More at American Thinker

A tale of two first ladies:

The Washington Post reports rather cheekily that Ann LePage, the wife of the Republican governor of Maine, has used family connections to secure a job.  She is waiting tables during Maine’s tourist-rich summer on the coast at an establishment where her daughter previously worked!  Her husband’s salary is only $70,000, the lowest of any state chief executive in the country.  Maine’s first lady is hoping to buy a car.


Quite a contrast to another first lady some time back, whose governor husband’s salary in Arkansas was also low by national standards.  First Lady of Arkansas Hillary Clinton invested $1,000 in cattle futures, which turned into $6,300 overnight and nearly $100K over ten months.

Read the rest at American Thinker.

Liberal Logic: Free press applies only to quill pens and hand presses!

Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman, Democrat from New Jersey, claims that the Second Amendment applies only to muskets, and as such, citizens don’t have the right to own various and sundry other weapons.  That delusion is based on her understanding that the Framers were specifically addressing only muskets.
Of course, that would also mean that the First Amendment’s freedom of speech does not apply to radio, television, recordings, electronic media of any type, and anything other than speaking or shouting with or without an eighteenth-century bullhorn.

Read the rest at Ameican Thinker.
 

North Carolina NAACP Official Spreading Hate

Gatewood waters the seeds of paranoia, fear, and hate, with implications of a police conspiracy to frame an innocent man.

Read the rest at Amercian Thinker.

Hillary Clinton prioritizes outlawing criticism of Hillary Clinton

Orlando, Dallas, Nice, terrorism, dangerous levels of deficit, lowest workforce participation in decades as millions give up even trying to find work, Putin auditioning for Tsar Vlad the Terrible, the bonds that hold a civil society together coming apart at an accelerating rate...and Hillary Clinton announces her intent to seek to alter the Constitution within a month of being sworn in as president.  For what grand purpose would that prioritization be?

Read the rest at American Thinker.

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Due Process in the Age of Obama's IRS

...if citizens are prevented from exercising a constitutional right, whether by legislation or, as often the case with this president, executive fiat, by having their names placed on a secret government list, is it remotely unreasonable to expect that political motivations (and to the left, politics motivates everything!) will result in various conservatives and libertarians being placed on that list?


Read the rest at American Thinker.

What Does 'Getting Weapons of War Off Our Streets' Really Mean?

Repeating words spoken by President Obama two years ago, Hillary Clinton stated, "I believe weapons of war have no place on our streets," referencing the AR-15 and presumably other semi-automatic rifles labeled "assault weapons" by Democrats.  The court media is also doing its part, expressing the sentiment word for word.

Read more at American Thinker.

Under the Protection of Our Flag

President Reagan was fond of telling the story of Captain Duncan Ingraham, U.S. Navy, and did so in remarks to the crew on board the USS Constellation on August 20, 1981.

After a failed attempt in 1848-1849 to free Hungary from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, one of the Hungarian leaders, named Martin Koszta, emigrated to the United States.  In doing so, Koszta made a sworn declaration of his intent to become an American citizen, and renounced any allegiance to any foreign power.  He started an import business, and nearly two years after taking that oath, while in Turkey on private business, he was recognized and seized by agents of the Empire and imprisoned in chains on an Austrian brig-of-war in Smyrna Harbor.  Koszta faced a sentence of death by hanging.

- Read It All at The American Thinker.

Instant Classic: Joe Biden on Jon Corzine

This has to be seen and heard to be believed: Biden's glowing testimony to Corzine's influence on Obama's stimulus policy in 2009 and much else!

Joe Biden on how the Obama Administration called Jon Corzine for economic advice!

Since those heady days of hope and change, Corzine ran MF Global (he was CEO) into bankruptcy, misplacing about $600 million along the way.

Gingrich Gives Pelley the Smackdown

CBS' debate moderator Scott Pelley all but asked for this smackdown, most especially by the smug look on his face as he interjects his own opinion into a Presidential debate. Gingrich is short and sweet in devastating a typical liberal platitude held by so many of the 'smart' people, those too wonderful to actually think through their opinions. Gingrich's answer would be immediately agreed to by Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR, Truman, JFK and Reagan.

