Looks like we will need a "reset button" for our relationship with England.

Obama administration trades England's nuclear secrets for deal with Russia.

Outrage of the Day.

Terrorist who confessed to murder acquitted.

According to Daniel Foster at NRO:

Ahmed Ghailani was found not guilty of each of the over 280 counts against him — save one — in the first civilian trial of a Gitmo detainee conducted by the Obama administration.


Among the charges were one count of murder for each of the 224 people killed in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, but Ghailani was found not guilty on each. The lone guilty verdict came on a conspiracy to destroy government buildings charge, which comes with a sentence of 20 years to life.

The jury in the case deliberated for seven days, with one juror requesting to be replaced after telling a judge she disagreed with her peers and was worried she’d face their ire.

Though Ghailani had previously confessed to his role in carrying out the bombings, that confession and a crucial prosecution witness were thrown out because both stemmed from interrogations at a CIA camp.

Ed Morissey observes:

Let’s face it. Barack Obama and Eric Holder gambled their entire national-security credibility on the Ahmed “Foopie” Ghailani trial, arguing that they could get convictions of detainees captured abroad by military and intelligence assets while using federal courts as a venue rather than the military commissions that Congress repeatedly authorized for that purpose. Holder scolded critics who pointed out all of the reasons that such a strategy was much more likely to fail for “politicizing” the process, especially in regard to the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, whose case is more problematic than Ghailani’s, where the FBI did a large part of the investigation before intelligence assets were used to seize and interrogate Ghailani.


The failure of Holder’s DoJ to win anything more than a single conspiracy count against Ghailani as a result of using a process designed for domestic criminals than wartime enemies shows that the critics had it right all along. It also shows that both Obama and Holder have been proven spectacularly wrong, since a man who confessed to the murder of over two hundred people will now face as little as 20 years, with a big chunk of whatever sentence Foopie receives being reduced by time already served.

The administration is left with three choices in regards to Ghailani: announce that they will release him at the appointed date whenever his sentence ends, announce that they will hold him indefinitely without regard to the court’s ruling on the matter while referring the case back to a military commission despite his acquittals, or refuse to state which they will do and hope the issue falls to the next administration.  The first will mean that the US will knowingly release a master al-Qaeda terrorist with more than two hundred murders under his belt; the second will mean that the trial they staged was nothing but a sham.  And the third will be a cowardly dodge.

Apparently,  Obama is arguing for the principle of "post-acquittal detention":

Even had he been acquitted on all counts, the Obama administration had made clear that it would simply continue to imprison him anyway under what it claims is the President's "post-acquittal detention power" -- i.e., when an accused Terrorist is wholly acquitted in court, he can still be imprisoned indefinitely by the U.S. Government under the "law of war" even when the factual bases for the claim that he's an "enemy combatant" (i.e. that he blew up the two embassies) are the same ones underlying the crimes for which he was fully acquitted after a full trial. When he banned the testimony of the key witness, Judge Kaplan, somewhat cravenly, alluded to and implicitly endorsed this extraordinary detention theory as a means of assuring the public he had done nothing to endanger them with his ruling (emphasis added):

[Ghailani's] status as an "enemy combatant" probably would permit his detention as something akin to a prisoner of war until hostilities between the United States and Al Qaeda and the Taliban end even if he were found not guilty in this case.

"One year later, Cash for Clunkers was still a dumb, economically harmful idea."


From Bubble Meter:

IN THE market for a used car? Good luck finding a bargain: The price of “pre-owned’’ vehicles has climbed considerably over the past year. ...

No great insight was needed to realize that Cash for Clunkers would work a hardship on people unable to afford a new car. “All this program did for them,’’ I wrote last August, “was guarantee that used cars will become more expensive. Poorer drivers will be penalized to subsidize new cars for wealthier drivers.’’ ...

When all is said and done, Cash for Clunkers was a deplorable exercise in budgetary wastefulness, asset destruction, environmental irrelevance, and economic idiocy.

The reason Cash for Clunkers pushed up used car prices is because it required that perfectly functional used cars be destroyed, thus decreasing the supply of used cars available to poorer drivers.

Outrage of the Day.

Insider Trading is legal if you are a Congressional aide.

Fire them all.  Let God sort it out.

"Sharia in New Jersey: Muslim husband rapes wife, judge sees no sexual assault because Islam forbids wives to refuse sex"

Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch reports that a New Jersey judge ruled that a Muslim man could not be convicted of raping his wife - who had filed for divorce - because of the man's Muslim beliefs that his wife could never refuse his sexual advances.

Muhammad said: "If a husband calls his wife to his bed [i.e. to have sexual relation] and she refuses and causes him to sleep in anger, the angels will curse her till morning" (Bukhari 4.54.460).


He also said: "By him in Whose Hand lies my life, a woman can not carry out the right of her Lord, till she carries out the right of her husband. And if he asks her to surrender herself [to him for sexual intercourse] she should not refuse him even if she is on a camel's saddle" (Ibn Majah 1854).

And now a New Jersey judge sees no evidence that a Muslim committed sexual assault of his wife -- not because he didn't do it, but because he was acting on his Islamic beliefs: "This court does not feel that, under the circumstances, that this defendant had a criminal desire to or intent to sexually assault or to sexually contact the plaintiff when he did. The court believes that he was operating under his belief that it is, as the husband, his desire to have sex when and whether he wanted to, was something that was consistent with his practices and it was something that was not prohibited."

The Court of Appeals reversed this decision.

Of course, it is within the living memory of Americans that this kind of argument was rejected in American law.  The idea that a New Jersey judge would revive this principle out of multi-cultural sensitivity is outrageous.

Here is the Appellate decision via the Volokh Conspiracy.

Separation of the Press and the State.

Columbia University's President Lee Bollinger argues for government subsidies for the old media so the United States can stay competitive with Communist China and Al-Jazeera.

We should think about American journalism as a mixed system, where the mission is to get the balance right.


To me a key priority is to strengthen our public broadcasting role in the global arena. In today's rapidly globalizing and interconnected world, other countries are developing a strong media presence. In addition to the BBC, there is China's CCTV and Xinhua news, as well as Qatar's Al Jazeera. The U.S. government's international broadcasters, like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, were developed during the Cold War as tools of our anticommunist foreign policy. In a sign of how anachronistic our system is in a digital age, these broadcasters are legally forbidden from airing within the U.S.

This system needs to be revised and its resources consolidated and augmented with those of NPR and PBS to create an American World Service that can compete with the BBC and other global broadcasters. The goal would be an American broadcasting system with full journalistic independence that can provide the news we need. Let's demonstrate great journalism's essential role in a free and dynamic society.

Yes, obviously.  We need the "right mix" of government subsidized liberal propoganda and whatever else we're allowed to hear, just like Communist China and Al Jazeera.

What a moron.

Why is this Idiot Bowing?

The LA Times asks "how low will he go?" and observes that:

"Very low bows like this are a sign of great respect and deference to a superior."

This is simply basic. 

America's civic faith is that all men are created equal.

Americans don't bow to royalty.

We didn't dip the flag to Hitler. We don't dip the flag.

Our president is not the social inferior anyone.

So, why is Obama bowing to the Emperor of Japan?

Dick Cheney shows how an American greets royalty.