More web-cruising

Great. The director of the National Counterterrorism Center didn't think the news of a suicide bomber on a U.S. airline was worth interrupting his vacation. Some things, apparently, are just not worth cutting short a Christmas vacation with the family. Such habits could make holiday attacks more likely in the future. (Link via Hot Air)

Someone at NRO linked to this great takedown of those fatuous COEXIST bumper stickers.

Are we supposed to be comforted that federal officials had woken up to the dangers of Abdulmutallab's presence on that Northwest flight and so were planning to talk to him when he landed?

This would have the makings of a rather devastating ad against Martha Coakley in that crucial Massachusetts Senate race.

In October 2005, a Somerville police officer living in Melrose raped his 23-month-old niece with a hot object, most likely a curling iron.

Keith Winfield, then 31, told police he was alone with the toddler that day and made additional statements that would ultimately be used to convict him.

But in the aftermath of the crime, a Middlesex County grand jury overseen by Martha Coakley, then the district attorney, investigated without taking action.

It was only after the toddler’s mother filed applications for criminal complaints that Coakley won grand jury indictments charging rape and assault and battery.

Even then, nearly 10 months after the crime, Coakley’s office recommended that Winfield be released on personal recognizance, with no cash bail. He remained free until December 2007, when Coakley’s successor as district attorney won a conviction and two life terms.

....She insisted that Winfield’s status as a law enforcement officer had no bearing on her decisions. “The fact that he was a Somerville police officer was irrelevant,’’ she said.

Coakley’s prosecutors made the recommendation that Winfield be released with no cash bail, even though an investigator with the Department of Children and Families, working in the weeks immediately following the rape, found that Winfield had been suspended from his job with the Somerville police for disciplinary reasons and had lied about it.

In addition, the investigator found that Winfield had concealed the fact that he had been evaluated at Melrose-Wakefield Hospital for stress less than two weeks before the rape.

Indeed, before Winfield’s trial, prosecutors sought to admit evidence that Winfield, in the days leading up to the rape, was treated for a substance abuse problem and had threatened to kill himself by holding a gun to his head, “evincing great emotional stress and the strong possibility that [he] would harm himself or others.’’

Gee, is that the kind of judgment we want in our public officials? And this is from a story in the Boston Globe, no right-wing rag.

Cruising the web

The WSJ reports on how teachers unions in a few states are threatening to torpedo their state's application for Arne Duncan's Race to the Top education grants. And the Obama administration is facilitating the ability of the unions to block such applications that look to evaluate teachers on student achievement.

Read this transcript from Robert Gibbs' press briefing yesterday as he tries to avoid answering questions about how Obama is breaking his campaign pledge to show the negotiations for the health care bill on C-Span. If this weren't so serious, it would be a comedy routine.

Tom Bevan of Real Clear Politics points to this absurdity in Gibbs' argument that the American people have had enough information about the health care bill and debates.

And Gibbs' response yesterday brings up a new question for the White House: if the American people aren't lacking any information about the content of the health care legislation, why is the President rushing through closed-door meetings to pass a piece of legislation on a party-line vote that a majority of the country disapproves of?

Duh!

Jay Cost makes a very interesting argument as to why the filibuster is a good thing. It's intriguing, as Cost's posts so often are.

Now he tells us. Senator Nelson now says that it was a mistake for the Democrats to focus on health care instead of the economy. Ya think?

When Tim Geithner was head of the New York Fed, he told AIG to withhold from the public information about its credit-default swaps.

The public is right. We should not be bailing out California. Perhaps bankruptcy might allow California communities to get out of their ruinous pension contracts that are bankrupting their treasuries.

Michael Barone explains why it is wrong for government officials to act as if they have such specialized knowledge and abilities that they can direct huge swaths of policy. As he says, they are misusing knowledge to expand government power.

Brian McGrory, a Boston Globe columnist, excoriates Democratic Senate candidate Martha Coakley for ducking debates with her opponent, Republican Scott Brown. She doesn't have the confidence to follow the examples of Ted Kennedy and John Kerry and go one-on-one with her opponent.

Missing opportunities

The WSJ has a powerful editorial reminding us of the Ramzi Yousef case. He was the guy who masterminded the first attack on the World Trade Center back in 1993. He was tried in criminal court and is now serving time in federal prison. His trial is the model that the Obama administration is proud to follow for Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Rather than looking at the outcome of a convicted terrorist serving time, think instead of the opportunity missed to interrogate Yousef.

