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The polite leftist explanation for Obama’s lack of serious response to the events in Iran has been that such a response would allow Iran’s tyrannical leaders to blame the United States for the revolution currently occurring there.  There’s only one problem with that statement.  They’ve already blamed us.

Iranian authorities on Sunday blamed “terrorists” and rioters for clashes and Ahmadinejad told the United States and Britain on Sunday to stop interfering in the Islamic Republic’s internal affairs

Even a Los Angeles times , hardly be considered a bastion of conservative thought, has noticed that Iran has leapt up onto the blame train in its efforts to save its own backside.  This kind of thing was eminently predictable.  Even the ostensibly American Democrat Party did much the same thing, back when one of its own wasn’t in the White House.

Obama clearly thought that he could avoid taking blame for an action to aid freedom by not taking it.  Just as clearly, he was wrong.

The problem that Mr. Obama doesn’t seem to take into account is that being blamed for something doesn’t necessarily have to have any connection with reality whatever.  This is self evidently and particularly true when the subject, in this case Iran’s current regime, is scrambling to save its own life, worried about the retribution of the Iranian people. At the core of this issue, of course, is the idea that those working against freedom don’t give a damn about the truth.

This timid passivity of Obama’s, bordering on cowardice , is not American, particularly where freedom is concerned.  As I’ve said in previous writings on the subject, Americanism, at all levels is based on the idea that it is freedom,  not government, that is the solution for the human condition.  That is a truism the applicable not just to Americans, but to those the world over. Urekl mumbles about “Justice” and thinks his task complete. Of course, that’s not true.  Clearly the president doesn’t understand the situation.  This is not about what he euphemistically calls “justice”.  It’s not about the election, anymore, though that was one of the major triggers of these events.

As Don Surber says this morning:

Surber

…the people of Iran do not want justice. They want freedom. “Justice” is a word that can be bent by those in authority to fit whatever meaning suits their purpose. Social justice. Economic justice. Environmental justice.
Freedom is pretty much life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.Thomas Jefferson pretty much settled that argument.

The press release will not be read by the masses on the streets. A speech on video would be used to rally protesters. Obama went out of his way not to place it on YouTube.

The press release does signal to the Iranian theocracy that the United States will do nothing to support the people on the street. There will be no meddling. Not even a YouTube.

Many .. no… most presidents in our past including JFK, Ronald Reagan, and both Presidents Bush, as a few examples have spoken eloquently to that point about freedom.  More, each of them took action for that ideal.  Alas, is a lesson that President Urkel has yet to learn.

Don also speaks eloquently to the point I’ made the other day both here and at Pajamas Media, about hope and change not been possible for the Iranians but for our actions in the Middle East including Iraq:

To the Left, though, Obama tosses a talking point to try to obfuscate the inalienable truth that Meddling Works.

President Bush overthrew the government to Iran’s north in Afghanistan, and to its west in Iraq. That is meddling. That is pressure. That is a hope. That is change. You see, we neocons and President Bush were right. While Obama and the New York Times were willing to allow Iran to take over Iraq two years ago, Bush was not.

Joe Biden and famously predicted that President Urkel would be challenged by world events.  Of course, Biden was suggesting that his bosses managerial style and ability would be tested.  Old Joe didn’t know how right he was.  What’s being tested, just now, is the leftist rhetoric he rode into office on.  The reality is being exposed that the Neocons had this correct all along.

And President Urkel? well, you’ll find him over at the ice cream shop.

Clayton Cramer on the MSM:

The Obama Administration told a bunch of whoppers: it was going to support gay rights; it was going to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell; it was going to close Gitmo right away; it was going to pull our troops out of Iraq almost immediately; it was going to have no lobbyists working in the government; it was going to be transparent; it was going to have every bill visible in final form for five days before Obama signed it.

And unfortunately, the mainstream media bought all this garbage, asking no questions, never challenging candidate Obama about how all this was going to happen. And they are now just barely starting to challenge President Obama when they discover that he either lied to them, or didn’t have a clue what he was getting himself into as President

This blog, last August:

Jim Geraghty’s Law, National Review

:All Barack Obama statements come with an expiration date. All of them.

The Obamatard in Chief is a chronic liar.

We have a revolution in Iran.

Hat tip photo: Gateway Pundit.

Hat tip photo:   Gateway Pundit.

