† Every Bubble Bursts Eventually: The Washington Post reports that in making the case for his re-election, President Barack Hussein Obama and his campaign staff “plan to define his tenure as a time of major progress:”

 

In an e-mail to supporters, Obama said his campaign would be an effort “to protect the progress we’ve made - and make more.”

 

“Progress” is defined as “forward or onward movement.” But in that same article, The WaPo notes that the decision to try KSM in a military court at Gitmo is a reversal from Obama’s campaign pledge to hold the trials in federal court.”

 

Others describe the decision as “a full spinning reversal with a triple twist”; “backpedaling”; “retreat”; “a major about-face”; and “a major policy U-turn.” For Obama, this is “progress” – albeit back to Bush-era policies.

 

Inspired by a “Saturday Night Live” bit (video), nine months into Obama’s only term in office™ The Stiletto noted:

 

† Has he halted North Korea’s nuclear program? Uh, no.

† Has he gotten Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions? Nope.

† Has he stopped the genocide in Darfur? Uh-uh.

† Has he achieved peace between the Arabs and the Israelis? Not yet.

† Has he stopped human rights abuses in China. Nah.

 

Now at Obama’s half-way mark, The Stiletto cannot discern any “progress” on any of these issues.

 

† Netanyahu Is Bush III: Former South African Judge Richard Goldstone, principle author of the report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict (AKA The Goldstone Report), which concluded that Israel had committed a variety of war crimes and human-rights during the 22-day Gaza war that began on December 27, 2008, has renounced its key findings “in a rare public display of intellectual honesty,” The Washington Times reports: (2008-12-27)

 

Detailed investigations held since the report was rushed out after the war had vindicated the Jewish state. In particular, there is no evidence that the nearly 1,000 civilian deaths in Gaza were premeditated or committed under orders. "While the investigations published by the Israeli military and recognized in the U.N. committee's report have established the validity of some incidents that we investigated in cases involving individual soldiers," Mr. Goldstone wrote, "they also indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy."

 

The flaws in the Goldstone report were mainly due to insufficient information. Israel was undertaking methodical internal reviews in 2009 that didn't fit the more brisk United Nations timeline and hampered cooperation with the U.N. mission. As well, Mr. Goldstone states that the U.N. Human Rights Council's "history of bias against Israel cannot be doubted," which also made Israel hesitant to cooperate. The reviews supported Israel's version of events, and Mr. Goldstone added that had "evidence explaining the circumstances in which we said civilians in Gaza were targeted," been available at the time, "it probably would have influenced our findings about intentionality and war crimes."

 

There goes one of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan’s anti-Israel talking points (second item)!

 

† Dispatch From Bizzaroland: President Barack Hussein Obama, who was praised for "transparency, accountability and good government" by John Gage, National President of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), is now being condemned for lack of transparency, accountability and good government by Gage, The Washington Times reports:

 

Representing more than a half-million federal workers, the union sued the White House budget office and its director, Jacob J. Lew, in U.S. District Court in Washington over what it called the office's "unlawful" failure to respond to an expedited Freedom of Information Act request.

 

The union filed the information request last month because it wants the Office of Management and Budget to turn over contingency plans on how federal agencies will handle a potential government shutdown, including a list of all federal employees who will continue to report to work "to protect life and property."

 

AFGE officials also want to know about any guidance from the OMB regarding when federal agencies should implement shutdown plans and how they should do so.

 

"It's not something that should be cavalierly handled," Mr. Gage said. "If a shutdown goes on, there will be federal employees who are going to be hurt financially. They should know before the eve of a shutdown what is happening, and it should be done orderly and not in a last-minute rush."

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (second item, The Right To Bear Arms Belongs To Us All: Part II): In another instance of the MSM trying to out law-abiding gun-owners - some of whom have shot only at paper targets - The Associated Press has asked IL Attorney General Lisa Madigan to release their names, reports John Stossel, host of an eponymous show on the Fox Business Network:

 

Publication of that list would tell the criminal class where the guns are, which could be useful to two different sorts of lawbreakers: gun thieves who want to know where the guns are and burglars who want to know where they are not.

  

New York City released its list recently at The New York Times' request. It included "dozens of boldface names and public figures: prominent business leaders, elected officials, celebrities, journalists, judges and lawyers," the Times reported. It then named names.

