Logical Reasonings

“From indictment to trial, the civilian case against the 9/11 terrorists will be a years-long seminar, enabling al-Qaeda and its jihadist allies to learn much of what we know and, more important, the methods and sources by which we come to know it. But that is not the half of it. By moving the case to civilian court, the president and his attorney general have laid the groundwork for an unprecedented surrender of our national-defense secrets directly to our most committed enemies.” –columnist Andrew McCarthy

“In the string of amazing decisions made during the first year of the Obama administration, nothing seems more like sheer insanity than the decision to try foreign terrorists, who have committed acts of war against the United States, in federal court, as if they were American citizens accused of crimes.” –economist Thomas Sowell

“After 9/11, we fought back, hit hard, rolled up the Afghan camps; after the [Danish] cartoons, we weaseled and equivocated and appeased and signaled that we were willing to trade core western values for a quiet life. Watching the decadence and denial on display this last week, I think in years to come Fort Hood will be seen in a similar light. What happened is not a ‘tragedy’ but a national scandal, already fading from view.” –columnist Mark Steyn

“President Obama traveled all the way to China to praise the free flow of information. It’s the only safe place he could do so without getting heckled. With a straight face, Obama lauded political dissent and told Chinese students he welcomed unfettered criticism in America. Fierce opposition, he said, made him ‘a better leader because it forces me to hear opinions that I don’t want to hear.’ How do you say ‘You lie!’ in Mandarin?” –columnist Michelle Malkin

“In the U.S., the call is for government control, through regulations, as opposed to ownership. Unfortunately, it matters little whether there is a Democratically or Republican-controlled Congress and White House; the march toward greater government control continues. It just happens at a quicker pace with Democrats in charge.” –economist Walter E. Williams

President O-bow-ma

via: michellemalkin.com

Crikey, is there a single adult in the White House who can teach the commander-in-chief some presidential protocol?

The Left complained that George W. Bush was too much of a cowboy on the global stage.

It’s better than having a waterboy:

First, the Saudi King. Now, the Japanese Emperor. What’s he going to do with Russian President Medvedev on Sunday — the downward-facing dog yoga pose?

FYI: Everyone else in the world seems to know how to greet the Japanese Emperor without scraping the floor…

What a Spineless Blunder:

Reminds me of one of my favorite Tea Party signs:

Ghoulish science + Obamacare = health hazard

via: onenewsnow

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius tried to reassure citizens in New Orleans this week that Obamacare bureaucrats will make sound medical decisions for all Americans. She failed. Under the government-run plan, she promised, a team of healthcare experts will recommend what should be covered: “I think it would be wise to let science guide what the best healthcare package is.”

Gulp. It’s the Obama administration’s view of sound “science” that should send chills down patients’ spines. Case in point: The president’s prestigious science czar, John Holdren, refuses to answer questions about his radical published work on population control over the last 30 years.

Last week, I called the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to press Holdren on his views about forced abortions and mass sterilizations; his purported disavowal of Ecoscience, the 1977 book he co-authored with population control zealots Paul and Anne Ehrlich; and his continued embrace of forced-abortion advocate and eugenics guru Harrison Brown, whom he credits with inspiring him to become a scientist.

After investigative bloggers and this column reprinted extensive excerpts from Ecoscience, which mused openly about putting sterilants in the water supply to make women infertile and engineering society by taking away babies from undesirables and subjecting them to government-mandated abortions, the White House issued a statement from Holdren last week denying he embraced those proposals. The Ehrlichs challenged critics to read their and Holdren’s more recent research and works.

Well, I did read one of Holdren’s recent works. It revealed his clingy reverence for, and allegiance to, the gurus of population control authoritarianism. He’s just gotten smarter about cloaking it behind global warming hysteria. In 2007, he addressed the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference. Holdren served as AAAS president; the organization posted his full slide presentation on its website.