• Unlike Peter Arnet, it is beyond my capacity to analyze a war in real time
• To BobbyGibbs, this is not robust debate.
• This Dan Rather is courage.
• And you you Babs Boxer, these women have earned by respect..
• They shoot women, don’t they?
• One Woman with courage makes a majority

Rest in Peace:   Neda Agha Soltan

Addendum I: (Eric)

Her name was Neda, which means “voice” in Farsi. According to numerous online accounts picked up by media outlets worldwide, she was shot in the streets by Iranian state police while protesting today

So says Michelle, who has reax from around the ‘sphere.

Addendun II:  (David L)

Her name was Neda Agha Soltan according to Allah Pundit, Hot Air:

Word on the street via one Iranian tweeter is that her name was Neda Agha Soltan. That’s also the name circulating on a few websites and now being attributed to her in a hastily arranged Wikipedia bio. The rumor — and it’s all rumor until some newspaper tracks down her family — is that she was 27 years old and a philosophy student. I hope to god this isn’t really her photo because the thought of her being so beautiful and dignified makes the murder somehow that much more obscene.

I updated the original text.

It may be a mangling of Newt Gingrich and Walter E. Williams, but there is a sure fire way to get rid of stupid laws, make them universally appliicable   That is the people who enact the laws have to live by them.   Or in the case government healthcare, die by them.

As it stands right now,  Senator Oldsmobile, a/k/a Teddy Kennedy, is sponsoring, and pushing,  a healthcare bill that would have provisions for standards of care that Kennedy has no desire accept for himself,   The Kennedy bill would exempt members of Congresss from the standards of care Congress would impose on the public.   Betsy McCaughey, Wall Street Journal, proposes a simple test:

[W]hatever health-insurance law is passed should apply to members of Congress. If it isn’t good enough for them, it shouldn’t be imposed on the rest of us

If Knnnedy’s proposed standards of care are not good enough for him, they are not good enough for you.

Doctor Krauthammer today makes a great point about Obama’s response to the Iran situation:

Doctor Charles Krauthammer

…. this incipient revolution is no longer about the election. Obama totally misses the point. The election allowed the political space and provided the spark for the eruption of anti-regime fervor that has been simmering for years and awaiting its moment. But people aren’t dying in the street because they want a recount of hanging chads in suburban Isfahan. They want to bring down the tyrannical, misogynist, corrupt theocracy that has imposed itself with the very baton-wielding goons that today attack the demonstrators.

This started out about election fraud. But like all revolutions, it has far outgrown its origins. What’s at stake now is the very legitimacy of this regime — and the future of the entire Middle East.

This revolution will end either as a Tiananmen (a hot Tiananmen with massive and bloody repression or a cold Tiananmen with a finer mix of brutality and co-optation) or as a true revolution that brings down the Islamic Republic.

The latter is improbable but, for the first time in 30 years, not impossible. Imagine the repercussions. It would mark a decisive blow to Islamist radicalism, of which Iran today is not just standard-bearer and model, but financier and arms supplier. It would do to Islamism what the collapse of the Soviet Union did to communism — leave it forever spent and discredited.

Those repercussions would also include pointing to the downfall of Saddam in Iraq at the hands of George W. Bush. Long time readers will know I’ve been downright brutal at whiles with Bush on various topics, but the war wasn’t one of them.

It was that act of ousting Saddam, which started this desire for democracy on the part of the people in the middle east, in Iraq certainly… but now Iran, as well. Do not make the mistake of thinking the two situations so isolated from each other. Being neighboring countries with less than well-protected borders, news of what’s changed for the better in Iraq has doubtless started filtering across the border, person to person.  Look at the map, here.

Islamic Extremism is being pushed to the edges of this map. Consider the changing and rather ironic dynamics here.

For all the animosity built up on the Iran- Iraq war and before, the degree of social isolation in Iraq because of Saddam, was actually a boon… a protectant against the influence of the rest of the world, from the point of view of the Iranian regime.  Similarly, Afghanistan, run as it was by the thugs, also provided Iran with Isolation they couldn’t have purchased with any price of arms or money.

That’s important for this reason: Have you ever seen a dictatorship where isolation wasn’t part of the mixture that made it possible? I’ve suggested in the past that this was part of the reason for going into Iraq in the first place; to start that ball rolling. The momentum of history has changed as a result of that act of Bush in Iraq. It has spread to Iran, now, and best the Iranian regime can hope for is to delay it for a while, regardless of how this situation works out in the shorter term. The genie is out of the bottle, now.

