† Is Obama Already A Lame Duck?: It’s starting to dawn on New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd that President Barack Hussein Obama is but a mere mortal – and not even a larger-than-life mortal at that:

It’s not a good narrative arc: The man who walked on water is now ensnared by a crisis under water. …

Obama wanted to be a transformative president and now the presidency is transforming him.

Instead of buoyant, he seems put upon. Instead of the fairy dust of hopefulness, there’s the bitter draught of helplessness. …

The oil won’t stop flowing, but the magic has.

Barack Obama is a guy who is accustomed to having stuff go right for him. He’s gotten a lot of breaks: two opponents in his U.S. Senate race in Illinois felled by personal scandals; a mismanaged presidential campaign by Hillary Clinton; an economic collapse that set the stage for a historic win.

Having repeatedly referred to Obama as “Spock” in her columns (The Stiletto’s new nickname for him is “Spork,” as in, stick a Spork in him, he’s done), Dowd now feels the need to explain why she inhaled the hopium so deeply (“[t]here’s so much you don’t learn about candidates in campaigns, even when they seem completely exposed”). Um, there’s so much you don’t learn about candidates in campaigns when you and your colleagues in the MSM not only fail to objectively cover him, but instead become his hagiographers.

† BAM To DOJ: KSM In NYC Is DOA: Plans to try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed remain undead three months after President Barack Hussein Obama futilely asked Attorney General Eric Holder to kill the monstrous idea, but the Senate Armed Services Committee has put another stake in the heart of Obama's misbegotten plan to close Gitmo, reports The Washington Times:

[T]he committee, in a voice vote, stripped $245 million that would have gone to buy and retrofit the Thomson prison in Illinois. …

Last month Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. told a congressional committee that the main obstacle to closing Guantanamo Bay was buying the Thomson facility. …

The Senate committee also adopted an amendment that would prevent the administration from returning suspected terrorist detainees to Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.

That last provision is an attempt to deal with the reality that nearly all the Gitmo detainees are hardened terrorists, even if we cannot prove it in a court of law. More on this from American Enterprise Institute visiting fellow Marc Thiessen, in his weekly column for The Washington Post:

For years the left has spun the myth that hundreds of Guantanamo detainees are really innocent goatherds and dirt farmers wrongly swept up in the war on terror. …

On Friday, while most Americans headed to the beach, the Obama administration unceremoniously released the Final Report of its Guantanamo Review Task Force. …

After an exhaustive review, the Obama administration determined that 95 percent of the al-Qaeda bar's clients are in fact terrorist leaders, operatives or fighters.

A detainee does not have to be a terrorist mastermind to be dangerous. One low-level detainee released in 2007, Hafizullah Shahbaz Khail, claimed he had no military training and was a supporter of Afghan president Hamid Karzai. Paul Rester, director of the Joint Intelligence Group at Guantanamo, told me that "after his transfer … [Hafizullah ] carried out an attack against U.S. forces during which two soldiers were killed and four wounded … he's now sitting back in Bagram, Afghanistan, today, having been recaptured." Rester said an intelligence officer in Afghanistan e-mailed back to Guantanamo after [Hafizullah's] capture to say, "Thanks a bunch for letting him go; he's killing our guys."

There are dozens of similar examples. … One out of five go back to jihad.

Although the Obama administration was able to spin the MSM so that they focused on the 10 percent of detainees who "played a direct role in plotting, executing, or facilitating" terrorist attacks (Thiessen cites the WaPo’s article, headlined “Most detainees low-level fighters” as an example), the actions taken by the Senate Armed Services Committee shows that they understand the implications of the report. Thiessen adds that rather than vindicating the Obama administration’s position that Gitmo should be closed, the report vindicates Liz Cheney’s contention that the Big Law attorneys representing detainees pro bono “really are al-Qaeda lawyers.”  

† When Science Is A Form Of Worship: Ben Stein’s documentary “Expelled” exposed how scientific institutions worldwide colluding in a witch hunt aimed at purging creationist sympathizers from their payrolls. But while researching her book, "Science vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think,” Rice University sociologist Elaine Ecklund learned something very disturbing from her survey of almost 1,700 scientists at elite American research universities, according to The Washington Post:

These surveys and 275 lengthy follow-up interviews reveal that scientists often practice a closeted faith. They worry how their peers would react to learning about their religious views.

