SPEAKING without a text in front of him, Barack Obama betrays a troubling lack of knowledge on important issues - such as the law and terrorism.

He claimed that, in the case of “the first attack against the World Trade Center, we were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial. They are currently in US prisons, incapacitated.”

McCarthy [asst. US attorney and prosecutor of '93 WTC attackers] notes: “While the government managed to prosecute many people responsible for the 1993 WTC bombing, many also escaped prosecution because of the limits on civilian criminal prosecution.

The convicted spiritual mentor of the 1993 WTC bombers is Omar Abdel-Rahman (”the blind sheik”). By Obama’s logic, the blind sheik was “incapacitated” and therefore rendered harmless by his conviction and imprisonment… Attorney Lynne Stewart was convicted in February 2005 of conspiracy and providing and concealing material support of terrorism for her actions in smuggling messages from Abdel-Rahman to his followers in the terrorist group Gama’a al-Islamiyya (Islamic Group).

He explained: “I mean, you remember during the Nuremberg trials, part of what made us different was even after these Nazis had performed atrocities that no one had ever seen before, we still gave them a day in court and that taught the entire world about who we are, but also the basic principles of rule of law.” … The Nazi war criminals had no access to US courts. The fair-trial provision of the charter governing the trial was relatively skimpy - and the provision on appeal rights was even shorter and sweeter: The defendants had no right to appeal. The procedures the court found deficient in Boumediene, by contrast, provided for appeal rights to the DC Circuit, the most prominent US bench below the Supreme Court.

In short, the procedural protections for Gitmo detainees under the statute before the Supreme Court in Boumediene exceed those accorded the Nuremberg defendants.

Full article here.

Here’s an interesting story from England about words not to use if you want to be more clearly understood by your constituents. More interesting to me than the actual point of the story is contained in the final paragraphs:

The association sent its letter after reports that one town council had told staff to use the term “thought showers” instead of “brainstorming.”

Officials at Tunbridge Wells council in southern England felt brainstorming might offend people with epilepsy, a condition that involves periodic electrical storms inside the brain.

However, the National Society for Epilepsy said it had surveyed its members and they did not find the term offensive.

Completely ridiculous. Who in their right mind has so much time on their hands that they invent new phrases like “thought showers” because they assume that the established word “brainstorm” will be offensive to people with epilepsy!? Thought showers sounds more like some positive sounding method of disbursing information in a 1984-eqsue story.

Part of the problem the western society has now is this overwhelming urge to not offend. It’s gone so far that we now stick up for others in what we assume may offend them. Instead of assuming that something will offend someone… maybe we could ask? Seems reasonable to me.

Hey kids, wanna have some fun? Grab your favorite hilarious CNN tee and jump in line at the airport!

Apparently, even after his green-ovation, the former Vice President and author of a global warming gloom-and-doom masterpiece uses 6,728kWh more energy every month than the average American household uses in an entire year. (Me? I used 713kWh last month.) More figures here, and a comment from that post:

He’s built his recent career on making Americans feel guilty about their lifestyles, and he’s using 20x more than those he wants to make feel guilty.

And he’s still flying around in that Gulfstream…

We’re comparing kWh here, not his monthly bill (which, by the by, is now a staggering $16,533), so his spokeswoman’s excuse that he’s involved in Nashville’s Green Power Switch Program–which costs more per kWh but lets the customer use some renewable sources–doesn’t really hold muster.

It really makes you question their motives. Why are they pushing this so hard if they don’t walk the walk? Or is that just for us normal people to do? Is this what’s behind the whole Cap and Trade mess? Would America really be for it if they knew that they would suddenly be forced to participating a new rigged market–the “quarter of a trillion dollar” [@ 3:55] emissions economy as well? Hmm… more governmental control. Awesome. (More on Cap and Trade here.) Of course, any intelligent business man will take advantage of such a system. If you’re not at the negotiating table, you’re on the menu, says Richard Sandor, the CEO of the Chicago Climate Exchange.

The real problem is giving them a system to game, and the fault for that lies squarely at the feet of politicians who buy into the junk-science arguments of “global warming” alarmists without any consideration of the massive economic costs Americans will bear in a Quixotic quest to stop climate change.  It reminds me of a club I once heard of: “The Stop Continental Drift Society”, and it makes as much sense.

Honestly, this is why I couldn’t give a real rip about what Gore or any other celebrity has to say about the issue. Dave Letterman and his racing team are included too. If you folks were really concerned that our behavior was causing the ultimate meltdown of Earth, your behavior would reflect it. If you truly believe your jumping on a table will break the table, you don’t tell everyone else to get off the table whilst you enjoy your continuing table dance–amusing though it might be.

I wish I could honestly write like great writers of generations before me. I admire so much writers like C.S. Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison.

Those last two, I have been reading a lot of lately. I came across this line just now in The Federalist #10:

But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.

