The Patriot Post® · Digest

The Foundation

“It is to me a new and consolatory proof that wherever the people are well-informed they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.” –Thomas Jefferson

Government & Politics

‘The People’s Seat’

“Here’s my assessment of not just the mood in Massachusetts, but the mood around the country: The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office.” So said Barack Obama when asked about Tuesday’s special election to fill the Senate seat held for 46 years by the late Ted Kennedy.

Naturally, to Obama, everything is about him; though, in a sense, Brown’s shocking victory was about Obama – but not in the way he thinks. In fact, we’re hoping the president campaigns for more Democrats come fall. Voters have responded to his presence on behalf of fellow Democrats with resounding rejections in the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races, and now in deepest-blue Massachusetts.

Then again, Obama says, it’s Bush’s fault. “People are angry and they’re frustrated,” he explained, “not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years, but what’s happened over the last eight years.”

So Scott Brown became the first Republican senator elected in Massachusetts since 1972 because voters are still angry with George W. Bush?

In reality, Brown won for several reasons. First, he was a first-rate candidate. His regular-guy persona resonated with voters and he communicated the right message – that we need less government, not more. He ran explicitly against ObamaCare, saying, “I can stop it.” In his victory speech, he said, “People do not want the trillion dollar health care plan that is being forced on the American people, and this bill is not being debated openly and fairly. It will raise taxes, it will hurt Medicare, it will destroy jobs and run our nation deeper into debt.”

Best of all, in a debate with Democrat opponent Martha Coakley, Brown answered a challenge from moderator David Gergen about taking Ted Kennedy’s seat only to derail health care: “Well, with all due respect, it’s not the Kennedy seat, and it’s not the Democrats’ seat, it’s the people’s seat.”

That’s when the sea change in the polls began.

Second, Martha Coakley was a lousy candidate. Briefly, for example (and there are many), in a state with a large percentage of Catholic voters, Coakley offered the advice that if you object to abortion and are a devout Catholic, then “you probably shouldn’t work in the emergency room.” She derided Red Sox hero Curt Schilling as a “Yankee fan” and scoffed at greeting people in the cold at Fenway Park, which is precisely what hungry candidates do in sports-crazy Boston. In addition, a member of her staff was caught on video knocking a conservative reporter to the ground. In short, her arrogance and inanity are out of touch.

Finally, health care became an albatross for Coakley, and the Leftmedia didn’t help, continuing to refer to the seat as “Kennedy’s seat” in order to play up that debate. Kennedy spent a lifetime fighting for socialized health care, and, when he died, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) even suggested naming the health care bill after him. The irony is that the senator from Massachusetts was supposed to steer socialized medicine to passage; now it looks like the senator from Massachusetts could be the one to sink it. As PBS’s Judy Woodruff sobbed, it would be “a tragedy of Greek proportions if Ted Kennedy’s successor … is the one who was responsible for the death of health care.”

Mary Jo Kopechne could not be reached for comment.

Americans who want to see the current health care bills die owe a debt of gratitude to Republican Mitt Romney. As Massachusetts governor, he signed universal health care into law in 2006 (as a state legislator, we should note, Brown voted for it). The law is similar to the one being debated in Washington in that Massachusetts residents are required to buy health insurance. The program is currently 20 percent more expensive than projected, and premiums are rising at least 7 percent per year. The reason Bay State voters don’t want to pay for socialized medicine is that they’re already paying for it. They believe that Washington’s bill is redundant, and they have serious questions about the affordability and sustainability of their own state’s health care plan. That’s federalism at its best.

Nancy Pelosi doesn’t think so, however. “Massachusetts has health care and so the rest of the country would like to have that too,” she defiantly lectured. “So we don’t [think] a state that already has health care should determine whether the rest of the country should.”

Brown’s win Tuesday may well end up being a victory for liberty. Many Democrats (finally) appear cautious about proceeding on health care. Even Pelosi admits she doesn’t have the votes to pass the Senate version in the House. Some, including Obama, are talking about a much smaller bill.

We won’t hold our breath, but those metaphorical crates of tea floating in Boston harbor this week may just be a promising sign.