In the opening slide, Holdren admitted that his “preoccupation” with apocalyptic matters such as “the rates at which people breed” was a lifelong obsession spurred by Harrison Brown’s work. Holdren heaped praise on Brown’s half-century-old book, The Challenge of Man’s Future, and then proceeded to paint doom-and-gloom scenarios requiring drastic government interventions to control climate change.

Who is Harrison Brown? He was a “distinguished member” of the International Eugenics Society whom Holdren later worked with on a book about — you guessed it — world population and fertility. Brown advocated the same population control-freak measures Holdren put forth in Ecoscience. In The Challenge of Man’s Future, Brown envisioned a regime in which the “number of abortions and artificial inseminations permitted in a given year would be determined completely by the difference between the number of deaths and the number of births in the year previous.”

Brown exhorted readers to accept that “we must reconcile ourselves to the fact that artificial means must be applied to limit birth rates.” If we don’t, Brown warned, we will face a planet “with a writhing mass of human beings.” He likened the global population to a “pulsating mass of maggots.”

When I pressed Holdren’s office specifically about his relationship with Brown, spokesman Rick Weiss told me he didn’t know who Brown was and balked at drawing any conclusions about Holdren’s views based on his homage just two years ago to his lifelong mentor, colleague and continued inspiration, Harrison Brown.

Weiss lectured me rather snippily about the need for responsible journalism (he was a Washington Post reporter for 15 years). He then told me not to expect any response from Holdren’s office to my question on whether Holdren disavows his relationship with a eugenics enthusiast who referred to the world population as a “pulsating mass of maggots” and championed a scheme of abortion and artificial insemination quotas. To date the office has maintained radio silence.

If this is the kind of ghoulish “science” that guides the White House, we can only hope that Obamacare is dead on arrival.

COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC

Confirmed: Deliberative democracy is a joke

via: michellemalkin

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

That was the reaction of Democrat House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer to the idea that members of Congress would actually read the health care takeover bill before voting on it:

“If every member pledged to not vote for it if they hadn’t read it in its entirety, I think we would have very few votes,” Hoyer told CNSNews.com at his regular weekly news conference.

Hoyer was responding to a question from CNSNews.com on whether he supported a pledge that asks members of the Congress to read the entire bill before voting on it and also make the full text of the bill available to the public for 72 hours before a vote.

In fact, Hoyer found the idea of the pledge humorous, laughing as he responded to the question. “I’m laughing because a) I don’t know how long this bill is going to be, but it’s going to be a very long bill,” he said.

“Members clearly–and staff and review boards, they read them in their entirety. They go over it with members, and members read substantial portions of the bill themselves, but the issue is–I don’t know who signed this (pledge), but frankly the opposition has been very vociferous, not of the verbiage and bill, but on the concept that it incorporates,” Hoyer said.

Let Freedom Ring, a Delaware-based conservative organization, is circulating a pledge that asks members of Congress to promise to read the entirety of the final text of a health-care reform bill before they vote on it. They also are asking that the full bill be made available for review by the public for 72 hours before Congress votes on it.

Obama lied, transparency died.

The joke’s on you. And it keeps getting more and more expen$$$$ive every day.

Sheila Jackson-Lee hits rock bottom

via: michellemalkin

Oh, no, she didn’t.

Oh, yes, she did.

Democrat Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee just pimped the stupidest House resolution ever on stage at the Jacko memorial at Staples Center. She held up a big, framed copy of it as the crowd cheered. That was after she extolled “The King,” painted him as the world’s greatest humanitarian, and demagogued the child molestation cases by proclaiming that members of Congress “understand the Constitution” and “we understand laws” and we know that “people are INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN OTHERWISE!”

Yes, she did. Right there in front of Jacko’s three children.

I thought Al Sharpton’s memorial rant (“There was nothing strange about your daddy!”) was the low point for American culture.

Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee, you win.

***

Question: Who paid for Jackson-Lee’s flight to L.A.?

