Ah... okay. But they also said they wouldn't vote for a bill that didn't contain abortion-funding, and they just did that.

Ultimately they will pass the bill without the amendment and the supposed pro-life Democrats will just say "We don't need to deal with this yet, it will be years before the plan is actually implemented, we will work on improving the bill until then."

And then they won't. Or they'll take a bunch of votes that go nowhere, just to get it on the record "they tried."

Susan Collins Opposes: She finds the Stupak language too tough for her liking and prefers some kind of convoluted dodge that ultimately allows fungible dollars to be used for abortions.

Posted by: Ace at 11:46 AM | Comments (169)
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We're not even done tallying up the latest bodycountbefore we again have to be instructed about the dangers of "backlash."

In this case, the "backlash" feared is a feminist writer at Pajamas Media stating the inarguable: We have to begin "connecting the dots" and stop the deadly doublethink that is getting people killed.

But that is part of the "backlash" CNN now worries about: Connecting the dots to avoid future terrorism.

Incidentally, if we did connect the dots and stopped the Islamically Correct bullshit and arrested Hassan earlier (for any number of violations of the military code) we would not even have to fear any "backlash," because no heinous mass-slaughter would have occurred.

Oh, and 15 people would still be alive today. If that matters any more. Apparently it doesn't, because I keep being told by the media that only Muslim lives matter. Only future harassments and inconveniences to Muslims matter; thousands of non-Muslim lives may be sacrificed on the altar of jihadist freedom in order to spare a single innocent Muslim a moment's worth of stink-eye.

If this much-feared speculative hypothetical alt-future "backlash" does occur, by the way, here will be the reason for it: Because citizens have learned they cannot trust their government, or the so-called "watchdog" media, to protect their lives when threatened by an Islamist.

Posted by: Ace at 11:06 AM | Comments (188)
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Keeping an eye on the real terrorists (that would be you).

Mr. Obama, during his private pep talk to Democrats, recognized Mr. Owens election and then posed a question to the other lawmakers. According to Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, who supports the health care bill, the president asked, “Does anybody think that the teabag, anti-government people are going to support them if they bring down health care? All it will do is confuse and dispirit” Democratic voters “and it will encourage the extremists.”

Maybe if Janet Napolitano hadn't been spending so much time scrutinizing "tea-bag people" she could have connected the dots on the worst domestic terrorism since 9/11.

Via justkarl's Twitter feed.

Posted by: Ace at 09:35 AM | Comments (221)
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Of course, of course. Which is why I find it so preposterous that Republicans couldn't manage the tactical savvy to vote "present" on the Stupak Amendment in the first place.

Sometimes I get the feeling that savvy is looked down upon in the GOP as being "inauthentic" and lacking "integrity" or something. As if anything clever -- well, okay: devious -- is somehow a sell-out.

And then the Democrats have our lunches. Because we're elevating "principle" above practical real-world effect.

A top House Democrat said Monday she's "confident" that a conference committee will strip language in the House health bill on taxpayer funding for abortion.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), the Democrats' chief deputy whip in the House, said that she and other pro-choice lawmakers would work to strip the amendment included in the House health bill that bars federal funding from going to subsidize abortions.

"I am confident that when it comes back from the conference committee that that language won't be there," Wasserman Schultz said during an appearance on MSNBC. "And I think we're all going to be working very hard, particularly the pro-choice members, to make sure that's the case."

Karl discussed the GOP "enabling" PelosiCare by voting for this sham.

Dave from Garfield Ridge wrote to me about this.

[Ramesh Ponnuru's question:] "I wonder what the advocates of this tactic think pro-life groups should have done? Should they have refrained from urging congressmen to cast a pro-life vote on the most important abortion-policy question before the House this year in the interest of affecting the outcome of a bill that is outside their bailiwick?"

This strikes me as missing the forest for the trees. Whatever its merits, the Stupak amendment was essentially grandstanding; the health care bill is, as always, the real-- and only-- threat. As Mark Steyn constantly and correctly notes in The Corner, all that matters to the Left is that the bill passes-- once that occurs, it'll never be eliminated, and then everything is permissible. Or are you comfortable in assuming that if the U.S. government takes over 1/6th of the economy, they'll refrain from modifying nationalized healthcare in the future in order to gut the Stupak provision? The 112th Congress, the 119th Congress, the 234th Congress will all have many, many opportunities to federally fund abortion as long as they have control of health care.

The abortion fight is a good and honorable fight. But if the plan passes, it'll become a Christmas tree for liberal entitlement ornaments in perpetuity, affecting far more Americans than just the unborn.

Stop national health care, and no one has to worry, ever, about whether it funds abortions or not.

Making this an easier call is that it was obviously a sham vote that was never worth the paper it was printed on. It was a contrivance simply to give endangered moderate "Democrats" a pro-life vote before they voted for the pro-abortion bill.

Update: For the other side, see John McCormack, via Hot Air. He says the present gambit wouldn't have worked, as all Stupak demanded was a vote, not an outcome. Having had the vote, the majority of the Blue Dogs were appeased.

