Obama Weekly Address: Shared Sacrifice, Blah, Blah...

The words have changed but the game's the same.

Class warfare tax the rich baloney. See Gateway Pundit: "Obama Weekly Address: Tax the Rich."

RELATED: At The Hill, "GOP leaders ignore Obama’s 36-hour deadline for a debt plan" (via Memeorandum).

Nancy Pelosi: 'Elections Shouldn't Matter as Much as They Do'

She's a strange woman, in many respects. I don't see someone like Pelosi as possessing anything approaching critical thinking facilities. It's all just emotion and stream of consciousness. And that really explains the talk she gave at Tufts, where she says that Republicans should just take back their party because we "share values about the education of our children." Never mind that we don't really have shared values, especially when people like Kevin Jennings, Assistant Deputy Secretary in the Obama Department of Education, is a prototypical exponent of those values. Nancy Pelosi is out to lunch when she claims that "elections shouldn’t matter as much as they do." In fact, I might have passed up on this, but Steven Hayward has an essay worth sharing, at Power Line, "THE MASK SLIPS, FALLS TO GROUND, EXPLODES." I still think she's out to lunch, but this is good:

It is a mistake to dismiss Pelosi as the complete nitwit she often appears. The most clarifying single moment of the last generation may well have been Pelosi's famous remark that we'd need to pass the healthcare bill to find out what was in it. Rather than being a matter of ridicule, I thought Pelosi expressed perfectly the innermost character of congressional legislation in the modern administrative state. What she said was quite true and accurate: even at more than 2,000 pages, the enormous discretion and policy responsibility delegated to executive branch agencies meant that in effect the actual operating law would be formulated by administrators rather than Congress. And the huge number of waivers being granted under ObamaCare reveals the essentially arbitrary (some might say lawless) nature of administrative government.

RTWT.

WikiLeaks' Dishonesty and Hypocrisy

The latest WikiLeaks dump could be breaking a record for provoking debate. I've said a lot already. But I'm thinking back to how badly the MFM and progressive manchild bloggers got beat on the Apache video last April. Jawa Report was doing yeoman's work, for example, "For The Idiots Who Still Say There Was no RPG -- UPDATED: Wiki Leak as Left Wing Propaganda."

Liars and hypocrites. And lots more in the news. For example, at The Guardian's reader-response interview, Julian Assange refused to answer this question:

Julian.

I am a former British diplomat. In the course of my former duties I helped to coordinate multilateral action against a brutal regime in the Balkans, impose sanctions on a renegade state threatening ethnic cleansing, and negotiate a debt relief programme for an impoverished nation. None of this would have been possible without the security and secrecy of diplomatic correspondence, and the protection of that correspondence from publication under the laws of the UK and many other liberal and democratic states. An embassy which cannot securely offer advice or pass messages back to London is an embassy which cannot operate. Diplomacy cannot operate without discretion and theprotection of sources. This applies to the UK and the UN as much as the US.

In publishing this massive volume of correspondence, Wikileaks is not highlighting specific cases of wrongdoing but undermining the entire process of diplomacy. If you can publish US cables then you can publish UK telegrams and UN emails.

My question to you is: why should we not hold you personally responsible when next an international crisis goes unresolved because diplomats cannot function.

Julian ASS-ange

More later ...

PREVIOUSLY: "Progressive Manchildren and WikiLeaks."

Progressive Manchildren and WikiLeaks

That's John Hawkins:

And here's Progressive Manchild #1: Glenn Greenwald, "WikiLeaks Debate With Steven Aftergood." And seriously. Is Julian Assange a hero? Hardly. The dude should be dead.

RELATED: Just now seeing another manchild, "Doctor Science" at Obsidian Wings (hmm, could be a womanchild), "The culture of conspiracy, the conspiracy of culture" (via Memeorandum). This isn't all that complicated, as I discussed yesterday: "Misunderstanding WikiLeaks." Indeed, it's pretty much broken down to a debate between serious folks on national security and antiwar nihilists. And yes, idiotic manchildren, or in the case of Charli Carpenter ... well, I won't go there: "What is Wikileaks?"