Gingrich Schools Pelley

Gaddafi and Offending Muslim Sensibilities

The SEALs take out Osama Bin Laden, a self avowed Muslim. His body is treated respectfully by our military. It is washed and wrapped for a Muslim burial, complete with prayers and this is accomplished within twenty-four hours of his death, as prescribed by Islam.

Gaddafi, also a Muslim, is beaten, sodomized and eventually executed by Muslims several days ago in a Muslim country. His body is kept in a meat locker, during which time it is repeatedly put on public display. On the same day that the new Lybian leadership announces that the new government and its laws will be Sharia based, it is also announced that Gaddafi may be buried tomorrow in an undisclosed location, nearly a week after his death.

The Telegraph:

Muslim clerics said on Monday that Osama bin Laden's burial at sea was a violation of Islamic tradition that may further provoke militant calls for revenge attacks against American targets.

In India, a host of Muslim scholars, clerics and citizens declared that the bodies of the terrorists responsible for the slaughter in Mumbai should not receive respectful Muslim treatment, whether burial in under twenty four hours or in a Muslim cemetery.

Just maybe the U.S. is a bit overly sensitive to what it presumes is Muslim sensitivities, whether because of political correctness, creeping dhimmitude or both!

Killing Politicians and Other Guilty Pleasures

In the leftist pile-on blaming the Tucson shootings on the right, the collective voice of Hollywood was muted. Some, like Jane Fonda and Michael Moore, were among the notable exceptions, but most, including many normally outspoken liberals, were silent. Hollywood's instinct for self-preservation makes many wary of anything that resembles the issue of whether John Hinckley's attempted assassination of President Reagan was in any way related to Hinckley's obsession with Martin Scorsese's movie Taxi Driver.

Even after it became abundantly clear that the shooter was mentally disturbed rather than politically motivated, leftist politicians, pundits, and bloggers proclaimed that things like crosshairs on a campaign map of political districts and militaristic metaphors like "don't retreat, reload" were subliminal calls to violence and political killings by even the apolitical among the deranged. It's a matter of "climate," they claimed.

Were these people expressing sincere conviction or betraying a despicably ghoulish opportunism? If they truly believe their claims and that the purveyors of this language and imagery must be held accountable and act responsibly, why aren't they confronting Hollywood for presenting the killing of politicians in a favorable light? The answer is that such principles don't apply to their political allies!

Read it all at American Thinker.

Time to Arm Airline Passengers?

Of the four planes hijacked on 9-11, only in the case of United 93 was the death toll limited to only the flight crew and passengers. There the passengers fought back, forcing the terrorists to crash the plane in a field in Pennsylvania rather than into an occupied building in the nation's capital. In December 2001, shoe-bomber Richard Reid, at 6'4" and over 200 pounds, had to fight off two female members of the flight crew of American Airlines Flight 63 while trying to detonate a bomb until several passengers jumped in and subdued him. On Christmas day 2009, when underwear-bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to detonate his bomb on Northwest Airlines Flight 253, it was a passenger, Dutch film director Jasper Shuringa, who subdued him, allowing flight attendants to douse the flames ignited in the attempted detonation.

Read it all at American Thinker.

No One Gives a Damn What Obama Says

From DOCTOR ZERO:

Let me put this bluntly: virtually no one in America gives a damn what Barack Obama says about anything at this point. What could be more predictable, and less interesting, than Obama’s opinion on any given subject? Who wants to contemplate the economic wisdom of a guy who looted the Treasury for a trillion dollars, with less benefit than we could have achieved by stuffing hundred dollar bills into random cereal boxes? Who’s excited to hear about the next plan to convert taxpayer dollars into Democrat campaign funds? Who’s hungry for another hour of tedious excuses about permanently broken markets and the titanic dead hand of George W. Bush? Who wants a lecture on ethical business practices from the titular head of the party that gave us Charlie Rangel and Maxine Waters? What use is another hollow foreign-policy speech from a man who sees no global adversary to rival the menace of Arizona? Even Obama’s supporters don’t hear anything he says any more. There’s nothing left to hear.

War on the People of Hatteras Island

Piping Mad: Fair People at the Mercy of a Government Gone Fowl from Kevin Hicks on Vimeo.

George Will without a Teleprompter....