Quote of the Week

“Martha Coakley’s resounding defeat in the Massachusetts Senate race is hardly the sort of anniversary gift President Barack Obama could have predicted. Yet there it was, wrapped in a bow and plopped on his doorstep like a flaming bag of dog poo to mark the end of his first year in office.” –Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch of Reason magazine

From the ‘Non Compos Mentis’ File

Sen. John Kerry, in a fundraising appeal for Martha Coakley, continued Democrat ridicule of the Tea Party sentiment bubbling up in Massachusetts. He warned that Scott Brown’s “allies in the right wing dream of holding a ‘tea party’ in Kennedy country.”

Uh, John, the original Tea Party was in Boston.

Meanwhile, Bill Clinton took the opposite tack, though at least he acknowledged the first Tea Party. “The Revolutionary War was first won here,” Clinton told a Boston crowd. “It started with the Boston Tea Party, and the right-wing Republicans have appropriated that on the premise the Tea Party was against government. What they were against was abuse of power.”

Try parsing that one in a way that favors Democrats.

This Week’s ‘Alpha Jackass’ Award

“That I do think is a mistake of mine – I think the assumption was if I just focus on policy, if I just focus on this provision or that law or if we’re making a good rational decision here, then people will get it.” –Barack Obama on his proposed health care takeover

Got that, folks? Even when he’s admitting a “mistake of mine,” he’s throwing the blame onto others. His failures are your fault because you just don’t get it. That’s called pathological narcissism.

New & Notable Legislation

Senate Democrats want to raise the federal government’s debt ceiling by $1.9 trillion to a mind-boggling total of $14.3 trillion. The current debt limit was just established by an increase of $290 billion snuck in at the end of December 2009, but will be reached by mid-February. If the ceiling is not raised again, then the government will default on payments to millions of Social Security recipients, defense contractors and other beneficiaries of government disbursements. Just 10 years ago, an increase of this size would have covered government spending for an entire year. Now, they’re sweating just getting through February.

The proposal is coupled with a new PAYGO proposal that would offset increased spending with tax hikes and cuts in other areas of the budget. Previous attempts at PAYGO fell by the wayside in recent years, as both Republicans and Democrats have given up on even the appearance of fiscal responsibility – which is all PAYGO is.

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-ND) and Evan Bayh (D-IN) have indicated they will not support PAYGO or a debt increase unless they are accompanied by a bipartisan commission that would create fiscal reform measures. House Democrats, led by Nancy Pelosi, are against the idea of a commission because it would take power away from their own budget committee leaders. The Obama administration attempted to bridge this logjam by announcing the creation of a similar commission at the executive level that would include Democrats and Republicans appointed by both Congress and the president. Any commission created by Obama, however, wouldn’t release any recommendations until after the November elections. How convenient. The dodge around fiscal responsibility continues.

The Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee is considering the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act, which, in essence, would allow the Obama administration to nationalize the student loan industry. Currently, federally subsidized loans through the Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) program make up approximately 80 percent of the industry. The government subsidizes or profits from a set interest rate and also guarantees loans for both student and lender. The bill under consideration would drop private lenders entirely and turn student lending over to the government. The proposal originated in Obama’s 2010 budget, and according to the Congressional Budget Office, it would save the government $87 billion over 10 years. Forget the Constitution – not that the status quo holds to it – Obama’s solution to every problem is nationalization.

Essential Liberty Project – Conference Presentation

This coming Feb. 4-6, the Constitutional Coalition is presenting their Educational Policy Conference 21, “Lessons Children and Others Must Hear.” The Thursday through Saturday event in St. Louis, Missouri, will feature Fox News host Glenn Beck, radio talk-show host Michael Medved, several stalwart conservative senators and representatives, and many principled authorities, including a presentation by our own Essential Liberty Project Executive Director, Jim Cuffia. Visit www.ConstitutionalCoalition.org for conference and registration details.

Hope ‘n’ Change: Obama Pens Haiti Story

The disaster in Haiti is a perfect example of Americans doing their best to help others in need, and it has once again brought out the finest qualities of the American character. Unfortunately, politics is at play. For example, Newsweek magazine, which years ago gave up its mission as an objective news source to become a propaganda organ of the Left, premiered its reporting on the crisis with a cover story by Barack Obama. His unremarkable piece offered the liberal rag an opportunity to boost its plummeting circulation. The latest Obama issue of the magazine hit the newsstands days before his first year as president comes to a close – a year in which he has experienced an unprecedented drop in popularity and support.

