It is an old rule of politics. When your opponent is in the process of destroying himself, don't get in his way. Despite tanking poll numbers both for themselves and their president, congressional Democrats have persisted for months in a stunning act of political self-destruction. The evaporation of home-state support for Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson and the retirements of Christopher Dodd and Byron Dorgan should give the White House and the congressional majority pause, but to date they haven't.
So should Republicans repair to the sidelines and watch the minions of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi strut over the cliff?
Not a chance.
Taking back the House and perhaps the Senate in 2010—not just doing well—will require winning back trust lost between 2000 and 2006. Here are the top 10 things the GOP must do in 2010:
10) Face up to why the party lost in 2006 and 2008. Pollster Kelly Anne Conway reported in mid-2005 that her polls had detected rising disaffection among a group of 2004 GOP voters. Defined by attitudes rather than demographics, their problem wasn't with Iraq, as the media imagined, but with the increase in federal domestic spending and deficits.
According to one veteran of the GOP leadership speaking on background this fall, the party's 2008 exit poll showed that these swing voters anticipated a left-leaning Obama presidency but wanted to teach the GOP a lesson. Last year's collapse of support for the liberal Republican candidate in New York's 23rd congressional district in favor of the Conservative Party nominee reflected the continuing disgust of former Republican loyalists.
9) Don't lose sight of why support for Democrats is tanking. What spending-sensitive voters didn't anticipate were trillion dollar bank and auto bailouts, trillion dollar deficits, a trillion dollar health-care overhaul, and a trillion dollar stimulus bill. When he traded his health-care vote for Nebraska Medicaid funding, Sen. Nelson made himself the emblem of what these voters abhor in Washington.
8) Face the fact that many swing voters who want Democrats out of power don't particularly want Republicans in. Whatever their declared party affiliation, these voters are anti-establishment. Party is secondary to them. They are not yet convinced that, if returned to power, the GOP will deliver the cheaper, more limited government it has long promised.
7) Fight for spending cuts now. The congressional GOP's nearly united front against the stimulus bill and complete unity against the health-care overhaul were good initial steps. More is needed. The GOP should resist increases in domestic spending on every parliamentary front. Great gestures matter. As part of this resistance, Republicans should renounce earmarks. They shouldn't wait for Democrats to go along. The House and Senate GOP caucuses should walk away from earmarks, leaving Democrats alone to defend this symbol of D.C.'s degeneracy.
6) For the midterm election, unite around a clear agenda of repeal. The party should give its candidates a list of programs and spending that will be up for cancellation the hour a Republican Congress is sworn in. At the top of the list should be the Troubled Asset Relief Program, unspent stimulus funds, and the health-care overhaul.
5) Add in an agenda of market-freeing reforms in health care, energy, environmental and education policy. Scholarly centers such as the Hoover Institution, the Pacific Research Institute, and the Manhattan Institute have developed market-freeing solutions to health inflation, energy dependence, real and immediate environmental challenges, and education quality. Reform for congressional Democrats means more spending and more mandates. After the health-care debate the nation has rejected that 1930s-style model. The new model's time has come.
4) Add to that a serious plan for moving to a surplus and reducing federal debt. In the past, critics of overspending have focused on minutiae, studies of the mating habits of insects and the like. Their critics have rightly noted that the government can't get to a balanced budget that way. So what will it take? Lay it out.
3) Start talking about the need to reform Social Security and Medicare. Swing voters know these programs could devastate federal finances. They want assurance that politicians know this, too, and are committed to fixing them. Talk of reforming these programs is no longer the third rail of politics. It will win the swing voters' respect.
2) Tax cuts must be part of the answer. The surpluses of the late '90s were to a significant extent a product of the growth in revenues that came after the capital gains tax was cut. The Democrats' theology—actually economic superstition—prohibits them from renewing the 2003 tax cuts, the looming expiration of which has been a drag on the economy ever since they recaptured Congress. Campaign for immediate renewal—and even greater cuts in the capital gains tax. Start talking about a flat tax as the next step.
1) Take a lesson from Ronald Reagan and emphasize that your programs are based on consistent principles leading to a hopeful future for all Americans. Reclaim the party's franchise for economic growth, entrepreneurship, personal liberty, and spending restraint. This is the route to a big victory in November—and a true service to the nation.
Mr. Judge is managing director of the Washington, D.C.,-based White House Writers Group and served as a special assistant and speechwriter to President Ronald Reagan.
Energy: As energy prices surge to uncomfortably high levels, a top administration official wants to make it harder for U.S. companies to get more oil and gas. Once again, we're shooting ourselves in the foot on energy.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar couldn't have picked a worse time to announce that he's placing new barriers on the development of oil and gas resources. Last year's rise in oil was the largest in a decade, and crude prices today have topped $82 a barrel.
Yet Salazar on Wednesday announced plans, as the energy news service Greenwire put it, that "will require more detailed environmental reviews, more public input and less use of a provision to streamline leasing."
In short, private energy development efforts are going backward.
Worse, Salazar has politicized energy to an unseemly degree. In unveiling his new plans and trying to lay blame somewhere else for recent energy price jumps, he said: "The previous administration's 'anywhere, anyhow' policy on oil and gas development ran afoul of communities, carved up the landscape and fueled costly conflicts that created uncertainty for investors and industry."
This isn't the first time Salazar's turned our energy future into a political debate. In November, he lashed out at the oil and gas industry, accusing it of "behaving like an arm" of the Republican Party and decrying the industry's "untruths."
"Trade groups need to understand that they do not own the nation's public lands," he said.