***

Here’s the video:

The truth about ObamACORN

via: onenewsnow

Left-wing groups in Washington, DC, are panicked. The New York Times and other Team Obama whitewashers are downplaying the connection between the Obama presidential campaign, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and Obama’s old employer Project Vote (ACORN’s nonprofit canvassing arm). Alas, the truth keeps seeping out.
 
At a closed-door powwow hosted Thursday at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, activists discussed how to combat a relentless stream of corruption charges from ACORN/Project Vote whistleblowers. But it’s too late for a reputation bailout. Former Project Vote official and whistleblower Anita MonCrief has harnessed the Internet to crowd-source a massive cache of documents showing ties between Obama staff members and the supposedly “nonpartisan” ACORN operations.

 

 

 

Last fall, The New York Times abandoned an investigation into whether Obama had shared donor lists with Project Vote, a 501(c)(3) organization that is prohibited from engaging in political activity. Public editor Clark Hoyt earlier this month called it “the tip that didn’t pan out.” Critics suggested the donor lists could have been compiled through public records. But I have obtained the lists — not only of Obama donors, but also lists of Democratic National Committee, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry contributors. The records include small donors to the Obama campaign, who are not disclosed in public campaign finance databases. It’s information only a campaign could supply.
 
MonCrief testified under oath last fall that her then-boss, Karyn Gillette, gave her the Obama donor list and told her the campaign had furnished it. Moreover, e-mail messages between ACORN, Project Vote and other affiliates, including ACORN subsidiary Citizens Services, Inc. (CSI), make explicit references to working on “Obama campaign related projects.” The “list of maxed out Obama donors” is specifically mentioned in staff e-mail. Another message from ACORN/Project Vote official Nathan Henderson-James warns ACORN and affiliated staff to prepare for “conservatives…gearing up a major oppo research project on Obama.”
 
Henderson-James wrote, “Understand I’m not suggesting that we gear up to defend a candidate’s campaign.” But that, of course, is exactly what the ACORN enterprise did.
 
Why does this matter? Transparency, tax dollars and electoral integrity. ACORN’s own lawyer Elizabeth Kingsley acknowledged last year that a vast web of tax-exempt ACORN affiliates were shuffling money around — making it almost impossible to track whether campaign rules and tax regulations were being followed. ACORN receives 40 percent of its revenues from taxpayers. Americans deserve to know whether and how much commingling of public money with political projects has occurred over the last four decades — and what role the Obama campaign played in this enterprise.
 
Remember: Last August, the Obama team admitted its failure to properly disclose $800,000 in payments to CSI — which works hand in hand with Project Vote and the ACORN parent organization. Obama mysteriously reclassified the campaign advance work expenditures as “get-out-the-vote” activities. Nary a peep from electoral integrity watchdogs.
 
Despite heated denials from Team Obama, the links between ACORN, Project Vote and CSI are inextricable. As Obama himself reminded ACORN leaders after its political action committee endorsed his presidential candidacy in February 2008:

“I come out of a grassroots organizing background. That’s what I did for three and half years before I went to law school. That’s the reason I moved to Chicago was to organize. So this is something that I know personally, the work you do, the importance of it. I’ve been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drives in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work.”

As I’ve reported before, the Obama campaign’s “Vote for Change” registration drive, run simultaneously with ACORN/Project Vote, was an all-out scramble to scrape up every last unregistered voter sympathetic to Obama’s big-government vision.
 
In an e-mail message to whistleblower MonCrief last summer, New York Times reporter Stephanie Strom told the truth: “The real story to all this is how these myriad entities allow them to shuffle money around so much that no one really knows what’s getting spent on what.” By Oct. 6, 2008, Strom had thrown in the towel in the wake of blistering phone conversations with the Obama campaign. She wrote:

“I’m calling a halt to my efforts. I just had two unpleasant calls with the Obama campaign, wherein the spokesman was screaming and yelling and cursing me, calling me a right-wing nut and a conspiracy theorist and everything else….I’d still like to get that file from you when you have a chance to send it. One of these days, the truth is going to come out.”

