Political Digest November 14, 2009

I post articles because I think they are of interest. Doing so doesn’t mean that I necessarily agree with every—or any—opinion in the posted article.

Quiz
http://pewresearch.org/politicalquiz/quiz/index.php
If you don’t get 10 of 12, you shouldn’t be allowed to vote! (Yes, I got 12. Easy questions for anyone paying attention.)

Obama Administration Intends to Purge Republicans From the Civil Service
http://www.redstate.com/erick/2009/11/12/obama-administration-intends-to-purge-republicans-from-the-civil-service/
Excerpts: It is a typical Washington process that many political appointees are able to take jobs within the civil service once their political appointment expires — usually at the conclusion of one administration. What often happens as well is Congressional staffers, before an election or shortly thereafter, will move over to the Executive Branch placed into the civil service, in effect, by appointment. So, for example, when George Bush became President in 2001, a number of Clinton political appointees became civil service employees. As a result, they became subject to civil service hiring and firing rules, which meant they could no longer be replaced simply for having been a Democratic appointee. Barack Obama is changing that. He intends to purge all Republicans from the federal bureaucracy retroactive to five years ago. Under his new rules, made retroactive for five years, the Office of Personnel Management will examine civil service employees who got their start as political appointees in the Bush administration and terminate those employees. The order is retroactive to 2004, that moment when a number of Republican congressional staffers and others sought to embed into the second Bush administration right after the election.

Fight fire with arson, then collect firefighter's pension http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-kass-11-nov11,0,1832804.column
Politically-connected firefighter convicted of arson gets to keep firefighter pension. The Chicago way, which corrupts everyone it touches. Everyone.

Pawlenty hasn't learned from Romney's mistakes
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/11/AR2009111126571.html?wpisrc=newsletter
Excerpt: Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty is widely regarded as one of the Republican Party's rising national leaders. The runner-up to Sarah Palin to be John McCain's vice presidential running mate, he is a conservative whose blue-collar roots, amiable personality and two terms as governor of a traditionally Democratic state would seem to make him a natural in attracting the kind of swing voters who are always fought over in presidential elections. But the Pawlenty who has stepped onto the national stage in recent months has said and done things that have other Republicans wondering about his instincts and his sure-footedness as a prospective 2012 presidential candidate. Pawlenty could learn from the earlier mistakes of one of his potential rivals for the GOP nomination, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.

The most important number in politics today
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/thefix/most-important-number/the-most-important-number-in-p-65.html?wprss=thefix
Excerpt: 64 That's the percentage of Ohioans who call themselves either "somewhat" (37 percent) or "very" (27 percent) dissatisfied with the way things are going in the Buckeye State in a new Quinnipiac poll. By contrast, roughly one in three (35 percent) say they are satisfied with the state of the state and just three percent of that group calling themselves "very" satisfied. That dissatisfaction is trickling down ballot with Gov. Ted Strickland (D) now in a dead heat with former Rep. John Kasich (R) despite the fact that the GOP nominee is far less well known in the state. (Strickland led by 10 points as recently as mid-September.)

Momentum is a challenge for Senate
http://thehill.com/homenews/house/67475-momentum-is-challenge-for-senate
Excerpt: Democrats on Capitol Hill have devised a plan to maintain momentum for healthcare reform, hoping to avoid the setbacks they suffered over the summer. The House’s passage of healthcare legislation was a huge victory for President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats. But the Senate’s snail-like pace presents the party with the challenge of proving to the public that they are making progress. Going into the Veterans Day recess, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) signaled that they intend to pass the Senate bill in the final weeks of 2009, with a final vote on the conference bill by about mid-January. This schedule is intended to show the bill is moving forward, avoiding a repeat of the August recess, when the healthcare reform movement stalled amid boisterous town hall forums.

Swine flu: Available doses vary wildly by county
http://www.chicagotribune.com/health/chi-swine-flu-count-13-nov13,0,3222873.story
Excerpt: It's a puzzle that Will County's health officials are struggling to unravel: Although they have received enough H1N1 flu vaccine to protect just 2.1 percent of their county's 680,000 residents, Kendall County has enough to protect 17 percent of its 103,000 residents. "We don't understand why a county that's so much smaller than ours is getting more vaccines," said Will County Health Department spokesman Vic Reato. "We thought that maybe the state had lost our order."… Chicago receives its allotment directly from the CDC, but the rest of Illinois goes through the state health department, which does not rely on any hard-and-fast formula when deciding which counties, hospitals and other health care providers receive vaccine doses, officials said. (Gee, maybe because that’s how government runs healthcare? Duh.)