He's right. They don't own it. We do. And because of Salazar's unwise and even hostile energy stewardship, we will likely suffer through years and years of higher prices for crude oil, natural gas and other badly needed resources.
As the chart shows, oil jumped from $44 a barrel at the start of 2009 to $83 a barrel at Wednesday's close. It's no accident.
Salazar's latest move partly reverses the clear intent of a 2005 law, passed by a Republican Congress, that would speed up and streamline permits for energy projects on public lands. In effect he's pawning our energy future to political expediency.
The U.S. is sitting on an immense supply of oil and gas, probably larger than anywhere else in the world. We have at least 86 billion barrels of oil and 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas offshore. As much as 35 billion barrels of oil lies waiting to be tapped in Alaska and the Chukchi Sea. A massive 2.2 trillion barrels of energy lies in our oil shale deposits in Utah, Wyoming and Colorado.
Let's put this in perspective: Since 1859, when the first oil well was drilled in Titusville, Pa., the world has used 1.1 trillion barrels of oil. We have twice that amount locked up in oil shale deposits, mostly on federal lands. By comparison, the current No. 1 in proven oil reserves, Saudi Arabia, has just 266 billion barrels of oil.
Worldwide, according to the respected Cambridge Energy Research Associates, as many as 4.8 trillion barrels of crude may be left. And a lot of it is here in the U.S.
All this is important because, like it or not, the U.S. will still depend on carbon-based fossil fuels for 80% of its energy by 2035, according to the Energy Department. Yet this administration seems intent on leaving it in the ground, opting instead to enact a cap-and-trade law that will cost the U.S. economy trillions of dollars while doing little if anything to cut C02 output.
"When it comes to paving the way for the responsible development of homegrown, job-creating energy resources, no administration in history has done more to ensure producers do less," said Tom Pyle, head of the nonpartisan Institute for Energy Research.
During the next 25 years, U.S. energy consumption is expected to grow by 15%, according to government estimates. We desperately need all the energy we can get — now.
If not, we face a future of rising prices, higher inflation, slower economic growth and lower standards of living.
That may be change, but it doesn't sound very hopeful.
Kim Peek gained wide recognition for his extraordinary memory.
December 27, 2009
In 1988, the film “Rain Man,” about an autistic savant played by Dustin Hoffman, shed a humane light on the travails of autism while revealing the extraordinary powers of memory that a small number of otherwise mentally disabled people possess, ostensibly as a side effect of their disability.
The film won four Oscars, including best picture, best actor and, for Barry Morrow and Ronald Bass, best original screenplay. But it never would have been made if Mr. Morrow had not had a chance meeting with Kim Peek, who inspired him to write the film.
Mr. Peek was not autistic — not all savants are autistic and not all autistics are savants — but he was born with severe brain abnormalities that impaired his physical coordination and made ordinary reasoning difficult. He could not dress himself or brush his teeth without help. He found metaphoric language incomprehensible and conceptualization baffling.
But with an astonishing skill that allowed him to read facing pages of a book at once — one with each eye — he read as many as 12,000 volumes. Even more remarkable, he could remember what he had read.
Indeed, Mr. Peek, who died Dec. 19 at home in Salt Lake City, had perhaps the world’s most capacious memory for facts. He was 58. The cause was a heart attack, said his father, Fran Peek.
Almost all documented savants — people with an extraordinary depth of knowledge and the ability to recall it — have been restricted in their expertise to specific fields like mathematics, chess, art or music. But Mr. Peek had a wide range of interests and could instantly answer the most arcane questions on subjects as diverse as history, sports, music, geography and movies.
“He was the Mount Everest of memory,” Dr. Darold A. Treffert, an expert on savants who knew Mr. Peek for 20 years, said in an interview.
Mr. Peek had memorized so many Shakespearean plays and musical compositions and was such a stickler for accuracy, his father said, that they had to stop attending performances because he would stand up and correct the actors or the musicians.
“He’d stand up and say: ‘Wait a minute! The trombone is two notes off,’ ” Fran Peek said.
Mr. Peek had an uncanny facility with the calendar.
“When an interviewer offered that he had been born on March 31, 1956, Peek noted, in less than a second, that it was a Saturday on Easter weekend,” Dr. Treffert and Dr. Daniel D. Christensen wrote about Mr. Peek in Scientific American in 2006.
They added: “He knows all the area codes and ZIP codes in the U.S., together with the television stations serving those locales. He learns the maps in the front of phone books and can provide MapQuest-like travel directions within any major U.S. city or between any pair of them. He can identify hundreds of classical compositions, tell when and where each was composed and first performed, give the name of the composer and many biographical details, and even discuss the formal and tonal components of the music. Most intriguing of all, he appears to be developing a new skill in middle life. Whereas before he could merely talk about music, for the past two years he has been learning to play it.”
Mr. Peek, who was dismissed as mentally retarded as a child and later misdiagnosed as autistic, led a sheltered life, with few people outside his family aware of his remarkable gifts. Then, in 1984, he met Mr. Morrow at a meeting of the Association of Retarded Citizens in Arlington, Tex. Mr. Peek’s father was chairman of the group’s communications committee, and Mr. Morrow had helped create two television movies about a retarded man named Bill (played by Mickey Rooney).
After Mr. Peek displayed his memory skills in a conversation with him, Mr. Morrow set about concocting a story around someone like Kim Peek. “I was absolutely flabbergasted that such a human being existed,” Mr. Morrow said in a 2006 documentary about Mr. Peek.
