot for buying a Kindle?

Now let's click the download button and see if we have pulled this off successfully.

Uh-oh! We got a warning! Let's see what it says.

"In order to download this file you have to be registered and logged in. If you have NOT registered yet, click 'Register' and follow the easy steps. Creating an account is free, easy and only takes seconds."

So, have we hit the security barrier? Is this where we have to put in our real name, credit card number, verified PayPal address?

Don't be silly.

All they want is your e-mail address. They promise to protect your information ("Download-zzz.com never releases e-mail addresses to third parties for any reason whatsoever and your personal information will be securely stored in accordance with our privacy policy") but if for any reason you're worried that they can't be trusted, just go over to Yahoo or Google or AOL and sign up for a free e-mail account. Use a fake name. What, is this your first robbery? You don't know this stuff already?

You can see that you're required to check the box next to the words "I have carefully read and agree to the Terms and Conditions." Be sure to click the link and read those terms and conditions. That's where it will tell you that you may not use this file-sharing service for the purpose of stealing copyrighted material. And the next time you park your car next to a broken parking meter, be sure to put money in it anyway.

Hey, what's THIS? They want us to pay a membership fee? That is SO not going to happen. If we didn't pay the author and we didn't pay the publisher and we didn't pay for the Kindle we're certainly not going to pay YOU, pal.

These people have a lot of nerve, asking us to pay $1.95 for membership (marked down from $39.85, which apparently they had no luck collecting).

Download-zzz.com offers testimonials from satisfied customers to help convince visitors to part with two dollars for their service. Here's one:

"I have found Download ZZZ to not only be helpful in getting the freshest media content and software versions, but also reliable and fast," writes the happy customer. "In today's market, such service is a really rare example of quality. Customer support is very good as well: quick answers and quick results for me. And I got all of this at a very reasonable and fair price."

Look, it's only two dollars, and people are entitled to be paid for their work, right?

Just kidding.

You can go back to Google and search "Rapidshare" and "Going Rogue" and "FREE download," and this time don't fall for that "trusted download" scam.

This is all just another way of saying that the authors who are calling their publishers to demand a share of e-book revenue are never going to recoup the cost of the long-distance phone call. That is, if they pay for long-distance phone calls. You can call on the Internet for free, but some authors still use typewriters.

America Wants To Know started a small publishing company this year and is currently writing a series of slightly twisted detective novels which have been and continue to be one hell of a lot of work.

When's the next book coming out?

Aiming for the fall of 2010.

When's the book coming out as an e-book?

Sometime after Sarah Palin is elected president. Look for it midway through her third term.

Copyright 2009

.

Obama love child surfaces

2009-12-25T14:25:00.000-08:00

The tabloids can stop searching for the long-rumored love child of President Barack Obama.

The Associated Press has located him. He's in the fifth grade in Selma, Indiana.

Of course, the AP didn't report that the boy is the child of the president. Everybody's off for Christmas and they won't put it together until Monday, or maybe after the first of the year.

But America Wants to Know won't make you wait. Here are the facts:

Delaware County Sheriff George Sheridan told reporters that a Selma Elementary fifth-grader was riding the bus to school on the last day before the Christmas vacation when he suddenly decided it would be a good idea to give away money. He handed out ones and fives to the other children, and his special friends got twenties.

The child gave away $300.

When the bus arrived at school, the other children went straight to the principal and the teachers and turned the kid in. They were angry that he was holding out on them.

The children complained that they only got meager little ones, fives and twenties, while the fifth-grader had ten thousand dollars in his pockets.

Of course, the money that the child was handing out belonged to somebody else.

It belonged to his grandparents.

No one is sure exactly how it could have happened, but the boy broke into his grandparents' safe and took all their cash.

Maybe Ted Sorensen wrote a speech for him.

Copyright 2009

.

Health Care Reform Dinner Theater

2009-12-23T00:22:00.000-08:00

America Wants To Know is pleased to present a choose-your-own-ending production of "Who Killed Health Care Reform?"

Possible Ending Number One:

Senator Joe Lieberman, Independent of Connecticut, stays up late into the night on December 23rd, reading the polls by firelight. In the car on the way to the Senate the next morning, he has an epiphany and becomes a Republican. He casts the deciding vote against the health care reform bill after an impassioned speech calling for lawmakers to renounce corrupt deals and start over from scratch. He is celebrated on Fox News Channel as a maverick and his new party promises him seniority on a bunch of good committees.

Possible Ending Number Two:

The Senate votes 60-40 to pass the health care reform bill and it goes to conference in January, where everything in it is thrown up in the air again for lobbyists and lawmakers to bat around. The bill is written in a locked room by the glow of ten iPods running an app that imitates a lighter. The bill goes back to the House, where it passes, and to the Senate, where it fails. Everybody blames President Obama.

Possible Ending Number Three:

The Senate passes the health care reform bill on Christmas Eve and it goes to conference in January, where everything in it is thrown up in the air again for lobbyists and lawmakers to bat around, and the bill is written in a locked room, and when it comes out no one has time to read it and it's shoved through the House and Senate with not a single vote to spare. President Obama signs it in a triumphant White House ceremony and then copies are distributed so everybody can find out what they just passed. A week later, two hundred million Americans get letters from their health care providers telling them that everything is now different and some of it is more expensive. A roar goes up that can be heard on Mars. Congress scrambles to fix a hundred provisions of the new law, but too late, the voters throw out most of the Democrats and some of the Republicans and when the new Congress arrives in 2011, the first thing they do is repeal the whole mess.

Wait, wait, hold everything, America Wants To Know has just received an urgent text message from the White House ordering us to present their side of the argument.

All right.