Too Late To Apologize

A Cornucopia of Consequences

Harry Reid’s Senate health care bill includes what is being called the “Botox tax”, a five percent excise tax on the cost of elective cosmetic surgery. That reminded me of a piece of federal excise tax history that should be known (but isn’t) to every Washington reporter and taught in every high school civics class (if we were ever again to teach high school civics) as an abject lesson in the all too common unintended consequences of legislation.

President George H.W. Bush broke his "read-my-lips" pledge to not allow any new taxes (and in doing so probably lost any chance of reelection) when he signed the Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990. Among other new taxes the bill contained a bit of demagogic class warfare embodied in an excise tax on boats costing in excess of $100,000 and other “luxury” items like jewelry and upscale cars. This was heralded far and wide by liberals with full court media support as a means of making the rich pay their “fair share” to reduce the deficit! To provide proper perspective some television news broadcasts would show footage of Donald Trump’s yacht, the Trump Princess while discussing the proposed tax. At 282’ the boat was almost the length of a WWII Evarts Class Destroyer Escort. Any politician opposing that tax risked being demonized as protecting the extravagant lifestyle of the rich against the interests of the common folk.

There were a few sensible but unheeded voices that tried to warn that the torch and pitchfork bearing mob being led up the hill to attack the castle may end up slaying other than the monster. Among the few was the late William F. Buckley. Buckley pointed out the crux of the problem in that it was reasonable to assume that people who were rich did not became or stay rich by paying for something considerably more than its actual value!

In 1990 a Congressional Committee on Taxation projected that the “luxury taxes” would bring in $31 million deficit reducing dollars. The actual result was very different. Revenues in 1991 were only $16.6 million, because sales of such taxable products plummeted. With the boats, people either didn’t buy them or bought them overseas where the tax didn’t apply. Yet that was only the beginning of the unintended consequences:

According to a study done for the Joint Economic Committee, the tax destroyed 330 jobs in jewelry manufacturing, 1,470 in the aircraft industry and 7,600 in the boating industry. The job losses cost the government a total of $24.2 million in unemployment benefits and lost income tax revenues. So the net effect of the taxes was a loss of $7.6 million in fiscal 1991, which means the government projection was off by $38.6 million.

The excise tax caused people to change their behavior and buy fewer of the taxed products. Over the next few years it got even worse. The NY Times reported:

Another consequence of the tax, contends the National Marine Manufacturers Association, has been the layoffs of thousands of skilled boatbuilders. ‘In a nutshell, this tax has been devastating,’ says Carl Herndon, president of Blackfin Yacht in Fort Lauderdale. ‘The rich are still rich. But the people who are on the unemployment rolls are blue-collar workers.’

A trade magazine reported:

According to a survey of the largest boat dealers in Connecticut, conducted by the Marine Retailers Association of America (MRAA), sales of boats costing $100,000 or more have fallen 93 percent… Nationwide, more than 19,000 people have been put out of work at boat making plants.

By 1993 Congressman John Kasich had this to say:

The 1990 budget deal also slapped a hefty luxury tax on boats… to draw more money from wealthy yacht owners. What actually happened? People bought fewer boats. So who really paid the price? The many nonwealthy boat builders who were put out of work by the tax… The [Washington] Post article reported estimates that 25,000 to 30,000 jobs were lost. These effects were so obvious that even the tax raisers in Congress now plan to repeal the yacht tax.

Republican Senator Slade Gorton in 1993 said with biting irony:

What went wrong with the luxury tax was that, in trying to go after the rich guys' toys, Congress put the toymakers out of business.

The Congressional Research Service reported in classic bureaucratic understatement:

The luxury excise taxes enacted in 1990 were all based on sales prices exceeding statutory amounts, suggesting congressional desire to shift some or part of the overall tax increase to upper-income individuals. Opponents argued, however, that the taxes depressed sales and employment in the affected industries and this actually burdened lower-income workers. Congress accepted this argument in 1993, repealing all the taxes except that on automobiles in the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993.

A tax that was intended to raise revenue and soak the rich ended up costing the federal government millions in lost revenue and unemployment payments while devastating thousands of middle class families and hundreds of small businesses. The excise tax on boats was eventually repealed in 1993 (with far less media fanfare than its passage).