In “Rain Man,” the autistic character, Raymond Babbitt, has been institutionalized since he was very young but is reunited with a cynical younger brother, Charlie (played by Tom Cruise), who had forgotten about his brother’s existence. (The title comes from Raymond’s recollection of the infant Charlie’s name for him.) The two men take a cross-country trip, and fraternal reconciliation ensues.
The movie, a critical and box office success, was not based on Mr. Peek’s life, but in preparing for the role, Mr. Hoffman visited with Mr. Peek and incorporated many of his characteristics — a shambling gait, peculiar hand movements and occasional blunt utterances — into the character of Raymond.
When Mr. Hoffman won an Oscar for best actor for the performance, he thanked Mr. Peek in his acceptance speech. Mr. Morrow went even further: he gave his own Oscar statuette to Mr. Peek, who carried it with him to public appearances for the next 21 years.
In the wake of “Rain Man,” Mr. Peek became something of a celebrity, emerging from his shell to travel around the country giving demonstrations of his talent and advocating tolerance for the disabled. Fran Peek estimated that some 400,000 people have hugged Mr. Morrow’s statuette.
“We called it the world’s best-loved Oscar,” he said.
Laurence Kim Peek was born on Nov. 11, 1951. (He was named for his mother’s favorite actor, Laurence Olivier, and the title character of Rudyard Kipling’s “Kim”; Kipling was his father’s favorite author.) Kim’s head was enlarged, his cerebellum was malformed and, perhaps most crucial, he was missing the corpus callosum, the sheaf of nerve tissue that connects the brain’s hemispheres. It has been theorized that this disruption of normal communication between the brain’s left and right halves resulted in a kind of jury-rigged rewiring.
“Perhaps the resulting structures allow the two hemispheres to function, in certain respects, as one giant hemisphere, putting normally separate functions under the same roof, as it were,” Drs. Treffert and Christensen wrote. “If so, then Peek may owe some of his talents to this particular abnormality.”
When Kim was 9 months old, a doctor said that he was so severely retarded that he would never walk or talk and that he should be institutionalized. When Kim was 6, another doctor recommended a lobotomy. By then, however, Kim had read and memorized the first eight volumes of a set of family encyclopedias, his father said. He received part-time tutoring from the age of 7 and completed a high school curriculum by 14. He spent great swaths of time absorbing volumes in the Salt Lake City Public Library. He never used computers, his father said.
“How he learned to read, I just don’t know,” Mr. Peek said.
Kim Peek’s parents divorced in 1981, and his father cared for him alone until his son’s death. Besides his father, Mr. Peek is survived by his mother, Jeanne Willey Peek Buchi; a brother, Brian; and a sister, Alison, all of Salt Lake City.
“Rain Man” changed Mr. Peek’s life. In the documentary, he confessed that before the film, he never looked anyone in the face.
“Barry influenced me more than any other person,” he said of Mr. Morrow. “He made me ‘Rain Man.’ ”
Though his social skills never fully developed, he grew to be outwardly engaging. He enjoyed being among people in his travels and became comfortable as something of a showman. He began developing mental skills he had never had before, like making puns; his coordination slowly improved, to the extent that he could play the piano. He became more self-aware, even displaying a certain social agility.
During a presentation Mr. Peek gave at Oxford University in England, after he fielded students’ questions about the Lusitania and about British monarchs, a young woman stood and asked him, “Kim, are you happy?”
Sen. John Rockefeller, D-W.Va., chairman of the Senate Finance Subcommittee on Health Care, and Rep. Joe Courtney, D-Conn., a member of the House Education and Labor Committee, have introduced the Pre-existing Condition Patient Protection Act, which would eliminate pre-existing condition exclusions in all insurance markets. That's an Obama administration priority.
I wonder whether President Obama and his congressional supporters would go a step further and protect not just patients, but everyone against pre-existing condition exclusions by insurance companies. Let's look at the benefits of such a law.
Retroactive Insurance
A person might save quite a bit of money on fire insurance. He could wait until his home is ablaze and then walk into Nationwide and say, "Sell me a fire insurance policy so I can have my house repaired." The Nationwide salesman says, "That's lunacy!" But the person replies, "Congress says you cannot deny me insurance because of a pre-existing condition."
This mandate against insurance company discrimination would not only apply to home insurance, but auto insurance and life insurance as well. Instead of a wife wasting money on costly life insurance premiums, she could spend that money on jewelry, cosmetics and massages and then wait until her husband kicked the bucket to buy life insurance on him.
Insurance companies don't stay in business and prosper by being stupid. If Congress were to enact a law eliminating pre-existing condition exclusions, what might be expected?
Pricey Policies
Say I'm a salesman for Nationwide, and you demand that I write you an insurance policy for your house that has already gone up in flames. I send an appraiser out to your house to estimate of how much money it would take to make you whole. Let's say it comes to $400,000. Guess how much I'm going to charge you for the policy?
If you said somewhere in the neighborhood of $400,000, you'd be pretty close to the right answer. You might say, "Williams, you're right. Forcing fire and auto insurance companies to sell policies for a pre-existing fire or auto accident is bizarre and stupid, but it's different with health insurance."
Yes, health insurance is different from fire and auto insurance, but the insurance principle remains the same.
If Congress and the president are successful in making the Pre-existing Condition Patient Protection Act the law of the land, their treachery won't stop there. Insurance companies will try to charge people with pre-existing health conditions a higher price to compensate for their higher expected cost.
Those people will complain to Congress. Then Congress will enact insurance premium price controls. Insurance companies might try to restrict just what treatments they will cover under such restrictions. That means Congress will play a greater role in managing what insurance companies can do.