  

People who want the lists made public say the disclosure is necessary to assure that government doesn't issue permits to felons. They point to an AP report that gun permits were given to hundreds of felons in Florida, Tennessee and Indiana. So because government is not competent enough to obey its own rules, the rest of us must have our privacy compromised? I don't buy it.

 

As Richard Pearson of the Illinois State Rifle Association says: "There is no legitimate reason for anyone to have access to the information. The safety of real people is at stake here. Once this information is released, it will be distributed to street gangs and gun-control groups, who will use the data to target gun owners for crime and harassment."

  

Good point. One nice thing about concealed weapons is that even people who don't carry guns are safer because the muggers can't tell who is armed and who isn't. Releasing the list of permit-holders undermines that benefit.

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (penultimate item, Restorative Capital Punishment): In January, after he had eaten his final meal, the United States Supreme Court stayed the execution of former Army recruiter Cleve Foster, 47, who was convicted in 2006 of murdering a woman he met in a Fort Worth bar nine years ago. Foster’s appeal claiming that his trial lawyers should have put a blood spatter expert on the stand was rejected, and his execution was re-scheduled for this week. The Supreme Court has now issued a second last-minute stay so the justices can consider whether to re-hear his appeal. Although his attorneys had unsuccessfully challenged the state’s substitution of pentobarbital for sodium thiopental in the three-drug lethal injection cocktail – the Third Court of Appeals of Texas upheld a lower court ruling rejecting the complaint – the high court did not comment on the execution protocol.

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (Obama Is Just About Every U.S. President All Rolled Into One!): More evidence that he’s Jimmy Carter, from The Washington Post:

 

Previous bouts of inflation have usually meant a wage-price spiral, as pay and prices chase each other ever upward. But now paychecks are falling further and further behind. In the past three months, consumer prices have been rising at a 5.7 percent annual rate while average weekly wages have barely budged, increasing at an annual rate of only 1.3 percent.

 

And the particular prices that are rising are for products that people encounter most frequently in their daily lives and have the least flexibility to avoid. For the most part, it’s not computers and cars that are getting more expensive, it’s gasoline, which is up 19 percent in the past year, ground beef, up 10 percent, and butter, up 23 percent.

 

Inflation is typically the symptom of an economy overheating. Workers can’t keep up with the demand for the vast array of things they make. Abundant dollars pursue scarce goods and services, forcing prices and wages up. The solution is simple enough: Central banks, such as the Federal Reserve, increase interest rates, applying brakes to the economy.

 

But the current price spike is in some ways more pernicious than the last great U.S. inflation - the steep increases of the 1970s - and harder for policymakers to address. Today, raising interest rates might make a weak economy even weaker, stifling what meager growth there has been in wages. Moreover, higher interest would make the nation’s massive budget deficits even more expensive to finance, taking an additional toll on the economy.

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (second item, A New Form Of Tax Avoidance): Those who don’t have the space or patience to grow their own tobacco, thereby avoiding onerous – or should that be usurious – cigarette taxes, prefer to buy “loosies” on the street, reports The New York Times:

 

By 8:30 a.m., amid the procession of sleepy-eyed office workers and addicts from the nearby methadone clinic, Lonnie Loosie plants himself in the middle of the sidewalk on Eighth Avenue in Midtown. Addressing no one in particular, he calls out his one-size-fits-all greeting: “Newports, Newports, packs and loosies.”

 

Rarely does a minute go by without a customer stopping just long enough to pass a dollar bill to Lonnie Loosie, known to the police by his given name, Lonnie Warner, 50. They clench the two “loosies” - as single cigarettes are called - that he thrusts back in return. …

 

Itinerant cigarette vendors have long been a fixture in some parts of the city, like bodegas that sell individual cigarettes in violation of state law. But with cigarette prices up and the number of smoke-friendly places down, the black market for loosies is now thriving on the streets. …

 

[T]here have been successive rounds of taxes — the most recent one, a $1.60 rise in the state tax in July — that raised the price of a pack of cigarettes to $12.50 at many Midtown newsstands.

 

“The tax went up, and we started selling 10 times as much,” Mr. Warner said. “Bloomberg thinks he’s stopping people from smoking. He’s just turning them onto loosies.”

