† R-E-S-P-E-C-T: You Get As You Give: The Wall Street Journal’s William McGurn takes Barack Hussein Obama and his West Wing staff to task for ushering in “our first post-gracious presidency”:

The most visible manifestations of the new ungraciousness are the repeated digs the president and his senior staffers continue to make against George W. Bush. …

Far from one-off asides, Mr. Obama's jabs at his predecessor have been a common feature of his speeches, fund-raisers and the like. They seem especially to pop up whenever Mr. Obama discovers some decision he must make is not as easy as he'd thought. And they date back to the first moments of his presidency. …

Mr. Obama's ongoing snipes against a predecessor who is no longer involved in setting policy are extraordinary. They are more extraordinary still issuing from a president who campaigned on a promise to transcend the political divisions of the past.

Barack Obama may believe that his incessant whining about all the challenges his predecessor left him lets America know how tough he has it. The danger to his presidency is that it can sound awfully like "I'm not up to the job."

The Nation’s John Nichols - McGurn’s ideological opposite – sniffs, “[t]he Obama administration really needs to get over itself” and to stop whining:

First, the president and his aides go to war with Fox News because the network maintains a generally anti-Obama slant.

Then, an anonymous administration aide attacks bloggers for failing to maintain a sufficiently pro-Obama slant.

These are not disconnected developments.

An administration that won the White House with an almost always on-message campaign and generally friendly coverage from old and new media is now frustrated by its inability to control the debate and get the coverage it wants. …

[W]hether the grumbling is about Republicans on Fox or bloggers in pajamas, there's a word for what the president and his aides are doing. That word is "whining." And nothing - no attack by Glenn Beck, no blogger busting about Guantanamo - does more damage to Obama's credibility or authority than the sense that a popular president is becoming the whiner-in-chief.

And in addition to being whiny, Obama’s “war” on Fox “would barely count as basketball-court trash talk, let alone words of war,” writes Jack Shafer, Slate's editor at large:

To get a genuine picture of what a war on the press looks like, you can't fan the pages of Nexis for grouchy things George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, or even Richard Nixon said about reporters, newspapers, and networks. You've got to go back to the 1930s, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt raged against the press like noisy clockwork. …

[U]ntil Rahm Emanuel and Rupert Murdoch - or even Fox News boss Roger Ailes - face off to trade insults in a live debate like the [Harold] Ickes-[Frank] Gannett one ["Do We Have a Free Press?"], please spare me any more stories about the war on Fox. This ain't war. This ain't even a decent war game.

Whatever it is - whining or war – inside baseball’s been berry, berry good to FOX, reports The Wrap: 

Preliminary cable news network ratings for the month of October were released Monday, and the thorn in the Obama administration’s side is tracking to have its best year ever. And, in even worse news for the administration, its public assault on the News Corp.-owned network actually gave Fox a bump.

In the two weeks prior to October 11 - when White House communications director Anita Dunn appeared on CNN declaring the administration’s renewed war against Fox - Fox News Channel programs averaged 1,206,000 total viewers, and 323,000 in the 25-54 demographic, according to Nielsen Media Research. Between October 12 and October 23, they averaged 1,312,000 and 368,000 among the 25-54 set - increases of 9 percent and 14 percent, respectively.

Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity have the Number One, Two and Three programs on cable TV when it comes to total viewers.

† We Fight Them Over There So We Don’t Have To Fight Them Over Here?: Two Chicago men have been charged in an alleged plot to kill employees of Danish newspaper Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten that published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in 2005 that caused “outraged” Muslims in several countries to go on murderous rampages. American-born David Coleman Headley, 49, who changed his name from Daood Gilani in 2006 and lived in Pakistan for a time, was charged with conspiracy to murder and maim in a foreign country. Canadian citizen Tahawwur Hussain Rana, 48, who was born in Pakistan and is living legally in Chicago, is accused of providing material support to terrorism by helping Headley arrange visits to Pakistan and two trips this year to Denmark. The two men met while attending a military school in the Pakistani town of Hasan Abdal, according to federal officials.

† The Media Get Punked (Yet Again): Online Media Daily reports that The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has filed a trademark infringement suit against the Yes Men over the parody site they created to lure Reuters and other media outlets to a fake press conference in which they announced that the business association was reversing itself and supporting climate change legislation. The Chamber of Commerce contends that the prank was meant to drum up publicity for the movie "The Yes Men Fix The World," which is now in general release nationwide.

Editorial Note: At the Q&A The Stiletto attended, someone asked why the Yes Men hadn’t been sued by any of their corporate targets yet and they had no clue, other than good luck. Looks like their luck ran out.

† Get It First – But Get It Right: An internal Coast Guard review of the training exercise on the Potomac River near the Pentagon on the anniversary of the September 11 terror attacks  concludes that - though ill-advised – the decision did not violate policies, reports The Associated Press:

The chain of false reports on television and on the Internet raised fears that Washington might be under attack, eight years to the day after a hijacked plane crashed into the Pentagon and two others slammed into New York's World Trade Center towers. …

The Coast Guard unit that conducted the training exercise was not aware that the president would be traveling nearby, Vice Adm. Robert J. Papp, commander of the Coast Guard's Atlantic area, determined in his review of the incident. If the unit had known that, it would have rescheduled the time and date of the exercise, the report said. …

Papp added that it was also ill-advised to continue the training after the Coast Guard had received inquiries about possible gunshots.

Next year the Coast Guard will prevent radio interception of its communications by the news media and others by scrambling the signal.

