The Democratic Party now has a total lock on governing power. How fitting that the comedian and left-wing crank Al Franken completes the collections of clowns – Republican and Democrat – that make up the world’s most exclusive club, the United States Senate.

“I look forward to working with Sen.-elect Franken to build a new foundation for growth and prosperity by lowering healthcare costs and investing in the kind of clean energy jobs and industries that will help America lead in the 21st Century,” said President Obama, without chuckling.

This is yet another symptom of the Republican Party implosion that began with the election of George W. Bush. Not since the days of Richard Nixon has a Republican president done more to sabotage his own political party. And conservatives helped.

George W. Bush, like his father before him, was no conservative. Like his father, George W. was a non-partisan Republican; the kind of Republican that likes “reaching across the aisle” to his Democratic opponents – no matter how liberal. Like his father, who dubbed Ronald Reagan’s plan to allow Americans to keep more of their income “voodoo economics,” George W. wanted to distance himself from conservatives while appealing to his party’s conservative base. Vuala! “Compassionate conservatism” was born. With nowhere else to go, conservatives foolishly hitched their wagon to an ideologically and intellectually weak horse and hoped for the best.

Tragically, Bush governed like another president from Texas, Lyndon Baines Johnson; spending vast amounts on domestic programs like “no child left behind” and the prescription drug program. He also saddled the nation with a Vietnam-like no-win-war in Iraq. When the nation’s financial sector teetered on the brink of collapse, Bush and his treasury secretary began the bailout madness that Obama has expanded to levels never seen in our nation’s history.

The collapse of the economy triggered by the disastrous Democratic policy of “affordable housing” (sub-prime lending), which Bush supported, was successfully pinned on Bush by the Democrats and their pals in the media. President Obama and his party owe President Bush a profound debt of gratitude. Bush set the stage for socialized medicine and government control of the economy, discrediting Republicans and conservatives by governing like a Democrat.

The cruel irony is that Franken won his senate seat by around 300 votes – nearly the same amount which carried George W. Bush into the White House in 2000. The election of Al Franken is a not so funny punch line to the Bush legacy.

Among the victim statements made in court – before Judge Denny Chin handed down a 150-year sentence to Bernie Madoff for his $50 billion Ponzi scheme – victim and former Mayer of Fort Lee, New Jersey, Bert Ross, got to the heart of the Madoff’s crime:

Several hundred years ago, the Italian poet Dante in his The Divine Comedy recognized fraud as the worst of sins, the ultimate evil more than any other act contrary to God’s greatest gift to mankind—love. In fact, he placed the perpetrators of fraud in the lowest depths of hell, even below those who had committed violent acts. And those who betrayed their benefactors were the worst sinners of all, so in the three mouths of Satan struggle Judas for betraying Jesus Christ and Brutus and Cassius for betraying Julius Caesar.

Many in America’s materialistic culture find fault in the government’s failure to properly regulate Wall Street’s investing class. In their view, this is what lead to the Madoff fiasco. In reality, the government is no more capable of ending all financial corruption than it is at ending all murders. Laws and regulations are reserved for those we catch. In the end, the only reliable regulator is the moral content in each human heart.

Know that as soon as the soul commits betrayal
The way I did, a devil displaces it
And governs inside the body….

Canto XXXIII of Dante’s Inferno

As Bert Ross so eloquently stated, Bernie Madoff’s crime was his betrayal of love for his fellow man – its most profound component being trust. Madoff will rot in a federal penitentiary until he casts off the mortal coil and raises his voice as part of an unholy quartet in Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell.

During the last presidential campaign, Michelle Obama was becoming a liability to her husband. “For the first time in my adult lifetime,” she said in an interview, “I am really proud of my country. And not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change, And I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction.” Her sentiments went over like a led balloon with proud Middle Americans. That’s when Obama campaign strategists put a muzzle on Michelle. And it worked.

Since her husband became president, Michelle has stayed in the shadows. Her husband’s political handlers decided to soften Michelle’s angry persona by repackaging her as a fashion guide to American women. Michelle is ready to free herself from her husband’s PR handlers.

In early June, Michelle fired her chief of staff Jackie Norris, replacing her with former boss and Chicago friend Susan Sher. One of Sher’s first official acts was to call President Obama’s senior adviser David Axelrod to inform him that he is to return the First Lady’s calls…immediately. After his verbal spanking, Axelrod had an amazing change of heart. “We were throwing her [Michelle] out there in the kinds of events that were probably not press-worthy…There was a push for quantity and not quality,” Axelrod told the Washington Post.