Fully half of these top scientists are religious. Only five of the 275 interviewees actively oppose religion. Even among the third who are atheists, many consider themselves "spiritual." One describes this spiritual atheism as being rooted in "wonder about the complexity and the majesty of existence," a sentiment many nonscientists - religious or not - would recognize. … As shown by conflicts over everything from evolution to stem cells to climate policy, breakdowns in communication between scientists and religious communities cause real problems, especially for scientists trying to educate increasingly religious college students.

† Updates To Previous Posts (penultimate item, Reality Check: Part IV): Making the same point about President Barack Hussein Obama's competence not living up to the hype as Karen Tumulty and Peggy Noonan (“[t]he oil spill puts Obama's reputation for competence in doubt”), Michael Barone, senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner, adds:

Before the oil spill, the Obama Democrats, noting their policies' unpopularity, might have asked voters to decide on "competence, not ideology," as Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis did in 1988. Now, suddenly, that doesn't seem like a viable theme for 2010 or 2012. 

Looks like Dems don’t have a leg to stand on, much less run with.

† Updates To Previous Posts (third item, How Did We Get From A Knowledge Economy To An Unskilled And Illiterate Economy?): Dean and Laura Franks, a British couple who opened Laura’s Kitchen in Wells, ME, in 2000 are just the sort of people the U.S. should welcome to its shores: They did all the required paperwork, ran a going concern for 9 years, paid all their bills on time and were able to hire three or four locals to work in the restaurant. But when they applied for a two-year renewal of their E-2 visa – granted to foreigners who want to invest in businesses – they were turned down this time, and are now in the process of selling their business and their home, reports The New York Times:

“This is the forgotten story of immigration,” said Angelo Paparelli, a prominent immigration lawyer in California. “The headlines deal with Arizona and border crossings, but these are real people too. This is what happens when you play by the rules.”

In denying the Franks’ renewal application last year, immigration officials said their restaurant had become a marginal business. The government sets no specific dollar amount, but it defines a marginal enterprise as one that “does not have the present or future capacity to generate more than enough income to provide a minimal living” for the visa holder and his family. …

Daniel Maranci, a lawyer in Boston who represented the Franks, said the couple met the test of earning more than enough to make a living because they had enough to hire three or four Americans as waiters and to pay for their properties.

“The marginality requirement is fairly subjective,” Mr. Maranci said. “U.K. nationals are saying there has been a shift generally in the way these cases are being adjudicated, with a more draconian view of marginality.” …

 “I love America,” Mr. Franks said, but he has become embittered because their hard work and frugal ways seem to count for nothing.

“You can go from ‘illegal’ to ‘green card holder,’ but we’re going from ‘legal’ to ‘no way you can get a green card,’ ” he said. “We did it wrong. If we came here illegally, we’d have a chance of becoming citizens.”

† Updates To Previous Posts (second item, Everybody Draw Mohammad Day): The Associated Press reports that “Pakistan lifted a ban on Facebook on Monday after officials from the social networking site apologized for a page deemed offensive to Muslims and removed its contents”:

"In response to our protest, Facebook has tendered their apology and informed us that all the sacrilegious material has been removed from the URL," said Najibullah Malik, secretary of Pakistan's information technology ministry, referring to the technical term for a Web page.

Facebook assured the Pakistani government that "nothing of this sort will happen in the future," Malik said.

Officials from the website could not immediately be reached for comment. They said earlier the contents of the "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day!" page did not violate Facebook's terms.

The page encouraged users to post images of the prophet to protest threats made by a radical Muslim group against the creators of the American TV series "South Park" for depicting Muhammad in a bear suit during an episode earlier this year. …

The government will continue to block some Web pages that contain "sacrilegious material," but Malik declined to specify which ones.