We now know that when Yousef was captured, in 1995, al Qaeda leaders were working feverishly to attack American targets. Yousef's uncle is none other than Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11 and one of Yousef's co-conspirators in the failed Bojinka plot to blow up airliners across the Pacific Ocean.

Yet as far as we know, Yousef told U.S. interrogators little or nothing about KSM's plots and strategy once he was in U.S. custody. This isn't surprising, since once he was in the criminal justice system Yousef was granted a lawyer and all the legal protections against cooperating with U.S. interrogators. To this day, we don't recall any official claim that Yousef has provided useful intelligence of the kind that KSM, Abu Zubaydah and other al Qaeda leaders later did when they were interrogated by the CIA.

We'll never know what would have had happened if we'd followed a different path with Yousef and interrogated him as an enemy combatant in 1993. What might we have found out about KSM's plans for what became the 9/11 attacks?

And we'll never know if Abdulmutallab might have yielded up useful intelligence about the terrorist camps in Yemen.

Instead we have the incoherent arguments from Obama's top counterterrorism official, John Brennan, that perhaps we'll get information from Abdulmutallab by offering him a plea bargain. Think of that - a federal counterterrorism official is thinking plea bargain for a guy who was all set to kill close to 300 people on that Northwest airline.

In other words, because the Obama Administration is loath to interrogate terrorists outside the criminal justice system, our only lever to get them to talk is offering a legal reprieve. This is bizarre to say the least, and self-destructive if it turns out that Abdulmutallab has information that could help prevent future attacks.

Once again, this administration doesn't seem to think of the tradeoffs involved in their decisions. Yes, it's fine to have confidence in our criminal justice system, but they should at least have considered what we're losing out on by their decision. Usually we get stories leaked about how hard the President and his advisers are struggling with their tough decisions. We haven't heard a peep that they actually even thought of another choice with how to treat Abdulmutallab. So we'll never know of the opportunities missed and the information of terrorist plots that we will remain ignorant of just as we missed that opportunity with Yousef.

Michael Mukasey weighs in on this subject today. Although he doesn't name him, we know that that official he's ridiculing is John Brennan.

Even as the initial spin was in progress, Abdulmutallab was chattering like a magpie to his FBI captors about having been trained by al Qaeda and about there being more where he came from.

Braggadocio aside, he was certainly aware of who had prepared the potentially deadly mix that was sewn in his underwear, who had trained him, where the training had taken place, whether there was in fact a South Asian man described by two other passengers who helped him talk his way on to the plane, and a good deal more. Such facts are valuable but evanescent intelligence. The location of people—and with it our ability to find and neutralize them—is subject to rapid change.

Had Abdulmutallab been turned over immediately to interrogators intent on gathering intelligence, valuable facts could have been gathered and perhaps acted upon. Indeed, a White House spokesman has confirmed that Abdulmutallab did disclose some actionable intelligence before he fell silent on advice of counsel. Nor is it any comfort to be told, as we were, by the senior intelligence adviser referred to above—he of the "no smoking gun"—that we can learn facts from Abdulmutallab as part of a plea bargaining process in connection with his prosecution.

Whatever that official thinks he knows about the plea bargaining process, he certainly should know that the kind of facts that Abdulmutallab might be expected to know have a shelf life that is a lot shorter than the plea bargaining process, assuming such a process ever gets started.

Holding Abdulmutallab for a time in military custody, regardless of where he is ultimately to be charged, would have been entirely lawful—even in the view of the current administration, which has taken the position that it needs no further legislative authority to hold dangerous detainees even for a lengthy period in the United States. Then we could decide at relative leisure where to charge him—whether before a military commission or before a civilian court. In Abdulmutallab's case, it would hardly make a difference, given the nature of most of the evidence against him.

That makes so much more sense from the blather that we got from Brennan. It's not a good thing for this country when the country's head of Homeland Security and the President's top counterterrorism official are figures of ridicule rather than confidence.

The Ninth Circuit makes another dumb decision

Roger Clegg points to another screwy decision from the 9th Circuit. A three judge panel just ruled that it was a violation of the Voting Rights Act to deny felons the right to vote. Just how have we not realized all this time that all the states that do deny felons voting rights were violating the law? It took the 9th Circuit to figure this out? Clegg summarizes why this is so very wrong.