† Updates To Previous Posts (last item, Why Middle Class Americans Can’t Afford Health Insurance: Part II): NY attorney general Andrew Cuomo announced the details of a settlement with more than a dozen insurance companies over their use of a database that “systematically understating the doctors’ fees for more than a decade and shortchanging consumers by hundreds of millions of dollars,” reports The New York Times:

Consumers’ reimbursements “will actually go up now because the reimbursements were artificially deflated,” said Mr. Cuomo, whose office conducted an investigation into these practices.

Under the new plan, a nonprofit company, FAIR Health, will be set up and will work with Syracuse University and a group of other state universities to operate the new database and consumer Web site. The system will go into operation within a year, Mr. Cuomo said. …

At issue is a reimbursement system that potentially affects about 70 percent of the nation’s insured families - ones enrolled in health plans that let them see doctors who are not part of the plan’s network. When patients go out of network, insurers typically reimburse patients for only a portion of the medical bill, based on what is called the “reasonable and customary” cost of the services in that city or region.

† Updates To Previous Posts (third item, Illegals Can Skew Elections – Even When They Do Not Vote Fraudulently): Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) has proposed an amendment to a spending bill that bans federal financing for the 2010 census if a question about citizenship is not included. His concerned that the population count of some states will be “artificially” inflated, thus “strip[ping]” those states with fewer non-citizens of their proper representation in Congress, reports The New York Times:

Mr. Vitter’s proposal, which would generally benefit nonurban areas where Republicans tend to dominate, could also affect reapportionment within each state. …

California [would lose] five seats and New York and Illinois one each, according to an independent analysis of census data released Tuesday. Texas, which is projected to gain three seats after the 2010 census, would get only one.

The proposed change would spare Iowa, Louisiana, Michigan and Pennsylvania the expected loss of one seat each. Indiana, Montana, North Carolina, Oregon and South Carolina would each gain a seat.

If every resident - citizens and noncitizens alike - is counted in 2010, as the Census Bureau usually does, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada and Utah would gain one seat each and Texas would get three, the analysis found.

Losing one seat each would be Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania, according to the analysis of census data through 2008 by demographers at Queens College of the City University of New York.

† Updates To Previous Posts (third item, What Freedom Of Speech Means To Muslims): President Barack Hussein Obama has flip-flopped on his support of a U.N. Human Rights Council resolution promoted by Muslim and Arab states that defines “blasphemy” as a human rights violation, reports The Associated Press:

The Obama administration is opposing efforts by Islamic nations to bar the defamation of particular religions, saying such measures would restrict free speech.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said … a person's ability to practice religion is unrelated to another person's right to free speech.

† Updates To Previous Posts (third item, Global Warming Is A Vegetarian Plot): In an interview with The Times of London, Lord Stern of Brentford - a former chief economist of the World Bank and the author of a 2006 analysis of the cost of tackling global warming – promoted vegetarianism as one solution to global warming:

“Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better. …

“I think it’s important that people think about what they are doing and that includes what they are eating. I am 61 now and attitudes towards drinking and driving have changed radically since I was a student. People change their notion of what is responsible. They will increasingly ask about the carbon content of their food.”

Food animals are not the only targets of the environazis. They’re also after Fido and Fluffy. Syndicated columnist Jonah Goldberg declares flat-out “The government cannot have my dog”:

Don't tell that to the authors of the new book, "Time to Eat the Dog?: The Real Guide to Sustainable Living." The authors calculate that dog owning is much worse than SUV driving for the planet. So when you see a car heading to the dog park with some very happy labs drooling out the window, you should think "climate criminals."

Meanwhile, in less surprising news, cats (long known as the handmaidens of Satan) have roughly the ecological paw print of a Volkswagen Golf.

The authors don't actually suggest you eat your dog. But they do say we'd all be better off if we weaned ourselves from pets that treat Gaia like a fire hydrant. Better to play fetch with our pet chickens and then eat them. …

Afraid the kids will be disappointed when you give away their pets? You could avoid that unpleasantness – and save the planet – if you foreswear procreation, a new study (“Fewer Emitter, Lower Emissions, Less Cost”) concludes. The Telegraph (London) reports:

Every £4 [$6.55] spent on family planning over the next four decades would reduce global CO2 emissions by more than a ton, whereas a minimum of £19 would have to be spent on low-carbon technologies to achieve the same result, the research says. …

[F]amily planning should be seen as one of the primary methods of emissions reduction. The UN estimates that 40 per cent of all pregnancies worldwide are unintended.

If these basic family planning needs were met, 34 gigatons (billion tonnes) of CO2 would be saved – equivalent to nearly 6 times the annual emissions of the US and almost 60 times the UK’s annual total. …

UN data suggests that meeting unmet need for family planning would reduce unintended births by 72 per cent, reducing projected world population in 2050 by half a billion to 8.64 million.

† Updates To Previous Posts (fourth item, Is Kozinski The Victim Of A Vendetta?): Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Chief Judge Alex Kozinski has apologized for “any embarrassment to the federal judiciary" by his having distributed racy jokes to an E-mail list that included friends, his law clerks and colleagues on the federal bench, attorneys and journalists, and has discontinued the practice. The Judicial Council of the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals, which was investigating Kozinski’s “gag list,” took no action against the judge and now considers the matter closed.  

† Updates To Previous Posts (last item, Madoff’s Victims: Gullible Or Greedy?): Madoff trustee Irving Picard plans to pursue his suit against the Picower estate and the FL-based Picower Foundation the defendant’s death, notwithstanding, reports The American Lawyer.