Why Fort Hood Really Happened
In war, uncertainty gets you killed. It just did. http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052748704576204574529844037896738-lMyQjAxMDA5MDEwMjExNDIyWj.html
Excerpt: The only good news out of the Fort Hood massacre is that U.S. electronic surveillance technology was able to pick up Major Hasan's phone calls to an al Qaeda-loving imam in Yemen. The bad news is the people and agencies listening to Hasan didn't know what to do about it. Other than nothing. Next week, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I., Conn.) will convene the Homeland Security Committee to find out if someone in the Army or FBI dropped the ball on Hasan. At Ford Hood itself, grief has been turning to anger as news of possible dropped balls has emerged. Earlier in the week at Fort Hood, President Obama spoke about the consequences of doing nothing. He named and described each of the 13 dead. That properly gave individual reality to what soon will become "the victims of Fort Hood." This is how it always goes. For about a week after these awful incidents—such as the USS Cole bombing in Yemen (year 2000, 17 dead)—the rest of us feel, just a little, what the surviving families feel. This week, 13 American families are shattered, forever. It's a big deal, the biggest deal there is. On Tuesday night at 9:06 p.m. in Virginia, the state executed the Beltway sniper, John Allen Muhammad, who gunned down 10 in 2002. The day before the execution, the father of a dead daughter described why he would witness it: "I want to see what he made me see. He forced us to look at our little girl laying in a coffin. I want to see justice done. I want to see him take a last breath. I want to be able to describe it to the rest of the family."… This will never come up in the Lieberman hearings next week, but I think that nonstop policy battle is why Hasan's overseers dropped the ball.

Medicalizing mass murder
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/12/AR2009111209824.html?wpisrc=newsletter
Excerpt: What a surprise -- that someone who shouts "Allahu Akbar" (the "God is great" jihadist battle cry) as he is shooting up a room of American soldiers might have Islamist motives. It certainly was a surprise to the mainstream media, which spent the weekend after the Fort Hood massacre playing down Nidal Hasan's religious beliefs. I cringe that he's a Muslim. . . . I think he's probably just a nut case," said Newsweek's Evan Thomas. Some were more adamant. Time's Joe Klein decried "odious attempts by Jewish extremists . . . to argue that the massacre perpetrated by Nidal Hasan was somehow a direct consequence of his Islamic beliefs." While none could match Klein's peculiar cherchez-le-juif motif, the popular story line was of an Army psychiatrist driven over the edge by terrible stories he had heard from soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Prosecutors tie Iran, U.S. assets
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/12/AR2009111209731.html?wpisrc=newsletter
Nothing to do with Islam, of course. Lots of Presbyterians financing nuclear bombs and terrorism. Excerpt: Federal prosecutors on Thursday moved to seize several U.S. assets allegedly controlled by entities linked to the government of Iran, including a mosque and Islamic school in Potomac, land in Prince William County and a Manhattan skyscraper. Prosecutors described an intricate web of ties allegedly connecting the properties to an Iranian bank that has been identified as a key financier of Tehran's nuclear and ballistic missile programs and possibly acts of terrorism. At the center of that web, they said, is a New-York based organization known as the Alavi Foundation, which U.S. authorities have for decades suspected of being a possible Iranian front.

'They Will Kill Us All'
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/opinion/13iht-edhayes.html?_r=1
Excerpt: The lodge where I stay in Kabul was badly damaged on Oct. 8 when a suicide car bomb exploded 80 meters down the road near the Indian Embassy. Seventeen Afghans working in photocopy shops near the embassy were killed and another 60 wounded. The Indian diplomats were unharmed. No apologies were offered by the perpetrators for the killings. Nobody was hurt at my lodge, but 75 windows were blown out. The next day I was talking with the owner, who, for the third time in three years, had to fork out $3,000 to fix his windows. I asked him what would happen if NATO pulls out of Afghanistan? He replied without hesitation, looking me straight in the eyes and obviously referring to the Taliban and their allies: “They will kill us all.”

Joys of Muslim Women http://www.meetup.com/WeSurroundThemGathering/messages/boards/thread/7405744
The beauty of multiculturalism. Excerpt: In the Muslim faith a Muslim man can marry a child as young as 1 year old and have sexual intimacy with this child. Consummating the marriage by age 9. The dowry is given to the family in exchange for the woman (who becomes his slave) and for the purchase of the private parts of the woman, to use her as a toy. Even though a woman is abused she can not obtain a divorce. To prove rape, the woman must have (4) male witnesses. Often after a woman has been raped, she is returned to her family and the family must return the dowry. The family has the right to execute her (an honor killing) to restore the honor of the family. Husbands can beat their wives ‘at will’ and he does not have to say why he has beaten her.