Oh, where to begin? First, the evidence of systemic discrimination is dubious. Second, even if there were such discrimination, the record is overwhelming that Congress did not intend the Voting Rights Act to apply to felon disenfranchisement. Third, even if the Voting Rights Act did apply, the state’s legitimate and strong reasons for not wanting criminals to vote would rebut any prima facie case. Those who won’t follow the law themselves can fairly be told that they will not be allowed to make the law for everyone else. We don’t let everyone vote — not children, not noncitizens, not the mentally incompetent, and not criminals — since there are certain minimum, objective standards of responsibility, loyalty, and trustworthiness that we require of those who would participate in the serious enterprise of self-government. The Center for Equal Opportunity has devoted part of its website to this important issue.

We can hope that the entire 9th Circuit will reverse this. If not, it can be yet another dumb 9th Circuit decision that gets reversed by the Supreme Court

A new source of Obama stimulus spending

Well, here's some money that we can save.

Security for the federal trial of self-proclaimed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four accused cohorts will run $200 million a year, sources told the Daily News.

The NYPD's newly revised projection is almost triple the estimate of $75 million in November, after Attorney General Eric Holder announced he would move the prisoners from Guantanamo to Manhattan for trial.

Remember how Holder told us that deciding to try these guys in criminal court in New York was a "trust me" thing. But he assured us that there was no chance that they would not be found guilty. I wonder if he was any better in planning the trial than he was in estimating the cost - and this is before it has even started. I'm sure the price will go up once it starts.

And this is all for guys who were ready to plead guilty until Obama and Holder stepped in and thought that a criminal trial was preferable.

Cruising the web

Ouch! The WSJ find the ultimate insult by calling the majority party the "Tom DeLay Democrats." The Democrats have adopted all the tactics that they came into office pledging to end. The question is whether it is possible to run Congress without adopting such tactics and giving in to all the special interests that influence each party.

Nick Gillespie explains why the Democrats' health care proposal is so unpopular. It's not really a great idea to pass a huge bill and then assume that once people find out what is in it, they'll come to love it. How has that worked out for TARP or the stimulus?

Even Nancy Pelosi laughs at Barack Obama's campaign promises. Yeah, the whole idea of The One fulfilling what he promised to do as he portrayed himself as someone who was all hopeandchangey and able to bring about a real change in Washington. Who would have thought that a simple letter from Brian Lamb, the one person in Washington that no one can say anything bad about, could so embarrass the Democrats.

"Democrats are dropping like flies." Thus says ABC News. First Byron Dorgan announces he's bowing out, we're expecting Chris Dodd's announcement today, and the Democratic governor of Colorado, Bill Ritter is announcing he won't run for reelection. Add in the Michigan Lt. Governor. They're just not finding it a very hospitable environment out there for Democrats this election year. As a Republican, I regret Dodd's announcement. The Democrats will probably hold that seat.

Dorothy Rabinowitz details why Janet Napolitano is the Homeland Security director that the Obama administration deserves. Her circumlocutions such as "man-made disasters" instead of terrorism might be awkward but they're revealing of the administration's wish to separate themselves from anything reeking of Bush-era policies.

While the Republicans used the ping-pong method of reconciling bills when they controlled Congress, the Democrats have resorted to the technique much more since they took control after the 2006 election, thus demonstrating that once one party comes up with a technique to implement their desired policies, the other party will adopt it when they have the chance. Think of it as a legislative arms race.

Fresh from predicting that the Democrats would take up immigration this year, TNR now has a post by Bradford Plumer arguing that cap-and-trade is not yet dead and the the Democrats will try to push it through this year. I can't believe that they're that suicidal to take up both a hugely controversial and divisive bill as well as one that would be so damaging to the economy. But they might regard this as their last chance to achieve such items on the Top Ten Liberal Wish List.

Does Nancy Pelosi even know what the truth is?

Boy, this qualifies as Whopper of the Month. C-Span is pressing congressional leaders to allow them to air the negotiating over the health care reform bill. And Nancy figures that it is better to just lie than to try to defend all the secret behind-the-door negotiating going on with this bill.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) defended Congress' work on a healthcare bill Tuesday saying the process has displayed historic transparency, just as C-SPAN mounts an effort to open the negotiations.

C-SPAN wrote a letter to congressional leaders Tuesday asking that TV cameras be allowed to film negotiations to reconcile the House and Senate versions of healthcare reform legislation.

But Pelosi said Congress has already been transparent throughout the process.

"There has never been a more open process for any legislation," Pelosi said at a press conference.

Pelosi also hinted that holding informal negotiations--likely without TV cameras--might be the most practical way to push the legislation through.