The dilemma Congress always faces, when it messes with the economy, was aptly described in a Negro spiritual play by Marcus Cook Connelly titled "Green Pastures." In it, God laments to the angel Gabriel, "Every time Ah passes a miracle, Ah has to pass fo' or five mo' to ketch up wid it," adding, "Even bein God ain't no bed of roses."
Leave Miracles To God
When Congress creates a miracle for one American, it creates a nonmiracle for another. After that, Congress has to create a compensatory miracle.
Many years ago, I used to testify before Congress, something I refuse to do now. At several of the hearings, I urged Congress to get out of the miracle business and leave miracle making up to God.
For a president and congressman to shamelessly propose something like the Pre-existing Condition Patient Protection Act demonstrates just how far we've gone down the road to perdition.
The most tragic thing is that most Americans have no idea that such an act violates every principle of insurance and it's something that not even yesteryear's lunatics would have thought up.
This is a rush transcript from "Hannity," December 8, 2009. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
SEAN HANNITY, HOST: And tonight, my exclusive interview with the former vice president of the United States, Dick Cheney. You will hear his thoughts on the Afghanistan troop surge, the KSM terror trial, and much more. As usual Vice President Cheney spoke very candidly about Barack Obama and his performance as commander-in-chief.
Let's take a look:
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
HANNITY: Mr. Vice President, good to see you. Welcome back.
FORMER VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: It's good to be back, Sean.
HANNITY: Enjoying vacation?
CHENEY: I am. It's — getting more hunting and fishing done these days, and it's true before, but I'm also working on a book, spending time with my family.
HANNITY: Is it going to be a tell-all, name-names, kind of book or...
CHENEY: It's not. It's more a matter of covering the 41 years I spent in Washington. I went down to stay 12 months.
(LAUGHTER)
HANNITY: Went a bit longer than you thought.
CHENEY: And — but there are some fascinating stories and interesting things I was involved in. That's not sort of the definitive history of the era, but what it is is a history of what I saw and what I did during that 41-year period of time from the beginning of the Nixon administration up until last January.
HANNITY: You gave a recent interview to the Politico. And you said about Barack Obama, he is projecting weakness to America's enemies. Expand on that.
CHENEY: Well, I think most of us believe, and most presidents believe, and talk about the truly exceptional nature of America. Our history, where we come from, our belief in our constitutional values and principles, our advocacy for freedom and democracy. The fact that we provided it for millions of people all over the globe, have done so unselfishly. There's never been a nation like the United States of America in world history.
And yet when you have a president who goes around and bows to his host and then proceeds to apologize profusely for the United States, I find that deeply disturbing.
That says to me, this guy who doesn't fully understand or share that view of American exceptionalism that I think most of us believe in.
HANNITY: You talked before his address to the nation last week about him dithering on a decision in Afghanistan. You also used that — in another interview the term "agonizing" over the decision. And you said that has consequences for the forces in the field.
CHENEY: Well, it does. This is a situation in Afghanistan where he made a decision last March based in part on some things we provided him up at the end of the Bush administration. Then he came around and appointed General McChrystal to implement it.
Then in August he defended it and said he'd give them whatever they needed before the VFW. And then he came around this fall and couldn't decide on McChrystal's request and had nine separate meetings of the National Security Council to finally come to a conclusion.
Now, admittedly, these are important decisions. I don't want to downplay the significance of it all and any president is going to weigh very heavily in those kinds of decisions that put American lives at risk.
But the fact that he spent so much time agonizing over it is the way I would think about it. Everybody is watching. The Taliban are watching. The Al Qaeda are watching. The Afghans who are on our side are watching.
And when they see hesitation, uncertainty, lack of clarity from an American president, they begin to think that the Americans aren't going to be here very long. They begin to think that the Americans are going to bail out sooner or later, and when that happens they'll be left behind with the forces of the Taliban, for example.
So then you see governments in that part of the world start to shift their alliances and their friendships. For example, just in the last two weeks the prime minister of Kuwait has gone to Iran on an official visit — first time in 30 years.
Why did he do that? Well, he wants to make sure he's got a foot in all camps. And they worry about declining U.S. influence and the U.S. is uncertain and hesitant, the conclusion they draw from that is that the United States is not going to be there for the long term.
HANNITY: So he was asked — the request came from General McChrystal, whom he appointed...
CHENEY: Right.
HANNITY: For 40,000 troops. Takes months to make a decision. You were critical of the time he was taking too long.
CHENEY: Right.
HANNITY: And then he only gives three-quarters of what General McChrystal was asking for — 30,000 of the 40,000 troops. And then he definitively says after 18 months our troops will begin to come home. How do you interpret that?
CHENEY: It adds to the damage, in my mind. That is to say that the troop levels, that commitment, I think is fine. It's what we ought to be doing. I think General McChrystal is a superb officer. He's been asked to head up the effort. And I certainly would have great confidence in his recommendations.
But it also says to our adversaries out there that if you just wait long enough, the Americans will leave. And what has worked so well in Iraq when we did the surge there was when the president went against all the public advice he was getting and all the conventional wisdom and said no, we're going to put surge, we're going to do it for as long as we need to do it. We're going to win in Iraq.
That changed the whole landscape out there in terms of how people were willing to line up. And we had a lot of folks previously involved in the insurgency who became friendly to the government.
HANNITY: Well, you suggested in one interview that this might be about politics. You know, he didn't really make a lot of executive decisions before he became president — voted present a lot.
Is this one of these moments where he's trying to thread the needle, vote present, appeal all sides of, you know, the political debate or did he just — did he make the right decision?
