† Is Obama Already A Lame Duck?: While President Barack Hussein Obama remains personally popular in MA - 6 in 10 approve of his job performance, as do a third of those who voted for Scott Brown - the policies of his administration are unpopular, according to a new poll of 880 randomly selected special election voters by The Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University's School of Public Health:

Dissatisfaction with the direction of the country, antipathy toward federal government activism and opposition to the Democrats' health-care proposals drove the upset election of Republican Senator-elect Scott Brown of Massachusetts, according to a new post-election survey of Massachusetts voters.

The poll … underscores how significantly voter anger has turned against Democrats in Washington and how dramatically the political landscape has shifted during President Obama's first year in office. …

Nearly two-thirds of Brown's voters say their vote was intended at least in part to express opposition to the Democratic agenda in Washington, but few say the senator-elect should simply work to stop it. Three-quarters of those who voted for Brown say they would like him to work with Democrats to get Republican ideas into legislation in general; nearly half say so specifically about health-care legislation. …

The Massachusetts election brought another indication that the Obama coalition from 2008 has splintered, just as the results in gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey showed two months ago.

Inviting Obama to a campaign event is the “kiss of death” for a Dem candidate, writes Howard Rich, chairman of Americans for Limited Government, because his “overreaching socialist agenda … galvanized supporters of freedom and free markets like never before” and because he has “fail[ed] to motivate voters inclined to support him and his candidates”:

Clearly the rest of America was slipping away from Obama and his Congressional allies, but not Massachusetts. Never Massachusetts, right?

Over the last two weeks, though, something amazing happened – an “independent voice” began to be heard, first faintly, but soon growing louder and ultimately reaching such a crescendo that it drowned out a noisy din of far left attack rhetoric.

Obama turned independents turned into “decideds” against Coakley – as these voters turned a deaf ear to him and to the millions of dollars worth of desperate noise coming from his political machine, which was supposed to be above that sort of “partisan politics.”

In addition to silencing Obama’s left-wing attack dogs, this “independent voice” also drowned out the “popular” President himself, as Obama’s last-ditch effort to save the flailing Coakley campaign resulted in the sudden, decisive end of a filibuster-proof “Obamajority” in the U.S. Senate.

When Obama made the decision to lay it on the line and campaign in Massachusetts, the race was a statistical dead heat, with surveys showing Coakley ahead by one or two points. By the time Obama had returned to Washington, D.C., Brown had opened up a nine-point lead – a margin even Obama’s vaunted union volunteer army and ACORN-led ground game would be unable to erase.

Erick Erickson of RedStateNews reminds us that Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) correctly predicted that healthcare “reform” would be Obama’s “Waterloo.”

† Obama – Not McCain - Will Be Bush III: Nearly 50 of the 196 detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, should be held indefinitely without trial under the laws of war, recommends a task force comprised of officials from the departments of Defense, State, Homeland Security and Justice, as well as agencies such as the CIA and the FBI, that reviewed “all of the known information” about each of them, reports The Washington Post:

The task force's findings represent the first time that the administration has clarified how many detainees it considers too dangerous to release but unprosecutable because officials fear trials could compromise intelligence-gathering and because detainees could challenge evidence obtained through coercion.

Human rights advocates have bemoaned the administration's failure to fulfill President Obama's promise last January to close the Guantanamo Bay facility within a year as well as its reliance on indefinite detention, a mechanism devised during George W. Bush's administration that they deem unconstitutional.

"There is no statutory regime in America that allows us to hold people without charge or trial indefinitely," said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

But the efforts of the task force, which this week completed its case-by-case review of the detainees still being held at Guantanamo Bay, allows the Obama administration to claim at least a small measure of progress toward closing the facility. …

The task force has recommended that Guantanamo Bay detainees be divided into three main groups: about 35 who should be prosecuted in federal or military courts; at least 110 who can be released, either immediately or eventually; and the nearly 50 who must be detained without trial.

As President George Bush was also releasing Gitmo inmates, at some point his administration would have determined that the remainder had to remain in custody in the interest of national – even, global – security. Perhaps that number would have been higher than the conclusions of the task force but, to paraphrase that old joke has it, “Now that we’ve determined Obama will continue Bush’s indefinite detention policy, we’re just haggling over the number of detainees.”

Meanwhile, a new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds that the number of Americans opposing the shuttering of Gitmo is at an all-time high – 56 percent, with seniors, political independents and whites being most opposed. Coincidentally – or not - these groups also formed the “Brown coalition” in MA.  