Word about what is possible under a greater degree of individual freedom is hardly information that will be passed between the Iran Iraq and Afghanistan that existed as little as a decade ago.  Pakistan, now finds itself in a  fight for it’s life with the extremists, but it does seem one they’ll win.  Syria, on the other end of this map,  is now isolated from other extremist states,and will be increasingly unable to aid the cause of the extremists in any significant way. Eventually the pressure there will build to the point where it has in Iran, and freedom will take root there, as well.

As The Doctor says:

It would mark a decisive blow to Islamist radicalism, of which Iran today is not just standard-bearer and model, but financier and arms supplier. It would do to Islamism what the collapse of the Soviet Union did to communism — leave it forever spent and discredited.

In the region, it would launch a second Arab spring. The first in 2005 — the expulsion of Syria from Lebanon, the first elections in Iraq and early liberalization in the Gulf states and Egypt — was aborted by a fierce counterattack from the forces of repression and reaction, led and funded by Iran.

Now, with Hezbollah having lost elections in Lebanon and with Iraq establishing the institutions of a young democracy, the fall of the Islamist dictatorship in Iran would have an electric and contagious effect. The exception — Iraq and Lebanon — becomes the rule. Democracy becomes the wave. Syria becomes isolated; Hezbollah and Hamas, patronless. The entire trajectory of the region is reversed.

Go and read the article for his full comments.

Meanwhile, back here, in the states, we have what passes for a leader under the name of Obama. As I said in last night’s Ramble… Obama’s choice to remain near silent in all of this will cost a lot of Iranian lives on the way to that freedom, however. Thus the question for us as a nation, is how we will be remembered by the Iranian people and indeed the rest of the world, once that shift to freedom takes place. As it stands now, I can’t see it being the world’s perception of us not supporting freedom in this case, being a good one. They’ll remember an entire generation of Iranian freedom fighters getting washed away by these thugs… while, under what passes for leadership by Obama, we stood by and refused to help.

And at the risk of seeming petty, there’s another issue that I’ll broach and leave hanging, not having fully thought it through;

What does it mean to all of Obama’s anti-Bush rhetoric when by virtue of Bush’s actions Democracy inexorably spreads through the region as now looks to me to be the case? Is it too much to suggest that Obama may actually want this revolution… and that in reality is what it is… to fail so as to prevent the hated BUUUSSSHHHHH from looking… Obama rhetoric not withstanding… like he had it correctly all along? What possible reason might Obama have for wanting to see the Middle East’s bid democracy fail, or at least minimize the connection to the actions of  George Bush?

Welcome one and all tot he most intense nightly read anywhere on the sphere… The BitsBlog Nightly Ramble

This is the Camper Edition

• Whistle Blowers and principles?  You know, when cases like this came up while Bush (either one) was in office, I used to take it on the chin from some well-meaning folks, who expressed concern… (I guess that’s a gentle way to put it) that I was not sticking to my principles, when I questioned the intent of people blowing whistles on Republicans. Glenn Reynolds, this morning, points to a Byron York article called How Republicans Can Crack the Americorps Scandal.  and says:
  

  You’d hope, of course, that Democrats would be concerned about abuses of executive power, too.
  They used to be . . . .

  Well, exactly. John Hinderaker wades in here, too.  Here it is:  I have never been convinced that Democrats were arguing from principle, when they’re constantly screaming about everything Republicans do, while having an extensive record of ignoring the abuses of their own, and even loudly defending them. Their reax on this most recent round of Obama abuses re the IG’s including Walpin goes directly to that point. I take claims to principle on all this as so much bilge, when my opposition is so clearly operating in a pure partisan and unprincipled manner. Until such time as I’m convinced they’re arguing from principle, it’s naught but the usual liberal partisanship. It should be dealt with on that level. How will I know we’re dealing with a principled argument? When I see Democrats start blowing whistles on their own….demanding an investigation into the misdeeds of their own….Obama, Dodd, Jefferson, Barney Frank, and so on. Until then, until I see that happen, they’re engaged in partisan attacks while hiding under “principle’ .  It’s merely a garbage ploy and should be treated as such. And I will, here. It’s that simple.  As an example:

• Courage? BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!  That’s what the White House Muckties are now calling the firing of Gerald Walpin.  Talk about your ultimate spin.
• No Census: You know she’s right. You KNOW Acorn is collecting data. Why feed the beast?
• Did you like those forclosures?  Get yourself ready for round two. Hope and change, and all that.
• Yeah, I saw the bit with  Babs “da Bitch” Boxer… And I use her title since she worked so hard to get it.  I figure the military has never been popular with the left anyway, so it it wasn’t a lack of the exact stroking her ego thinks her ‘position’ requires, to get her to be tacky AND clueless, it would have been some other nit she’d pick. Now, what she actually did to get the title of senator, much less what she’s done since then to deserve the title Senator since then, is another question altogether. Next to nothing, in my view. But she did earn her nickname. It’s well-deserved.
• Hey Steve:
  

  “Yes, the HONEYMOON IS OVER hype is overblown. But it is a legitimate story.“

  Yeah, well, maybe how overblown it is should be judged within the framework of the degree to which pre-election stories about his popularity were overblown by a press trying to create their own reality?  As a buddy used to say; It ain’t where you’re at, it’s where you’re goin’… The speed with which Obama’s numbers are falling here is the story. The support he’s had has always been fragile at best, as the current numbers and the direction they’re taking makes very clear.

• No, Neal…  I’m sure you’ve missed a few things, but even the list you have there would be enough to explain someone being removed from office. Assuming they weren’t a Democrat, at least.
•  Here’s a clue, Barry:  When you’ve lost your own doctor on your attempts at government takeover of healthcare, you’ve seriously screwed up.
• Play for Pay a way of life with Democrats… including Obama. 19 ambassadorships went for sale?
• The Great apology  continues unabated. Remember I spoke this morning about self-hating Democrats?  Case in point.
• Hey, RIAA: Isn’t it about time you quit this nonsense?

Even the Egyptian Government gets it from the June 18, 2009. in Al-Ahram (Egypt),

“Events in Iran have followed in close succession since the announcement that fundamentalist candidate Ahmadinejad was elected to a second term in the presidential elections. Between the mass demonstrations [of the reformists] decrying electoral fraud, and the counter-demonstrations accusing the reformists of allegiance to the West, the international community has stood confused about what position to take towards this democratic outpouring in a country that is on the threshold of acquiring nuclear capabilities, something all international and regional actors consider an unwelcome development.

“The caution that has characterized the position of the principle international actors towards the abuses occurring in the streets of Iran, up to and including the killing [of protesters], may be sending the wrong message to the ruling powers there. The upshot of this message is that the strong desire to reach a political resolution to the Iranian nuclear crisis and to avoid a clash with the Iranian authorities is a goal that supersedes all other considerations – even if these other considerations be support for international principles and human rights, and the urging of the [Iranian] government to stop the violence and bloodshed and to lend an ear to the views of the Iranian opposition. [This opposition] has expressed its rejection of the election results and its resistance to a second term for the current president, primarily for domestic reasons, and principle among them [Ahmadinejad’s] failed management of the economy.”

Hat tips:   Gateway Pundit and Free Repubois

As a result of having the ability to carry several hundred books in my ‘smart phone”… a Palm Treo, I now find myself catching up with a number of the classics, mostly because they were the easiest to obtain in a format that could be converted to my phone… but more because I’ve begun to feel the need once again to re-read them, wondering among other things if the little wisdoms that 50  -plus -years brings with it, will aid me to a better understanding of them than I had when I read them at age 17. 

 The most recent of them to cross my list is “The Education of Henry Adams”, which is available free, on line, here.  I’m only up to the second chapter as this post goes online.

Some background is required. Adams was the descendant of the Adams family of Revolutionary and presidential fame, and the book goes to some length to so describe him, for the environment he is steeped in is the point of the entire first chapter, and in many ways the entire work:

UNDER the shadow of Boston State House, turning its back on the house of John Hancock, the little passage called Hancock Avenue runs, or ran, from Beacon Street, skirting the State House grounds, to Mount Vernon Street, on the summit of Beacon Hill; and there, in the third house below Mount Vernon Place, February 16, 1838, a child was born, and christened later by his uncle, the minister of the First Church after the tenets of Boston Unitarianism, as Henry Brooks Adams.