It’s only just begun.

Left-wing groups in Washington, DC, are panicked. The New York Times and other Team Obama whitewashers are downplaying the connection between the Obama presidential campaign, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and Obama’s old employer Project Vote (ACORN’s nonprofit canvassing arm). Alas, the truth keeps seeping out.
 
At a closed-door powwow hosted Thursday at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, activists discussed how to combat a relentless stream of corruption charges from ACORN/Project Vote whistleblowers. But it’s too late for a reputation bailout. Former Project Vote official and whistleblower Anita MonCrief has harnessed the Internet to crowd-source a massive cache of documents showing ties between Obama staff members and the supposedly “nonpartisan” ACORN operations.

 

 

 

Last fall, The New York Times abandoned an investigation into whether Obama had shared donor lists with Project Vote, a 501(c)(3) organization that is prohibited from engaging in political activity. Public editor Clark Hoyt earlier this month called it “the tip that didn’t pan out.” Critics suggested the donor lists could have been compiled through public records. But I have obtained the lists — not only of Obama donors, but also lists of Democratic National Committee, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry contributors. The records include small donors to the Obama campaign, who are not disclosed in public campaign finance databases. It’s information only a campaign could supply.
 
MonCrief testified under oath last fall that her then-boss, Karyn Gillette, gave her the Obama donor list and told her the campaign had furnished it. Moreover, e-mail messages between ACORN, Project Vote and other affiliates, including ACORN subsidiary Citizens Services, Inc. (CSI), make explicit references to working on “Obama campaign related projects.” The “list of maxed out Obama donors” is specifically mentioned in staff e-mail. Another message from ACORN/Project Vote official Nathan Henderson-James warns ACORN and affiliated staff to prepare for “conservatives…gearing up a major oppo research project on Obama.”
 
Henderson-James wrote, “Understand I’m not suggesting that we gear up to defend a candidate’s campaign.” But that, of course, is exactly what the ACORN enterprise did.
 
Why does this matter? Transparency, tax dollars and electoral integrity. ACORN’s own lawyer Elizabeth Kingsley acknowledged last year that a vast web of tax-exempt ACORN affiliates were shuffling money around — making it almost impossible to track whether campaign rules and tax regulations were being followed. ACORN receives 40 percent of its revenues from taxpayers. Americans deserve to know whether and how much commingling of public money with political projects has occurred over the last four decades — and what role the Obama campaign played in this enterprise.
 
Remember: Last August, the Obama team admitted its failure to properly disclose $800,000 in payments to CSI — which works hand in hand with Project Vote and the ACORN parent organization. Obama mysteriously reclassified the campaign advance work expenditures as “get-out-the-vote” activities. Nary a peep from electoral integrity watchdogs.
 
Despite heated denials from Team Obama, the links between ACORN, Project Vote and CSI are inextricable. As Obama himself reminded ACORN leaders after its political action committee endorsed his presidential candidacy in February 2008:

“I come out of a grassroots organizing background. That’s what I did for three and half years before I went to law school. That’s the reason I moved to Chicago was to organize. So this is something that I know personally, the work you do, the importance of it. I’ve been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drives in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work.”

As I’ve reported before, the Obama campaign’s “Vote for Change” registration drive, run simultaneously with ACORN/Project Vote, was an all-out scramble to scrape up every last unregistered voter sympathetic to Obama’s big-government vision.
 
In an e-mail message to whistleblower MonCrief last summer, New York Times reporter Stephanie Strom told the truth: “The real story to all this is how these myriad entities allow them to shuffle money around so much that no one really knows what’s getting spent on what.” By Oct. 6, 2008, Strom had thrown in the towel in the wake of blistering phone conversations with the Obama campaign. She wrote:

“I’m calling a halt to my efforts. I just had two unpleasant calls with the Obama campaign, wherein the spokesman was screaming and yelling and cursing me, calling me a right-wing nut and a conspiracy theorist and everything else….I’d still like to get that file from you when you have a chance to send it. One of these days, the truth is going to come out.”