But, again: Three votes.

Posted by: Ace at 08:48 AM | Comments (303)
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Today is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

It didn't happen because Mikhail Gorbachev was a neat guy who was channeling his inner Jefferson. No matter what some will say, the Wall didn't fall because of protesters and appeasers, it happened in spite of them.

The Berlin Wall and the Soviet Bloc fell because of more than 40 years of constant effort and vigilance by millions of Americans and Europeans who stood watch against and on more than one occasion went to war with the forces of repression and tyranny.

It fell because of leaders like Ronald Reagan.

Reagan kept that "tear down this wall" line in over the objections of the State Department who feared it was too provocative. Somethings never change.

That speech was delivered a year and a half before the wall fell. Did it have any direct impact on the end of the Cold War as we knew it? The man who wrote the line thinks so.

As I looked over my notes in my hotel room that evening, I was struck by the way Marschinke and Bammel had both used language suggesting a sense of incredulity or unreality. The wall, both had implied, had seemed so real, solid, immovable--such a fixed part of everyday life, of the East German state and of the entire Communist outlook and philosophy--that the very idea of tearing it down had by contrast seemed strange and fantastic. Even when the wall had ceased to function, Bammel, a professional diplomat, had had trouble believing it until he had seen, with his own eyes, East Germans freely crossing the border.

Ronald Reagan, I recognized in that Berlin hotel room, had given something to people in the East, something difficult to describe but tangible all the same. In predicting that Communism would end up on the ash heap of history, in describing the Soviet Union as an evil empire--in insisting that the West remained fundamentally vibrant and good, the Soviet Union backward and corrupt--Reagan had spoken the unspeakable. He had done what no one could do. And he had thus created for people in the East a new space for thought and feeling, a new sense of the possible.

Many, the current occupant of the Oval Office included, are quick to deny America's role in the end of the Cold War. They see it as a great mistake, dragged out by mirror images in the West and East but it wasn't. It was a great struggle for freedom and right.

Too many of these same people saw the Cold War as a permanent feature of the world, one we needed to accommodate ourselves to. Well, if you were so small you could barely see beyond the end of your own nose or the next issue of Foreign Affairs, it certainly seemed that way.

But if you were a giant, like Reagan, Thatcher, Walesa, John Paul II, you could see further. You knew this mountain had a top and if you stayed the course and navigated by principal, you could get past it.

Reagan is often regarded as a foolish old man, out of touch with reality, too quick to see the world in terms of good and evil. Yet by word and deed he showed what smart diplomacy really is.

Posted by: DrewM at 07:57 AM | Comments (83)
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It is now well past the time we have learned Hasan attempted to contact Al Qaeda, and was a "typical fundamentalist Muslim," and worried the Army (though not enough) with his weekly outbursts in support of jihad.

And still it continues. This time from Time.

As an army psychiatrist treating soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, Major Nidal Malik Hasan had a front row seat on the brutal toll of war. It is too early to know exactly what may have triggered his murderous shooting rampage Thursday at Fort Hood - Hasan is accused of killing 12 people and wounding 32 others before he was wounded by a police officer - but it is not uncommon for therapists treating soldiers with Post Trumatic Stress Disorder (P.T.S.D.) to be swept up in a patient's displays of war-related paranoia, helplessness and fury. (See pictures of suicide in the recruiters ranks.)
In medical parlance it is known as "secondary trauma", and it can afflict the families of soldiers suffering from P.T.S.D. along with the health workers who are trying to cure them. Dr. Antonette Zeiss, Deputy Chief of Mental Health Services for Veteran Affairs, while not wishing to talk about the specific case of the Fort Hood slayings, explained to TIME that: "Anyone who works with P.T.S.D. clients and hears their stories will be profoundly affected."

Um, but what about the fact he appeared to be an Al Qaeda wannabe -- literally a wannabe, attempting to contact them, and drinking the venom spat out by Al Qaeda's favorite former Iman in America?

Oh, Time makes allowances their theory may be incomplete:

It's entirely possible that other factors may have acted as a trigger for Hasan's alleged killing spree.

It's possible. Let's go ahead and pencil in a "Get right on that" as far as these mysterious "other factors."

Jeffrey Goldberg has some thoughts on When Muslims Attack:

This is the second time this year American soldiers on American soil have been gunned down by a Muslim who was reportedly unhappy with America's wars in the Middle East (the first took place in Arkansas, to modest levels of notice). And, of course, this would not be the first instance of an American Muslim soldier killing fellow soldiers over his disagreements with American foreign policy; in 2003, Army Sgt. Hasan Akbar killed two officers and wounded fourteen others when he rolled a grenade into a tent in a homicidal protest against American policy.