Possible Ending Number Four:

The health care bill passes and everyone gets everything they want at everybody else's expense. When it is pointed out that nothing in the bill adds up, Congress goes into special session and repeals the laws of mathematics. South Carolina secedes from the Union and within three hours 49 states follow. President Obama announces in his State of the Union address that he plans to bring hope and change to the Washington D.C. public schools and also a couple of the subway stations.

Copyright 2009

Editor's note: You might be interested in the earlier posts, "Gazing into the future" and "Yes we can and no we won't."

Royal travels

2009-12-20T10:05:00.000-08:00

Will everyone please stop complaining that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi travels like a queen?

Yes, it's true, she took five Air Force jets to Copenhagen because she had to be there to offer your hard-earned tax dollars to Third World socialists and tin pot dictators.

Yes, she tried to get a bigger Air Force jet to fly back and forth from Washington to California because she didn't want to be inconvenienced by refueling stops or, heaven forbid, commercial flights.

But it is simply wrong to accuse her of traveling like a queen.

This is a picture of the queen traveling to her Sandringham estate for Christmas:

Really, that's the Queen of England.

Queen Elizabeth chose to travel on an ordinary commuter passenger train, elegantly and regally making the point that she understands the economic hardship in her country and is not out-of-touch with the British public.

It's probably no accident that Her Majesty did this on the very day Prime Minister Gordon Brown and her son, the Prince of Wales, took separate jets to the U.N. Climate Conference in Copenhagen to lecture everyone else on the importance of reducing their carbon footprint.

So let's all stop insulting the queen by accusing Nancy Pelosi of acting like her.

If you are annoyed at Speaker Pelosi for her policies or her perks, here's something constructive you can do about it.

Meet John Dennis:

He's running for Congress in California's 8th Congressional district, currently represented by Rep. Nancy Pelosi.

Here's his website, http://www.johndennis2010.com.

Here's his page on the issues of "Liberty & Privacy," where he begins by quoting Patrick Henry: "The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government."

Here's the page where you can chip in five or ten dollars to his campaign: https://www.completecampaigns.com/public.asp?name=DennisJohn&page=8.

If you'd like to send Speaker Pelosi a message, you can always call her office. But if you'd like to make sure she gets the message, send five dollars to John Dennis for Congress.

Copyright 2009

Rewriting the First Amendment

2009-12-20T09:04:00.000-08:00

Suppose you wanted to amend the Constitution to bar Congress from restricting freedom of speech in any way.

How would you word it?

You might write something like this: Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.

That certainly sounds airtight. Congress shall make "no law" abridging the freedom of speech or of the press.

"No law."

Not "no unreasonable law."

Not "no unfair law."

"No law." Congress shall make "no law" abridging (definition: depriving, cutting off) the freedom of speech or of the press.

That should do it. We would just need to get it approved by two-thirds of the House and two-thirds of the Senate, and then by three-quarters of the fifty state legislatures, and it would be the law of the land.

Of course, we can save ourselves a lot of trouble by reading the Constitution we already have, because that's what it says now.

The U.S. Supreme Court is currently puzzling over the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which stems from a documentary motion picture critical of Hillary Rodham Clinton. At issue is whether the movie is some kind of an illegal campaign advertisement under the campaign finance laws passed by Congress.

It's possible that the justices will throw out the 2002 McCain-Feingold Act and any number of other restrictions on who can say what when about incumbents and their challengers.

It's also possible that the justices won't throw out these laws and instead will continue to decide on a case-by-case basis which restrictions on campaign donations and ads are reasonable, and which ones aren't.

And this brings us to the strange case of Congressman Alan Grayson, Democrat of Florida.

Rep. Grayson wrote a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder on December 15 asking him to investigate and prosecute Angie G. Langley for putting up a website that is critical of him and seeking to raise money to defeat him next November.

The website is called MyCongressmanIsNuts.com. "Utterly tasteless and juvenile," Rep. Grayson complained in his letter.

The congressman wants Ms. Langley fined and imprisoned for five years for violating 18 U.S.C. 1001.

Maybe Angie G. Langley has violated 18 U.S.C. 1001 and maybe she has not, but either way a citizen of the United States has a perfect right to ask:

"What the hell kind of an unconstitutional law prohibits a citizen from criticizing a congressman and trying to raise money to defeat him in the next election?"

And while we're thinking about it, "What the hell kind of an unconstitutional law makes a congressman believe he can threaten a citizen with arrest for ridiculing him?"

It's easy to say Congressman Alan Grayson is a whack job and no one in the Justice Department will take his request seriously. But it's no small thing to be threatened with arrest by the United States government. It's expensive to defend yourself against federal charges, and just the reported possibility of charges can be enough to destroy a career and throw a life into financial chaos.

Do we want to live in the kind of country where citizens are afraid to criticize elected officials and terrified to raise money to defeat them?

Let's hope the U.S. Supreme Court throws out the entire body of federal campaign finance law. Justices and lawmakers take an oath to uphold the Constitution. Perhaps we should make them take an oath to read it, too.

Copyright 2009

Predicting slavery

2009-12-07T18:38:00.000-08:00

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid took to the Senate floor today and said Republicans who oppose the health care reform bill are just like the 19th century politicians who supported slavery.

"If you think you've heard these same excuses before, you're right," Reid said. "When this country belatedly recognized the wrongs of slavery, there were those who dug in their heels and said 'slow down, it's too early, things aren't bad enough.'"

He also compared health care reform opponents to people who opposed the civil rights movement.

"When this body was on the verge of guaranteeing equal civil rights to everyone regardless of the color of their skin, some senators resorted to the same filibuster threats that we hear today," the Senate Majority Leader said.

America Wants To Know predicted these comments in a September 4, 2009, post titled "Why we're fighting." Here it is:

Why we're fighting

Believe it or not, the battle over health care reform has its roots in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the Supreme Court ruling that banned racial segregation in schools.