Now we may have an excise tax on elective cosmetic surgery, as Politico reports:

The bill levies a 5 percent tax on elective cosmetic surgery. The provision raises $5 billion and was needed to make the numbers work, according to a Democratic Senate aide.

Yes, the $5 billion was needed to make the numbers add up in the Senate health care bill. However, the “global medical tourism” sector has already been growing rapidly for procedures like elective cosmetic surgery. Should anyone be surprised if this excise tax results not only in a revenue shortfall from projections but also in more such surgery being done in places like Costa Rica with commensurate job and income losses in the U.S.?

Having said all of this, while focus on the excise taxes is worthwhile in itself, it can obscure the looming larger danger. Here is the text of the Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990 relating to the tax on boats:

SEC. 4002. BOATS.
`(a) IMPOSITION OF TAX- There is hereby imposed on the 1st retail sale of any boat a tax equal to 10 percent of the price for which so sold to the extent such price exceeds $100,000.
`(b) EXCEPTIONS- The tax imposed by this section shall not apply to the sale of any boat for use by the purchaser exclusively in the active conduct of--
`(1) a trade or business of commercial fishing or transporting persons or property for compensation or hire, or
`(2) any other trade or business unless the boat is to be used predominantly in any activity which is of a type generally considered to constitute entertainment, amusement, or recreation.

That is it, in total. Those relatively few lines, a fraction of a page, caused terrible even if unintended harm to many thousands! The health care bill passed by the House is over 1900 pages. The proposed Senate bill is over 2000. If that passes, the two bills are brought together to breed a kind of mutant offspring in reconciliation. It is hard to imagine that the result of that will be a smaller piece of legislation.

These bills have been rushed, and not widely read or understood even by those who will vote on them. They have been cobbled together by Congressional staff members and lawyers with little or no experience in health care. It is one thing and terrible enough to have thousands of blue collar workers in the ship building industry lose their livelihoods to satisfy other people’s envy made manifest in ill-thought legislation. It is quite another order of magnitude to have thousands of pages of legislation passed that could potentially effect the health, medical care and well being of every American with all manner of unintended consequences lurking in those pages!

NPR’s Mara Liasson accurately summed up the Democrats’ position this way:

… the message that the White House and President Clinton is sending to doubting Democrats is: Swallow hard, vote for this even if it's not perfect. We can fix it later, because this is our chance and probably our one chance in this presidency to get this thing we have wanted for so long.

It took the Congress three years to “fix” the excise tax on boats by repealing it, even in the face of the devastation to thousands of blue collar workers and a decline in tax revenue. Of course, the problem need never have happened in the first place if Congress had thought through their proposed legislation. What damage will have to be done to the health and medical well being of how many American citizens before Congress might “fix” the things they get wrong now, the unintended consequences in those thousands of unread pages they are rushing to pass?

Muslims Bombing Muslims!!!

Muslims (Saudis) are shelling and bombing Muslims (Yemenis) and we are not getting hourly photos of the civilian casualties!

Read the rest at American Thinker.

Rep Cao vs retired Lt Gen Honoré

The single Republican to vote for Speaker Pelosi's version of ObamaCare was Rep. Anh "Joseph" Cao, who replaced William "Cold Cash" Jefferson in Louisiana's 2nd Congressional District. Rep. Cao's engagement in bi-partisanship immediately raised the obvious question as to what was offered in return, and Michelle Malkin provides an answer:

Cao wrote he obtained commitment from President Obama that he would work together to address...issues related to Charity and Methodist Hospitals.

Read the rest at The American Thinker.

President Obama: Afghanistan is yours! You wanted the job, you've got it!

Make of this what you will.

US Military Fatalities In Afghanistan/OEF By Year (from icasualities)
Year-----US
2001-----12
2002-----49
2003-----48
2004-----52
2005-----99
2006-----98
2007-----117
2008-----155
2009-----276
Total-----906

Note the numbers for the last four months (June - October) as compared to all the previous history. President Obama announced his new strategy last March, three months before the monthly death toll jumped into the seventies from previous highs in the forties.

Coalition Military Fatalities by Month and Year.













Note the sharp upward trend in KIA by IED:

Washington Post, March 28, 2009
Obama Outlines Afghan Strategy
He Pushes Stability and Regional Partnerships

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 28, 2009

President Obama introduced his new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan yesterday with a threat assessment familiar from the Bush administration. "The terrorists who planned and supported the 9/11 attacks," he said, are continuing to devise plots designed to "kill as many of our people as they possibly can."

