First Amendment Shmirst Amendment

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Elena Kagan, Obama's nominee for lifetime Supreme Court Justice, doesn't have much of a track record to show where she stands on important issues. But a notable exception exists in the case of Freedom of Speech...specifically, political speech...which she believes should be regulated and controlled by the government.

Acting as Obama's Solicitor General, Kagan argued this point before the Supreme Court, prompting Chief Justice Roberts to say that she "asks us to embrace a theory of the First Amendment that would allow censorship not only of television and radio broadcasts, but of pamphlets, posters, and the Internet."

Justice Kennedy said that Kagan's legal argument amounted to an illegitmate attempt to use "censorship as thought control."

Fortunately, Kagan failed to convince the Supreme Court of the merits of her argument and it was voted down...causing a belligerent Barack Obama to criticize the members of the court (and mischaracterize the findings of the court) during his State of the Union address.

We hope that Kagan's anti-free speech views, and the danger of losing freedom of political speech, will be thoroughly discussed on "television and radio broadcasts, pamphlets, posters, and the Internet"...while they still can be.

Without freedom of political speech, we couldn't point out that
Dick Morris and Elena Kagan were apparently separated at birth.

Holder Your Tongue

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Under intense questioning on Capitol Hill, Attorney General Eric Holder flatly refused to admit that "radical Islam" could even conceivably be a reason that a growing string of Muslims perpetrate terrorist acts against the United States.

The same Eric Holder who called Americans "a nation of cowards" for their attitudes about race, and called Bush administration officials "war criminals," has suddenly developed such delicate sensitivities that he is unwilling to concede that Malik Nadal Hassan, Umar Farouq Abdulmuttalab, and Faisal Shahzad had any ideological links. No, they just happen to be three guys with somewhat exotic names (sort of like Barack Hussein Obama). It's all just a crazy coincidence.

Most assuredly, the vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists. But when America's Attorney General is afraid to even say "Islamic radicalism" out loud...then the terrorists have won.

Mr. Holder, you either need to buy a vowel,
solve the puzzle, or get off the stage.

Misfortune Teller

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Perhaps the most overused and misused word in recent news stories has been "unexpectedly," as in "the unemployment rate unexpectedly rose again."

We're starting to wonder just who the experts are that "expect" things which clearly fly in the face of logic, and who appear to be shocked (shocked!) when the absolutely predictable happens.

Besides rising unemployment, we've recently seen that Obamacare may cause workers to "unexpectedly" lose their employer-supplied insurance because it will be cheaper for companies to pay fines to the government than to continue paying medical bills. And who could have foreseen that extending unemployment benefits might unexpectedly lead to people choosing not to apply for jobs until their benefits - up to 2 years of benefits - run out?

All in all, this administration falls prey to the "unexpected" entirely too often to be believable. Which is why a clean sweep in November will not be unexpected.

On The Job Training

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When it comes to selecting someone for an important job, a "lack of negatives" shouldn't be your only consideration...especially if there's no record of "positives."

Yet this is the very standard that Barack Obama has brought to his selection of Elena Kagan as a potential Supreme Court justice. She has never been a judge at any level, never heard a case, never written a decision, and has such a thin trail of paperwork that her judicial philosophies are something of a mystery. But these qualities are being touted as strengths by the president. After all, how can anyone object to the track record of a woman who has no track record?

In fairness, the surgeon who performs his very first surgery might do a great job. A Supreme Court justice who's never previously decided a case might conceivably prove to be competent.

But do we really want to accept the blind risk of giving someone with no experience, no demonstrable track record, and no paper trail a critically important job?

After all, it didn't work out too well when choosing a president.

Surreal Estate

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Some ideas just seem bad from the moment you hear them: Auschwitz™ Extra-Crispy Gingerbread Men, Hiroshima™ Sunscreen Lotion, and New York's new Ground Zero Mosque.

And this won't be just any mosque. It will have a built-in theater ("Fahrenheit 9/11" anyone?), a swimming pool ("try the 1300 foot screaming high-dive!"), and a public basketball court which will no doubt see its first game when Barack Obama drops by for "Hoops n' Healing."

As great as all this sounds, there are some people who are concerned because the mosque will be named for Cordoba...where Islam reached a "glorious peak." And some people who don't like the idea that the money for the mosque may have come from anti-American Wahabists in Saudi Arabia (which also supplied 15 of the terrorists who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks).

And of course, there are some people who think that sad and hallowed ground should be respected by people of all faiths, including Islam, out of a simple sense of decency.

Tech Non-Support

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Despite being credited for running the most tech-savvy presidential campaign in history, and a seeming addiction to his ever-present Blackberry, Barack Obama told a graduating class of university students that they should back away from modern technologies with unfiltered news which are "putting new pressures on our country and our democracy."

Besides criticizing Xboxes, Playstations, iPods and iPads, the president singled out certain news blogs and talk radio outlets, saying "some of the craziest claims can quickly gain traction."

We're not precisely sure which "crazy claims" he's referring to. Perhaps talk radio's longtime assertion that Obamacare will raise the cost of medical services? No, wait...Health & Human Services just confirmed that. Or maybe that the Times Square bomber wasn't just pissed off about his mortgage, but was actually part of a terrorist war on America? Hang on, Eric Holder just confirmed that's not crazy either. Maybe the president meant that it's crazy to think rising unemployment numbers mean, um, rising unemployment? Hmm.

In any case, the president is doing his best to make sure that today's college students become tomorrow's Democratic voters.

It's as simple as turning off the news.

Cold Comfort

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Sometimes "good news" doesn't sound much like good news. And such is the case with the latest unemployment figures, which officially rose to 9.9%...but are actually 17.1% according to the government's broader (and more realistic) U-6 measurement standards.

Perversely, the Obama administration is trumpeting this as good news, citing the likelihood that unemployment numbers rose because people who had previously given up all hope have now re-entered the job market...without, of course, finding a job.

In other words, rising unemployment is good because it shows that the jobless now have hope. Misguided, unfulfilled hope, but still...hope! Granted, they'd probably rather have change, but that won't happen until November 2012.

Bonus: From the Hope n' Change Gift Shoppe, expert economic analysis from Inigo Montoya.

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