Had he been born in Jerusalem under the shadow of the Temple and circumcised in the Synagogue by his uncle the high priest, under the name of Israel Cohen, he would scarcely have been more distinctly branded, and not much more heavily handicapped in the races of the coming century, in running for such stakes as the century was to offer; but, on the other hand, the ordinary traveller, who does not enter the field of racing, finds advantage in being, so to speak, ticketed through life, with the safeguards of an old, established traffic. Safeguards are often irksome, but sometimes convenient, and if one need s them at all, one is apt to need them badly. A hundred years earlier, such safeguards as his would have secured any young man’s success; and although in 1838 their value was not very great compared with what they would have had in 1738, yet the mere accident of starting a twentieth century career from a nest of associations so colonial,—so trogloditic,—as the First Church, the Boston State House, Beacon Hill, John Hancock and John Adams, Mount Vernon Street and Quincy, all crowding on ten pounds of unconscious babyhood, was so queer as to offer a subject of curious speculation to the baby long after he had witnessed the solution. What could become of such a child of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when he should wake up to find himself required to play the game of the twentieth?

With this then in mind, we pan down a bit to a passage I found strikingly apt in describing the environmental roots of northeastern liberalism: (Emph is my own, of course)

Henry Adams

The atmosphere of education in which he lived was colonial, revolutionary, almost Cromwellian, as though he were steeped, from his greatest grandmother’s birth, in the odor of political crime. Resistance to something was the law of New England nature; the boy looked out on the world with the instinct of resistance; for numberless generations his predecessors had viewed the world chiefly as a thing to be reformed, filled with evil forces to be abolished, and they saw no reason to suppose that they had wholly succeeded in the abolition; the duty was unchanged. That duty implied not only resistance to evil, but hatred of it. Boys naturally look on all force as an enemy, and generally find it so, but the New Englander, whether boy or man, in his long struggle with a stingy or hostile universe, had learned also to love the pleasure of hating; his joys were few. 9
Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, had always been the systematic organization of hatreds, and Massachusetts politics had been as harsh as the climate. The chief charm of New England was harshness of contrasts and extremes of sensibility,—a cold that froze the blood, and a heat that boiled it,—so that the pleasure of hating—one’s self if no better victim offered,—was not its rarest amusement; but the charm was a true and natural child of the soil, not a cultivated weed of the ancients. The violence of the contrast was real and made the strongest motive of education. The double exterior nature gave life its relative values. Winter and summer, cold and heat, town and country, force and freedom, marked two modes of life and thought, balanced like lobes of the brain.

 Perhaps the above passages, even the parts I’ve highlighted, won’t mean much to some of you, but this one struck a chord with me. I’ve often enough regarded the subject of hate and self-loathing as revealed in the modern liberal. I am reading comments to my post over at Pajamas Media, just now, and there’s a fine example of those thoughts, there:

I warned long before the election that Barack Obama is a self-hating American who primarily blames America for most of the evils in the world

  The concept of having such hatreds regarded as a matter of  upbringing and education and a societal environment in a text written over 100 years gone, now, is a remarkable “Aha!” moment, to me. It’s particularly enlightening when one understands it’s Adams himself doing the writing in a strange third person sort of way; he’s describing his own upbringing.

Notice again, also, the passage in the second quote;

…for numberless generations his predecessors had viewed the world chiefly as a thing to be reformed, filled with evil forces to be abolished, and they saw no reason to suppose that they had wholly succeeded in the abolition; the duty was unchanged

The Union movement of today is unabashedly liberal in it’s leanings.  I’ve said often enough that Unions when they were first formed had in fact a purpose; there was abuse to be certain and Unions were an effective front against such abuse.  Yet the days of such abuses as they fought back then have long since ended, as we have discussed in this blog on many occasions.  Yet, like their Northeastern liberal roots, the see no reason to suppose they’d succeeded in the abolition of such abuses, and so go merrily on, demanding more and more from employers until such time as the employers go under from the financial strain of knuckling under to the demands of the unions… which in our case, have had the government helping them to that end, however unconsciously.

Clearly, these qualities are not new to the world, if Adams made these observations at the beginning of the industrial age. 

I don’t intend to review the book, here.. it’s outside the scope of the direction this blog has always taken. (I don’t think I”ve ever written a book review for this blog, though I’ve writen them on occasions for other pubications.) But I was struck with the historical perspective being so close to the positions I’ve taken as a matter of course here at BitsBlog. I see it as part vindication, part reaffirmation.

In last night’s Ramble, I alluded to a forthcoming  article  of mine over at Pajamas Media.