† Sotomayor And The Supreme Court: It’s Not The End Of The World For Conservatives: Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote the majority opinion in a capital punishment case, in which she was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Stephen G. Breyer in upholding the death penalty for an AL man who fatally shot his former girlfriend while she was sleeping and had appealed his sentence on the grounds that his attorney did not a present evidence of his diminished mental capacity to the jury. The Washington Post notes that “Sotomayor's extensive record as a judge is scant on capital punishment” so her vote in the case was a pleasant surprise for the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation. But she was on the other side of the high court’s liberal-conservative divide in the 5 to 4 over the ruling to void parts of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. She joined Justice John Paul in his dissent, along with Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer.

† How To Tell When A “Hate Crime” Has Been Committed: The Associated Press reports on yet another case of black students violently attacking classmates of another race and the indifference to their plight shown by LaGreta Brown, principal of South Philadelphia High School, where Asian students “say they've endured relentless bullying by black students while school officials turned a blind eye to their complaints”:

"We have suffered a lot to get to America and we didn't come here to fight," Wei Chen, president of the Chinese American Student Association, told the school board in one of several hearings on the violence. "We just want a safe environment to learn and make more friends. That's my dream."

Philadelphia school officials suspended 10 students, increased police patrols and installed dozens of new security cameras to watch the halls, where 70 percent of the students are black and 18 percent Asian. The Vietnamese embassy complained to the U.S. State Department about the attacks and numerous groups are investigating, including the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission.

The New York-based Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund joined the fray this week with a civil rights complaint to the U.S. Justice Department.

The Philadelphia school district acted with "deliberate indifference" toward the harassment and failed to prevent the Dec. 3 attacks, according to the complaint. It says Asian students' pleas for help and protection were ignored by school employees.

Asian students say black students routinely pelt them with food, beat, punch and kick them in school hallways and bathrooms, and hurl racial epithets like "Hey, Chinese!" and "Yo, Dragon Ball!"

The AP never used the term “hate crime” in its report. Neither did The Philadelphia Inquirer, whereas sister paper Philadelphia Daily News published an article with the astonishing hed: “At S. Philly High, A Good Student Mix.”

† Navy SEALs E-Petition (last item): The Washington Times reports that “at least 100,000 people have signed up on a Facebook page, Support the Navy SEALs Who Captured Ahmed Hashim Abed.”  Another 119,365 have signed the E-Petition. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has yet to pull the plug on their courts martial, despite this show of support from the American public.

† Updates To Previous Posts (fourth item, Global Warming Is In The Eye Of The Beholder): The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) “issued an unprecedented apology over its flawed prediction that Himalayan glaciers were likely to disappear by 2035” and admitted that “the prediction in its landmark 2007 report was ‘poorly substantiated’ and resulted from a lapse in standards,” reports The Times of London:

The stunning admission is certain to embolden critics of the panel, already under fire over a separate scandal involving hacked e-mails last year.

The 2007 report, which won the panel the Nobel Peace Prize, said that the probability of Himalayan glaciers “disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high.” It caused shock in Asia, where about two billion people depend on meltwater from Himalayan glaciers for their fresh water supplies during the dry seasons.

† Updates To Previous Posts (last item, King Of The Heels): Maybe it’s how he came off in the 2008 campaign post-mortem-cum-backstabbing book “Game Change.” Or the revelation by former campaign aide Andrew Young that – in addition to masquerading as baby Quinn’s father – Edwards asked him to steal one of the girl’s diapers so he could secretly get a DNA test conducted and get the doctor to fake the results if his paternity was confirmed. Or having to ruminate for four months whether to admit - flash from the newsroom! – that he is Quinn’s father, after two years of denials. Whatever. The important thing is, a national poll validates The Stiletto Blog’s naming Edwards “King Of The Heels”:

The North Carolina Democrat is viewed positively by only 15 percent of voters in his home state, according to the firm Public Policy Polling. That total makes Edwards the "most unpopular person we've polled anywhere at any time," conclude the survey's authors.

He's still seen positively by 25% of Democrats but only 9% of independents and 3% of Republicans. Interestingly despite his new image as a philanderer men have a more unfavorable opinion of him (75%) than women (68%).

For his part, Gov. Mark Sanford (R-SC) – a heel in his own right - used the occasion of his final state-of-the-state address to apologize for an umpteenth time – the last, he says – for the affair that prompted his wife to file for divorce and state legislators to formally rebuke him.

† Updates To Previous Posts (last item, A Court Of Law, Not Of Justice): Perry County Senior Judge C. Joseph Rehkamp, 61, was charged with misdemeanor assault and summary harassment after he allegedly choked his wife, and was removed from the bench by the PA supreme court's chief justice until the charges are resolved, reports the ABA Journal:

[Rehkamp had been] doing much-needed fill-in work in Luzerne County, where the bench has been depleted in a stunning series of corruption scandals. …

As a condition of bail, he has been ordered not to have any contact with his wife.