"We will do what is necessary to pass the bill," Pelosi said.

Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), assistant to the Speaker, said the healthcare bill had been "subjected to unprecedented level of public scrutiny."

LOL!! Really. The whole Senate bill that was voted out of the Senate was crafted behind closed doors by Harry Reid with special trinkets like the Louisiana Purchase and the Cornhusker Kickback tucked into the bill to buy individual votes. It was the same story in the House. Now they're planning to ping-pong back and forth between the House and Senate instead of having a conference committee work on it. And Michelle Malkin reminds us how the Democrats were complaining when Republicans avoided having conference committees. But that was back when the Democrats were promising to clean out the culture of corruption in the Congress. Things are different now, but one thing is still the same. Nancy Pelosi will say whatever sounds good with total disregard for the truth.

Why don't you practice what you preach, President Obama?

Robert Gibbs tells us that President Obama wants to send the message to all the intelligence agencies that there should be no finger pointing and blame shifting after the Christmas bombing plot.

President Barack Obama will deliver a stern warning to his appointees at a meeting Tuesday afternoon that he won’t tolerate efforts by the CIA, the State Department and others to shift blame for the recent intelligence foul-up to other parts of the government, said spokesman Robert Gibbs.

“We are going to move beyond agency finger-pointing,” Gibbs told reporters. “The president will not find acceptable a response where everybody gets in a circle and points at someone else. The American people won’t accept that.”

All very admirable, I'm sure. Though I've never seen a bureaucracy where such blame-shifting didn't go on.

However, Barack Obama is the biggest finger-pointer we have in politics. Almost every speech he gives includes a jab at the prior administration. He has set a pattern of blaming others for whatever is wrong as long as those others are Republicans. Even when he goes overseas he includes jabs at the Bush administration in his speeches; most previous presidents have shown more class when talking to foreign audiences, but not The One. And now he suddenly wants others to avoid pointing fingers at others. Perhaps he should model a different attitude himself.

In the very speech in which he was calling for there to be no finger-pointing he basically blamed Bush for this most recent terrorist attempt by saying that Guantanamo was the reason why Al Qaeda in Yemen was established and that he is dedicated to closing it down. Why didn't Abdulmutallab get that message about Obama closing Gitmo so all should be hunky dory now? Does Obama really believe that there would be no Al Qaeda in Iraq if there had never been a detainee camp at Guantanamo? So why was Al Qaeda attacking us on 9/11? Once again he is demonstrating that he doesn't understand the difference between a pretext for terrorism and a cause of terrorism.

UPDATE: Andrew McCarthy comments,

Our intelligence agencies performed horribly here, and their statements since the news broke do not inspire confidence about their handle on the zillion threats we haven't heard about. But is Obama in any position to complain about that? He's spent the last year allowing intelligence officers to be investigated criminally, portraying them as rogues, accusing them of war crimes, removing them from the interrogation equation, and rebuffing calls to disclose to the public how effective their post-9/11 intelligence gathering was. If you create a climate in which pursuing and connecting dots is likely to get you in a heap of hurt, how surprised should you be that we've become lax in dot pursuit and connection?

If the president really wants dots connected, why doesn't he just declare Abdul Mutallab an unlawful enemy combatant and interrogate him like one? Doing so wouldn't stop Obama from having the terrorist indicted in the civilian justice system some time down the road. But if Abdul Mutallab has actionable intelligence, what's stopping the commander-in-chief from taking the obvious steps to get it? And why is the attorney general, rather than, say, the president or the secretary of defense, making these wartime decisions?

Cruising the web

In their continuing effort to find the perfect method to select a presidential nominee, the Democrats are returning to the 1970s by doing away with the superdelegates to their convention. The Clinton-Obama race revealed the uselessness of the superdelegates as well as the non-democratic aspects of having people vote based on their personal ties to the candidates rather than how their constituents voted in primaries. The superdelegates were put in place in the 1980s by Democratic leaders who feared that, left alone, the party would pick more candidates like George McGovern.

Robert Samuelson argues that what we need to do in order to recover from what he calls the Great Recession is to unleash American entrepreneurship. Unfortunately, the Obama policies seem to be stifling the growth of small businesses. Imagine that.

The explanation for the lack of economic growth that worries Samuelson can be found in this column by Gary Becker, Steven Davis, and Kevin Murphy. They explain how the uncertainty that business leaders are feeling over Democratic policies and the continuing recession is freezing their willingness to invest in new growth. As long as they don't know how new government policies such as health care and cap-and-trade will affect their business and they're in doubt about what the new tax situation will be after the Democrats complete their plans for our economy, they will hold off on the major new investments that we need in order to begin a strong recovery from our economic woes.