It’s up this morning, and about as subtle as a hand grenade.

At every turn since becoming president, as various problems have presented themselves, Barack Obama has raised the power of government over people (usually the least accountable government possible, his pledge for transparency notwithstanding) and eschewed the free market solution. He’s taken over the banks and the auto companies. He’s now working on taking over health care. He’s appointed “czars” who are not accountable to any elected authority and who even Democratic Senator Robert Byrd insists are unconstitutional.

These are not the actions of someone who thinks freedom paramount. Clearly government, and not freedom, is Obama’s panacea.

With this is mind, why are we so shocked and amazed when he refuses to stand up for freedom for the people of Iran? He’s already made it consistently clear that he doesn’t support freedom. Rather, he thinks government is the solution for every problem.

It’s available here.

Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post:

And where is our president? Afraid of “meddling.” Afraid to take sides between the head-breaking, women-shackling exporters of terror — and the people in the street yearning to breathe free. This from a president who fancies himself the restorer of America’s moral standing in the world

Note to the unhingted one, thw Washington Post’s best columinist has not been fired.

Welcome, one and all to the most intense nightly read anywhere on the ‘sphere… The BitsBlog Nigtly Ramble

• Children: This observation is so obviously true, that it’s interesting it still has to be made. I guess it’s the same function, though, that I spoke of to him a while ago, when I spoke of teaching and re-teaching the concepts of freedom.  I hesitate to try to add anything to the line, but of course I will, if only to call attention to it.Note the use of the phrase “seemingly trivially”. Moving mountains with the turn of a phrase, that boy. It’s not trivial, of course. It is, rather from the perspective of the child, foundational. Children build their lives, their personality, on what are to us, small things.
• Iran: Yes, the news coming out of Iran is increasingly worrisome. The suggestions are there, that the government there is gearing up for a serious crackdown. Michael Ledeen at Pajamas Media comments:
  

  …the most powerful leaders in Iran are facing a life or death showdown. Both Khamenei and Mousavi-the two opposed icons of the moment, at least-know that they will either win or die. After nightfall, millions of revolutionaries chant from their rooftops “Allah is Great” and they are chants of defiance hurled at the Islamic Republic. I cannot imagine a soft landing.

  Nor, frankly, can I.

  The issue for the future of world politics though, however the part Ledeen speaks to falls out, becomes one of our response, or more correctly, our lack of one. I’ve written to this point, in an article scheduled for sometime this weekend, also at Pajamas Media :

  Mr. Obama could and should have spoken up at once, at the very least, telling Iran’s current leadership that how it treats its opposition will determine its place in the world going forward. But no…. that calls for a real leader. What we have instead is Obama, who now withholds comment, plays it safe, hoping apparently to win the day with his winning smile and a few shovelfuls of manure. But win…. what, exactly?

  Obama’s cooperative silence might get a brief bit of peace, perhaps, or at least the absence of war… (and no, they’re not the same thing)… but the freedom that Reagan and JFK placed so high a value on? Apparently not.

  This is kind of betrayal of freedom that those around the world will remember. It is that betrayal that those folks will remember, regardless of how this particular upset in Iran falls out, but particularly if the current regime remains in place.  At this point, and barring a lot of Iranian blood being shed, I don’t see it being changed. even with a lot of Iranian blood being shed, without the overt support of the west, I don’t see regime change happening.  Those seeking that regime change from within Iran will surely be jailed, and most will die quietly. Mousavi particularly, being now the defacto leader of the opposition,  not survive if the mullahs prevail. We’ve seen this far too often to think it’s going to go down any other way, now.

  Don’t misunderstand…  I have no doubt in my mind that Iran, eventually, will get their government back under the control of the people. Revolution will happen, change will come, and there will be freedom in Iran. There’s nothing that will stop that now. It’s simply a matter of time. Perhaps, decades. That ball was started rolling by George W. Bush with the first domino being Iraq. Obama’s choice to remain near silent in all of this will cost a lot of Iranian lives on the way to that freedom, however.  Thus the question for us as a nation, is how we will be remembered by the Iranian people and indeed the rest of the world, once that shift to freedom takes place. As it stands now, I can’t see it being the world’s perception of us not supporting freedom in this case, being a good one. They’ll remember an entire generation of Iranian freedom fighters getting washed away by these thugs… while, under what passes for leadership by Obama,  we stood by and refused to help.