Some people said well, you know, Hannity, you're a conservative, give him credit. How do you view the ultimate decision that he made with the 18-month withdrawal date?
CHENEY: Well, it's better than withdrawal now, is the way I put it. Putting extra troops in, I think, you know, taking it that far, is a plus. But this notion of uncertainty, the difficult time he has putting it together, all of this feeds into sort of the basic Al Qaeda strategy.
Remember the way Al Qaeda operates and what their underlying plan is, is if you kill enough Americans, you can change American policy. And they've done it. You know they did it in Mogadishu in '93, the World Trade Center in '93. Terrorize us enough so that what you get out of that is a change in U.S. policy.
And when they see him announce in advance that there's going to be a withdrawal 18 months down the road, they come to the point where they feel like their strategy, their world view, has been validated.
And in the meantime, your task of trying to control the situation, trying to put down the Taliban and so forth has simply gotten hard because we're weak and indecisive when you made the decision to do it. And then at the end of the day you set this date when you're going to begin withdrawal. And that's not an impressive way to deal with the threat that the Taliban represents.
HANNITY: You're saying that if we have an exit date, an exit strategy, announced at the time of the troops surge, we're not going to get the support that we would need to ultimately be successful in Iraq? A fair statement?
CHENEY: I think that's a fair statement. It's harder to get what you need. I would like to see them also talk about victory. Talk about winning. The task for when you accomplish the mission, is when you stabilize Iran — Iraq — in this case, you've got a government established that's capable of control their sovereign territory, you've trained and equipped Afghan forces to be able to deal with all of that.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
HANNITY: And coming up, more of my exclusive interview with former vice president, Dick Cheney. So what does he think about the Obama administration's decisions to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a New York City courtroom? That answer and much more straight ahead.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HANNITY: And we continue now with more of my exclusive interview with former vice president Dick CHENEY:
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
HANNITY: You said that the president's cerebral approach projects weakness and that the president is looking far more radical than you expected. I was, during the campaign, criticized a lot because I was warming, I thought of the president's radical associations.
How radical do you view him now? How radical do you view his opinions?
CHENEY: I saw him when he got elected as a liberal Democrat, but conventional in the sense of sort of falling within the parameters of the national Democratic Party. I think he's demonstrated pretty conclusively now during his first year in office that he is more radical than that.
That he's farther outside the parameters, if you will, of what we have traditionally had in Democratic presidents in years past.
HANNITY: In the speech, he said — I want to transition to the KSM trial a little bit. He said — again, he goes back to this I prevented — prohibited torture, I'm closing Guantanamo Bay. Now they're going to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and some other collaborators in a civilian court.
Your reaction to that?
CHENEY: I think it's a huge mistake. The precedent exists for us to use military commissions. It was done by Roosevelt in World War II, it was done in connection with the plotters in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Set up a military commission, try these individuals and if they're guilty, then you execute them. And the Supreme Court had upheld that.
Now we have a situation in which they're going to use the commissions for the Cole bombers, and they're going to bring KSM and his associates up to New York and put them in a federal civilian court.
The danger of that, in my mind, is that it's going to give KSM a huge platform.
He'll have the opportunity to go in there — excuse me — and do battle over the evidence, try to get his hands on classified material. Beyond that he'll be able to go in, whenever he's up on the stand, and proselytize, if you will, millions of people out there around the world, including some of his radical Muslim friends, and generate a whole new generation of terrorists.
HANNITY: Beyond proselytizing, is there a worry that you would have that he may want to send a message to his fellow terrorists? I mean do we have to worry about that?
CHENEY: I think we have to worry about it all the time anyway. And...
HANNITY: Regardless of this?
CHENEY: Well, this is may add to it a bit.
This is a man who said — who, first of all, has admitted his crime. He said he expected to be tried before a military commission and executed down in Guantanamo. He wants to die for Allah. He's proud of what he did when he came to the U.S. or organized the efforts of 9/11 and killed 3,000 Americans.
And the more visibility he gets for his continued activities, the more he's going to encourage others to think as he does and to embark upon the same religious jihad that dominated his life.
HANNITY: But this is what's odd to me, because he admitted that he was responsible, that he was the mastermind — in his words — from A to Z.
CHENEY: Right.
HANNITY: How likely is it that the evidence that they accumulated is now going to be inadmissible because it is a civilian trial but they didn't give them Miranda rights?
CHENEY: I'm not a lawyer, Sean. So I don't want to make predictions. But I don't know what's going to happen in those trials. The thing that's disturbing is, I don't think the Justice Department does either.
And if — you know, if it's an absolute certain thing, then Holder has the problem of saying well, we're going to have a balanced trial and they'll have an opportunity to defend themselves and so forth.
If it's not a certain thing, why are you bringing him here? I mean we know he's guilty. He's one of the most evil men in history. He is responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans and he ought to be punished as such.
HANNITY: You said in an interview that New York City is great, this trial in New York City is great for Al Qaeda. It's a pretty strong statement. What did you mean by that?
CHENEY: I mean that the — I think it'll give aid and comfort to the enemy. I think it will make Khalid Sheikh Mohammed something of a hero in certain circles, especially in the radical regions of Islam around the world.
It will put him on the map. He'll be as important or more important than Usama bin Laden. And we will have made it possible. We will have given him that platform, that opportunity, to come here and there is absolutely no need to do that. There's all the precedent in the world for prosecuting him with a military commission at Guantanamo and so forth.
HANNITY: You could bring it back to the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, you mentioned Lincoln, World War II, and they changed the policy in this particular case.
Is all of this predicated on the president's belief — although he did seem to shift in his speech the other night — because for a long time the administration wouldn't even use the term "War on Terror." They were redefining it as a man-caused disaster.