John Stossel encourages TSA to go full hog on profiling and to learn from Israel how to keep bad actors off of their airplanes.

As his nephew receives his acceptance letter to West Point, William McGurn pays tribute to men and women who attend that institution which does so much to inculcate the honor and character of those young people.

Victor Davis Hanson describes how, on the international and domestic front, our chickens are coming home to roost.

TNR reports that, in a deal to make sure that the Hispanic Caucus supports the health care bill, the administration and Democratic leaders will not oppose efforts to begin major immigration reform this year. The Caucus had been upset that there was not protection of health care for illegal immigrants in the bills before Congress. So watch out for that debate to start up again.

The Dead Pelican, which reports on Louisiana politics, reports that an additional provision in the so-called Louisiana Purchase which bought Senator Mary Landrieu's vote for the health care bill, was a promise by the Democrats to support her brother's run for mayor of New Orleans. The front-runner for the race has dropped out amid plans from the Democratic Party to financially support Mitch Landrieu's candidacy.

Heather MacDonald argues that the lack of an increase in crime as the economy has worsened helps to blow up the argument that it is economics that drives crime. Instead crime has decreased. How do those social theories survive the constant contrary evidence?

Byron York explores how Obama's decision not to make a statement after news broke of the attempted Christmas bombing was a deliberate choice to contrast his behavior to Bush's after a terror strike. He and his advisers wanted to display his cool approach to tricky problems as well as not to elevate the terrorist to the level of demanding a presidential response. See, Obama's response wasn't a bug; it was a feature!

The world just isn't that into him

Robert J. Lieber, a professor of international relations at Georgetown, writes today in the Los Angeles Times to describe what he calls "Obama's can't-do style." He puts his finger on a central mistake that President Obama has made in thinking that his personal celebrity and popularity abroad would translate into diplomatic success for the United States once he was the head of the government.

First, there is Obama's remarkable solipsism, i.e., his penchant for projecting himself as the personification of U.S. policy. Personal attraction can be a useful political and diplomatic tool, and polls in Europe and to a lesser extent in Asia and the Mideast confirm that foreigners strongly prefer him to his predecessor. Nonetheless, the emphasis on the president's own persona is quickly wearing thin.

Ths we see time and again that Obama's speeches insert his own remarkable story into his argument as if to say that no country or organization such as the Olympic Committee would deny a country led by someone as marvelous as he is. Thus, he ignores a central truth that any actor on international relations needs to understand.

Second, Obama overestimates the extent to which America's adversaries determine their policies in reaction to U.S. rhetoric and policy rather than as expressions of their own values, history and interests. Emphasis on interdependence, good intentions and the belief that "the interests of nations and peoples are shared" does not go very far in explaining the motivations of Vladimir Putin, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bashar Assad or Hugo Chavez. The message conveyed is that if only he could assure adversaries or allies that he -- and thus America -- means well, threats or problems could be mitigated or overcome altogether.

In a quest to bridge differences, the president sometimes slips into mirror-imaging by downplaying the distinction between allies and adversaries, and in seeking to equate very different kinds of responsibility. For example, his Cairo speech suggested Western sources for the region's problems and downplayed local causes such as authoritarianism, corruption and internal obstacles to social and economic progress. Anxiously anticipating how others will react may also explain Obama's curious downplaying of human rights, as in his muted response to massive protests by the Iranian people over the rigged outcome of the June presidential election, and in his recent China visit.

If he can't understand what other countries want and how their own interests drive their behavior, he won't be able to have any success in negotiating the troubled waters of the international world today. Thus, he seems to think that, if only he extended an open hand and welcoming attitude towards Iran's leaders, then they'd be happy to come to the negotiating table and get rid of their atomic ambitions. Time and again, they've slapped back with disdain Obama's open hand and gone on their way working to gain nuclear weapons as they sponsor terrorist activity around the world.

Until Obama stops thinking that other countries and organizations' response to the United States was tied up in their dislike of Bush and would be ameliorated by his inauguration, he will continue to make dangerous mistakes in world affairs.