It appears Michelle the fashion plate is ready to dawn the persona of angry Klingon warrior. And she intends to push her husband’s goal of socializing U.S. medicine – hopefully succeeding where Hillary Clinton failed.

Early in Bill Clinton’s presidency, Mrs. Clinton was dedicated to socializing the nation’s health care system. She held secret meeting with members of the health care industry and high-ranking members of the Democratically controlled congress to push the process through the legislative pipeline. It failed. And the Democrats lost control of both houses of congress. Today, with Republicans like Sen. John McCain pushing for socialist-lite variations of the Obama plan, the outcome is all but certain America will soon enjoy the wonders of Cuban health care – with the rationing of medical services and a reduced life expectancy for one and all.

“The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care…someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more,” Mrs.Obama said during the presidential campaign. Or, in the words of the Klingon proverb: “Once you have their money…never give it back.” Soon, the same will be true of our very lives.

It’s a universal truth among the unhinged that when the world refuses to fit their understanding of reality, it’s due to a massive conspiracy. Here at home, those who believed Islamic fanatics were nothing more than a minor nuisance were jarred by the ugly reality of 9/11. Unwilling to accept that reality, they dismissed the attacks as the work of George W. Bush and the CIA. In the dysfunctional Islamic world, nut-cases ascribed 9/11 to the same goofy conspiracy theories but added the usual anti-Semitic spin – that the international Jewish conspiracy aided in the plot.

In Pakistan, where the government is finally battling the Taliban it helped install in Afghanistan, the terrorist organization is beginning to loose support among the primitives living in Pakistan’s autonomous tribal regions. And the reason, you ask? The mountain dwellers are convinced the Taliban is a creation of the CIA.

According to the Times of London, a Sunni cleric named Sarfraz Ahmed – who aided Pakistan’s government in forming an alliance with 22 Islamic groups to fight the Taliban – told the Times his peculiar conspiracy theory:

Halfway through the interview, however, he [Ahmed] suddenly added that the Taliban was also being funded and trained by the CIA, Mossad, and the Indian RAW intelligence agency. Why? As part of a strategy to carve out an independent statelet in northwestern Pakistan to help to contain China’s growing military and economic power. And to capture Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.

We have obviously been fighting the war on terror foolishly all these years. I think that our best shot at getting bin Laden for 9/11 is to make it look like he was on the U.S. and Israeli payroll all along; it may be the only way to get his primeval crackpot followers to give him up. Memo to CIA: start firing-up Adobe Photoshop.

The world is morning the passing of Michael Jackson. It’s amazing how easily our media-saturated “culture” rehabilitates dead pop stars no matter how damaged they were in life or how damaging they were to others. They say you should not speak ill of the dead, but I think an exception can be made in Jackson’s case.

Entertainment serves a purpose. At its best, it takes us to spiritual heights of beauty that we call art. Popular culture, on the other hand, momentarily lifts us out of our everyday lives and is more of a whimsical, child-like diversion. How fitting that the freakish Michael Jackson dubbed himself the “King of Pop.”

For Jackson, his child-like diversions seemed to be, well, children – the most vulnerable among us. In the British documentary film “Living with Michael Jackson,” a young Gavin Arvizo (who later accused the pop singer of sexually abusing him) and Jackson discuss the boy’s sleepover at Neverland Ranch. Public outcry finally forced the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office to file child molestation charges against Jackson in 2005. A Los Angeles jury, of course, acquitted him of all charges.

During Jackson’s trial, there was a question not asked nearly enough: what possessed parents to entrust their child to such a dysfunctional misfit? The answer, of course, was that they were blinded by Jackson’s glittering celebrity and, more importantly, by his vast fortune. For these parents, celebrity and money was enough to make them forget the awesome responsibility that comes with bringing a life into this world. That it took so long for law enforcement to step into the three-ring-circus taking place in Jackson’s Neverland was a testament to the power celebrity holds over the law in Southern California – the entertainment capitol.

A physical sign of the singer’s mental degeneration was his addiction to plastic surgery. His self-loathing compelled him to alter his face, time and time again. There was a period when it looked as though his nose had fallen off. Before departing America for a safe haven sympathetic to his bizarre fetishes – the Middle East – Jackson took on the appearance of Batman’s archenemy, the Joker.

Half a decade later, Jackson signed a deal to perform 50 concerts in England (leave it to the Europeans to embrace this freakish mental case) in an effort to rebuild his declining fortune. He recently moved to a lavish rented mansion where he planned to rehearse for his upcoming European concert tour.