Misunderstanding WikiLeaks

There's some debate on the degree of international cooperation in apprehending WikiLeaks' Julian Assange. At Telegraph UK, "WikiLeaks: British Police Asked to Join Hunt for Julian Assange." Also at Memeorandum. And there's some breaking stuff at NYT that I haven't gotten to yet, for example, "Diplomats Noted Canadian Mistrust Toward U.S."

For now what's sparking my interest, and some frustration, is the easy accolades so many commenters are offering to WikiLeaks, with attention especially on claims that increasing transparency is a means to a greater libertarian end. And in this I'm finding, as a side note, through Ross Douthat, that Will Wilkinson is now blogging at The Economist. I was a subscriber for three years while in graduate school. I read that magazine religiously. But like just about every other mainstream periodical in recent years, its quality has deteriorated badly. Outside the pages of Wall Street Journal, The Economist used to be the place to read the most rigorous analysis of free market economics. Yet now the previously classically-inclined editors at The Economist have jumped ship. (Alan Caruba captured this unfortunate descent just the other day, "Climate Change Idiocy and The Economist.") So I guess it makes sense that Will Wilkinson's blogging there now. The countercultural left has increasingly joined with ideological libertarianism to escalate the contemporary attack on the modern moral regime and the foundations of social order. To take that attack to its logical conclusion is to launch an extreme repudiation on state power, since it's the state that controls the monopoly of force and the means to prohibit certain activities, such as drug use and prostitution. But with the recent WikiLeaks dump, the left-libertarian alliance has metastasized into a romantic nihilism, which sees a heroic purpose to WikiLeaks when the exact opposite is true. My old infantile antagonist E.D. Kain gleefully provides a synopsis, which perfectly illustrates the verbose left-libertarianism's replacement of firm realism with fluffy fawning:

The government has a monopoly on violence; the media has only words. We should encourage underdogs like WikiLeaks who continue to fight an uphill battle, not against the United States – this country is more than its government, after all – but against the over-reach of the state. We have ceded so much of our own privacy to our government, perhaps now we would like to return the favor.

WikiLeaks may be a small player, really, in the bigger scheme of things. But to some degree it is also a bellwether, a forecast of things to come as information and technology continue to nip at the heels of the state. Perhaps we really are approaching a time when government becomes less relevant, less necessary, where other institutions both real and virtual can begin to supplant the role of the state in our lives, subversively at first but then more openly as time passes. I don’t know. I’m not even sure what that would look like in practice. Predicting the future is not among my talents; I cannot see where frying pans leave off and fires begin. But if I am at all correct then we should also realize that when an institution is threatened it reacts accordingly. Things will get worse before they get better.

If this were just a philosophical excursion vis-à-vis theories of federalism and government devolution, that'd be one thing. But it's not. We're talking about a 21st century non-state actor conducting information warfare against the United States. It's not a big surprise that WikiLeaks' most enthusiast backers are found among the world's anarcho-communist contingents. What's pathetic --- although not new, just even more pronounced --- is how willingly the libertarians jump on board this lame new vehicle toward alleged greater government accountability.

So to be clear: Julian Assange despises America with all he's got. There's nothing good about his agenda. And libertarianism is deathly nihilism if folks can't get their heads around the idea that there's little functional alternative to the nation-state in today's post-modern advanced democratic societies. That's not to say we can't limit the expansion of the state nor improve government performance and accountability. But we'll destroy ourselves by radical attempts to tear it down. And back over at The Economist is a deep clue to the ideological confusion. Folks apparently never got the memo from earlier this year on the bogus WikiLeaks Apache video "Collateral Damage." There's wasn't anything "objective" about it. But tell that to The Economist:

WikiLeaks's release of the "Collateral Murder" video last April was a pretty scrupulous affair: an objective record of combat activity which American armed forces had refused to release, with careful backing research on what the video showed. What we got was a window into combat reality, through the sights of a helicopter gunship. You could develop different interpretations of that video depending on your understanding of its context, but it was something important that had actually taken place.