The Brown ruling was a landmark decision because it reversed the precedents which stretched all the way back to the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. The framers of the Fourteenth Amendment were very careful to leave racial segregation untouched. Twice they specifically refused to adopt language that banned discrimination on the basis of race, citing their fear that the courts might use that language to strike down racial segregation, a result, they said, that was "not intended."

When the 20th century Supreme Court struck down racial segregation, the justices were asserting the power of the federal courts to set aside both precedents and statutes in order to achieve justice, a result that they believed could not be achieved by strictly following the Constitution.

Racial segregation, like slavery before it, was protected by the Constitution's division of power between the states and the federal government. It takes the approval of three-quarters of the states to amend the Constitution, and that's a very steep hill to climb. Who knows how many generations of African-Americans might have been forced by law to live as second-class citizens if the Supreme Court and the federal government had not stretched their powers in order to force the states to ban racial discrimination.

But here's the problem.

Not everything is slavery.

In fact, nothing else is slavery. No other injustice compares to turning people into property, so that the Constitution's vitally important protection of property rights would perversely hold people in bondage in the name of liberty.

Even though women, and immigrants, and gays, and Jews, and Catholics have experienced discrimination in the United States, nothing compares to slavery.

Nothing.

However, to many people who came of age in the post-Brown era, any attempt to prevent the federal government from enforcing fairness of any kind, on any issue, is equivalent to opposing court-ordered desegregation.

That's why so many people are accusing health care reform opponents of racism, as House Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel did on Thursday.

Is it racist to want to hold the federal government to the constitutional limits of its power?

In the case of school segregation, it was.

But is private health insurance like segregation? Is market pricing for pharmaceuticals like segregation? Is state-by-state regulation of insurance companies like segregation?

Are locally-controlled school curricula like segregation? Are lower federal taxes like segregation? Is a balanced budget like segregation?

You would think so, to listen to some politicians. Yesterday Vice President Joe Biden called the $787 billion stimulus bill "morally right."

Reasonable people can disagree over whether it is "morally right" to borrow money for federal spending and then send the bill to everybody's grandchildren, but right now we're all too angry at each other to be reasonable.

The health care reform bill is a dead body, and the politicians pretending to revive it are just maneuvering to get somebody else's fingerprints on the knife. But this is an argument we're going to keep having until we face the fact that Brown v. Board of Education was necessarily unconstitutional, and not a model for the expanded use of federal government power to solve every problem.

Copyright 2009

Editor's note: For more information and complete source notes on the history of the Fourteenth Amendment and the desegregation cases, please see the appendix to The 37th Amendment at www.ExtremeInk.com/appendix.htm.

Argus on Tiger

2009-12-06T23:30:00.001-08:00

Comedian Argus Hamilton has decided to honor the world's number-one golfer with a Special Collection of Tiger Woods jokes on his web site. Tiger joins the exclusive company of previous honorees Eliot Spitzer, Mel Gibson, Larry Craig, Paris Hilton, Sarah Palin and the California recall election.

You can find the jokes at http://www.ArgusHamilton.com/tiger.htm.

Read Argus five days a week (Tuesday through Friday and Sunday) at www.ArgusHamilton.com/argus.htm.

.

The case for adultery

2009-12-04T21:22:00.000-08:00

Notice anything about these pictures?

The first one is Michaele Salahi meeting the president at a White House state dinner last week. The second one is Monica Lewinsky meeting the president at a White House Christmas party in 1996.

All politicians have a gift for charming people, so maybe that's the reason the facial expressions of the women are so similar.

They both look really... what's the word... comfortable.

They look delighted and effusive and in love.

Just a coincidence, surely.

Or is it?

This week the Obama administration announced that White House social secretary Desiree Rogers would not cooperate with a congressional investigation into the breach of security that allowed Michaele Salahi and her husband into the White House.

"Based on the separation of powers, staff here don't go to testify in front of Congress," press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters on Wednesday.

Seriously?

"It doesn't even pass the laugh test, to be quite blunt about it," said George Mason University public policy professor Mark Rozell, the author of a new book on executive privilege.

But House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson decided not to fight the White House. He refused to authorize a subpoena for Desiree Rogers' testimony as requested by Rep. Peter King, the ranking Republican on the committee.

Three uniformed Secret Service agents were put on paid administrative leave this week although everyone continues to praise their outstanding work, and no one from the social office is in trouble although everyone acknowledges that procedures could have been better.

Earlier this year, President Obama had to do major damage control after he casually sided with a black Harvard professor against a white police officer, so the president might incur the seething wrath of law enforcement officers across the country if he permits three Secret Service agents to be saddled with blame for someone else's incompetence.

And he did campaign on greater transparency, specifically criticizing the Bush administration's unwillingness to let presidential aides testify before Congress.

What is the big secret that's worth all this political risk?

Is it presidential adultery?

After the party-crashing incident, press secretary Robert Gibbs went on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" show and was asked if the president was angry.

"I think it is safe to say he was angry, Michelle was angry," Gibbs said.

Did you catch that? The anger of the president is presumed. The anger of the first lady was witnessed.

A few months ago, the Obamas gave an interview to the New York Times Magazine about how the presidency has affected their marriage. Mrs. Obama hinted that things weren't perfect. "The bumps happen to everybody," she said.

Washington correspondent Jodi Kantor wrote:

"Clearly, the Obamas prefer to think of themselves as largely unaltered. 'The strengths and challenges of our marriage don't change because we move to a different address,' the first lady said, the president studying the carpet as she answered."

Maybe we should have been a little more suspicious when the president put up such a fight to keep his BlackBerry.

