Today We Got Proposed To...

...by Barack Obama.

"If you put your trust in me — if you give me 'your hand and your heart' — then that's exactly what I intend to do as your next President."

The Messiah

He ventured forth to bring light to the world: The anointed one's pilgrimage to the Holy Land is a miracle in action - and a blessing to all his faithful followers.

Read more about it here.

Boumediene v. Bush

Holding: "[A]liens designated as enemy combatants and detained at the United States Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba . . . do have the habeas corpus privilege." Boumediene v. Bush, 2008 U.S. LEXIS 4887

Translation: "Alien enemy prisoners, waging a jihad against the American people and captured by our military in a war authorized by Congress, have a right — under our Constitution — to petition our courts for their release." National Review Online

Precedent: Never before in history has there been

an instance where a court, in this or any other country where the writ is known, has issued [habeus corpus] on behalf of an alien enemy who, at no relevant time and in no stage of his captivity, has been within its territorial jurisdiction. Nothing in the text of the Constitution extends such a right, nor does anything in our statutes.

Justice Robert Jackson, writing for the Supreme Court majority in Johnson v. Eisentrager ("case involving German operatives captured in China and held in zone of postwar Germany fully controled by occupying American forces.")

So much for precedent.


My Hero: "Eisentrager thus held — held beyond any doubt — that the Constitution does not ensure habeas for aliens held by the United States in areas over which our Government is not sovereign…. [The majority opinion] is a sheer rewriting of the case.… By blatantly distorting Eisentrager, the Court avoids the difficulty of explaining why it should be overruled."
Justice Scalia, dissenting in Boumediene v. Bush.

What this case is really about: "The United States Supreme Court now routinely invents constitutional rights to support whatever social, political, and legal goals it deems desirable. It is so much easier to legislate from the bench than it is through the branches of government that were created by our Founders to do just that." Peter Wehner, Supreme Disgrace, National Review Online

What it means: "[F]oreign al-Qaeda killers detained in Cuba can march right into the federal district courts and demand what, suddenly, are their constitutional rights. In those courts, judges — without guidance and emboldened by the high court’s usurpation of war powers — will be encouraged to make it up as they go along: More access to classified information? Subpoenas commanding the testimony (and cross-examination) of our soldiers regarding the circumstances of capture? Miranda warnings? Prompt access to counsel, which is certain to halt any questioning — and thus any revelation of lifesaving intelligence — before it can even start? Full-blown trials in the criminal-justice system with the same presumptions of innocence, privacy, and other privileges vested in American citizens?" Editors, National Review Online.

More Scalia:

The game of bait-and-switch that today’s opinion plays upon the Nation’s Commander in Chief will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed. That consequence would be tolerable if necessary to preserve a time-honored legal principle vital to our constitutional Republic. But it is this Court’s blatant abandonment of such a principle that produces the decision today… It sets our military commanders the impossible task of proving to a civilian court, under whatever standards this Court devises in the future, that evidence supports the confinement of each and every enemy prisoner.

"What drives today's decision is neither the meaning of the Suspension Clause, nor the principles of our precedents, but rather an inflated notion of judicial supremacy."

"The Nation will live to regret what the Court has done today."

More commentary on this ruling by "the al-Quaeda wing of the U.S. Supreme Court":
Supreme Cowardice, American Spectator
Lord Kennedy, American Spectator



Remember what the Obamessiah said about the type of judges he'd nominate to the Supreme Court?


We're convinced: A vote for Obama is a vote for al-Quaeda.

Great Orators of the Democratic Party

• "One man with courage makes a majority."--Andrew Jackson
  
  
• "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."--Franklin D. Roosevelt
  
  
• "The buck stops here."--Harry S. Truman
  
  
• "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."--John F. Kennedy

Oh yeah, and this:

• "What they'll say is, "Well it costs too much money," but you know what? It would cost, about--It-- It--it would cost about the same as what we would spend--It--Over the course of 10 years it would cost what it would cost us (nervous laugh). All right. Okay. We're going to--It--It would cost us about the same as it would cost for about - hold on one second. I can't hear myself. But I'm glad you're fired up, though. I'm glad. Everybody know that it makes no sense that you send a kid to the emergency room for a treatable illness like asthma, they end up taking up a hospital bed, it costs, when, if you, they just gave, you gave them treatment early and they got some treatment, and a, a breathalyzer, or inhalator, not a breathalyzer. I haven't had much sleep in the last 48 hours."-- Barack Hussein Obama

Obama, Political Viagra

A good reality check from Mark Steyn at National Review Online:

"If Obama is political Viagra, the media are at that stage in the ad where the announcer warns that, if leg tingles persist for over six months, see your doctor."

Maybe

At least the great orator is original.

Judges, our jurisprudential nannies

Who said this, and what was he/she talking about?

“We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old . . ."