It's time to drop our comforting delusions

After the attacks on 9/11 woke us up to the hatred of radical Islamicists who would kill themselves in order to strike a blow against a western civilization they hate so intensely, people searched to try to understand why these people behaved that way. As President Bush went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq and mounted our first pushback in the war on terror, many liberals felt that such a violent reaction against terrorists was a faulty measure. In their eyes, we needed to figure out why they hated us so much and then not do those things. It seemed handy, and politically beneficial, to connect Bush's actions as exacerbating their hatred and thus counter-productive. The Democrats came to argue that if we could just rid ourselves of Bush and elect someone with Obama's exotic background and ties to the Muslim world, the hatred of the Islamicists would die down. All Obama had to do was be the anti-Bush and we would all be safer.

Well, as Rich Lowry points out today, we now have evidence that the Democrats' comforting argument was all bunk.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab couldn't ignite the bomb in his underwear on Flight 253 on Christmas Day. All he managed to blow up was a worldview.

His failed attempt put paid to the notion that terrorism is the byproduct of a few, specific US policies and of our image abroad. This view dominates the left and animates the Obama administration. It informs its drive to shutter Guantanamo Bay, to get out of Iraq and to cater to "international opinion." If we are only nice and likable enough, goes the theory, the Abdulmutallabs of the world will never be tempted to violent mayhem.

Only the young Nigerian didn't appear the least bit moved by President Barack Obama's commitment to close Gitmo in a year. He didn't seem to care that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will get a civilian trial in New York. He didn't appear to be fazed at all by Obama's Cairo and UN speeches, or a year's worth of international goodwill gestures. He just wanted to destroy an airliner.

It shouldn't be hard to fathom why. Abdulmutallab was in the grip of a violent ideology with an existential hatred of the United States at its core, an ideology promoted by a global terrorist conspiracy under the loose rubric of al Qaeda. This is the essential fact that the left tends to minimize or deny. Obama called Abdulmutallab an "isolated extremist" in his initial statement on the incident, and left the same impression about Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the terrorist of Fort Hood. How coincidental that we are beset by isolated extremists believing the same things and inspired by the same people -- in the cases of Abdulmutallab and Hasan, the radical Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.

A totalist rejection of the United States, this ideology will never lack for particular reasons to hate us. For years, we were told that the Iraq War was al Qaeda's best recruiting tool. Now, new recruiting tools are at hand. Hasan reportedly was disappointed that Obama stayed in Afghanistan. In taking responsibility for Abdulmutallab's attempted attack, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula claimed it was in retaliation for a US-sponsored strike against its leadership in Yemen.

If we pull our troops from Afghanistan, they'll object to our missile strikes in Pakistan. If we stop the missile strikes, they'll object to our training of foreign militaries. If we stop that, they'll object that we have the temerity to maintain a blue-water navy. Nothing short of suicidal abdication will suffice. The other great reputed recruiting tool was Gitmo. But what's worse -- holding terrorists in a facility condemned by the world's scolds, or releasing them to re-invigorate al Qaeda's franchise operations?

But the Democrats still reject what should be so clear. They continue to act under the delusion that it is the existence of Guantanamo that is the problem. That is why they are so insistent that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab not be treated as an enemy combatant but should be tried in the criminal system even if that means he will lawyer up and we won't gain any useful intelligence from him. If we treated him as an enemy combatant, where could they hold him? They certainly don't want to send him to Gitmo. In their eyes, it is crucial that we close Gitmo even if it means sending more of the detainees there back to the same Yemen where other released detainees have jumped right back into terrorist activity.

In their eyes, the crucial goal is not doing everything possible to destroy these terrorists, but to close Gitmo and get out of the detainee business. The Obama administration doesn't understand that Gitmo isn't the problem. If Guantanamo had never existed, they'd still be trying to kill us. It didn't exist during the Clinton years or before 9/11 and they planned the terrorist attacks of the 90s as well as the attack on 9/11. As Andrew McCarthy, who prosecuted the blind sheikh who planned the first attack on the World Trade Center wrote a couple of weeks ago, Guantanamo didn't cause terrorism.

We are talking about people who live in sharia states where they still stone women for adultery, apostates for daring to abandon Islam, and homosexuals for breathing. We are talking about people who riot and murder over cartoons — people who use mosques to hide weapons and Korans to transmit terrorist messages and then murder non-Muslims for purportedly defaming their religion. It makes no difference to these people that we detain Muslim terrorists in military brigs under the laws of war rather than detaining them in civilian prisons after trial in our criminal justice system.