To add further political twist to a natural disaster, Narcissist in Chief Obama asked Americans to donate for Haitian relief through the White House Web site, not directly to Red Cross. How this is beneficial, we don’t know, but maybe he wants to first take the government’s typical 30-70 percent cut.

The House unanimously passed a bill that will allow cash contributions to Haitian relief made through March 1 to count against 2009 taxes. Americans didn’t need this incentive, though. In the week since the earthquake, we committed over $275 million to relief efforts, with a third of that amount coming from American companies. The $83 million that those evil corporations have contributed in just seven days has received little recognition by the media, however.

Meanwhile, America’s attempts to help the wounded and keep order in the fragile nation have come under fire by the French, joined by Cuba and Venezuela. Alain Joyandet, the French minister in charge of humanitarian relief, called upon the UN to curb America’s military role in Haiti, claiming that our military personnel resembled an occupying force, and he asked the UN to “clarify” our role. Of course, to the French, every foreign army is an occupying force.

Halls of Justice: SCOTUS Overturns Part of McCain-Feingold

The Supreme Court of the United States overturned two precedents and struck down limits on corporate political spending in a 5-4 ruling this week, with the usual suspects in dissent. The Court found that at least part of the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, known as McCain-Feingold, violates the First Amendment by prohibiting corporations from funding political ads leading up to an election.

As The Wall Street Journal reports, “The case before the court, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, originated in a 2008 feature-length movie critical of then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Citizens United, a conservative advocacy group, wanted to promote the film, but the election commission called it an ‘electioneering communication’ subject to McCain-Feingold restrictions.” In 2003, the Supreme Court upheld the law.

Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority in a 57-page opinion, “The government may regulate corporate political speech through disclaimer and disclosure requirements, but it may not suppress that speech altogether.”

Additionally, of requiring that money be funneled through political action committees – those now-hated 527s – Kennedy wrote, “When government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought. This is unlawful.”

Barack Obama called the decision a victory for Wall Street, Big Oil and other special interests hated by the Left, and he promised to work with Congress on a “forceful response.” That’s nothing but hypocrisy coming from the first major-party presidential candidate to reject public funds, opting instead to run solely on money from special interests.

The BIG Joke

“When you think about the First Amendment … you think it’s highly overrated.” –White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, joking (or so he says) at the May 9, 2009, White House Correspondents Association Dinner

From the Left: Edwards Admits Paternity After Affair

Former Democrat presidential candidate and North Carolina Sen. John Edwards admitted this week to fathering a child with Rielle Hunter, a former campaign groupie, in an affair that he says ended in 2006. His campaign has been under investigation for illegal use of funds in connection with the affair. Edwards, a former trial lawyer who became John Kerry’s running mate in 2004, initially confessed to the affair in August 2008, after the National Enquirer beat the Leftmedia to the story while they were busy slamming John McCain’s choice of a running mate. Until now, however, Edwards had avoided acknowledging paternity, while another staffer took the fall. Edwards’ wife, who has been battling breast cancer for years, was “relieved” that the truth is out, but family friends say the couple has now separated.

National Security

Department of Military Correctness: Hood-winked

The Pentagon just released its report on the Ft. Hood massacre, and having reviewed it, we have some questions: Has anyone been fired yet? If not, why not? And what’s wrong with naming Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the terrorist who killed 14 people, including an unborn child, in the report? Or what’s wrong with mentioning “radical Islam” – the fuel fanning Hasan’s fire – and perhaps a discussion of its role in why this attack happened?

We can’t understand how the deaths of the innocent could be so spackled over by 86 pages of politically correct twaddle that identified neither the terrorist nor the root cause of his action. While the report indicates that commanders must be provided suitable tools and guidance to differentiate between appropriate religious practices and those leading to “violence or self-radicalization,” it offers little, if anything, to accomplish that task.

With this in mind, we suggest a starting point for commanders, supervisors and pretty much everyone else on the planet to help navigate these complex religious nuances. If someone under your command not only acts wacky but also professes a profound hatred for America – the same America he or she, upon entering the military, swore an oath to support and defend – rip up that person’s security clearance. “Nutjob” and “hate-my-country” are excellent reasons to deny someone access to national secrets and secure sites. Next, relieve the individual of duty and bring administrative action toward a discharge. Serving in the military is a privilege, not a right. Moreover, that privilege is not extended to those with an acknowledged hatred of their country, whatever their religious preference. Finally, have the courage to do the right thing, which is almost always diametrically opposed to the politically correct thing, for you too have sworn an oath to “support and defend.”