When word reached the public that Jackson was rushed to UCLA Medical Center, celebrity-crazed Angelinos began gathering around the hospital. Once his death was officially announced, the media instantly overlooked Jackson’s freakishness and need for the company of young boys and waxed eloquently about the great man’s contribution to our lives. The public that once scorned him now light candles at makeshift sidewalk shrines. In America, celebrity triumphs over all.

The Los Angeles coroner’s office will conduct its autopsy to determine what caused the pop idol’s death. Michael Jackson’s  twisted soul, like the insane, empty-headed  public that now celebrate him, died long before his heart stopped beating.

Wasn’t the world supposed to come together under this president? Wasn’t Barrack Obama’s election going to rekindle waves of good will from a world dying to love us? If we elected a leader who spoke in soothing non-judgmental multicultural “you’re okay, I’m unworthy” tones, the world would finally enter the Age of Aquarius, an age of “mutual respect,” right? Someone forgot to tell the rest of the world.

Obama’s previous pathetic pleas for unconditional talks with Iran’s killer clerics put him squarely on the side of a dictatorship that now brutalizes it own people. Obama’s efforts to enter into talks founded on “mutual respect” with one of the world’s greatest exporters of terror meant lowering America’s presage to achieve eye-level contact with the Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the grizzly mullahs he serves. But Obama’s efforts are all for nothing.

Obamba’s weak condemnation of Iran’s crackdown on demonstrators was not well received by the man with whom he wishes to talk. “Mr. Obama made a mistake to say those things,” said Ahmadinejad of Obama’s dish-water rebuke of Iran’s leadership, “Our question is why he fell into this trap, and said things that previously (George W.) Bush used to say.”

Meanwhile, Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez – who met and shook hands with President Obama at a recent meeting of the Organization of American States– condemned the president and European leaders for Iran’s unrest, “People are in the streets, some are dead, they have snipers, and behind this is the CIA, the imperial hand of European countries and the United States.”

Lowering the United States to the level of third world dictators is not so much a sign of “mutual respect” as it is a symptom of our president’s moral cowardice. As the world should have learned from its experience with Adolph Hitler, whose actions on the world stage and toward his own people were an accurate indication of his unreliability as a treaty partner, madmen do not operate in good faith.

“Mutual respect” is a meaningless term. There can be no mutuality between the nations that liberated Europe from Hitler and rouge leaders that tirelessly seek to imitate him. By jumping into the diplomatic cesspool with the likes of Iran, Venezuela and Cuba for the sake of “mutual respect,” Obama erodes two of America’s precious and hard earned possessions – its moral authority and self-respect.

During his first daytime news conference on Tuesday, President Obama called on Huffington Post reporter Nico Pitney to ask a prearranged question. Pitney, who writes on Iran for the Internet journal, received a question from an Iranian protester to pass on to the president. Obama’s stage-managing raised eyebrows among the denizens of the White House Press Corps.

The Iranian protestor’s question (if he or she really exists) was:

Under which conditions would you accept the election of Ahmadinejad, and if you do accept it without any significant changes in the conditions there, isn’t that a betrayal of the — of what the demonstrators there are working towards?

The angry White House Press Corps immediately forgot Obama’s staged answer to the staged question. That an Internet journalist got the special treatment was more than newspaper and television reporters could stand; and it set off a firestorm in the mainstream print media.

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post fumed:

The use of planted questioners is a no-no at presidential news conferences, because it sends a message to the world — Iran included — that the American press isn’t as free as advertised. But yesterday wasn’t so much a news conference as it was a taping of a new daytime drama, “The Obama Show.”

White House deputy press secretary Bill Burton admitted his boss’ collusion with the Huffinton Post:

We did reach out to him [Pitney] prior to press conference to tell him that we had been paying attention to what he had been doing on Iran and there was a chance that he’d be called on. And, he ended up asking the toughest question that the President took on Iran. In the absence of an Iranian press corps in Washington, it was an innovative way to get a question directly from an Iranian.

The mainstream media’s complaints are nothing more than sour grapes. The Obama-worshiping media is whining like  jilted lovers. If any news outlet has a reason to cry in its beer, it’s MSNBC. No news organization works so tirelessly to keep the nation’s heart light burning for Obama than they – most notably Keth Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and fast-talking Chris Matthews. Let’s hope Obama’s open act of favoritism spurs a jilted and jealous media to do their job by asking tough questions that challenge the president’s child-like assumptions about foreign policy and fundamental economics.

WHAT A PATHETIC LITTLE MAN

President Obama’s went to great lengths to prearrange a reporter’s question in order to deliver what he and his advisers thought was a strong response to events taking place inside Iran:

What we can do is to say, unequivocally, that there are sets of international norms and principles about violence, about dealing with peaceful dissent that spans cultures, spans boarders. And what we’ve been seeing over the Internet, and what we’ve been seeing on news reports, violates those norms and violates those principles. I think it is not too late for the Iranian government to recognize that there is a peaceful path that will lead to stability and legitimacy and prosperity for the Iranian people. We hope they take it.

