The Anchoress
Okay, I think I’m done. No one can say I was not exceedingly fair to President Obama over the last week or so – and even this morning about the Exec Salary Caps for bailout beneficiaries. I don’t like the precedent – and I believe now that it’s been done for one group, we’re going to see the Obama/Pelosi/Reid/Frank government move to cap other salaries, but I got the politics of it.
But now, I think I’ve seen enough.
Item:
U.S. President Barack Obama will likely order a military commission to withdraw charges against Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a suspect in the U.S.S. Cole bombing held at Guantanamo naval base, ABC News reported on Thursday.
The decision, likely to be announced on Friday, would end prosecution of al-Nashiri in the military court system that Obama has criticized and may ultimately dismantle, ABC News reported, citing unnamed sources. (Reporting by JoAnne Allen; Editing by Anthony Boadle)
President Obama is going to talk to the families of 9/11 victims and those killed on the U.S.S.Cole. From what we have seen of the president these past few weeks, his talking to them will be very nice, and their concerns will have no affect on his position, whatsoever. Rather like “inviting” the opposition in for a talk and telling them, “I won.”
Andrew McCarthy believes Obama will be dropping charges on all the bad guys:
…it is noteworthy that, before the appointing authority acted this evening, Obama had scheduled a meeting for tomorrow afternoon with victims and families of victims not only of the Cole bombing but of of the 9/11 attacks. At a minimum, he appeared poised to announce he was dropping the Cole charges against Nashiri. All evening, however, it has been floated from several knowledgeable sources that the president was prepared to announce the dismissal of all the commission cases — i.e., not only against Nashiri but against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other 9/11 plotters. That suggestion is supported by the fact that the 9/11 families were invited to the White House meeting: there would have been no need to invite them to discuss an announcement that impacted only the Cole case.
Dismissals, if they happened, would surely be couched as “without prejudice.” That is, Obama would be able to tell the families — whether he meant it or not — that he could always re-file military commission charges if he ultimately decided that commissions, rather than civilian trials, were the best way to go.
Those words, “whether he meant it or not” are pretty chilling. If those bent on terrorism were wondering whether Bush’s “strong horse” has left the building, I’d say they have their answer.
So, now, these combatants will be “held without charges.” Isn’t that the bad thing Bush used to do? Wasn’t that “unconstitutional?”
Ed Morrissey has more:
This decision puts Nashiri into the very status to which Obama and the Left objected so strenuously: held without charge. That was the status that Congress and the Bush administration worked hard to change twice in passing legislation that established the military tribunal system. The last time, in 2007, Democrats joined Republicans in creating a system with more safeguards for defendants than our own military personnel get under the UCMJ, complete with access to the federal court system on appeal. [emphasis mine – admin]
UPDATE – Peggy Noonan:
On Wednesday, in an interview with Politico, Dick Cheney warned of the possible deaths of “perhaps hundreds of thousands” of Americans in a terror attack using nuclear or biological weapons. “I think there is a high probability of such an attempt,” he said.
When the interview broke and was read on the air, I was in a room off a television studio. For a moment everything went silent, and then a makeup woman said to a guest, “I don’t see how anyone can think that’s not true.”
I told her I’m certain it is true. And it didn’t seem to me any of the half dozen others there found the content of Cheney’s message surprising. They got a grim or preoccupied look.
The question for the Obama administration: Do they think Mr. Cheney is essentially correct, that bad men are coming with evil and deadly intent, but that America can afford to, must for moral reasons, change its stance regarding interrogation and detention of terrorists? Or, deep down, do the president and those around him think Mr. Cheney is wrong, that people who make such warnings are hyping the threat for political purposes? And, therefore, that interrogation techniques, etc., can of course be relaxed? I don’t know the precise answer to this question. Do they know exactly what they think? Or are they reading raw threat files each day trying to figure out what they think?
UPDATE: Or, I guess the question is, “do you feel lucky, punk?” I dunno…Pakistan has just released the “father of the nuclear bomb” from house arrest. I wonder where he will go?
Item:
In its first action to overturn Bush administration policies on energy, the Obama administration on Wednesday said it will cancel oil drilling leases on more than 130,000 acres near two national parks and other protected areas in Utah.
“In the last weeks in office, the Bush administration rushed ahead to sell oil and gas leases near some of our nation’s most precious landscapes in Utah,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar told reporters. ““We need to responsibly develop our oil and gas supplies to help us reduce our dependence on foreign oil, but we must do so in a thoughtful and balanced way that allows us to protect our signature landscapes and cultural resources.”
“We will take time and a fresh look at these 77 parcels to see if they are appropriate for oil and gas development,” he said, adding that the Bureau of Land Management will return the $6 million in bids from an auction last December.
Let me interpret that for you: “These drilling contracts are dead. We don’t care if it costs jobs. We have no intention of making America less energy-dependent. If we really wanted to do that we would have done it while Carter was president, or when Clinton was president, not when Bush was president because we hated him. But we never intend to allow America to use her own energy resources. We have other investments. We don’t care if energy prices go up. We are the government, and we won.
Item: This stimulus meets Rod Blagojevich
Item: Capitalism and Free Markets are failed theories? I can think of a failed theory called Barney Frank insisting that Fannie and Freddie had no problems. I can think of a failed theory that insisted banks make riskier loans.
Item: Combing through the spendulus yeilds some shocking numbers. More here.
Item: A baby is born alive and breathing, her umbilical cord is left untied and is shoved into a waste bag with the placenta and afterbirth, and thrown into the garbage. No, not a back-alley abortion. A legal one in a “legal” abortion clinic.
Item: President Obama, who famously voted against the “Born Alive” act, which mandated medical care for infants born during attempted abortions, and who is about to sign a far-reaching “Freedom of Choice Act” which will strip away just about all restrictions to abortion, said this morning at a prayer breakfast:
“We know there is no God who condones the killing of an innocent human being.”
Just words? Yeah, certainly seems like. Meanwhile, “Either women know what they’re doing, when they choose abortion, or they don’t“? I think abortion has been couched in euphemisms for so long that when a woman does see a living, breathing baby born from her, she does suddenly confront what she did not properly understand before. Yes, abortion is killing the baby. The only way you can stop it from being or becoming a baby is to kill it. A lot of people still don’t really understand that.
Item: Debbie Stabenow wants “balance” in media, and she wants it to be in the form of the so-called “Fairness Doctrine.” And she is married to a former liberal talk-radio exec, but that is irrelevant.
Item: Unthuthers, even those given full credit by sympathetic media are still not telling the truth. Tax Cheats are still being offered up for positions of leadership by an administration that increasingly seems contemptuous of the rest of us little people, who should not mind it so much, and um…evaders are still evading. Broken pledges are broken pledges
Item: Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry? Well, yes, the president did call you to congratulate you on your ambassadorship, but we’re going in another direction, so how about Saudi…would you like Saudi? No? No one is in charge, here!.
Just who the hell is running this joint, anyway, and does anyone expect America to resemble herself at all, when they get done? I swear, between Obama’s just plain strange ideas about what the last 20-30 years between the US and Islamic extremists have been like, and his handing off the “stimulus ball” like a quarterback afraid of being sacked, to Harry Reid reminding me of George in Of Mice and Men, “Duhhh, I got da votes! I have a furry economic windfall for the government, and I will love it and pet it and I will call it a stimulus, and I will hug it to my chest until it squeezes the whole country…” I just don’t know what to think anymore!
I have a headache. I think I’m going to stick with religion. This other way, American politics, 2009 – there lies madness.
Daniel Pearl and the normalization of evil; and one to read and remember: Brother Pearl.
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