Notwithstanding the red herring, armchair-quarterbacking communication between domestic law enforcement and military agencies, the real issue in this case isn’t intelligence or intelligence sharing. It’s naming the evil and doing something about it. Hasan’s activities and mindset were known well before he became an active threat. These indicators were ignored for the sake of political correctness, so Hasan was passed like a bad penny from one assignment to another. However, the failure of any of Hasan’s supervisors or commanders in his chain of command to stand up and act on information they had – or at least should have had – is not just “a failure of the system.” It’s personal and professional cowardice on the part of each individual in Hasan’s supervisory and command chains.

TSA Nominee Withdraws

Barack Obama’s nominee to head the Transportation Security Administration, Erroll Southers, withdrew from the process Wednesday. Southers cited political opposition, saying, “I am not a politician. I’m a counterterrorism expert. They took an apolitical person and politicized my career.”

Despite his virginal claim, Southers is the one who warned that the real terrorists are the Left’s stereotypical view of right-wingers. “Most of the domestic groups that we pay attention to here are white supremacist groups. They’re anti-government, in most cases anti-abortion, they are usually survivalist type in nature, identity oriented,” he explained in 2008. “Those groups are groups that claim to be extremely anti-government and Christian identity oriented.”

His qualifications were in doubt, as well. Twenty years ago, Southers, then an FBI agent, improperly used law enforcement databases to access information about his then-estranged wife’s new boyfriend. He then lied to Congress about this blatant abuse of power.

The White House complained about Republican “obstruction,” but nominating anyone for the post didn’t seem to concern Obama until more than eight months into his term. The agency failed miserably on Christmas Day (and, notably, Department of Homeland Security Chief Janet Napolitano’s report to Congress, like the Ft. Hood report, avoided mention of terrorism or Islam) but TSA has managed to keep an 8-year-old boy on the “no fly” list.

ACOG Kerfuffle

ABC News has discovered that there are sinister “secret codes” stamped on many of our military’s rifle sights. The shocking revelation has the Leftmedia searching for answers. To them, these secret codes are offensive and must be removed.

The codes in question are Scripture verses stamped on sights made by Trijicon, which is based in Wixom, Michigan. According to ABC News, “The biblical references appear in the same type font and size as the model numbers on the company’s Advanced Combat Optical Guides, called the ACOG.” References such as 2COR4:6 and JN8:12 point to Bible passages on light (the sights use available light to illuminate the reticle). The company says the inscriptions have been there for nearly three decades without complaint, and their Web site explains, “We believe that America is great when its people are good. This goodness has been based on Biblical standards throughout our history, and we will strive to follow those morals.”

Predictably, ABC and others screamed “separation of church and state!” Michael “Mikey” Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation declared that “it violates the Constitution.” But we would remind leftists yet again that there is no mention of the term “separation of church and state” in the U.S. Constitution. Furthermore, we are unaware of any contract prohibition against serial numbers containing biblical references.

Certainly, this tempest in a teapot was yet another distraction we don’t need. Unfortunately, Trijicon came to the same conclusion, announcing Thursday that they would remove the references from future sights ordered by the military, as well as provide modification kits for current ones.

Business & Economy

Regulatory Commissars: Obama Goes After Banks

Last week, we reported the White House’s scheme to impose a so-called “financial crisis responsibility fee” (read: tax) which, according to the Treasury Department, “would require the largest and most highly leveraged Wall Street firms to pay back taxpayers for the extraordinary assistance provided so that the TARP program does not add to the deficit.” (This proposal ignores the fact that nearly all the banks targeted by this tax have already repaid their bailout money.) Now Wall Street is fighting back, exploring a potential challenge to the tax on the grounds that its bank-specific, industry-specific bull’s-eye makes it unconstitutional. The market responded with its worst two-day decline since August.

In classic “ignore the issue, attack the source” fashion, Barack Obama warned, “Instead of sending a phalanx of lobbyists to fight this proposal or employing an army of lawyers and accountants to help evade the fee, I suggest you might want to consider simply meeting your responsibilities.” And the president might want to quit exceeding his.