A lot of commentators apparently act as though they're offering profound insights of democratic theory when expounding on WikiLeaks. I note E.D. Kain as one exhibit, although Glenn Greenwald comes to mind as well. But it's really not such a super sophisticated or intellectually glamorous issue. WikiLeaks wants to destroy authority. People are going to get killed, and not in the name of any state interest that could be otherwise checked by the processes of democratic governance. IBD had a great editorial on Julian Assange the other day, and I'll close with this, "An Infoterrorist?":

Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., the soon-to-be chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, is absolutely correct in calling for Assange's outfit to be classified a terrorist organization under U.S. law. King has called on Attorney General Eric Holder to charge Assange with a crime under the Espionage Act. While Holder's office has announced an investigation, don't hold your breath.

But what of Assange's accomplices in the U.S. and foreign media?

The New York Times, where Assange gets to dump "all the secrets fit to leak," boasts that its collaborations with WikiLeaks give "the unvarnished story of how the government makes its biggest decisions" — hardly a rationale for endangering our liberty.

This is a continuing, slow-motion disaster for the U.S., and our government has done little beyond having a State Department lawyer send a huffy letter to Assange's lawyer in Sweden.

These leaks must be plugged — by force if necessary — before it is American blood we find flowing.

At the video, more radical left-wing Wiki-boosting from communist Amy Goodman's Democracy Now!

RELATED: From Peter Feaver, "WikiLeaks Only Interested in Damaging U.S. Foreign Policy."

Comeback

The new ad from General Motors:

Looks like it's going over pretty well. Then again, in other news: "After GM Stock Sale, Taxpayers Lose, Unions Win." Actually, not everyone agrees on that: "Capitalists ‘Recover’ On Backs of Workers."

Explosive Powder, PETN, Target of Airport Screenings

Yeah, could be deadly, but sheesh.

At LAT:

Full-body scans and aggressive pat-downs now under scrutiny are designed to seek out the explosive powder that was used in several failed terrorist bombings recently, officials say.

New airport security procedures that have stirred the emotions of air travelers — full-body scans and aggressive pat-downs — were largely designed to detect an explosive powder called PETN, which has been a staple of Al Qaeda bomb makers for nearly a decade.

It was PETN that was molded into the sole of Richard Reid's black high-top sneaker when he walked onto American Airlines Flight 63 bound for Miami in December 2001.

It was PETN that was sewn into the underwear of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, authorities say, when he boarded Northwest Airlines Flight 253 for Detroit on Christmas Day 2009.

And it was PETN that suspected Al Qaeda operatives in Yemen packed inside computer printer cartridges that were shipped Oct. 28, intending to blow up planes en route to Chicago.

None of the plots succeeded in taking down an aircraft, but top U.S. officials are concerned about fresh indications that Al Qaeda remains determined to get PETN on airplanes by trying to exploit vulnerabilities in passenger and cargo screening.

Not only has the terrorist network acknowledged its role in bomb plots, it is also sharing what it knows about building bombs on the Web and elsewhere.

PETN, or pentaerythritol tetranitrate, presents some vexing problems for security experts. A powder about the consistency of fine popcorn salt, it will not trigger an alarm on a metal detector. Because of its more stable molecules, PETN gives off less vapor, making it more difficult to detect by bomb-sniffing dogs and the trace swabs used by the Transportation Security Administration.

PETN's stability makes it easy to hide and easily transformed. When mixed with rubber cement or putty, it becomes a rudimentary plastic explosive — a baseball-sized amount can blow a hole in an airplane fuselage.

"PETN is hard to detect and lends itself to being concealed," said an intelligence official who was not authorized to speak on the record. "It packs a punch."

RELATED: At The Hill, "Next step for body scanners could be trains, boats, metro" (via Memeorandum).

Professor Caroline Heldman Clueless on Politics of Town Halls

I first saw Professor Caroline Heldman last year, on the O'Reilly Factor, in the weeks before the November election. According to her information page, she is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Occidental College. Professor Heldman co-edited a book on feminist electoral politics (Rethinking Madam President: Are We Ready for a Woman in the White House?). She also published an article at Ms. Magazine last year, "Out-of-Body Image: Women See Themselves Through Eyes of Others." Her 2005 curriculum vitae lists two other books, but they don't turn up on a Google search. Heldman holds a Ph.D. from Rutgers University. She took a Bachelor's in Business Administration from Washington State University in 1993.