“Wow. Yes. Absolutely,” I thought. I couldn’t agree more. In this paper, Madison is describing the natural and immovable existence of factions within a free society. Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires, he says. But just as ridiculous as it would be to try to be done with air simply to extinguish a fire, one cannot get rid of the liberty that is required for a faction to exist just to rid a society of factions. What is a faction? Glad you asked. James, tell us:

…a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.

Which, I believe, is why the Democrats ultimately fail in their efforts to secure power in the government and are replaced by Independents and Republicans when the citizens realize what they’ve done. The Democratic Party, to me, and ironically considering Obama’s campaign of unity, seems very much unlike a group of people with a common message and purpose. I’ve written about this before. Instead, it really seems like a collection of factions; a collection in which it appears the Democrats want to include everyone except the Religious Right. The problem, of course, is that because these factions do not share a strong enough message of common good for the entire population of this country, their message ultimately fails.

Over 200 years ago, Madison attributed the most long-standing source of animosity between groups to the amount of property, or lack thereof, each individual can claim as his own. And of course he’s right. It’s the battle cry of the “people” in every communist revolution. And almost frighteningly, it’s also the battle cry of the Democrats. On the stump, you’ll constantly hear Democrat candidates remind their audience of “the rich”, chiding those with money as if it were a foregone conclusion that they’d done something evil to achieve such fortune. (Nevermind the overwhelming hypocrisy behind such a notion, coming from political candidates. Don’t look behind the curtain.) I’ve heard this sentiment in my own experience. I have almost no money. Why do I not join them in the deriding of those who have it? Because some day I want to join them. And I don’t see America as a land where I’m kept from doing so. I see it opportunistically, and once I get there, I don’t want a larger chunk in terms of percentage taken from me just because I’ve achieved more than the have-not’s, content their entire lives with complaining that they don’t have what they want.

And it is exactly this sentiment, this passion, that leads to excessive taxing on the wealthy. Yes, I said it. It’s unfair. Because the tax code as it stands currently is, essentially, a giant, collective attempt to “stick it” to the man. And it’s wrong.

The apportionment of taxes on the various descriptions of property is an act which seems to require the most exact impartiality; yet there is, perhaps, no legislative act in which greater opportunity and temptation are given to a predominant party to trample on the rules of justice. Every shilling with which they overburden the inferior number, is a shilling saved to their own pockets.

A quote from Larry Summers via Madeline Albright on CSPAN today. Albright:

The truth is that if you don’t own your land, you don’t have title to it, you don’t have the money or the interest to develop it or buy seeds or fertilizer, so it all goes together…

Now, she was talking about The Commission on Legal Empowerment for the Poor, an international group working to–obviously–empower the poor, especially in developing nations. But I would also add, this is exactly the reason property rights are so cherished and important in America. I would also argue that we should take the logic one step further. Nobody ever washes a rented car, and nobody ever takes care of things when they’re just handed out all the time. Disagree? Take a quick drive through some Section 8 housing and then get back to me.

There’s a difference, mind you. It’s like Dave Ramsey always says, poor is a state of mind. He’s been broke several times, but he’s never been poor.

I can’t wait to see how he’ll unite people once he’s in office.

Is this a joke?

President Bush renewed calls for the obvious: more offshore drilling and exploration of the oil shale in the midwest. The logical person thinks about it and can’t understand: So exactly why are we not using our own oil reserves? How is this not the emergency we’ve been saving it for?

And yet even in the face of what is obviously for the most public good, we’ve got partisan politics.

“After eight years, President Bush and [Vice President] Dick Cheney have turned the GOP into the Gas and Oil Party. That’s the legacy that they are going to leave,” said Rep. Edward Markey of Massachusetts, chairman of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.

Wow. Listen, we all know the story. We get it. You hate Bush. But even if he and his cronies stand to really rake it in here, how will this hurt the American people? This is exactly what we need! We’ve got all this available oil at our disposal–more than 3 times the proven recoverable oil in Saudi Arabia!–and we’re tying out own hands behind our backs. As I heard radio talk show host Phil Valentine analogize a few weeks back:

It’s like a thirsty man begging for a drink. “Oh, I’m so thirsty, please just get me some water. Please!” “Hey man, what about that full canteen you’ve got there?” “Oh, no, I’m saving that for an emergency. Please, just get me some water!”

Our elected officials have got to get off their environmentalism kick. This is only going to hurt Americans!

If we were to drill today realistically speaking we should not expect a barrel of oil coming out of this new resource for three years, maybe even five years, so let’s not kid ourselves…

Ah, so what you’re saying is that it takes a while, hmm? So instead of all this blaming our current President, one might blame the former administration for blocking all our attempts and exploration and drilling ten years ago?

The fact is, ANWR oil would be flowing now if President Clinton hadn’t vetoed a drilling bill in 1995.

More here.