The income people earn is not the government’s; it belongs to the people who earned it. When people in Washington say things like “We can’t afford a tax cut,” they need to think about who the “We” is. It is the people’s money, not the politicians’.

From The Washington Times: Five questions with Michele Bachmann

A plate of damp hay appears, smoldering under the empty, super-heated pan that rests atop it.  A squeeze bottle is produced:  You are directed to squirt a few drops of hay-infused oil into the pan and then crack a speckled wild-duck egg into the oil.  A timer is set.  The egg white bubbles and spits.  When two minutes have elapsed, you are instructed to swirl a knob of goat butter into the pan and briefly sauté a few fragile leaves of spinach and of ramson, a kind of wild garlic that may have been gathered that morning in a nearby city park.  A chef brings over a tiny saucepan of forest-green ramson oil, which he spoons over the cooked white.  You scatter hermes and wildflowers, and break off whorls from a potato-chip helix.  The fragrance of Nordic spring drifts from the pan:  the distant smoke, the dampness of thawed earth, the secret pungency of the forest floor.  You have discovered what it might be like to fry an egg in the spring woods if you had perfect ingredients and the resources of one of the world’s great kitchens.  A hundred tiny things have been orchestrated to ensure that you will be eating the best fried egg of your life.

“What we’re trying to do is save the world from the Republican budget. We’re trying to save life on this planet as we know it today.”

- Nancy Pelosi

Posted without comment.

A friend poses the following: Imagine that there really were these fundamentalist Christian terror cells all over the United States, as the Department of Homeland Security imagines. Let’s say a group of five of these terrorists hijacked a plane, flew it to Mecca, and plowed it into the Kaaba.Now let’s say a group of well-meaning, well-funded Christians — Christians whose full-time job was missionary work — decided that the best way to promote healing would be to pressure the Saudi government to drop its prohibition against permitting non-Muslims into Mecca so that these well-meaning, well-funded Christian missionaries could build a $100 million dollar church and community center a stone’s throw from where the Kaaba used to be — you know, as a bridge-building gesture of interfaith understanding.

Read the rest at NRO: Ground Zero Thought Experiment – The Corner – National Review Online.

for the past 15 years… there has been no “statistically significant” warming… according to Professor Phil Jones… former director of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit.

Wait… I thought there was a “consensus” on warming.  Looks like there is a lot more complexity to the issue than people are willing to admit.

While it starts a bit on the slow side, this interview with Christopher Hitchens is superb.  One thing in particular that stuck me was how I feel his attitude towards religious believers — particularly Christian believers — has seemed to moderate somewhat over the past few years.  While Hitchens sill sees religion as a problem in the sense that he does not see how such beliefs can exist within a secular, democratic system without the danger of those very beliefs being “imposed” on everyone else, it seems to me he has found a certain bit of humility and has developed a curiosity of sorts at the scores of very intelligent people who have looked at the arguments in favor of and against the existence of God and have decided that they find God’s existence to be a more convincing argument.  Gone are the disparaging remarks about his intellectual equals (which are few and far between to be sure) who disagree with him.  Gone is the rhetoric about how religion is irredeemably destructive to society.  Perhaps there is still some hope for Hitchens after all!

Now this comes as a surprise to all of us who distinctly remember Obama promising the American people that people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will be given “full MILITARY trials”:

The vast majority of the folks in Guantanamo, I suspect, are there for a reason… I think there are a lot of dangerous people. Particularily dangerous are people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Ironically, those are the guys are going to get real military procedures…

Now let me just address a couple points that have been made on the other side. You’ll hear opponents of this amendment say that it will give all kidns of rights to terrorist masterminds like KSM. I want to repeat… that is not true. The irony of the underlying bill as it is written… is that someone like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is gonna get, basically, a full military trial…with all the bells and whistles… because the feeling is that he is guilty of a war crime and to do otherwise might violate some of our agreements under the Geneva Convention.

I think that is good that were goin to provide him with some proceedure and some process…. Justice will be carried out in his case.