After 17 years of attacks, we should have learned the difference between causes of terrorism and pretexts for terrorism. Terrorism is caused, and terrorist recruitment is driven, by Islamist ideology and by American weakness in the face of terror attacks. In that sense, Senator Durbin causes more terrorism than Gitmo ever will. Terrorist organizations are encouraged when they come to believe they can win — when they come to believe they can outlast America because we lack resolve.

The Blind Sheikh, echoed by Osama bin Laden, has promised for years that if “battalions of Islam” keep reprising Hezbollah’s 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, and al-Qaeda’s orchestration of the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” incident in Somalia, then the Americans will pack up and go home. The terrorists tell their recruits we’re soft and won’t defend ourselves if it gets ugly. When a U.S. senator takes to the floor of the chamber and compares heroic American troops to Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot, he confirms Abdel Rahman and bin Laden’s views. When he suggests that terrorism is somehow caused by locking up terrorists in a secure, offshore military facility, where they can no longer threaten Americans or anyone else, the Islamic world’s fence-sitters start thinking, “The jihadists are right: America doesn’t have the stomach to tough it out. If we just make it bloody enough, we can win.”

The only part of Gitmo that causes terrorism is its front gates, when we allow terrorists to walk out of them so they can go back to the battle. Gitmo is a pretext for terrorism. Terrorists use it because, unlike us, they know it’s irresponsible not to study and understand the enemy. They know the Left exercises outsize influence on the media and that the Left’s key characteristic is projection.

Leftists don’t like Gitmo (or the PATRIOT Act, or warrantless surveillance, or military commissions, or Bush, or Cheney, or . . . ) so, presto, Gitmo becomes a “cause” of terrorism. Perversely, jihadist murderers become the vessels of our values: They’re noble savages and they don’t murder because they believe their religion commands them to. They do it, we’re told, because of national-security policies that just happen to be the ones despised by the Left. The terrorists are onto this game even if we’re not. So they snicker and say, “Oh, yes, of course, it’s been Gitmo all along — that’s why we do it!” They know some pointy-headed intelligence analyst, some ambitious general, some craven U.S. senator, or even some pandering American president is bound to repeat the canard until it becomes received wisdom. And the press will play along, never pausing to ask: “Well, then, how come 9/11 and the Cole and the embassy bombings and Khobar and Bojinka and the Trade Center bombing all happened before there ever was a Gitmo?” (To which the answer, of course, would be “Israel!”)

Long before there was a Gitmo, Muslim terrorists also plotted to accomplish the release of their captured confederates, either through escape plots or extortionate terrorist attacks — like the massacre at Luxor. For them and their millions of sympathizers, the issue isn’t where the jihadists are detained, or under what theory (law of war or civilian prosecution) this detention is justified. The issue is that we detain them, period. In the Muslim world, where illiteracy is rampant, there are not many scholars of American law. And, as we’ve already seen, even the ACLU is saying there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between Gitmo and the new Gitmo North at Thomson. If that’s what the lefty lawyers are saying, what do you suppose the jihadists think?

From the prison where he serves his life sentence, Abdel Rahman was able to announce to the world: “The Sheikh is calling on you, morning and evening: Oh Muslims! Oh Muslims! And he finds no respondents. It is a duty upon all the Muslims around the world to come to free the Sheikh, and to rescue him from his jail.” That he was in a nice civilian jail after a nice civilian trial didn’t make any difference. Of Americans, the sheikh decreed: “Muslims everywhere [must] dismember their nation, tear them apart, ruin their economy, provoke their corporations, destroy their embassies, attack their interests, sink their ships, and shoot down their planes, kill them on land, at sea, and in the air. Kill them wherever you find them.” Osama bin Laden later called this the green light — the necessary Islamic fatwa — for the 9/11 attacks. It was four years before there was a Gitmo for Dick Durbin to blame. So should we shut down all the civilian prisons, too?

We need to drop our delusions. Until we do, we are fighting a war on terror with both our hands tied behind our backs. This is going to be a long, difficult war and we can't afford to fight it if we don't understand what we're facing.

How that stimulus "free money" is helping to bankrupt the states

Remember how a handful of Republican governors such as Rick Perry of Texas, Mitch Daniels of Indiana and, yes, Mark Sanford of South Carolina resisted accepting all the federal stimulus money because they argued that it would force the states to spend more money that they didn't have. Well, guess what. It's all come to pass.

First, in most state capitals the stimulus enticed state lawmakers to spend on new programs rather than adjusting to lean times. They added health and welfare benefits and child care programs. Now they have to pay for those additions with their own state's money.