The Stiletto is confused. The page is still up, as far as she can tell, and the tenor of many of the submissions has gone from wry to wrathful. In the beginning, the artists merely wanted to strike a blow for free speech. Now, more than a few of them want to strike a blow against Islam. Pakistan’s intolerance of free speech - radical Islamic student protesters carried signs urging holy war against Facebook - created the very insult it was trying to squelch.

† Updates To Previous Posts (Garbage In, Garbage Out: Part II): Robert Enlow, CEO of Milton and Rose Friedman’s Foundation for Educational Choice, slams the Obama administration’s proposed public school bailout (AKA the $23 billion Keep Our Educators Working Act) in a Washington Times op-ed:

In public school districts across the country, teachers are facing layoffs, thanks to years of oversized budgets and recent shrinking revenues. …

Obviously, educating children is critical to our future, but this irresponsible behavior begs the simple question of why moms and dads lose their jobs while school administrators, educrats and teachers get unlimited job protection. Maybe it's because the federal government can print money without considering what it will cost our children. And maybe it's because the education monopoly is once again in overdrive to protect the adults at the expense of kids. …

The teaching profession, not to mention children, would be better off if some teachers were in different jobs. It's always better to have a school full of good teachers than have the federal government prop up a system in which everybody gets to keep his or her job - with no regard to whether teachers are good or bad.

If this president and Congress really wanted to help children and benefit teachers, they would emancipate students so their parents could use their own tax dollars to obtain educational services wherever they wanted - at charter schools, virtual schools or with a voucher to transfer to the private school of their choice.

† Updates To Previous Posts (ninth item, Take The Veil Off, Or Go Home): Froma Harrop, a liberal Providence Journal columnist, takes issue with Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman’s libertarian defense of the burqa:

[Chapman] writes that forbidding the burqa in public "trades one form of compulsion (you must wear this) for another (you may not wear this)."

Not quite. "You may not wear this" leaves considerably more latitude for personal expression than "you must wear this." …

Every society gets to make its own rules for conduct, which includes dress. Some cultures require covered heads. Some require uncovered faces. We don't have to approve, but we have to respect. Granted, these arguments get dicey when they touch on civil rights. But the French should have the same option to ban burqas on the street - or green socks, if they choose - as Saudi Arabia has to proscribe miniskirts.

Libertarians will counter, "We think Saudis should allow miniskirts." To that I respond, "Update us on your progress."

In his column, Chapman asks how burqa critics know that the veil is imposed on women, and argues that “just because a few adults may be coerced into doing something doesn't mean others should not be allowed to do it of their own free will.” In a repressive, regressive society, there is no free will – as evidenced by the fact that even non-Muslim women throughout the Middle East are forced to wear the veil in public for their own personal safety. Western societies should not be accommodating or tolerating repressiveness.

It seems to The Stiletto that every columnist who defends burqa-wearing as a personal or religious freedom is a man. Though The Stiletto and Harrop are on different sides of the political divide, we certainly agree on the necessity of burqa bans.

† Updates To Previous Posts (last item, 10 Reasons Michelle Obama Should Be Proud – Really Proud – Of America): This latest installment in The Stiletto Blog’s ongoing series meant to help instill the necessary pride of country in Michelle Obama’s consciousness to enable her to serve as an unofficial ambassador focuses on Twilight Wish Foundation, Seniors Have Dreams Too and other grass-roots volunteer groups for nursing home residents or homebound seniors “inspired by the Make-A-Wish Foundation for sick children,” reports The Associated Press:

While the organizers are careful not to call them "last" wishes, they're often the kind of activities the seniors can't arrange themselves or a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, like meeting a favorite celebrity or touring their childhood home. …

One of the largest such groups, the Twilight Wish Foundation, has granted about 1,300 wishes in 35 states since it was founded in 2003. It has chapters in Arizona, Illinois, Pennsylvania, New York, Virginia, New Jersey, Georgia, Washington and Idaho.

"There have been some very poignant wishes, such as people who want to go to family reunions or see a family member one more time," said Cassy Forkin, the group's founder and executive director. …

Twilight Wish divides the dreams into two categories: simple needs such as replacing a broken appliance or getting new dentures, and "living life to the fullest" wishes, which have included riding in a fighter plane and meeting a favorite baseball player.