Now, being the critical thinker that I am… a number of questions naturally occur to me.  First, Why are we only trying some (not all) of the Guantanamo terrorists in federal courts in New York?  I mean, if they are proper for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, why are they improper for the rest of the gang?  Secondly (and related to the first question), why are we only trying the terrorists that we are confident will result in a “successful” outcome?  I mean, if you think that the civilian justice system offers the fairest sort of justice… then wouldn’t you want to try suspects who have the weakest cases in civilian courts (to give them the most possible protections) rather than the strongest cases–the cases we are already were guaranteed to win??  And furthermore, if we are guaranteed to win our case against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, why try him in a civilian court in the first place — especially when it is widely understood that a civilian trial of this sort is all but certain to publicize (and do irreversible damage) many of our national security (which is the very reason for military tribunals in the first place).  Finally, why do this when the military system has all the ample “bells and whistles” Obama assured us was good enough for  ”dangerous people” like  Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?

Well, I’m afraid only one explanation makes any sense:  Obama didn’t really think Military tribunals were fair back in 2006 and he doesn’t now.  He made us all believe a bill that granted constitutional rights to terrorists wouldn’t disturb the vital role of military tribunals– all the while demeaning those who’s criticism of the bill is now entirely validated by Obama’s own actions.  Obama is doing this for no other reason than to placate the far-left in this country who want to see the US government, the CIA, and the US Military on trial.  Obama wouldn’t dare put a terrorist on the stand and risk the public backlash should there be an acquittal.  Of course he wouldn’t… and that’s why he’s only bringing the “safest” cases… so he can claim the federal courts work for terrorists while making each and every one of the CIA’s practices and techniques front page material for the New York Times.

Anthony Dick summed it up well over at “The Corner”:

The strange thing about the Obama administration’s decision to hold these civilian al-Qaeda trials is that the project is flawed even based on the premises of its staunchest defenders: They talk about due process and the rule of law, but the trials can’t possibly provide anything close to the level of objectivity that applies in an ordinary criminal-law setting. There is no way the defendants will get an impartial jury in New York, and there is no way the government will actually release the terrorists if they are acquitted. Thus the courtroom proceedings in Manhattan will be, in a very real sense, show trials. They are designed purely for PR purposes, so that the Obama administration can pay lip service to the ideal of due process while implicitly rebuking the Bush administration for failing to respect the rule of law.

Meanwhile, it is the Obama administration that is truly making a sham out of the rule of law, by politicizing the trial process and pretending that these enemy combatants will be getting normal, neutral, dispassionate trials, as if the larger strategic context of the War on Terror will not affect the judge, the jury, or the actions of the government, which is sure to retain custody of the defendants in the off chance they are acquitted.

I ask you… what other explanation is there?

This is a really great speech.  Sort of sad Netanyahu needed to give it… but worth watching.  Here is a brief transcript:

BUT TO THOSE WHO GAVE THIS HOLOCAUST-DENIER A HEARING, I SAY ON BEHALF OF MY PEOPLE, THE JEWISH PEOPLE, AND DECENT PEOPLE EVERYWHERE: HAVE YOU NO SHAME? HAVE YOU NO DECENCY?” “WHAT A DISGRACE!

Watson marshals the speeches and writings of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and the jurisprudence of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, among others, as evidence for his claim of the pervasive influence of social Darwinism in the intellectual cocktail that is progressivism. As Wilson demonstrates, the progressives sought to move the energy of government from the democratic branches to the bureaucracy. Insulated from politics and popular opinion, federal bureaucrats would engage in the scientific administration of government — the overriding ethos of progressivism. The expert and, in time, the judge would supply regulations and orders to fill the multiplying and unruly (i.e., unregulated) gaps of modern industrialized society. Thus, the real purpose of politics under progressivism informed by social Darwinism is not justice, or the preservation of personal and economic liberty — those worthless dregs of past history — but the infusion into federal and state governments of the substantive powers needed to achieve the perfection of government administration.

via The Undoing of American Constitutionalism by Richard M. Reinsch on National Review Online.