Charles Krauthammer points out what should be obvious:





From a CRS (Congressional Research Service) Report to Congress, November 2007, entitled "Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs)in Iraq and Afghanistan: Effects and Countermeasures":

In July 2007, DOD officials reportedly accused four captured Iranians of smuggling explosives and personnel from Iran into Iraq. Iran is suspected of supplying Iraq insurgents with training and new IED technology, such as “passive infrared” electronicsensors that are used for triggering roadside bombs. The new sensors are more resistant to electromagnetic countermeasures now employed by U.S. forces. DOD officials also suspect that Iran is supplying Iraq insurgents with a more lethal IED bomb design called an explosively formed projectile (EFP). An EFP is made from a pipe filled with explosives and capped by a specially shaped metal disk. When the explosives detonate, they transform the disk into a jet of molten metal capable of penetrating armor. EFPs reportedly strike with enough power to cause pieces of a targeted vehicle’s heavy armor to turn into shrapnel, making them much more deadly than traditional IED weapons.

DOD officials report there were 69 attacks utilizing EFPs in April 2007. The same type of EFP device has been used by Shiite organizations in Lebanon, where Hezbollah receives military support from Iran. However, Iranian government officials deny involvement with any transfer of these weapons to Iraq.

UPDATE: As to what Krauthammer calls Obama's "disgusting" continuous bashing of his predecessor, there is a precedent for that and it might be what Obama is following. That was how FDR and the New Dealers treated Hoover, with never ending attacks for years that were often bold faced lies but served a political purpose for FDR. Roosevelt stands as a giant success to Democrats not because he ended the Great Depression but because he won four Presidential elections in a row. Truman respected and came to rely on Hoover for counsel, but Truman didn't carry the FDR baggage.

AP: Jerusalem's Holiest Site Is - Muslim!!!???

Yes, that's the AP headline:

Israeli police storm Jerusalem's holiest site
By RAWHI RAZIM, Associated Press Writer Rawhi Razim

JERUSALEM – Israeli forces stormed Jerusalem's holiest shrine Sunday, firing stun grenades to disperse hundreds of stone-throwing Palestinian protesters in a fresh eruption of violence at the most volatile spot in the country.

A wall of Israeli riot police behind plexiglass shields closed in on the crowd, sending many protesters — overwhelmingly young men — running for cover into the black-domed Al-Aqsa mosque.

Is this journalistic objectivity or is the AP being religiously correct or merely allowing a certain amount of editorializing from a Muslim point of view so as to prevent troubles to - AP? If that had read "Jerusalem's holiest Muslim shrine" or "holiest" Muslim site", it would be entirely accurate and fair. Or perhaps the AP editors are blissfully unaware of the Jewish and Christian shrines in Jerusalem, every one of which predates the Al-Aqsa mosque! There is the Jewish Western Wall and the Christian Church of the Holy Sepulcher, for example!

Or is this one of those cases that if the AP didn't call the Muslim shrine the holiest site in Jerusalem some would consider that blasphemy?

By way of contrast, Israel Today calls the Temple Mount, upon which the Al-Aqsa mosque site, "the holiest site in Judaism".

We can expect reports of crowds of angry Christians shouting "death to AP" for the blasphemous insult any moment now...

UPDATE: AP has probably noticed a problem that maybe got through those layers of editors! At the Yahoo News link above to the AP story by Rawhi Razim there is now an updated AP story by Matti Friedman in its place. The stories have switched but not the title, which still alludes to the Al-Aqsa mosque being the holiest site. However, the body of the story now calls that mosque Israel's most volatile shrine!

UPDATE #2: Even Drudge has the headline "Israeli police storm Jerusalem's holiest site..."

UPDATE #3: For those who may not know;

The Western Wall (or Wailing Wall) is a remnant of Herod's Temple, built about 20 B.C. The Temple was virtually destroyed by the Romans about 70 A.D.