Here's a little more evidence that there might be more to the Obama-Michaele handshake than meets the eye.

Michaele's husband Tareq corresponded by e-mail with Pentagon official Michele Jones in the weeks before the state dinner. In one e-mail he wrote that he knew "for a fact" that six people who had been invited, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid among them, would not be attending:

The only administration official who has publicly acknowledged contact with the Salahis is Michele Jones, and Tareq Salahi was giving her this information, not hearing it from her.

Who told him? Were the Salahis in touch with someone in the social office? Why would someone in the social office share details of the RSVPs for an upcoming state dinner with people who weren't even invited to it?

Maybe there's a seedier explanation.

This is an excerpt from the Starr Report:

Ms. Lewinsky testified that she and the President had a sexual encounter during this visit. (176) They kissed, and the President touched Ms. Lewinsky's bare breasts with his hands and mouth. (177) At some point, Ms. Currie approached the door leading to the hallway, which was ajar, and said that the President had a telephone call. (178) Ms. Lewinsky recalled that the caller was a Member of Congress with a nickname. (179) While the President was on the telephone, according to Ms. Lewinsky, "he unzipped his pants and exposed himself," and she performed oral sex. (180)

The numbers in parentheses are footnotes, where Independent Counsel Ken Starr scrupulously documented the source for every unbelievable but corroborated detail. You can read it here.

Did Michaele Salahi hear the RSVP information in the same way Monica Lewinsky overheard telephone conversations with Members of Congress?

If Michaele Salahi has a personal relationship with the president, the Secret Service agents on duty might have recognized her and believed that she was expected inside the White House for the state dinner, and you can bet they'd know better than to call the social office staffers who work for the first lady.

In fact, the Secret Service acknowledges that the agents did not call the social office staff. No explanation for this departure from the agency's protocols has been given.

Not publicly, anyway.

Is it impossible that Michaele Salahi is having an affair with President Obama?

Would anyone who was having an affair with the president post photos of her White House visit on a Facebook page? Wouldn't that be rather indiscreet?

"Between 1995 and 1998, Ms. Lewinsky confided in 11 people about her relationship with the President," the Starr report says.

This is a photo of then-Senator Obama with Michaele Salahi, her husband, and celebrity guests at a polo event in 2005:

At the time that photo was taken, Senator Obama was living in Washington D.C. while his wife Michelle lived in Chicago with the kids.

A few days after the Salahis crashed the state dinner, the Obamas attended the Oregon State-George Washington University basketball game. Here's a picture of the president and the first lady in their courtside seats:

That's Mrs. Obama's mother sitting between them in the well-known Chelsea Clinton position.

Yes, it's just speculation.

It's hard to believe the president is cheating on his wife right under her nose inside the White House.

It's much easier to believe that three highly trained Secret Service agents decided for no reason to allow two uninvited and unscreened party crashers into the White House state dinner for the prime minister of India.

Right.

Copyright 2009

Editor's note: You might be interested the the earlier posts, "Bombshell" and "Mr. Rumsfeld's mythical privilege."

.

Bombshell

2009-11-27T19:16:00.000-08:00

Have you ever worked for somebody who had a secret life?

America Wants To Know has had that experience a couple of times.

Whether it's a mistress or illegal drug use or a personal life that is different than the image presented in public, an employer's secret life is something that employees learn to keep secret if they don't want to find another job.

And that brings us to the strange case of the Secret Service and the state dinner crashers.

It seems inexplicable that in the post-9/11 environment, anyone would be allowed into the executive mansion without proper authorization.

So if we want to figure out how two aspiring reality TV stars crashed a state dinner at the White House and got this close to the vice president...

And this close to the president...

...we should begin with the assumption that very capable and competent people -- Secret Service checkpoints are not staffed by part-time mall cops -- had a reason to believe that Tareq and Michaela Salahi were expected inside the White House even though their names weren't on any list.

It is probably an indication that people often come into this White House without having their names on the kind of document that can be requested under the Freedom of Information Act.

It might be a clue that the president keeps certain visitors secret from his wife and anyone in the White House social office who is loyal to her.

When you work for someone who has a secret life, you learn quickly that some people cannot be questioned and some questions cannot be asked.

Suppose you worked for the Secret Service during the Hypothetical administration. Suppose President Hypothetical had a series of mistresses who darted into the White House at all hours. Suppose one evening you're working the checkpoint when a pretty young thing shows up for a White House event and says, "The president's expecting me."

Should you: a) Turn her away; or b) Call the White House social office and tell the first lady's staff the young woman's name.

It's a trick question. It's career suicide either way.

The right answer, of course, is: Don't call anybody who's not supposed to know, and don't put anything in writing. Just run the woman through a metal detector and send her in.

We'll probably never know the full story of why the Secret Service allowed the former Redskins cheerleader and her husband into the White House. It's easy for government officials to argue that the details of presidential security can't be publicly disclosed.

But you'll know we've guessed correctly if the Secret Service declines to fire anybody over this incident and instead transfers the responsible employee to another job.

Smart people with secret lives never release disgruntled ex-employees into the wild, where they might be hunted down by TMZ.com or the National Enquirer. They keep them on the payroll in jobs that keep them happy.

Is ambassador to France still open?

Copyright 2009

.

Billboard on the One Term Expressway

2009-11-22T23:26:00.000-08:00

Not that it required any special psychic power, but America Wants To Know predicted that the Fort Hood shooting had the potential to be a big political problem for President Obama.

If you remember, in a post titled "Obama picks a church" we bet everybody a hundred bucks that the president would attend services at St. John's Episcopal the Sunday after the Fort Hood massacre, just to demonstrate to a queasy public that the White House occupant who spent part of his childhood as a Muslim in Indonesia harbors absolutely no doubt about where he stands now.