I mention all of this to provide some background to Heldman's latest appearance on the O'Reilly Factor last night. At the video, O'Reilly talks to both Scott Rasmussen (of Rasmussen Reports) and Professor Heldman. The discussion follows the Talking Points segment. Rasmussen gives an accurate background analysis of what's happening with President Obama's public support on key issues, and particularly the recent surge in public opposition to ObamaCare.

Both O'Reilly and Rasmussen argue that the tea parties/town halls are having an effect on the Obama administration. Basically, as public support for the grassroots demonstrators has gone up, pubic backing for the ObamaCare fiasco has gone down. Heldman first shakes her head in agreement with Rasmussen, but when O'Reilly asks her, "as a political scientist," what she thinks is happening, Heldman argues that the protests are related to a "broader concern" with "the loss of healthcare." But actually, polls have showed that roughly 8 out of 10 Americans are satisfied with the quality of their healthcare and their insurance coverage.

Then, when O'Reilly continues, saying Americans are very clear on ObamaCare ("they don't want it"), Heldman comes back with, "I disagree with you ... we need a piece of legislation first. And what's needed prior to producing legislation is democratic debate. And what's happening at these healthcare forums is folks are coming and shutting down debate. So I don't think people know much about healthcare ..."

Professor Heldman concludes with some spurious comparison to "healthcare lobbies" in 1993, which purportedly distorted the Clinton adminstration's reform program away from "the best interest" of the public. (I gather that would be single-payer nationalization.)

Watch the video. Heldman shows all kinds of exasperated body language to indicate her frustration with the way the discussion's going. But she's clearly wrong on facts, and most importantly, she's badly misinformed with what's happening today on the conservative street with regards to the town halls.

From my perspective, as a blogger and a teaching political scientist, this year's been one of the most incredible learning experiences on democratic participation in American life. Americans aren't buying the left-wing smears of tea-partyers as astroturfed mobs. USA Today's poll this week was particulary telling. The survey indicated, by 2-to-1 margin, a shift in public sympathy toward the town hall demonstrators. Fifty-one percent said the town halls are an example of "democracy in action." Certainly Professor Heldman's entitled to her opinion, but as she's a political scientist, I'd expect her to have a more rigorous grasp of survey trends if she's going to be speaking on the topic as an expert.

Also, in a related development, Michelle Malkin reports that John L. Jackson, Jr., who holds the majesterial title of Richard Perry University Associate Professor of Communication and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, has attacked Malkin's book, Culture of Corruption, as a "hate crime: "That's the implicit message of this screed from the Chronicle of Higher Education."

Jackson's piece is titled, "The Rising Stakes of Obamaphobia." And once again, we see the same lefist canards and ignorant characterizations of the protests. Jackson at one point argues that:

A relatively small group of like-minded people can have a disproportionate impact on our collective public stage, especially if they make effective use of new media technologies ....

Americans' current "run on guns" isn't just about a potential change in national policy around gun control and the right to bear arms. Some of it also seems to be predicated on an uptick in right-wing militias and their renewed calls for a "race war." Part of it is about a kind of "racial paranoia" linked to economic insecurities, a racial paranoia that pivots on a growing social movement around reactionary racial politicking.

It turns out that Professor Jackson has apparently made his academic mark with this kind of bull-hockey analysis. He's the author of Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness, yet another argument for the "hidden," "unseen" racism that's allegedly destroying our country.

It can't be said enough - and I attest to this as both an activist and an analyst - that the right's grassroots movement is really unprecedented in recent years. Folks in the left-wing media and the radical academy are doing themselves tremendous harm in misunderstanding what's really happening, and in disrespecting that which they don't understand.

It's bothersome, frankly. I wish I'd known back in 1992 what I know now about politics and ideology. I might have done some things differently in life. On the bright side, recent experiences in blogging and political activism are making me a better professor.