It’s only just begun.

The Jihadi Virus in Our Jails

via: jewishworldreview

President Obama’s speech on homeland security was 6,072 words long. Curiously, he chose not to spare an “a,” “and” or “uh” on the New York City terror bust that dominated headlines the morning of his Thursday address. Did the teleprompter run out of room?

After a yearlong investigation launched by the Bush administration, the feds cracked down on a ring of murder-minded black Muslim jailhouse converts preparing to bomb two Bronx synagogues and “eager to bring death to Jews.” They also planned to attack a New York National Guard air base in Newburgh, N.Y., where the suspects lived and worshiped at a local mosque.

Not one word from the president on the jihadists’ intended victims, motives or means.

No comfort for the reported targets in the Big Apple, still raw from the Scare Force One rattling that so vainly and recklessly simulated 9/11.

No condemnation for the accused plotters.

Why? Because doing so would force Obama to abandon his cottony “extremist ideology” euphemisms and confront the concrete truth. To borrow one of our obtuse president’s favorite cliches, “let me be perfectly clear” about the reality Obama won’t touch: America faces an ongoing Islamic jihad at home and abroad. Not merely “man-caused.” But Koran-inspired. Yet, Obama refuses to spell out the centuries-old roots of the war that he claims he’ll win faster, better and cleaner than any of his predecessors

Moreover, his push to transfer violent Muslim warmongers into our civilian prisons — where they have proselytized and plotted with impunity — will only make the problem worse. A brief refresher course for the left’s amnesiacs about the festering jihadi virus in our jails and overseas:

In 2005, Bush administration officials busted a terrorist plot to attack infidels at military and Jewish sites in Los Angeles on the fourth anniversary of 9/11 or the Jewish holy days. It was devised by militant Muslim converts of Jam’iyyat Ul-Islam Is-Saheeh (Arabic for “Assembly of Authentic Islam”) who had sworn allegiance to violent jihad at California’s New Folsom State Prison.

Convicted terror conspirator Jose Padilla converted to Islam during a stint at a Broward County, Fla., jail and reportedly fell in with terrorist recruiters after his release.

Convicted “shoe bomber” Richard Reid converted to Islam with the help of an extremist imam in a British prison.

Aqil Collins, a self-confessed jihadist turned FBI informant, converted to Islam while doing time in a California juvenile detention center. At a terrorist camp in Afghanistan, he went on to train with one of the men accused of kidnapping and beheading Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

In East Texas, inmates were recruited with a half-hour videotape featuring the anti-Semitic rants of California-based Imam Muhammad Abdullah, who claims that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were actually carried out by the Israeli and U.S. governments.

Federal corrections officials told congressional investigators during the Bush years “that convicted terrorists from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing were put into their prisons’ general population, where they radicalized inmates and told them that terrorism was part of Islam.”

Despite the insistence of Obama and the Jihadi Welcome Wagon that our civilian prisons are perfectly secure, convicted terrorist aid Lynne Stewart helped jailed 1993 World Trade Center bombing/NY landmark bombing plot mastermind Omar Abdel-Rahman smuggle coded messages of Islamic violence to outside followers in violation of an explicit pledge to abide by her client’s court-ordered isolation.

As I’ve reported previously, U.S. Bureau of Prison reports have warned for years that our civilian detention facilities are major breeding grounds for Islamic terrorists. There are still not enough legitimately trained and screened Muslim religious leaders to counsel an estimated 9,000 U.S. prison inmates who demand Islamic services. Under the Bush administration, the federal prison bureaucracy had no policy in place to screen out extremist, violence-advocating Islamic chaplains; failed to properly screen the many contractors and volunteers who help provide religious services to Islamic inmates; and shied away from religious profiling.

What’s Obama’s plan to prevent the jihadi virus from spreading? Washing hands and covering mouths won’t work for this disease.