Furthermore, as The Wall Street Journal reports, “responsibility” hardly seems the right term. “[T]he White House wants to tax more capital away from profit-making banks to offset the intentional losses that the politicians have ordered up at Fan and Fred. The bank tax revenue will flow directly into the Treasury to be spent on whatever immediate cause Congress favors. Come the next ‘systemic risk’ bailout, taxpayers will still be on the hook.”

Also this week, the administration proposed adding insult to injury with further regulations on the industry with the goal of limiting the size and activities of the largest banks. The regulations would not allow commercial banks to own, invest in or advise hedge funds or private equity firms. Also, an existing cap would be strengthened so that banks would be prohibited from controlling more than 10 percent of not only the nation’s insured deposits, but non-insured deposits and other assets, as well.

In other words, as The Journal so aptly explains, “Welcome to one more installment in Washington’s year-long crusade to revive private business by assailing and soaking it.”

On Cross-Examination

“I don’t see any reason why [banks] should be paying a special tax. … I don’t see the rationale for it. … Look at the damage Fannie and Freddie caused, and they were run by the Congress. Should they have a special tax on congressmen because they let this thing happen to Freddie and Fannie? I don’t think so.” –billionaire investor and philanthropist Warren Buffet

Actually, that might solve a lot of our problems…

Nanny Statism and Consumer ‘Protection’

Among the many bad ideas for the liberal Democrats’ nanny state utopia was the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency bureaucracy. As a condition for Sen. Chris Dodd’s dying initiative to revamp financial-sector regulations, the future former senator has broached abandoning his push for a new stand-alone agency during negotiations to secure a bipartisan deal on the legislation – so long as Republicans agree to create an intrusive consumer-protection division within another federal bureaucracy. Some deal.

Although the Obama administration and congressional Democrats continue to champion a stand-alone agency, they have been unable to explain a clear need, mission or discernible expertise yet another new federal bureaucracy would bring to the table. Further muddying the waters, this new agency could subject financial institutions to onerous new regulations that conflict with regulations issued by current regulators, not to mention the realities of the financial industry.

Instead of creating ill-defined federal agencies, Congress should focus its energies on straightening out the regulators who failed to do their jobs and unleashed a horrible recession upon the nation. Of course, an even more effective mechanism to bottle the genie would be to retire inept congressmen who played a meaningful role in creating this calamity. After killing reforms when reform could have avoided the recession, and securing sweetheart mortgage deals for himself, Dodd’s retirement is a good start. Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), the House version of Dodd whose district just voted for Scott Brown, should follow suit.

Culture & Policy

Climate Change This Week: Another UN Scandal

It wouldn’t meet the research standards of a basic college science class, yet it was enough for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to rely on for claiming that Himalayan glaciers will melt away by 2035. Well, as Investor’s Business Daily put it, “The scientists who said that Himalayan glaciers will be gone by 2035 have admitted the claim has as much credibility as sightings of the mythical Yeti. It’s their fraudulent claims that are melting away.”

Actually, the alarm of imminent meltdown in the Nobel Peace Prize-winning report published by the IPCC in 2007 came from a 1999 article in the popular non-peer reviewed journal New Scientist – an article which itself was based on a phone interview with scientist Syed Hasnain, who has since described his views as “speculation.” UN Report lead author Murari Lal was quick to shift blame, however. “We relied rather heavily on grey [not peer-reviewed] literature,” he said. “The error, if any, lies with Dr. Hasnain’s assertion and not with the IPCC authors.”

Hasnain countered, “The magic number of 2035 has not [been] mentioned in any research papers written by me, as no peer-reviewed journal will accept speculative figures,” and, he added, “It is not proper for IPCC to include references from popular magazines or newspapers.”

A Nobel Prize based on a fraud… Has that ever happened before?

Of course, propagating speculative “science” to prop up global warming alarmism is nothing new to the IPCC, whose founding principles assume “the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change.” Perhaps it’s fitting that the panel’s chairman is not a climatologist at all but an economist and engineer. After all, engineering the facts seems to be a favorite IPCC pastime.

Faith and Family: Roe v. Wade Turns 37

Today marks the 37th anniversary of the most tragic Supreme Court decision in American history, Roe v. Wade. The primary issue, of course, remains the right to life affirmed in our Declaration of Independence.