We lost that bet. President Obama spent the weekend at Camp David.

We said it was "no time for fuzzy statements about multi-cultural understanding."

Good thing we didn't put any money on that.

"They are Americans of every race, faith, and station," President Obama said, describing the members of the U.S. Armed Forces during his weekly address following the Army psychiatrist's solo jihad, "They are Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus and nonbelievers. They are descendants of immigrants and immigrants themselves. They reflect the diversity that makes this America."

Some might argue that what makes this America is a set of beliefs and principles that transcends ethnic identity, religion and "station," but let's not quibble about it now.

This is a picture of a billboard that just went up in Wheat Ridge, Colorado:

KDVR in Denver reports that the sign belongs to a car dealership.

Maybe the president should have gotten those cash-for-clunkers reimbursements mailed out a little faster.

Yes, of course, the sign is obnoxious and whatever else anybody wants to call it. But when a local businessman is willing to put up a billboard like that and stand by it, the president has a political problem.

President Obama's detached reaction to the bloodbath at Fort Hood (he was in the Rose Garden the next day to "caution against jumping to conclusions" about the gunman who shouted "Allahu akbar," and he warned Congress against holding public hearings, which he described as "political theater") is just one of many peculiar actions on his part that seem to stem from some deep-seated belief that America deserves what it gets, due to past sins.

What did you make of that bow to the emperor of Japan?

It's as if he's always trying to make the point that America isn't better than any other country and in many ways is a lot worse.

He's certainly entitled to his opinion but if that's what he thinks, he's really in the wrong job. If you work for Coca-Cola and you're always trying to level the playing field for Pepsi, you're going to be president of Harvard in no time.

Copyright 2009

Editor's note: You might be interested in the previous posts, "Barack Obama, angry colonial," "Certifiable," and "Tabloid update: "Where Obama was really born!"

.

Killing ourselves: Why terrorists should be tried in military courts

2009-11-21T19:23:00.000-08:00

In 1936, the U.S. Supreme Court threw out the convictions of three black Mississippi sharecroppers who had been viciously beaten by sheriff's deputies until, broken and bleeding, they confessed to the murder of a white planter.

"The rack and torture chamber may not be substituted for the witness stand," Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes wrote. "It would be difficult to conceive of methods more revolting to the sense of justice than those taken to procure the confessions of these petitioners, and the use of the confessions thus obtained as the basis for the conviction and sentence was a clear denial of due process."

The case of Brown v. Mississippi established a precedent in both U.S. and state courts. The Constitution's guarantee of due process of law was not mere rhetoric; it had teeth.

Will the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed knock any of those teeth loose?

Having no intention of ever bringing the 9/11 plotter into a U.S. criminal court for trial, the Bush administration authorized very severe "enhanced interrogation techniques" to be used against him in order to obtain intelligence information about the al-Qaeda organization and any future plots against the United States.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was reportedly "waterboarded" 183 times.

The U.S. Constitution guarantees due process of law and the equal protection of the law to all persons, which means any law or procedure that applies to the rest of us will apply to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

And vice versa.

If the U.S. District Court rules that some of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's statements made while in custody are admissible evidence against him, will that upend the precedent of Brown v. Mississippi?

Will "enhanced interrogation techniques" be evaluated on a case-by-case basis when Americans are arrested?

Suppose a suspected gang member is picked up on the streets of Los Angeles and the police, believing he has information about an imminent murder, beat him up during an interrogation in an attempt to save somebody's life.

Or suppose a child kidnapping suspect is arrested and the police, believing he has left the victim somewhere to die, break his arm in order to find out where he abandoned the child.

Now suppose they arrested the wrong guy by mistake.

You see the problem.

It is too dangerous to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a U.S. court, not just because terrorists might attack the courthouse, not just because he might be let off on a technicality, and not just because the trial will give him a platform to spew his repulsive rhetoric. It is too dangerous because the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed could easily undermine the legal precedents that protect Americans from abusive practices and wrongful convictions by law enforcement officials.

In 1934, Arthur "Yank" Ellington was pulled out of his house by a deputy sheriff, hanged by the neck from a tree, let down, ordered to confess to the murder of Raymond Stuart, and hanged again when he refused. Then he was let down, tied to a tree and whipped. When he still refused to confess he was allowed to return home, but a day or so later he was arrested and taken from his home, whipped viciously, and warned that the beating would continue until he confessed to the murder. He confessed. On no evidence other than his confession he was convicted in a Mississippi state court. The conviction was upheld in the state appeals court and by a divided state Supreme Court.

In 1936, the United States Supreme Court said the treatment of Yank Ellington did not meet the Constitution's standard for due process of law.

Is that a precedent this administration wants to overturn?

Well, Nixon went to China.

Copyright 2009

Source notes: Brown v. State of Mississippi, 297 U.S. 278 (1936). The spelling of Raymond Stuart's name is given as "Stewart" in the Brown v. Mississippi decision, but the local newspaper in Meridian, Mississippi, reported it as "Stuart," as cited in Richard C. Cortner, A "Scottsboro" Case in Mississippi, page 13 (1986). The brutal details of the case were recorded for history in the dissenting opinion of Mississippi Supreme Court Judge Virgil A. Griffith, joined by Judge William D. Anderson.

Editor's note: You might be interested in the earlier posts, "The trouble with waterboarding" and "The innocent tomatoes," and in the novel, The 37th Amendment, the story of a man convicted of murder in the year 2056, forty years after Americans repealed the Constitution's guarantee of due process of law. The 37th Amendment is currently in use in Northern Arizona University's Department of Criminology in an undergraduate class on wrongful convictions.

.