For example, the stimulus offered $80 billion for Medicaid to cover health-care costs for unemployed workers and single workers without kids. But in 2011 most of that extra federal Medicaid money vanishes. Then states will have one million more people on Medicaid with no money to pay for it.

A few governors, such as Mitch Daniels of Indiana and Rick Perry of Texas, had the foresight to turn down their share of the $7 billion for unemployment insurance, realizing that once the federal funds run out, benefits would be unpayable. "One of the smartest decisions we made," says Mr. Daniels. Many governors now probably wish they had done the same.

And this is before Obamacare kicks in and forces the states to expand their Medicaid coverage.

Then there are the provisions tucked into the stimulus bill which prevent the states from cutting spending in specified programs if they accepted the federal money.

Second, stimulus dollars came with strings attached that are now causing enormous budget headaches. Many environmental grants have matching requirements, so to get a federal dollar, states and cities had to spend a dollar even when they were facing huge deficits. The new construction projects built with federal funds also have federal Davis-Bacon wage requirements that raise state building costs to pay inflated union salaries.

Worst of all, at the behest of the public employee unions, Congress imposed "maintenance of effort" spending requirements on states. These federal laws prohibit state legislatures from cutting spending on 15 programs, from road building to welfare, if the state took even a dollar of stimulus cash for these purposes.

One provision prohibits states from cutting Medicaid benefits or eligibility below levels in effect on July 1, 2008. That date, not coincidentally, was the peak of the last economic cycle when states were awash in revenue. State spending soared at a nearly 8% annual rate from 2004-2008, far faster than inflation and population growth, and liberals want to keep funding at that level.

Cute, huh? It's as if they think that forcing the states to spend more money will somehow help them balance their budgets. They're leaving the states with little choice but to raise taxes. Perhaps that was a deliberate goal.

Yet more reasons to condemn the Democrats' failed stimulus plans. And to be highly suspicious of any new grandiose plans they come up with.

Cruising the web

Barbara Hollingsworth has a startling story about how whistleblowers about lapses in TSA measures have been not only ignored, but have, contrary to federal law, have seen their careers suffer.

The WSJ exposes how the real block to getting a new director of the TSA approved is not Jim DeMint, but the Democratic urge to extend unionization to employees of the TSA. Just ask yourself how our efforts to screen out terrorists would have been helped by having those guys waving you through the metal detector be members of a union.

Of course, it might be a problem that the TSA nominee, Erroll Southers, has admitted that he accessed private federal records to get information about his estranged wife's new boyfriend and then "inadvertently" misled the Senate about the 20-year old incident. Gee, just the type of guy we want in charge of an agency where there already deep concerns about privacy.


The Associated Press gets out the hankies for our poor beleaguered President who is just so tired because he, wait for it, isn't like Bush, but actually stays up late. So don'tyou dare make fun of his going golfing so much.

The effort to unionize everyone possible sees Michigan unionizing unaware home childcare workers. One day you're wiping noses and the next you find out that you've been made a member of a union and have to pay dues. They won't stop until everyone is cast willy-nilly into a union.

David Fredosso does the math and finds that Bush would have won in 2004 even without Ohio under the new electoral map that seems likely to emerge after the 2010 census. Of course, that's assuming that those voters leaving the Northeast and the Rust Belt to head to red states don't turn those red states blue. That's why auguries such as Virginia's gubernatorial vote this year must be such worrisome signs to the Democrats.

Orrin Hatch, Ken Blackwell, and Kenneth Klukowski outline three constitutional problems with the Democrats' health care bill. Of course, we can place no dependence on the Supreme Court to rescue us from bad legislation. Witness their ruling on campaign finance reform. I don't want to place my faith on what Anthony Kennedy decides the General Welfare Clause means.

LaShawn Barber points to this story out of Berkeley where Berkeley High School is considering getting rid of all their lab science classes because not enough black students sign up for them. Yup, that's the way to address the race gap - dumb down the white students. Just what we need to prepare students for jobs in the 21st century.

George Will tells the story of how New York is trying to redefine the word "blight" in order to use eminent domain to take perfectly fine private property away from its owners and give it to a wealthy developer so he can build a new arena for the New Jersey Nets and a shopping district. Blighted property now includes condominiums that go for over half a million dollars. If this goes through, no private property is safe.

Happy New Year!

I wish all of my readers a very happy, healthy new year. May your hopes for the year come to fruition and may you achieve at least 10% of your resolutions.