Washington can’t meet the Cheerios standard

I think it’s time we applied the same advertising standards to Washington’s legislative products that the feds apply to breakfast foods. The Food and Drug Administration rapped General Mills this week for making misleading claims about the benefits of Cheerios. The food manufacturer says the whole-grain O’s are “clinically proven to lower cholesterol.” The FDA demanded packaging changes to ensure truth in labeling.

Well, how about the bogus marketing of the fiscal “stimulus”? President Obama and the Democrats promoted the trillion-dollar package as job creation salvation. The White House claims 150,000 jobs have been “created or saved.” But since February, the nation has lost more than 1.3 million jobs. The current 8.9 percent unemployment rate in the wake of the stimulus passage is worse than the 8.8 percent unemployment Obama’s economists darkly predicted if Congress didn’t immediately adopt their recovery plan.

The “stimulus” was supposed to provide aid to the country’s neediest areas. It’s not. The Associated Press reported after reviewing 5,500 planned transportation projects that “states are planning to spend 50 percent more per person in areas with the lowest unemployment than in communities with the highest.”

Obama promised that Americans would be able to track “every dime” of the “stimulus” at one handy clearinghouse website. They won’t. The Recovery.gov site data won’t be fully available until next spring — halfway through the program.

Washington told us the “stimulus” projects were “shovel-ready” and would provide immediate relief. They’re not. The New York Times notes that the program “has paid out less than six percent of the money, largely in the form of social service payments to states.”

Democratic leaders baldly claimed that “there are no earmarks” in the bill. But untold tens of millions of dollars are headed to pet projects such as skateboard parks, tennis and basketball court renovation, the National Zoo, the $11 million Bridge to Microsoft, and Pennsylvania King of Pork Rep. John Murtha’s ghost airport to nowhere.

More falsely labeled products in the Capitol Hill pantry: How about the “Toxic Assets Relief Program”? The trillion-dollar-plus banking bailout morphed from a toxic assets purchase plan to a capital injection plan, back to a toxic assets purchase plan, to a life insurance company bailout, to an auto supplier bailout, and may now be used to bail out the state of California. Supporters of that maneuver argue that TARP should be extended to every cash-strapped state and local government to guarantee their debts against default.

How about “Social Security”? There’s nothing secure about it. While Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid scoffed during the Bush years that “the so-called Social Security crisis exists in only one place — the minds of the Republicans,” the insolvency problem festered. Now, the Obama administration reports that both Social (In)security and Medicare are hurtling toward bankruptcy far sooner than previously estimated. The “trust funds” exist only in the minds of the deluded.

And just this week, Congress collaborated with the White House to conjure up a misleading description of Obama’s $108 billion bailout of the International Monetary Fund. They’re advertising the expenditure as a “line of credit” with the “hope to get the money back,” according to the Wall Street Journal. “So the White House argued that the budgetary impact should be calculated at zero.” That’s right. Capitol Hill is officially claiming that $108 billion = zero.

If Beltway spending plans were breakfast cereals, they’d be yanked from grocery stores in a heartbeat. Their promises and premises are as full of holes as a box of persecuted Cheerios.

COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

100 Days of Reckless Photo-Op Hubris

via: patriotpost

Come on, who’s surprised? The White House-engineered photo-op of low-flying Air Force aircraft that caused terror in New York City this week epitomizes the Age of Obama. What better way to mark 100 days in office than with an appalling exercise in pointless taxpayer-funded stagecraft?

The superficiality, the unseriousness, the hubris, the obliviousness to post-9/11 realities: They were trademarks of the Obama campaign, and they are the tattoos on his governance.

He never leaves home without his teleprompter. All the Obama world’s a stage. Or a world ready to be staged.

So is it any wonder he would staff his White House military office with a clueless paper pusher who saw nothing wrong with spending inordinate government resources — and re-creating 9/11 havoc — to update Air Force One publicity shots? And who planned, believe it or not, to do the same in Washington, D.C., next month, where the 9/11 jihadists murdered 53 passengers and 6 crewmembers on board American Airlines Flight 77, and 125 military and civilian personnel inside the Pentagon?