Tabloid update: "Obama Lung Cancer Drama"

2009-11-17T23:54:00.000-08:00

America Wants To Know runs like a gazelle from the first sign of news about anything medical -- don't ask, why should we both have nightmares -- but today in the supermarket checkout line the Globe tabloid lifted itself into the air and swan-dived into the cart, so we might as well tell you what it said.

"Obama Lung Cancer Drama," the cover announces in grotesque yellow letters. "Coughing fits - Chest pains - Alarming 25 lb. weight loss."

Inside, the tabloid reports that White House insiders estimate the president's weight is down from 180 pounds during the campaign to about 155 pounds now.

"Everyone fears he has lung cancer because of his smoking and coughing," the Globe's source says, "And he often can't keep food down. In fact, at the last White House banquet he left the room suddenly and vomited."

That's not good.

"He's had a lot of dizzy spells lately," says another source. The Globe reports that the president suffered a "shocking collapse" during a late-night meeting at the White House.

That's not good either.

The tabloid says the president is refusing to see a doctor despite "prolonged coughing fits, dizzy spells, chest pains and a loss of appetite" and is continuing to "smoke up a storm."

"Michelle is livid because he keeps sneaking ciarettes and she can smell the smoke on his breath and clothes," an "insider" tells the Globe.

Before everyone on Wall Street gets their hopes up -- did you ever hear the 1930s-era joke about the businessman who looked searchingly at the newspapers every day as he walked by the newsstand until finally the owner asked him what he was looking for, and the businessman said he was looking for an obituary, and the newsstand owner said they were inside the papers toward the back, and the businessman said, no, the one I'm looking for will be on the front page -- President Obama may be suffering not from lung cancer but from the symptoms of nicotine overdose:

"[Nicotine] overdose symptoms may include nausea; vomiting; diarrhea; stomach pain; cold sweat; headache; dizziness; problems with hearing or vision; confusion; uneven heartbeats; chest pain; seizures; and death," the Drugs.com website advises.

If President Obama is using nicotine gum or patches and continuing to "smoke up a storm," he might be experiencing symptoms of nicotine overdose.

Anyone who's doing that and experiencing those symptoms should either quit or stop pretending to quit.

Or buy Philip Morris stock and let the chips fall where they may.

Copyright 2009

.

The Museum of Non-Denial Denials

2009-11-15T16:38:00.000-08:00

Hillary Clinton appeared on ABC's "This Week" today and was asked about rumors that she's thinking about running for governor of New York.

"That's another one of those stories that never will die and I'm hoping we can put it to rest today," she said. "I'm committed to the job that I have. It is an extraordinarily important time to be secretary of state of my country and to work with President Obama to pursue our interests and advance our values around the world, and that's what I'm going to continue doing."

Exquisite, isn't it? It sounds like "I'm not running," and it looks like "I'm not running," and yet art historians working with the most advanced scientific techniques could peer at it for a year and never find "I'm not running" anywhere in it. This is the kind of artifact that collectors trample historic ruins to scoop up and spirit back to their warehouses.

Actually, though, it's not all that rare.

When the Smithsonian Institution opens its National Museum of Non-Denial Denials, Hillary Clinton will have her own wing.

If you do business in the state of New York, and if you think it would be useful to be on Hillary Clinton's list of people whose calls get returned quickly, here's the link where Secretary Clinton is still accepting campaign contributions for her 2008 presidential campaign:

www.hillaryclinton.com

"As we take the next steps in our journey, I know you'll be right there with me, as always, in my heart and by my side," Secretary Clinton says on the web page. She's vague on what those next steps will be, but it looks like the art department is ready for anything:

Incidentally, the latest Federal Election Commission reports from the Clinton team show that Secretary Clinton has already raised enough money to pay off her remaining campaign debt.

But don't let that stop you if you want to donate to her debt-reduction fund. She still has to pay the ongoing salaries of her campaign staffers, eight of them as recently as June 30 of this year.

During the same period, Sen. Chuck Schumer had just three campaign staffers on the payroll, and he's making no secret of the fact that he's running next year.

That's no way to get your own wing at the Smithsonian.

Copyright 2009

Editor's note: You might be interested in the earlier post, "Tabloid update: Hillary's shocking secret illness."

.

Tabloid update: "Michelle & Obama adopting baby boy!"

2009-11-10T02:33:00.000-08:00

Under the heading, "More than we want to know," this week's Globe tabloid blasts supermarket shoppers with the news that the "First Lady CAN'T get pregnant."

"And believe me," the Globe's source tattles, "she has tried and tried to get pregnant but just can't."

That's why the president and the first lady have decided to adopt a child, the Globe reveals in a "World Exclusive."

"Michelle sees a baby as the answer for all their ills," the Globe's source explains, "She says a baby makes their family complete -- and helps them politically."

Yes, "the Obamas are convinced a new baby will divert the nation's attention away from the country's troubles and improve his popularity."

Not unless they adopt one of the Reagans.

The Obamas "are working with adoption attorneys and have sent out a three person team across the country searching for the perfect baby," one of the tabloid's sources said (writer Randy Jernigan said there were two sources for this story).

"The secret search for a child isn't said to be focusing on the infant's race," the Globe reports.

So the Reagans are still in it.

"They have set only two criteria -- the baby has to be American and have an underprivileged background."

Aw, the Reagans are out. Two for three, what can you do.

The tabloid insists in a big red headline across pages 34 and 35 that the first couple will adopt by June, but the story really isn't very credible. It goes on and on about the difficulty of finding the right baby, and it never even mentions that Malia's allergic.

More interesting is the story across the bottom third of pages 34 and 35, headlined "Obama Trick Squad ROASTS Limbaugh!" It appears to be a payoff to the White House "insiders" who gave the Globe the intimate details of Mrs. Obama's pregnancy tests.