The Church of the Holy Sepulcher was first built around 330 A.D. by Helena, the mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine. It was believed to have been built on the spot where Jesus' body was laid to rest in the tomb provided by Joseph of Arimathia and that therefore was also the place at which Jesus rose from the dead. It is also believed to have been built on the Hill called Golgotha where Jesus was crucified. The original church was destroyed by the Persians during a siege of Jerusalem around 614 A.D. and rebuilt. The Muslim Egyptian caliph al-Hakim destroyed that church around 1010 A.D. Most of the current standing church was built by the Crusaders who completed their construction in 1168 A.D.

The Al-Aqsa mosque is where Mohammed is believed to have prayed and received from Allah the commandment to pray fives times a day. Mohammed is believed to have traveled from Mecca to Jerusalem on a flying white horse. The mosque was built over what was the remains of the mostly destroyed Jewish Temple in about 709 A.D. It is considered the third holiest Muslim site after Mecca and Medina.

The Obama Thesis Mess, involving Michael Ledeen, Rush Limbaugh and Joe Klein, and my sorry part in it all!

Yesterday was not a good day! I found myself at something close to the center of an embarrassing controversy (The Obama Columbia Thesis Affair!), and though not alone in that uncomfortable location, much if not most of it was totally my fault.

Early in the day I ran across a two day old post at Faster, Please!, Michael Ledeen's blog. I've read and respected Mr. Ledeen's work for years. It was entitled Obama and the Constitution; He Has His Doubts.

Mr. Ledeen wrote at the very beginning of his post:

Brian Lancaster at Jumping in Pools reported on Obama’s college thesis...

So very early to make a critical assumption and mistake, but not too early for me! I have used similar formulations, such as "as reported by Robin at Chickenhawk Express". When I do so, I am invariably making reference to someone who has credibility with me. I read Mr. Ledeen's words projecting my own sense of confidence in that way and didn't follow the link to Brian Lancaster's site. Huge mistake!

Noting that Mr. Ledeen's post was two days old (Oct. 21), I searched Google news for sources that would have picked up the story of these eminently newsworthy quotes attributed to a young Barack Obama at Columbia. I got nothing.

At that point and considering some very verifiable history of the GUANOs (Government's Unoffically Authorized News Organizations) as regards Barack Obama, I thought we might have another case of media 'ho-hum, move along, nothing to see here' when something might reflect badly on Obama!

I wrote a short piece comparing what I thought was media inaction in reporting on what I thought was an Obama thesis and the many reports in the media on the decades old thesis written by the Republican candidate for governor in Virginia. I sent that to American Thinker mid-morning, and it was posted as Obama's Columbia thesis excerpt surfaces. That post had:

What on earth does this President have to do to get the media coverage he so richly deserves! In the Virginia Governor's race, Republican candidate Robert McDonnell wrote a graduate thesis twenty years ago that could be politically damaging to his campaign. That decades old thesis has been covered by the Washington Post on August 30 and again on September 1. It has been reported on in some depth across the spectrum of media outlets from NPR to US News to the CS Monitor to FOX and on and on!

That was the main point of the post. I also quoted the supposed thesis by Obama as having this written by him:

... the Constitution allows for many things, but what it does not allow is the most revealing. The so-called Founders did not allow for economic freedom. While political freedom is supposedly a cornerstone of the document, the distribution of wealth is not even mentioned. While many believed that the new Constitution gave them liberty, it instead fitted them with the shackles of hypocrisy.

I didn't then and do not now consider those sentiments to be beyond the pale of possibility that Obama could think and write such as a very young college student who by his own admission sought to hang out with the radicals at Columbia, some of whom I've known! In this 2001 interview video, Obama the State Senator speaks of the Constitution as a document of negative liberties that avoided discussion of distribution of wealth, his "redistributive change".

Having said that, my main point was still about the GUANOs covering for Obama, a very current topic as the administrations has sought to keep the GUANOs in line by the example of ostracizing and demonizing FOX.

AT published the post and I had other things to do, but in spurts as I could I began to search Google news for any connection, as the Ledeen post had claimed, between Joe Klein and the thesis, and came up empty. I started to have growing doubts about the story. When the post went up at AT, the first comment to it was time stamped at 9:13. The times on the comments do not reflect the real time here on the East Coast where I write, but they do properly show intervals. By 9:59, three quarters of an hour later by time stamp, I commented as DenisK, identifying myself as the author, that I have doubts that the story I picked up from Michael Ledeen's blog was real and I was having trouble verifying it from other news sources. I wrote:

...I am having no success now in further verifying the quote and a growing sense of doubt that it is real.