About half of the people in the United States say they are pro-life and the other half say they are pro-“choice.” How is this affiliation determined? For the most part, if you consider a fetus nothing but a blob of tissue within a woman’s body, you become pro-choice. If you believe that a fetus is a human being and that life begins at conception, you are pro-life. Who is right?

It has always been evident to us, scientifically and morally, that life begins at conception. But for the last word on the matter, we consult our Creator’s guidebook. The Psalmist wrote, “For You formed my inward parts; you wove me in my mother’s womb.” And then he noted, “Your eyes have seen my unformed substance; and in Your book were written all the days that were ordained for me, when as yet there was not one of them.” Imago Dei!

Tragically, nearly 50 million lives have been sacrificed on the alter of “choice” since 1973, and now, the most pro-abortion White House and Congress in history are in control of Washington, trying to pass a “health care” bill that funds abortions. May God grant us mercy.

Judicial Benchmarks: Federal Power and Predators

The Supreme Court is currently considering whether the federal government has the right to “civilly commit” sex offenders after they have served out their federal sentence. Specifically, U.S. v. Comstock concerns the validity of the 2006 Adam Walsh Child Protection Act, so named after the young boy whose 1981 murder by a pedophile led to a victims’ rights movement.

As appealing as this law might look at first blush, we must remember that the issue here is not whether sex offenders should be locked up indefinitely, but whether the federal government has the right to usurp a power traditionally left to the states.

Graydon Comstock was sentenced to three years in prison after being convicted of purchasing child pornography. After he had completed his sentence, the feds certified Comstock as a danger to the public and sought to extend his incarceration. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed, landing the case squarely in front of the Supremes, where Solicitor General Elena Kagan argued that the federal government, which is responsible for the criminal justice system, should be allowed to commit Comstock under the “Necessary and Proper” clause of the Constitution.

This argument is a thinly veiled attempt to expand federal power. Twenty states have enacted civil commitment statutes for sex offenders, and the feds are seeking to remove that choice from the others. As Justice Antonin Scalia pointed out, the Framers intended the Necessary and Proper Clause to be used in conjunction with powers already bestowed upon the federal government, not take those reserved for the states. “The federal criminal proceeding is terminated,” Scalia stated. “The individual is released. You could say it’s necessary for the good of society, but that’s not what the federal government is charged with. There is no constitutional power on the part of the federal government to protect society from sexual predators.”

Frontiers of Junk Science: Cape Wind May Yet Fly

As the first year of the Obama administration concludes, the list of its unfinished (and urgent) business continues to grow. One of these items is the fate of Cape Wind – an offshore wind energy initiative – which has been in dispute for 10 years. The tips of the 130 proposed wind turbines will, if completed, reach 440 feet above the waters more than 15 miles off Nantucket.

The opposition to the project recently lost one of its biggest (and certainly most famous) members when Sen. Ted Kennedy, whose family compound on Hyannis Port looks out on the proposed site, died last summer. Kennedy was among a group of politicians and Native American groups, who contend that the project would ruin their view of Nantucket Sound and disturb Indian burial grounds. Coincidentally, the project site is close to Kennedy’s Hyannis Port and would marginally obstruct their million-dollar view – but only on a clear, calm day.

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar has promised to reach a decision on the project by April, stating that renewable energy is a “top priority” of the Obama administration. The president has yet to come down on either side of the issue; perhaps he was torn between his promises to environmental groups and the significant support Kennedy had thrown behind him during his campaign.

And Last…

Can’t get enough of Barack Obama? Longing for more than just the wall-t0-wall Leftmedia coverage of the Patron Saint of Big Government? Then there’s a new iPhone app for you: “The White House.” According to the White House blog, “The White House App delivers dynamic content from WhiteHouse.gov to the palm of your hand.” Yes, now you can watch thrilling press briefings and riveting speeches like the State of the Union right on your phone or iPod touch. As columnist Michelle Malkin writes, “It’s a revolution in open government! Watch the president yakking LIVE, right on your phone. He’s mobile! He’s streaming! Carry him around in your purse or pocket! iObama can now be with you 24/7.” Unfortunately, though, there is one topic you won’t be able to watch Mr. Transparency and his trusty congressional sidekicks tackle, and that’s health care. Apparently, there just isn’t good enough visibility for the video cameras in those smoke-filled cloakrooms.