"Rush looks RIDICULOUS after he falls for presidential scam," the Globe gloats in bold type.

"Egg on his face," the tabloid sneers.

This story is about a hoax thesis, allegedly written by Barack Obama when he was a student at Columbia University, which was posted on the Internet and then "fed to Limbaugh as fact by people secretly working for Obama," according to the Globe.

In the thesis, titled "Aristocracy Reborn," Obama supposedly wrote that the U.S. Constitution fits people with the "shackles of hypocrisy" and is an inconvenient "obstacle."

Before he realized he had been hoaxed, Rush told his listeners that the document supported the argument that President Obama is a "closet socialist."

Of course that's ridiculous. Barack Obama is a closet socialist the way Lindsay Lohan is a closet partyer. The way Alex Rodriguez is a closet Yankee. The way Rush Limbaugh is a closet Republican.

The most interesting thing about the Globe's nasty and insulting story on Rush Limbaugh is the picture they chose to illustrate it, which shows the radio legend looking slim and tanned and just great.

Why did the Globe use such a flattering picture? Could it be because they promised the White House they'd run an embarrassing story about him ("Radio loudmouth Rush Limbaugh was soundly humiliated in front of millions of Americans after falling for a scam masterminded by President Obama's dirty tricks squad!" the story begins) but in fact the editors have no desire to make the talk show host look bad?

How bad does it look for the White House to have a "dirty tricks squad" running around trying to "humiliate" broadcasters?

Maybe it's pointless to read tea leaves in a tabloid. Maybe it's all fiction.

On the other hand, this is the second straight week the Globe has splashed the Obamas on the cover and as of this writing the tabloid has not yet been nationalized, or threatened with an antitrust prosecution, or blamed for the unemployment rate or the foreclosure crisis or the premature deaths of Americans without health insurance. So they must be doing something right.

Last week the Globe headlined a "Dramatic White House meltdown" that had "Michelle in tears" as "Obama goes berserk!" over his falling popularity.

"Obama Explodes!" the Globe reported in a world exclusive, "White House sources say Obama erupted during a late-night meeting in the Oval Office that left his inner circle stunned and his wife in tears."

No wonder she can't get pregnant!

"You people aren't doing your jobs," the president told his stunned staff, according to the Globe's source, "Get it right or get another job! Turn this thing around!"

Then the president demanded to know why people hate him. "Right now, he's a broken man," an insider told the Globe.

Aww, that's too bad.

Maybe the adoption attorneys can find him a new economic policy. One of those little flat taxes from Eastern Europe would be just darling.

Copyright 2009

Editor's note: You might be interested in the earlier posts, "The hit on Rush Limbaugh" and "Tabloid update: Clinton! Parkinson's! Michelle! Baby Tragedy!"

.

History, and history

2009-11-08T14:24:00.000-08:00

When the Social Security Act was passed in 1935, it established a tax on jobs that would be paid by both employers and employees in order to provide payments to retired workers.

The law set the tax at 2 percent of wages, half paid by the employer and half by the employee, for employment during the calendar years of 1937, 1938 and 1939.

"The term wages means all remuneration for employment, including the cash value of all remuneration paid in any medium other than cash; except that such term shall not include that part of the remuneration which, after remuneration equal to $3,000 has been paid to an individual by an employer with respect to employment during any calendar year, is paid to such individual by such employer with respect to employment during such calendar year," the law stated.

In other words, only the first $3,000 of wages in any one year was subject to the tax, reflecting the generally held view that Social Security withholding was a kind of pre-payment for personal retirement benefits, and not simply another tax on income.

The law provided for the tax to increase every few years until 1949 when it capped at 6 percent, half paid by the employer and half by the employee.

Do you know what it is today?

The current Social Security tax rate is 12.4 percent, half paid by the employer and half by the employee, unless you're self-employed, in which case you pay the entire 12.4 percent all by yourself.

Medicare is an extra 2.9 percent.

And that $3,000 limit on wages subject to Social Security tax? For 2009 it's $106,800. There's no limit on the wages subject to Medicare tax.

But there's a problem.

The programs are still insolvent and projected to go bankrupt.

Social Security and Medicare are funded by a 15.3 percent tax on wages and it's still not enough.

Unemployment in this country is currently 10.2 percent according to official government statistics, so raising the payroll tax again and making it even more expensive to hire people is not an idea whose time has come.

What about cutting benefits? Good luck. When word came this year that there would be no cost-of-living increase in Social Security benefit checks, President Barack Obama proposed sending every senior a check for $250.00, just to help make up for it.

How will the government find the money to pay promised benefits? By taking on more debt. That will put financial pressure on future generations and make it harder and harder for them to save and invest for themselves. That's what has happened to us. We are paying a 12.4 percent tax that our great-grandparents were told would rise no higher than 6 percent. How much more will your children and grandchildren have to pay, and what will happen to their jobs and their economy and their retirement?

On Saturday night, between eleven o'clock and midnight, the House of Representatives congratulated itself on barely passing a health care reform bill after a day of hard lobbying by the President of the United States.

All day long, Democrats likened the legislation to the passage of Social Security in 1935.

They were trying to say it was controversial when passed, but universally acclaimed as a success today.

They may have said more than they intended.

Copyright 2009

.

The offense of freedom

2009-11-06T16:07:00.000-08:00

On March 26, 2009, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey held a news conference to announce the signing of the first commercial lease in the Freedom Tower to be built at One World Trade Center.

CNN reported that the lease "will create the China Center, a 190,810-square-foot business and cultural facility, to be on portions of the 64th floor and the entire 65th through 69th floors of One World Trade Center," with an option to lease two additional contiguous floors under the same terms.