Do you think it's predicated on the belief that maybe Barack Obama, his administration, doesn't believe there's a War on Terror?
CHENEY: I think so. I'd state it slightly differently, but it's very consistent with your concept. I think the key that happened on 9/11 is we went from considering terrorist attacks as a law enforcement problem to considering terrorist attacks, especially on the scale we have on 9/11, as being an act of war.
When you lose 16 acres of downtown Manhattan, people jumping out of 80th story of the Trade Center to avoid being burned alive, the attack on the Pentagon, the possible attack on the White House, the Capitol Building — this is an act of war. And that changes your whole strategy, it should, in terms of the means you're prepared to use in order to defend against that kind of attack in the future.
What I see happening here is the Obama administration is now going back to that old pre-9/11 concept that this is all about individual crimes and a problem for law enforcement. It's not a war to be fought and prosecuted as we ordinarily would prosecute it.
HANNITY: Do you think part of this is to put our CIA on trial? To put you on trial? To put President Bush on trial? Or maybe if it's not designed to do that, ultimately will that happen?
CHENEY: I don't know. I don't know whether that's a motive for them or not. It could be. It could be that Holder expects to be able to use this to go back and sort of review in depth the Bush-Cheney administration policies in terms of what we did to prevent attacks against the United States.
I think that's a loser for them. I think the vast majority of the American people appreciate the fact that we had good, tough policies. We had great people carrying them out and we succeeded.
Janet Napolitano -- former Arizona governor, now overmatched secretary of homeland security -- will forever be remembered for having said of the attempt to bring down an airliner over Detroit: "The system worked." The attacker's concerned father had warned U.S. authorities about his son's jihadist tendencies. The would-be bomber paid cash and checked no luggage on a transoceanic flight. He was nonetheless allowed to fly, and would have killed 288 people in the air alone, save for a faulty detonator and quick actions by a few passengers.
Heck of a job, Brownie.
The reason the country is uneasy about the Obama administration's response to this attack is a distinct sense of not just incompetence but incomprehension. From the very beginning, President Obama has relentlessly tried to play down and deny the nature of the terrorist threat we continue to face. Napolitano renames terrorism "man-caused disasters." Obama goes abroad and pledges to cleanse America of its post-9/11 counterterrorist sins. Hence, Guantanamo will close, CIA interrogators will face a special prosecutor, and Khalid Sheik Mohammed will bask in a civilian trial in New York -- a trifecta of political correctness and image management.
And just to make sure even the dimmest understand, Obama banishes the term "war on terror." It's over -- that is, if it ever existed.
Obama may have declared the war over. Unfortunately, al-Qaeda has not. Which gives new meaning to the term "asymmetric warfare."
And produces linguistic -- and logical -- oddities that littered Obama's public pronouncements following the Christmas Day attack. In his first statement, Obama referred to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as "an isolated extremist." This is the same president who, after the Fort Hood, Tex., shooting, warned us "against jumping to conclusions" -- code for daring to associate the mass murder there with Nidal Hasan's Islamist ideology. Yet, with Abdulmutallab, Obama jumped immediately to the conclusion, against all existing evidence, that the would-be bomber acted alone.
More jarring still were Obama's references to the terrorist as a "suspect" who "allegedly tried to ignite an explosive device." You can hear the echo of FDR: "Yesterday, December 7, 1941 -- a date which will live in infamy -- Japanese naval and air force suspects allegedly bombed Pearl Harbor."
Obama reassured the nation that this "suspect" had been charged. Reassurance? The president should be saying: We have captured an enemy combatant -- an illegal combatant under the laws of war: no uniform, direct attack on civilians -- and now to prevent future attacks, he is being interrogated regarding information he may have about al-Qaeda in Yemen.
Instead, Abdulmutallab is dispatched to some Detroit-area jail and immediately lawyered up. At which point -- surprise! -- he stops talking.
This absurdity renders hollow Obama's declaration that "we will not rest until we find all who were involved." Once we've given Abdulmutallab the right to remain silent, we have gratuitously forfeited our right to find out from him precisely who else was involved, namely those who trained, instructed, armed and sent him.
This is all quite mad even in Obama's terms. He sends 30,000 troops to fight terror overseas, yet if any terrorists come to attack us here, they are magically transformed from enemy into defendant.
The logic is perverse. If we find Abdulmutallab in an al-Qaeda training camp in Yemen, where he is merely preparing for a terror attack, we snuff him out with a Predator -- no judge, no jury, no qualms. But if we catch him in the United States in the very act of mass murder, he instantly acquires protection not just from execution by drone but even from interrogation.
The president said that this incident highlights "the nature of those who threaten our homeland." But the president is constantly denying the nature of those who threaten our homeland. On Tuesday, he referred five times to Abdulmutallab (and his terrorist ilk) as "extremist[s]."
A man who shoots abortion doctors is an extremist. An eco-fanatic who torches logging sites is an extremist. Abdulmutallab is not one of these. He is a jihadist. And unlike the guys who shoot abortion doctors, jihadists have cells all over the world; they blow up trains in London, nightclubs in Bali and airplanes over Detroit (if they can); and are openly pledged to war on America.
Any government can through laxity let someone slip through the cracks. But a government that refuses to admit that we are at war, indeed, refuses even to name the enemy -- jihadist is a word banished from the Obama lexicon -- turns laxity into a governing philosophy.