• More Iran:  I mentioned Micheal Totten yesterday, and his non-stop Iranathon. God bless the man for slugging away at this stuff.  I also mentioned him being on Moran’s show last night, and tossed the link, if you’ll recall. Now, I’ll toss a link for James Joyner’s show, since Totten was there last night. And here you are.
•  Cue Richard Nixon: The White House is refusing to answer questions about the AmeriCorps IG firing, says Byron York. Here’s the thing, though…  it’s not just Walpin… it’s now three IG firings that are being questioned, says Dan Riehl.  I won’t say this is going to be Obama’s undoing, because Democrats simply are not held to the same ethical standards Republicans are.  But I will say that had John McCain done anything of the sort, the Democrats would have the tar pots all warmed up already.
• Speaking of ethics  investigations: The issues surrounding Chris Dodd are still out there and growing.
• And more: Not that the White House or Dodd are the only ethics challenged Democrats.
• A little late, guys…  Seems Obama is becoming increasingly unpopular as people get the idea that his policies have some ramifications…. Oh.. and Killing that fly the other day seems a major irritant to the PETA folks.  Heh. When a leftist loses PETA as a support group….
• Pay no attention to that man behind the curtin:  ABC is now claiming that the reason it won’t take paid ads talking back at PresBO about government healthcare is that they don’t take advocacy ads. Of course we’re not supposed to notice that the whole show they’re planning over there is an advocacy ad, right?  I figure they’re so close to the thing, they don’t think it corrupt. Look for example at the rather troubling voting patterns at ABC news, and you’ll see what I mean.As George Carlin once observed… “Have you ever noticed your own farts don’t smell so bad?” Seems to me something of the sort is in operation here with ABC. More properly, perhaps, is something I said to this point a few years ago at Q&O…””When standards go by the way, people tend to fall to their own devices, and beliefs.”
  “Now, by their own polling, the US press is a group of people who are overwhelingly leftist to the tune of 85-90%. Which way will things fall among such a group, when those journalistic standards get bypassed? Which way is objectivity more likely to fail?” And surely, objectivity isn’t happening at ABC.
• ABANDON SHIP!!!!   Even Tom Daschle, one of the Obama inner circle on healthcare  from the off, is now telling him to ditch this turkey.  
• (Sigh)  All I can say about this story is the guy went out doing what he loved doing.
• Message to Stephen Collins:  Hey, Moron… here’s how: Arthur Shawcross.  Not that I think you’ve got the spine to understand that, either.

The National Bureau of Economic Research  has released a study purporting to show that women’s happiness has declined since the ‘Seventies, or about since when Riic came off the market.  Color me skeptical that happiness is actually a  measurable metric   Oh, I accept that happiness exists, and the purported decline seems probable enough.   I just  don’t see how  it can be measured.

Having said that, assuming the conclusion to be true, the the great lady, Phyllis Schlafly, Townhall, weighs in, here us one of her thoughts:

Feminist organizations such as the National Organization for Women held consciousness -raising sessions where they exchanged tales of how badly some man had treated them. Grievances are like flowers — if you water them, they will grow, and self-imposed victimhood is not a recipe for happiness.

I mean have you ever seen a happy gender feminist?    They wear their anger as a badge of honor.

Amendment XXI, Section 4 (1967) Constitution of the United States:

Section 4. Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Reference:  Wikipedia

White House response as to why AmeriCorp Inspector General Gerald Waldpin was fired, from  John Gerstien, Politico:

“Mr. Walpin was removed after a review was unanimously requested by the bi-partisan Board of the Corporation,” Obama ethics counsel Norm Eisen wrote in a letter to senators Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Susan Collins (R-Me.), with a copy directed to McCaskill. “The Board’s action was precipitated by a May 20, 2009 Board meeting at which Mr. Walpin was confused, disoriented, unable to answer questions and exhibited other behavior that led the Board to question his capacity to serve.”.

Hat tip:  Ed Morrissey, Hot Air.

From CNN, President Obama confused). (video

Hat tip video:   Glenn Reynolds, Instantpundit.

In review:

• Constitution authority – check.
• Precedence –  check.
• Confused – check
• Disoriented – check.

So what are you waiting for Joe?

Eric, did I miss anything?