President Obama painted himself into a corner by pledging to negotiate with terrorist Iran without preconditions. Now that Iran’s ruling Mullahs use terror to suppress their people’s fledgling revolution, Obama is in danger of finding himself on the wrong side of history. So he hastily convenes a news conference with a prearranged question from a compliant media mouthpiece to issue his day-late-and-dollar-short semi-condemnation of Iran’s violent clerics.

This, of course, raises some questions: why is the president suddenly concerned by Iranian terror only when it is turned against the Iranian people? The president was willing to negotiate with Tehran without preconditions even after U.S. soldiers and many civilians were wounded and killed by weapons and roadside explosives supplied to Iraqi terrorists by this same regime. Why the concern and outrage over Iranian dead when he was willing to dismiss American dead in order to begin talks with Iran?

He speaks of Iran’s skirting of “international norms and principle.” Our president, unfortunately, is too foolish to realize that Iran’s barbaric actions are the international norm. As much as it may pain Obama and his supporters to admit, his moral authority as president stems from our nation’s tradition of liberty under the rule of law and our willingness to die so that others may enjoy that same freedom. Instead, he mouths multicultural gibberish by begging Iran to abide by the principles of an imaginary realm where “peaceful dissent…spans cultures, spans borders.” His statement is worthy of a Hallmark card or a worthless United Nations Secretary General, but wholly unworthy of the leader of the free world and President of the United States.

It appears the Americans who make up the soft, gooey center of our nation’s political landscape (you know…the ones who represent that special 2 to 5 percent that have no opinion but form the election-swinging “margin of error” in national polls) are starting to formulate an inkling of an opinion on President Obama’s brand of “hope” and “change.”

A recent Rasmussen poll found that 54 percent of Americans think our big-spending president and his Democratic congress need to ratchet back their wealth spreading ways.

Gooey, soft-center Americans feel that spending $1.6 trillion for Obama’s socialized medical plan – that only covers two-thirds of the 47 million uninsured – is a bit excessive.

The president labels socialized medicine “health care reform,” and assures us, with his usual Orwellian doublespeak, that its trillion-plus cost represents “savings.” Even California’s Democratic Sen. Dian Feinstein understands the growing public opposition to Obama’s health plan makes it unlikely congress will pass it this year, if ever.

Many high-ranking Democrats are fighting uphill re-election battles at home because of Obama’s bailouts and big spending ways. “Margin of error” Americans are beginning to see that Obama’s health care plan is looking a lot like his Chrysler bailout plan – a boondoggle whose benefits will never outweigh its whopping costs. Where Obama is concerned, “margin of error” Americans are beginning to realize that voting for Obama might have been their greatest error.

Not since the Japanese attacked our anchored fleet on that sleepy morning on December 7, 1941, has the mid-Pacific islands of Hawaii been a target of a belligerent Asian nation. North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il now threatens the U.S. Pacific paradise with nuclear attack if he perceives any act of the United States as an act of war. According to the Asia Times:

On March 9, the General Staff of the nuclear-armed Korean People’s Army had begun preparing to launch simultaneous retaliatory strikes on the US, Japan and South Korea in response to their act of war.

Although no appropriate test site for a thermonuclear bomb is available on the Korean Peninsula, North Korean scientists and engineers are confident, as a series of computer simulations have proved that their hydrogen bombs will be operational. The North Korean message is that any soft spots of the US, Japan and South Korea’s defense lines will be used as the testing grounds for their thermonuclear weapons.

The story goes on to state:

After shifting to a plan B, Supreme Leader Kim Jong-il has put in place a nuclear game plan as a part of the plan’s military first policy to deal with nuclear rogue state America and its allies South Korea and Japan.

The nuclear game plan is designed firstly to militarily prevent the US from throwing a monkey wrench into the plans of the Kim Jong-il administration for economic prosperity by 2012 – the centenary of the birth of founding father Kim Il-sung – in a bid to complete its membership of the three elite clubs of nuclear, space and economic powers.

Its second aim is to win the hearts and minds of the 70 million Korean people, North, South and abroad, and leave little doubt in their eyes that Kim Jong-il has what it takes to neutralize and phase out the American presence in Korea. This will hasten the divided parts of ancestral Korean land – bequeathed by Dankun 5,000 years ago and Jumon 2,000 years ago – coming together under a confederal umbrella as a reunified state.