All for some publicity shots.

No one should be shocked. Remember: Barack Obama is the frivolous man who concocted his own presidential-looking Great Seal before he was elected. An ego big enough to publicly display a ridiculous “Vero Possumus” (“Yes, we can” in Latin) motto and a regal eagle with the Obama campaign logo emblazoned on its chest is an ego capable of far more reckless things. Obama orchestrated a grand photo-op in Berlin, Germany, to declare his world citizenship at the Siegessäule — the Victory Column — a soaring monument of arrogance championed by Adolf Hitler and Third Reich architect Albert Speer. He manufactured his own Open Temple of The One in Denver for the Democratic National Convention last summer, replete with fake Greek columns.

Since taking office, Obama has remained in perpetual campaign mode, idling in 9/10 gear. The photo album has filled up quickly with megalomaniacal moments. When his massive pork-filled stimulus package was in trouble, he ran to Ft. Myers, Fla., for a carefully choreographed revival meeting with his most ardent supporters. “It is such a blessing to see you. Oh! Gracious God, thank you so much!” one young booster exclaimed.

The president’s famous embrace with another questioner — homeless woman Henrietta Hughes, a perpetually unemployed drifter looking for a handout — turned up on the White House online retrospective of the stimulus bill victory. (Missing: The photos of hundreds of thousands of Americans who took to the streets in Tea Party protests to oppose this massive act of generational theft and expansion of the entitlement state.)

Another Kodak moment from the stimulus campaign exposed Obama’s hype of the spending boondoggle’s effects. Using a Caterpillar plant and workers as a backdrop, Obama grandly promised that if the stimulus passed, Caterpillar would rehire laid-off workers. It made front-page headlines. After the photo-op: Caterpillar’s own CEO refuted the bogus promise and last week posted its first quarterly net loss in 16 years. After the signing, it finally dawned on pliant media outlets that the stimulus money was stupendously wasteful, and the job creation estimates, bogus. No pictures of those epiphanies.

Obama’s photo-ops abroad have been more unsettling: Bowing and scraping before Saudi King Abdullah, trashing America as “arrogant” (talk about a pot and kettle moment) in front of adoring French and German students, chumming it up with Venezuelan thug-in-chief Hugo Chavez. These are the defining images of a stunt(ed) presidency blind to our enemies and in a perpetual state of (re)pose.

Obama appointed Leon Panetta, a chief of intelligence with no intelligence experience. He gave us Hillary Clinton, a secretary of state who cackled about the Somali pirate hijacking and laughed off serious questions about the effectiveness of enhanced interrogation techniques. He installed Rosa Brooks, a radical George Soros-trained ideologue, as a top Pentagon adviser. He came close to embracing Charles Freeman as top U.S. intelligence analyst — a jihadi-sympathizing conspiracist who blamed America for 9/11.

And he appointed Janet Napolitano, the homeland security secretary who can’t get her facts straight about the 9/11 terrorists, pooh-poohed our immigration laws, disseminated a hit job on conservatives and veterans as right-wing extremist threats, and redefined acts of terrorism as “man-caused disasters.”

“Man-caused disaster.” That’s a perfect description of the Scare Force One torture photo-op that took place this week and an apt summary of the last 100 days. Say cheese.

COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

At least he didn’t bow

via: michellemalkin

Click on the link for the full-size photo if you must. I can’t stand to look at our president’s dumb grin as he warmly greets Venezuela’s thug-in-chief:

Gag.

And another handholding pic here: Ew.

Did anyone smell sulfur during the photo op?

Now, the Evil Clown (as Allahpundit calls him) can add his friendly pic with Obama to his Chavista Fan Club photo album:

Tools.

Obama is hanging with Chavez and company this weekend to “seek a new beginning with Cuba.”

Meanwhile, George Moneo at Babalu Blog points out, Oscar Elias Biscet continues to rot in prison.