At the same news conference, the Port Authority announced that "Freedom Tower" would be dropped as the name of the skyscraper, and it would instead be called "One World Trade Center."

Was that a coincidence?

"The China Center at One World Trade Center is expected to represent the elite of China's business and cultural communities and serve as a hub for Chinese firms developing United States operations, as well as for U.S. companies that wish to conduct business in China or expand operations," CNN reported.

China is run by a communist government, and nobody joins the "elite of China's business and cultural communities" or conducts business in China without the approval of the government. It's not a free country. Free countries don't issue edicts that people are not permitted to have more than one child.

Did you know that China has pressured Google, Microsoft and other Internet companies to block the word "freedom" when it's entered into a search engine?

"Microsoft's new Chinese internet portal has banned the words "democracy" and "freedom" from parts of its website in an apparent effort to avoid offending Beijing's political censors," the Financial Times reported in 2005.

"After complying with Chinese requirements that it censor its search engine results to those people reaching them in China, Google has won a business license to operate in the Communist state," MarketingVox.com reported in 2005, citing a Reuters news story.

On Monday, Germany is hosting a ceremony to mark the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. President Barack Obama declined an invitation to attend.

Once again, in case it didn't quite register with you, the President of the United States declined an invitation to mark the end of the almost fifty-year-long Cold War and the triumph of freedom over Soviet communism.

Next week, President Obama is scheduled to leave for a trip to Asia. "He planned his Nov. 11-19 trip around the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Singapore, but added stops in Japan, China and South Korea," McClatchy Newspapers reported. "The itinerary reflects the growing importance of East Asia — especially China — to everything from financing U.S. debt and powering the global economic recovery to climate change, disease control, and containing nuclear threats from North Korea and Iran."

Did President Obama decide to skip the ceremony marking the anniversary of freedom's triumph in Berlin because China might be offended by anything he says in celebration of freedom?

Did he decide to skip it because he doesn't personally think the triumph of freedom over communism in Europe is anything to celebrate?

Did he evict the bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office because he thinks the wrong side won the war?

He's on his way to 25 percent approval. No wonder Hillary Clinton hasn't closed her campaign accounts.

Copyright 2009

.

Obama picks a church

2009-11-06T13:45:00.000-08:00

Betcha a hundred bucks right now that President Obama attends services at St. John's Episcopal Church on Sunday.

What would you do if you were him? What would you do, immediately after a Muslim member of the U.S. Armed Forces cleaned out his apartment, said good-bye to a friend, gave away his Quran and murdered fellow American soldiers at Fort Hood, shouting "Allahu Akbar!" as he opened fire?

Would you begin your closing remarks at a White House conference of tribal nations and then casually segue into a statement of condolence? This is an excerpt from the transcript of the president's remarks, which the White House press office sent out by e-mail:

THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
______________________________________
For Immediate Release November 5, 2009

REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT AT THE CLOSING OF THE TRIBAL NATIONS CONFERENCE

Department of Interior
Washington, D.C.

5:02 P.M. EST

THE PRESIDENT: Please, everybody have a seat. Let me first of all just thank Ken and the entire Department of the Interior staff for organizing just an extraordinary conference. I want to thank my Cabinet members and senior administration officials who participated today. I hear that Dr. Joe Medicine Crow was around, and so I want to give a shout-out to that Congressional Medal of Honor winner. It's good to see you. (Applause.)

My understanding is, is that you had an extremely productive conference. I want to thank all of you for coming and for your efforts, and I want to give you my solemn guarantee that this is not the end of a process but a beginning of a process, and that we are going to follow up. (Applause.) We are going to follow up. Every single member of my team understands that this is a top priority for us. I want you to know that, as I said this morning, this is not something that we just give lip service to. And we are going to keep on working with you to make sure that the first Americans get the best possible chances in life in a way that's consistent with your extraordinary traditions and culture and values.

Now, I have to say, though, that beyond that, I plan to make some broader remarks about the challenges that lay ahead for Native Americans, as well as collaboration with our administration, but as some of you might have heard, there has been a tragic shooting at the Fort Hood Army base in Texas. We don't yet know all the details at this moment; we will share them as we get them. What we do know is that a number of American soldiers have been killed, and even more have been wounded in a horrific outburst of violence.

These remarks were carried live on cable news networks and did not receive good reviews. "Frightening insensitivity," the NBC station in Chicago said on its website.

If you were President Obama, would you go into the Rose Garden and "caution against jumping to conclusions" about Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan?

Lt. Gen. Robert Cone, the post commander at Fort Hood, told NBC's Today show on Friday that Hasan shouted "Allahu akbar!" before opening fire. If you've missed the news for the past eight or nine years, that phrase is Arabic for "God is great!" and it's the traditional greeting of suicide bombers.

"Hasan's motives remain unclear," reporters were told.

What would they have been told if Hasan had been arrested before he did this? Would the word "terrorism" have appeared in the press release? In the headline?

This is the kind of incident that moves public opinion, and not in a pleasant direction.

It is no time to underplay the seriousness of the threat. It is no time for a president to separate himself from the emotional reaction of a country that has just suffered what feels like a treasonous act of war, an attack on a U.S. military base by a person hostile to the United States.

It is no time for fuzzy statements about multi-cultural understanding.

That will only lead to a harsh and uncontrollable backlash against Muslim Americans who exercise their First Amendment rights. The administration will have to convince the public that it understands the risk posed by radicalized individuals inside the United States, and that it is taking every legally permissible action to protect the American people from them.

This is the nation that locked Japanese-Americans in internment camps, an action that was approved by liberal icon Earl Warren.

Fear does things to people.

What it will do to the approval rating of a president who spent part of his childhood as a Muslim remains to be seen.

St. John's Episcopal on Sunday. Bet on it.

Copyright 2009

.