Welcome, one and all to the most intense nightly read anywhere on the ‘sphereThe BitsBlog Nightly Ramble

This is the “Bread, MIlk and a Sixpack Edition”

• Publius/Whalen Redux: By way of James Joyner, I see that the English courts have ruled that Bloggers don’t have a legal right to anonimity.
  

  .A British judge has ruled against a blogger who sought an injunction against having his secret identity published in the Times.

  Thousands of bloggers who operate behind the cloak of anonymity have no right to keep their identities secret, the High Court ruled yesterday. In a landmark decision, Mr Justice Eady refused to grant an order to protect the anonymity of a police officer who is the author of the NightJack blog. The officer, Richard Horton, 45, a detective constable with Lancashire Constabulary, had sought an injunction to stop The Times from revealing his name.[…]

  In the first case dealing with the privacy of internet bloggers, the judge ruled that Mr Horton had no “reasonable expectation” to anonymity because “blogging is essentially a public rather than a private activity”. The judge also said that even if the blogger could have claimed he had a right to anonymity, the judge would have ruled against him on public interest grounds.

  […]

  The action arose after Patrick Foster, a Times journalist, identified the NightJack blogger “by a process of deduction and detective work, mainly using information on the internet,” the judge said.

  

  James Joyner

  It’s hard to argue against Eady’s reasoning here. The journalist found Horton’s identity through legitimate means and there was a genuine public interest in learning who this cop was who was revealing all manner of juicy inside details about the police force.

  Well, look, James… forget “Public Interest’. It’s the ‘Public Interest’ argument that leads us down the merry path of Kelo V New London. We know where THAT leads. My concoern would be the invidual’s interest. for example, Ed Whalen.  Unlike that case, which was one individual against another, we’re arguing here in this case, that a government sympathetic entity… the Times…  wants to remove the cloak of anonimity from a  blogger so as to not allow said blogger to make the government look bad, really. That strikes me as a rather totalitarian move. James says:

  I would add, however, that some motivations for revealing the identity of anonymous (or, as in most of these cases) pseudonymous bloggers are more noble than others.

  Well, this raises the question, though of how one deals with nobility of purpose as a matter of law. And who gets to decide what is and is not ‘noble’?

  And back to the individual. “Publius”, call your office. I mean, was he ‘noble’ in his attacks on Whalen? And who gets to rule on THAT? More to the point how does one as a matter of law protect indivduals from anonymous attack while not applying that same protection to government? I’ve no problems with Whalen outing Publius, as an example, but the Nixon administration outting ‘Deep Throat” by virtue of the same law is inherrently dangerous, in my view.

• A Shortage of WHAT???  The Dallas Morning News  and their supurb Automtive Reporter, Terry Box, is reporting today that dealers are running short on SUV’s.  Yes, that’s right… SUV’s are selling. Selling like crazy, in fact. In combo with manufacturing shutdowws, taht means short supply.  Proving once again, as we’ve been saying at this blog for years, now, that given the chocie Americans simply will not buy the kind of vehicles the left wants them to.
• Affair of the week:  Sentaor John Ensign, last night decided to spill the beans about an extra marital affair.  You knew this was coming, when someone labeled him as havinga  reasonably fair chance at a White House run.  I doubt he’d have gone very far in such efforts, anyway, but be that as it may,, there was some blackmail involved, apparently.
• 10% unemployment?  Well, that’s what Obama’s saying now.  I think we can pretty much figure on it going far higher, given three factors… an aversion to truth that makes him look bad, Obama economic policies, and the fact that he’s already predicted we’ see no higher than 8%.  We see how that worked out.
• Iran Blogging: Michael Totten is doing it just as well as I’ve seen anyone do it. He was on Rick Moran’s show last night, too. Very informative.  To the point, in fact, where I’ll take the unusual step of making it available right here:

• Krugman gets a visit from the ghost of postings past: Courtsy of  Megan McCardle. Says Krugman
  

  The basic point is that the recession of 2001 wasn’t a typical postwar slump, brought on when an inflation-fighting Fed raises interest rates and easily ended by a snapback in housing and consumer spending when the Fed brings rates back down again. This was a prewar-style recession, a morning after brought on by irrational exuberance. To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.

  Clearly, Krugman got what he wanted. Once again the problem was government meddling in the market. It’s seldom that an economy falls down on it’s own… it’s usually pushed off that cliff by ideological elements within government, with the full coercive power of government backing them. And now we understand whose ideology brought this one about, don’t we?