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (penultimate item, Employers Hiring Forged Documented Aliens Are Lawbreakers In Other Ways, Too): The Stiletto has repeatedly made this point herself, but it can never be repeated too many times: Employers who hire illegal aliens “are like war profiteers who put profits ahead of the interests of their nation and its people” 0emphasis, The Stiletto]. Here, Center for Immigration Studies explains why:

 

War profiteers use their power and influence to actively engage their governments in war for their personal and corporate gain. Like war profiteers, illegal immigration profiteers use their power and influence to get their governments to facilitate and encourage illegal immigration so they can pad their bottom lines.

 

War profiteers engage in actions that put heavy burdens on a nation's taxpayers. Illegal immigration profiteers shift billions of dollars in social costs associated with low-paid, often exploited illegal alien employees to American taxpayers. …

 

War profiteers replace national interests and the interests of the nation's citizens with their own personal interests. Illegal immigration profiteers support open borders and encourage people with no allegiance to the United States to take the place of hard-working Americans who do their best to obey the laws and to raise their children to be honorable citizens.

 

War profiteers ignore the laws they don't like and fight laws that limit their ability to profit from war regardless of the harm done to others. If laws restrict their activities, they find loopholes and ways around them. Illegal immigration profiteers fight to prevent the enforcement of existing laws or the passage of new laws that would limit their ability to profit from illegal immigration.

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (sixth item, Is Hillary Clinton Campaigning For President?):  On the very day that President Barack Hussein Obama announced the launch of his re-election campaign, John Phillips (“The John Phillips Show,” 790 KABC-Los Angeles) makes the case that Hillary supporters want their gal to challenge our challenged president for the Dem nomination in 2012 in a post on Los Angeles Times blog Top of the Ticket (the dueling campaign buttons are funny, funny, funny):

 

Despite Obama's anti-climactic campaign announcement just now, according to all the recent polls, Hillary voters aren't only jumping ship – they're taking their fins, snorkels and pina coladas with them. …

 

The military action in Libya is Team Hillary's 'I told you so' moment...with Hillary serving as the realistic, aggressive war hawk and Obama being a not-ready-for-prime-time waffler.

 

This frustration was expressed by a Clinton insider in the British newspaper The Daily, who said, "Obviously, she’s not happy with dealing with a president who can’t decide if today is Tuesday or Wednesday, who can’t make his mind up...it’s like playing sports with a bunch of amateurs. And she doesn’t have any power. She’s trying to do what she can to keep things from imploding.”

 

 

This may not be a vote of no confidence...but at a minimum, it's voting 'present.' …

 

Despite her contemporary denials, Hillary would only throw her hat in the ring if she thought she had a better than even chance at moving back into the White House. Obama is looking weak, but not weak enough to justify a primary challenge...yet.

 

If Libya turns into a full blown disaster...resulting in billions of dollars wasted, boots on the ground and abysmal public opinion numbers, my money is on Hillary resigning her post as secretary of State and jumping in the 2012 primary.

 

She can even rerun the "3 AM Phone Call" ad...with the tagline 'See, I told you so.'

 

Mediaite reports that for his part, Glenn Beck “hummed the theme song to ‘Jaws’ as he suggested that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton smells blood in the water and predicted that she will “reluctantly get into the race for 2012.”

 

† Updates To Previous Posts (last item, First They Came For The Guns, Then They Came For The Knives): ME legislators approved a bill legalizing the use of switchblade knives have a blade that is three inches or shorter by people with one arm, that Gov. Paul LePage (R) is expected to sign, Reuters reports:

 

Backers of the measure say legalizing switchblades would eliminate a need for one-armed people to be forced to open folding knives with their teeth in emergencies. …

 

Until now, Maine banned the use of switchblades by anyone.

 

In most states, carrying switchblades is illegal in most circumstances, though owning the knives may be allowed in some states.

 

Federal law allows their use by a person with one arm only on federal property if the blade is shorter than three inches.

 

Meanwhile, 10-year-old Nicholas Maxim, a fifth-grader Readfield (ME) Elementary School who was born without hands and lower arms and writes by holding a pencil between his upper arms has been awarded the first Nicholas Maxim Special Award for Excellent Penmanship, The Associated Press reports:

 

Judges who sifted through 200,000 handwriting entries in the annual contest run by Zaner-Bloser, of Columbus, Ohio, were so impressed that they decided a new category was warranted to inspire others.

 

Maxim, who said he likes writing and illustrating comic strips, didn't know his paper had been submitted to the contest, so Monday's school assembly in his honor came as a surprise.

 

"We submitted his entry because we felt his penmanship was amazing considering he completes most of his work without using his prostheses," said Principal Cheryl Hasenfus.