Does Islam Breed Violence? By Amil Imani—Worth Reading http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/does_islam_breed_violence.html
Excerpt: There is a division of the house. On one side are the politically correct in government, the leftist mainstream media, and a raft of Islamist apologists. One and all are tripping over each other in reassuring us the mass murderers such as Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan and suicide-bombers who detonate their explosive vests in crowded marketplaces and even mosques are individual anomalies and Islam is not responsible for what they do. On the other side are those fed up with the innumerable daily horrific acts throughout the world that are clearly committed under the banner of Islam. In all fairness, there needs to be a distinction. Numerous criminal acts are also committed on a daily basis by non-Muslims. The critical difference is that non-Muslim criminals do not hoist a religious banner to justify their misdeeds, while the Muslims proudly claim that they commit their heinous acts in obedience to the dictates of their religious faith.

The Misnomer of Radical Islam America’s Security Blunder http://www.rightsidenews.com/200906065041/editorial/the-misnomer-of-radical-islam-americas-security-blunder.html
There are tens of millions of peaceful, moderate Muslims, just as there were tens of millions of peaceful, moderate Germans, Italians and Japanese in 1939. And they are just as irrelevant. I get the feeling the left feels that 13 dead is an acceptable price for having avoided subjecting Maj. Hasan to “Islamophobia.” Too bad they weren’t the ones who paid it.

Man arrested for 'anti-Christian' mall disturbance http://www.danvilleweekly.com/news/show_story.php?id=2339
Thought the Leftstream Media was worried that Ft. Hood would produce a backlash against Muslims? Excerpt: Police arrested 22-year-old Abdul Walid Hamid of Hayward on the evening of Wednesday, Nov. 4, after he reportedly tore a crucifix from a person's neck and scared others at Stoneridge Shopping Center. Hamid, an employee at a mall kiosk near Starbucks, has been charged with battery, terrorist threats and grand theft. According to reports, Hamid was yelling "Allah is power" and "Islam is great" while holding a pen in a fist over his head. Witnesses said he shouted anti-Christian comments, said police.

Grabbed another phony vet
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2009/1111091medals1.html
Excerpt: NOVEMBER 11--Just in time for Veteran's Day, a California bank employee is facing federal charges for allegedly masquerading as a decorated Marine and wearing a host of bogus medals, including the Purple Heart, Bronze Star, and Navy Cross. Steven Burton, 39, is scheduled to surrender tomorrow in U.S. District Court in Riverside, California (Burton, who has never served in the armed forces, was named last week in a misdemeanor criminal information charging him with the unauthorized wearing of military medals).

A Beard too far
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZmJhMDE5NDk2NjUyMjNmNjA3NTBlZjhjMjhmOWJlMzY
I’m shipping over and taking my kilt! Excerpt: Some ironies are more than cruel. On the day that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan approached Fort Hood armed with two handguns, he may have passed a newsstand selling copies of the November 9 edition of Army Times. On the front page was a photograph of a Sikh soldier wearing a beard, mustache, and turban with his uniform, accompanied by the headline, “Regs Make Way for Religion — Sikh, Muslim Allowed to Incorporate Customs into Army Dress.” Maj. Gen. Gina S. Farrisee, acting deputy chief of staff for Army personnel at the Pentagon, had granted a “religious accommodation” exception for Capt. Kamaljeet Singh Kalsi, a Sikh physician. Without providing a reason for the special treatment, General Farrisee’s October 22 letter stated that Captain Kalsi would be allowed to wear uncut hair, a turban, and a beard with his uniform. The religious accommodation was granted for Kalsi alone, and the letter explicitly states that the Army may revoke it at any time. (Another Sikh, who has been studying dentistry under the same Health Professions Scholarship Program that Kalsi was enrolled in, expects a similar personal waiver.) Army Times further reported that a Muslim officer serving as an orthopedic-surgery intern at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center had received permission to “wear a beard, as required by his sect of the Muslim faith.”

Two quotes
Obama after hearing that abortionist George Tiller was shot--- "I am shocked and outraged." Obama after receiving the news that 12 unarmed soldiers were gunned down at Ft. Hood Army Post, "I would caution against jumping to conclusions" about the motives of the gunman.

Love thy enemies:
Pray for Obama. Psalm 109:8