George Michael (March 24, 1939 – December 24, 2009)[1] was an American sportscaster best known nationally for The George Michael Sports Machine, his long-running sports highlights television program. Originally named George Michael's Sports Final when it began as a local show in Washington, D.C. in 1980,[2] it was nationally syndicated by NBC from 1984 until its final installment was aired on March 25, 2007. Michael won a Sports Emmy in 1985 for his work on The George Michael Sports Machine.
Early life and career
Michael was born George Michael Gimpel in St. Louis, Missouri on March 24, 1939.[3] While attending Saint Louis University, he worked as a Midwest promoter for several record labels such as Scepter and Motown. After brief stints at WIL-AM in his hometown and WRIT-AM in Milwaukee, he became a disc jockey at KICN-AM (call sign changed to KBTR in 1964) in Denver in 1961, working under the name "King" George Michael for the first time. He earned the nickname due to his success at "ruling" evening radio.[4][5]
He moved to Philadelphia in September 1966 as one of the original "Boss Jocks" at WFIL-AM, which had just changed its format to Top 40 rock and roll. He served as music director and evening deejay, working the 6-to-10 pm shift. WFIL, which was popularly known as "Famous 56" after the transition, ended WIBG-AM's listener ratings dominance and became the city's most popular radio station by the summer of 1967.[5]
Michael, noted for his energetic style, was hired by WABC-AM in New York City in August 1974.[6] This was a daunting challenge not only because he was entering the nation's largest media market, but he also had to succeed radio legend "Cousin Brucie" Morrow, who had jumped to direct competitor WNBC-AM.[7] Several incidents from Michael's radio stint there have been chronicled in Morrow's autobiography.[8] Even though he was reunited with Dan Ingram and Ron Lundy, colleagues from his WIL days in St. Louis, Michael's time at WABC, which ended in 1979, was mostly frustrating because he was no longer a music director who had any influence on a playlist which was much shorter than the ones with which he was more familiar.[6]
His first experience in sports broadcasting also came in 1974 when he was a television announcer for the Baltimore Orioles on WJZ.[6] He declined an offer to work for the ballclub full-time in order to accept the WABC position.[5] As part of the deal to bring him to New York, Michael also worked for WABC-TV as the weekend sports anchor and a color commentator on New York Islanders telecasts for several seasons, paired mainly with Tim Ryan.[6] He served as an occasional substitute on ABC Contemporary Radio Network's Speaking of Sports show whenever Howard Cosell, the primary commentator, was on vacation or assignment.[3] [edit] Television career
As the primary sports anchor at WRC-TV (News 4) from 1980 to 2007, Michael was easily one of the most popular media personalities in the Washington, D.C. area. Michael got significant latitude in his programming, employing a bevy of segments some might consider old-fashioned, including his "Tuesday Replays" and "Wednesday Wrestling." He also had devoted extensive coverage to and was considered a significant influence in the popularity of NASCAR, broadcasting interviews with famous drivers such as Dale Earnhardt well before that sport became what it is today. An avid equestrian himself, Michael also broadcast segments on bull riding and rodeo.
Michael's affable personality landed rare interviews with many aloof local and national sports personalities. For example, Michael's team at WRC had been the only local sportscasters allowed to broadcast from inside the Washington Redskins' FedEx Field during the season.
In November 2005, Michael was seriously injured in a horseback riding accident. He broke several ribs and injured his wrists during the mishap at his Comus farm in upper Montgomery County, Maryland. Michael resumed his duties in December 2005. [edit] Later career
Michael left his role as WRC's daily sports anchor on March 1, 2007 following a dispute with WRC-TV (News 4) over layoffs of his staff. The George Michael Sports Machine went off the air on March 25, 2007.[9][10] He continued to host weekend sports panel shows, such as Full Court Press (basketball season) and Redskins Report (football season) as well as interviews at Redskins Park on Mondays with Jim Zorn and Joe Bugel through December 2008. He was completely dropped from WRC due to budget cuts despite the fact Redskins Report was consistently one of WRC's top shows. He indicated at the time of his layoff, he would like to work on a panel show again but not on a nightly newscast.[11] [edit] Death
Michael died at age 70 at Sibley Memorial Hospital on December 24, 2009 after being diagnosed with B-cell chronic lymphocytic leukemia for two years.[3][12]. He is survived by his wife Pat, whom he married in 1978 and who produced the Sports Machine, along with daugthers Michelle and Cindi, son Brad, sister Jane, and brother Earl.
References
1. ^ "Washington sportscaster George Michael has died". The Washington Post. 24 December 2009. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/local-breaking-news/washington-sportscaster-george.html?hpid=breakingnews. Retrieved 24 December 2009. 2. ^ George Michael official biography at WRC-TV 3. ^ a b c Bernstein, Adam. "George Michael, famed D.C. sportscaster, dies," The Washington Post, Thursday, December 24, 2009. 4. ^ Denver's KTBR/71: "Home of the All Americans" – Denver Radio Memories. 5. ^ a b c George Michael (profile) – Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia. 6. ^ a b c d "Hiring George Michael For WABC" – MusicRadio77.com 7. ^ "The Cousin Bruce Morrow 'Party Tape'" – MusicRadio77.com. 8. ^ Morrow, Bruce & Baudo, Laura. Cousin Brucie: My Life in Rock 'N' Roll Radio. Sag Harbor, NY: Beech Tree Books, 1987. (ISBN 0-688-06615-1) 9. ^ John Maynard (2006-11-17). "George Michael to drop anchor chores, continue weekend sports panel shows". The Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/16/AR2006111600669.html. 10. ^ Leonard Shapiro (2006-11-21). "Saying goodbye to George Michael". The Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/21/AR2006112100626.html. 11. ^ Shapiro, Leonard. "Loss of Michael Is a Truly Deep Cut," The Washington Post, Monday, December 29, 2008. 12. ^ http://www.usatoday.com/sports/2009-12-24-george-michael-obit_N.htm
Bill's Comment: George Michael was one of the Philly Boss Jocks on "Famous 56", WFIL, in Philadelphia, from approximately 1966 to 1974. One of the last songs he played at the station was "When Will I see You Again" by Three Degrees. Heaven is waiting for you, George. WE will catch up with you, then. R.I.P.