That would be Obama. And he wasn't talking about the head of a non-profit organization, or the Pope, or even a charismatic presidential candidate. We'll let Obama tell you what he was talking about:

— and that’s the criteria by which I’ll be selecting my judges.”

So much for the rule of law.

As Jonah Goldberg put it, "Supreme Court justices are supposed to decide what the written law requires, not pick winners and losers based upon some sense of noblesse oblige. That’s why all of those statues of Lady Justice show her standing blindfolded, not bent over kissing the boo-boos of the unfortunate and the downtrodden."

Sowell on Obama

Once again, Thomas Sowell shows why he is one of our favorite modern thinkers/writers.

No doubt it is only a matter of time before there is a black president, just as it was only a matter of time before Paul Waner got his 3,000th hit. The issue is whether we want to reach that landmark so badly that we are willing to overlook how questionably that landmark is reached.

What's so questionable about Obama? Is he the candidate of change--which is something we all would like to see?

Although Senator Obama has presented himself as the candidate of new things — using the mantra of “change” endlessly — the cold fact is that virtually everything he says about domestic policy is straight out of the 1960s and virtually everything he says about foreign policy is straight out of the 1930s . . ..We paid a terrible price for such 1960s notions in the years that followed . . . [while the 1930's foreign policy] approach, in the name of peace, is what led to the most catastrophic war in human history.

We are Deipnosophist

We can't tell if we're supposed to be electing the person who is best qualified and most capable of leading the greatest nation on earth, or casting our votes for the next big celebrity or pop entertainment icon.

Judging by the way they portray themselves, it appears to be the latter.


I am:


I am:


My name is:


My name is:

Political Life Imitates Saturday Night Live

"Lay off me, I'm starving!"
- Chris Farley, Gap Girls, Saturday Night Live



"Why can't I just eat my waffle?"
- Barack Obama, Election 2008

Equal Opportunity Blogger

For those of you who think we've given too much attention to ol' Barack (after all, we did give him his own Blog label - "Obamania"), we give you this exciting bit of Youtubery.



Here's how Hillaryous defended her words at this week's Debate:

Well, Tom, I can tell you that I may be a lot of things, but I'm not dumb. And I wrote about going to Bosnia in my book in 2004. I laid it all out there. And you're right. On a couple of occasions in the last weeks I just said some things that weren't in keeping with what I knew to be the case and what I had written about in my book. And, you know, I'm embarrassed by it. I have apologized for it. I've said it was a mistake. And it is, I hope, something that you can look over, because clearly I am proud that I went to Bosnia. It was a war zone . . . So I know that it is something that some people have said, "Wait a minute. What happened here?" But I have talked about this and written about it. And then, unfortunately, on a few occasions I was not as accurate as I have been in the past....

...So I will either try to get more sleep, Tom, or, you know, have somebody who, you know, is there as a reminder to me. You know, you can go back for the past 15 months. We both have said things that, you know, turned out not to be accurate. You know, that happens when you're talking as much as we have talked.

But you know, I'm very sorry that I said it. And I have said that, you know, it just didn't jibe with what I had written about and knew to be the truth.

Really? Is outright lying just an embarrassing thing for her, sort of like accidentally admitting that she still wets the bed? And is a complete fabrication such as this really just the result of sleep deprivation?

Let no one accuse us of being unfair and unbalanced. Even if she is.

The Three "R"'s

An interesting short read about our new least favorite politician by our new favorite writer/commentator, Thomas Sowell.

“In Shelby Steele's brilliantly insightful book about Barack Obama -- "A Bound Man" -- it is painfully clear that Obama was one of those people seeking a racial identity that he had never really experienced in growing up in a white world. He was trying to become a convert to blackness, as it were -- and, like many converts, he went overboard.”

Obama = Messiah?

Excuse me, but this sounds more like a cult than a political campaign. The language used here is the language of evangelical Christianity – the Obama volunteers speak of "coming to Obama" in the same way born-again Christians talk about "coming to Jesus."

But he's not Jesus! He's not going to magically enable us to transcend the bitter partisanship that is tearing this country apart. And even if he is elected, in no way will that show that somehow we have "gotten beyond" race.

Kathleen Geier of the liberal TPMCafe (and an Edwards supporter) commenting on this article.

“I’ve been following politics since I was about 5." “I’ve never seen anything like this. This is bigger than Kennedy. [Obama] comes along, and he seems to have the answers. This is the New Testament. This is surprising.”

Chris Matthews in the New York Observer

Perhaps it's my atheism at work but I found myself increasingly wary of and resistant to the salvational fervor of the Obama campaign, the idealistic zeal divorced from any particular policy or cause and chariot-driven by pure euphoria. . . . I don't look to politics for transcendence and self-certification.

James Wolcott, a left leaning contributor to Vanity Fair.

See for yourself.