I am not arguing, of course, that American Muslims, as a whole, are violently unhappy with America (I've argued the opposite, in fact). But I do think that elite makers of opinion in this country try very hard to ignore the larger meaning of violent acts when they happen to be perpetrated by Muslims. Here's a simple test: If Nidal Malik Hasan had been a devout Christian with pronounced anti-abortion views, and had he attacked, say, a Planned Parenthood office, would his religion have been considered relevant as we tried to understand the motivation and meaning of the attack? Of course. Elite opinion makers do not, as a rule, try to protect Christians and Christian belief from investigation and criticism. Quite the opposite. It would be useful to apply the same standards of inquiry and criticism to all religions.

And I can't help but think that the deadly doublethink here is having bad effects even when people aren't being murdered.

Thanks to MargaretH., DavidR., and Hot Air's headlines.

Posted by: Ace at 07:32 AM | Comments (174)
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Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 07:00 AM | Comments (37)
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(update at bottom, below original post)

Apparently that is, according to this AP article via MSNBC, which titles the article "Alleged Shooter Tied to Mosque of 9/11 Hijackers" because, you know, it might've been someone else and stuff.

"WASHINGTON - The alleged Fort Hood shooter apparently attended the same Virginia mosque as two Sept. 11 hijackers in 2001, at a time when a radical imam preached there.

Whether the Fort Hood shooter associated with the hijackers is something the FBI will probably look into, according to a law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing."

Probably? That's nice to know.

Rest assured that this matter is being addressed at the highest levels in the U.S. Army chain of command and that they're highly focused on priorities:

"Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey said Sunday it's important for the country not to get caught up in speculation about Hasan's Muslim faith, and he has instructed his commanders to be on the lookout for anti-Muslim reaction to the killings at the Texas post."

"He says focusing on the Islamic roots of the suspected shooter could "heighten the backlash" against all Muslims in the military.

Casey says diversity in the military "gives us strength.""

Well, I'm certainly glad he cleared that up for us. I was worried there for a moment.

UPDATE: Thanks to "spypeach" in the comments for drawing attention to this story at ABC's "The Blotter" this morning (Drudge is apparently also carrying it). It appears that Major Hasan had made attempts to get in touch with al Qaeda via the interwebs and intelligence agencies were aware of it months ago. Or to put it the same way:

"U.S. intelligence agencies were aware months ago that Army Major Nidal Hasan was attempting to make contact with people associated with al Qaeda, two American officials briefed on classified material in the case told ABC News. "

"It is not known whether the intelligence agencies informed the Army that one of its officers was seeking to connect with suspected al Qaeda figures, the officials said."

"One senior lawmaker said the CIA had, so far, refused to brief the intelligence committees on what, if any, knowledge they had about Hasan's efforts. "

Kick ass!

Posted by: Open Blog at 10:45 PM | Comments (318)
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Welcome to the club Tom Friedman!

This peace process movie is not going to end differently just because we keep playing the same reel. It is time for a radically new approach. And I mean radical. I mean something no U.S. administration has ever dared to do: Take down our “Peace-Processing-Is-Us” sign and just go home.

...

Let’s just get out of the picture. Let all these leaders stand in front of their own people and tell them the truth: “My fellow citizens: Nothing is happening; nothing is going to happen. It’s just you and me and the problem we own.”

...

It is obvious that this Israeli government believes it can have peace with the Palestinians and keep the West Bank, this Palestinian Authority still canÂ’t decide whether to reconcile with the Jewish state or criminalize it and this Hamas leadership would rather let Palestinians live forever in the hellish squalor that is Gaza than give up its crazy fantasy of an Islamic Republic in Palestine.

If we are still begging Israel to stop building settlements, which is so manifestly idiotic, and the Palestinians to come to negotiations, which is so manifestly in their interest, and the Saudis to just give Israel a wink, which is so manifestly pathetic, we are in the wrong place. It’s time to call a halt to this dysfunctional “peace process,” which is only damaging the Obama team’s credibility

Wait, the Israelis and Palestinians have their own agendas and our presence and interference isn't going to change that?

After liberals spent 8 years bitching about Bush's indifference to the Holy Peace Process and excoriating him for paying too much attention to Iraq and not enough to the Palestinians, Mr. Establishment Thinker tells President Shout-Out to throw in the towel after 9 1/2 whole months of "effort"?

I seem to remember people saying the mere fact that Obama, with his charm, dreamy eyes and mutli-ethnic background, to say nothing of his awesome powers of Smart Diplomacy, would put an end to all this unpleasantness.

Now Mr. Three Pulitzers says, "never mind, turns out this age old problem was more complex than shouting Bush Sucks!"

I hope Freeman's next book is an autobiography. He can call "Flat and Stupid, My Life and Times".

Posted by: DrewM at 08:14 PM | Comments (96)
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Good evening M&Ms. It's the final countdown for the weekend so get your fun in while you can. If you're funemployed, be sure and pace yourself.

Tom Dempsey's Record NFL 63 Yard Kick Back in 1970
In the last 2 seconds of the game he kicked a 63 yard field goal to lead the Saints to a 19-17 victory over the Detroit Lions. Dempsey was born without toes on his right foot and used a special shoe for kicking. In 1998 the Bronco's Jason Elam tied the record.

Posted by: Open Blog at 06:00 PM | Comments (356)
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