The Asia Times story fails to make clear how  incinerating half the Korean peninsula will win Kim Jong Il the hearts and minds of the incinerated.

Though President Obama expresses a desire to employ the nebulas policy of “soft power” (that is, to say much while doing little), it is hard to imagine how this flaccid foreign policy approach will be perceived as anything but a sign of weakness by North Korea’s little dictator.

When the U.S. was in a shooting war North Korea (1950-1953), the new Eisenhower administration, refusing to continue the no-win war policies of President Harry Truman, conceived a plan to widen the war if North Korea refused to end hostilities. Carter Malasian, in his book on the Korean conflict writes:

American leaders issued a series of nuclear threats. First, on 21 May, Dulles [Secretary of State] told Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru that the USA would expand military action if the current round of talks failed. Dulles expected that his statement would be relayed to the Chinese. Second, on 27 Mary, [Gen. Mark] Clark sent Kim [Il Sung] and Peng a letter stating that negotiations had reached their final stage. Third, on 3 June, Ambassador Charles Bohlen in Moscow told Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov that the failure of armistice talks would create a situation that the USA hoped to avoid. All these statements were meant to convey American intent to escalate the war, and possibly use atomic weapons, if the Communists did not concede soon in negotiations.

Of course, North Korea agreed to an armistice that has lasted more than fifty years. But now that little Kim Jong Il has nuclear weapons, all bets are off.

According to the New York Times, Hawaii may be in North Korea’s crosshairs in time for the upcoming all-American holiday:

…the Obama administration says North Korea could launch a ballistic missile in the state’s direction — possibly around the Fourth of July, according to the Japanese news media — prompting the United States military to beef up defenses here.

In response, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced the deployment of ground-based interceptors and sea-based radar to shoot down any North Korean missile threat to Hawaii. This is ironic in light of candidate Obama’s pledge to “…cut investments in unproven missile defense systems.” The nation owes a tremendous debt of gratitude to President Ronald Reagan’s for his farsighted Strategic Defense Initiative – and Obama can thank his lucky Star Wars.

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The following is a documentary on the history of President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. It’s interesting, in light of Obama’s deployment of  missile defenses in Hawaii, how vociferous and condescending opposition was from the Democratic Left and the squishy Republican Center to Reagan’s missile defense concept. Thankfully, the Democratic Left and squishy Republicans lost and our nation is safer for it.

When the New York Times received a leak that the Bush administration was eavesdropping on conversations between al-Qaida and its U.S. operatives, the New York Times new it had a story with Pulitzer Prize written all over it. A year after the intercept program was launched, the Times printed a story on the secret program on it front page. According to the Times:

The White House asked The New York Times not to publish this article, arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny. After meeting with senior [Bush] administration officials to hear their concerns, the newspaper delayed publication for a year to conduct additional reporting.

In a speech before the National Press Club, then Vice President Dick Cheney said:

Our government prevented attacks and saved lives through the terrorist surveillance program, which let us intercept calls and track contacts between al-Qaida and persons inside the United States. The program was top secret, and for good reason, until the editors of the New York Times got it and put it on the front page. After 9/11, the Times spent months publishing the pictures and the stories of every single individual killed by al-Qaida on 9/11. Now, here was that same newspaper publishing secrets in a way that could only help al-Qaida. It impressed the Pulitzer Committee but it damned sure didn’t serve the interests of this country or the safety of our people.

When it came to “getting the story,” the lives of average Americans was not worth suppressing a story to the editors at the New York Times. However, when it comes to lives of their reporters, survival is a priority.

Seven months ago, Taliban terrorists kidnapped Times reporter David Rohde, his driver and a local reporter. The Times believed that keeping the story off its front page could save the life of their reporter. According to the Times’ executive editor Bill Keller:

From the early days of this ordeal, the prevailing view among David’s family, experts in kidnapping cases, officials of several governments and others we consulted was that going public could increase the danger to David and the other hostages. The kidnappers initially said as much. We decided to respect that advice, as we have in other kidnapping cases, and a number of other news organizations that learned of David’s plight have done the same. We are enormously grateful for their support.

Luckily, David Rohde and the other reporter escaped by climbing a wall of the compound where they were imprisoned and hiked to a Pakistani military camp. The reporters were later airlifted to a U.S. military base in Bagram, Afghanistan. It’s interesting that the Times was quite willing to suppress a story that endangered one of their reporters but showed no such restraint when printing stories tipping off al-Qaida to our government’s telephone intercept program – an act that clearly endangered all our lives.

Oh, I almost forgot; the driver, who was kidnapped along with the reporters by Taliban terrorists, was left behind. No matter, he is not nearly as important as a reporter.