Host of 'Sports Machine' Michael passes Broadcasting pioneer hosted long-running highlights show
By Barry M. Bloom / MLB.com
12/24/09 6:06 PM EST
Sportscaster George Michael passed away on Thursday morning after a lengthy bout with leukemia. He was 70.
Michael was a mainstay of the Washington, D.C., sports media scene and made his name nationally with the syndicated "George Michael Sports Machine," a weekly highlights show.
Michael was surrounded by family and friends when he died from complications of chronic lymphocytic leukemia at Washington's Sibley Memorial Hospital.
"The Washington Nationals and the Lerner family join all of the Washington community and sports fans nationally in mourning the loss of legendary sportscaster George Michael," the Nationals said Thursday in a statement.
"He was not only an icon in sports in the Nation's Capital, but he was also a pioneer in the sports broadcasting world with his use of game highlights during his nationally syndicated program 'The George Michael Sports Machine.' Our deepest affection and condolences are with the Michael family in their time of grief."
The prototype for "Sports Machine" was launched in 1980 as a late-night local feature shortly after Michael's arrival at WRC-TV in Washington. In 1984, it became the first nationally syndicated sports highlights show, ultimately airing in 194 U.S. markets and 10 foreign countries. The show ran until March 2007, when cutbacks at WRC and Michael's health issues led to the end of the show's run.
"He waged his battle against cancer with the same drive and determination that made him a one-of-a-kind in the broadcasting industry," the Michael family said in a statement. "Whether it was covering a sports story, working on his horse farm, or spending time with family and friends, he approached everything in life with passion."
Michael's family said plans for a memorial service are not yet complete. He is survived by Patricia, his wife of 31 years, his daughter, Michelle Allen, and his son, Brad.
Barry M. Bloom is a national reporter for MLB.com. This story was not subject to the approval of Major League Baseball or its clubs.
A journalist reads the latest draft of the Copenhagen Accord at the climate summit in Denmark. APView Enlarged Image
Global Warming: Russian analysts accuse Britain's Meteorological Office of cherry-picking Russian temperature data to "hide the decline" in global temperatures. Is Copenhagen rooted in a single tree in Siberia?
Michael Mann, a Penn State meteorologist, wrote in Friday's Washington Post that "stolen" e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit still don't alter the evidence for climate change.
Mann, a creator of the discredited hockey-stick graph used in reports from the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to show man-made warming, attacks climate skeptics, including former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, saying they "confuse the public."
Chutzpah has been redefined.
As Ronald Reagan used to say, facts are stubborn things. The fact is that imminent man-made climate disaster has been shown to be a massive fraud driven by manipulated data and deliberate suppression of facts to the contrary.
The latest Climate-gate shoe to drop is the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) accusation that the Hadley Center of Britain's Meteorological Office deliberately relied on a carefully selected 25% of Russia's weather stations that fit its theory of global warming.
By ignoring those that don't, the Russians say, the CRU overestimated warming in the country by more than half a degree Celsius.
Russia accounts for 12.5% of the earth's land mass and has weather stations throughout, so ignoring vast swaths of it can greatly skew any analysis. The IEA says CRU ignored data covering 40% of Russia, preferring data from urban centers and data that showed a warming trend. On the final page of the IEA report is a chart that shows the CRU's selective use of Russian data produced 0.64C more warming than using all the data would have done.
Steve McIntyre at ClimateAudit reports that the CRU has long been suspected of misusing Russian data. He notes a March 2004 e-mail from CRU director Phil Jones to Mann that says: "Recently rejected two papers (one for JGR and for GRL) from people saying CRU has it wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either appears (in these journals) I will be very surprised, but you never know with GRL." (JGR and GRL are scientific journals).
Siberia has played a pivotal role in this outright fraud. In 1995, a paper by the CRU's Keith Briffa asserted the medieval warm period was actually really cold, and recent warming is unusually warm. It relied on tree ring data from trees on Siberia's Yamal Peninsula.
Here too data were carefully selected. Those from just 12 trees from 252 cores in the Yamal data set were used. A larger set of 34 tree cores from the vicinity shows no dramatic recent warming, and warmer temperatures in the Middle Ages. They weren't used.
The hockey-stick graph was produced in 1999 by Mann using these manipulated tree ring data. The graph supposedly proved air temperatures had been stable for 900 years, then soared off the charts in the 20th century. Mann et al. had to make the Medieval Warm Period (A.D. 800 to 1400) and the Little Ice Age (A.D. 1600 to 1850) statistically disappear.
McIntyre, who with fellow Canadian researcher Ross McKitrick exposed the hockey-stick fraud, says the evidence from only one Siberian tree, known as YAD061, seemed to show a hockey-stick pattern. If they look hard enough, the CRU can probably find a tree that shows evidence of elves making cookies.
This tree spawned the hockey stick that found its way into the reports of the U.N.'s climate change panel. It led to Kyoto and Copenhagen, which is why McIntyre calls it "the most influential tree in the world." As the CRU e-mails and other evidence reveal, Mann and his unindicted co-conspirators are barking up the wrong one.