In the interim and afterward, I tried without success to contact Mr. Ledeen (but did get through to PJM, the host for Mr. Ledeen's blog, with my concerns) and to continue to try to find any news source connecting Joe Klein to a supposed thesis. PJM later replied to me that they were also doubting the story. In frustration I finally, belatedly, unforgivably went to Mr. Ledeen's source for the story at Jumping in Pools- and found it to be a satire! I had certainly found - confirmation!

I was listening to Rush Limbaugh while doing so and he started to reference the Ledeen claim on his radio show, and believing in abject shame that he picked it up from my post at AT (he did as he later read from my piece), I immediately e-mailed him (subject line: Obama Thesis Quote Phony) and stated that I was the AT author, that I checked Ledeen's source and found it to be satire and that he should back away from a story that was totally bogus. If you go to the transcripts of Rush's show, you will find that he backed off the story within minutes of talking about it, though I don't necessarily believe it was my e-mail or solely my e-mail that got to him on it! Rush said this, and did so making his own satirical point about the GUANOs:

I'm also told that the blog containing the passage on Obama's thesis is a satire blog. So it's one of these sites like ScrappleFace or The Onion or some such thing. So I shout from the mountaintops: "It was satire!" But we know he thinks it. Good comedy, to be comedy, must contain an element of truth, and we know how he feels about distribution of wealth. He's mad at the courts for not going far enough on it. So we stand by the fabricated quote because we know Obama thinks it anyway. That's how it works in the media today.

Immediately after that I posted in the comments again at AT (11:42 a.m.) with a correction stating that Ledeen had inadvertently taken a satire seriously and that I had taken Ledeen's post seriously and the story was bogus. Not long after that Mr. Ledeen posted a link at the top of his blog post to an apology he offered for the mistake, and he also personally contacted Joe Klein and apologized to him:

The Obama “thesis” hoax
It’s a hoax, or a satire, depending on your point of view. Joe Klein has said that he never read any part of an Obama “thesis” from his Columbia days, and that’s conclusive, as far as I’m concerned.

The hoax/satire was written in August, so it’s not connected to any current event. I cam across it on Twitter, read the blog, found it interesting, and posted on it. I failed to notice that one of the tags was “satire.” So he got me, and lots of others. It worked because it’s plausible...

So I should have picked up some hint, but I didn’t. Shame on me.

I’m posting this as quickly as possible. Apologies to the president and to Joe Klein, and to Rush Limbaugh, who had many very wise things to say about the Constitution and the views of the Founders today, and to everyone else who got involved.

I ended up posting two more comments, one yesterday when it seemed some readers weren't getting the point that the story was in error. The other was today, with more detail, and in that one I directly answered one critical commentor, CommonSense, as follows:

Yes, CommonSense, bad mistakes, very much including mine. However, how quickly did we seek to correct them? Mr. Ledeen, Rush Limbaugh and PJM and the blog post author here at AT all posted corrections or backed off the story or both within hours or less. Was that the case with the major media and many on the left with the fake Limbaugh quotes, or the fake TANG documents about Bush, or Jimmy Masssey, or...as you write this:

"Have you all no shame? As the president he deserves that much."

CommonSense, have you ever in the last several years heard the totally bogus claim that "Bush lied" about Iraq, and who has climbed down on that false charge? On the left it was just keep repeating the lie until it is believed! That's the difference.

I also have to say this. I believe Mr. Ledeen's apology, especially to Joe Klein, was gracious. Mr. Klein's response, not so very much:

A report is circulating among the wingnuts that I had a peek at Barack Obama's senior thesis. It is completely false. I've never seen Obama's thesis. I have no idea where this report comes from--but I can assure you that it's complete nonsense.
Update: Michael Ledeen now has apologized to me on his blog, claiming that he, Limbaugh and others were punked by a satire. I appreciate the apology...but I wonder about what the willingness to take this cheesy crap as gospel says about Ledeen's--and Boss Rush's--sensibility. Actually, on second thought, I don't wonder all that much.

All I can say to Mr. Klein is that people make mistakes. Some try to correct them and even make strenuous effort to do so. Others, when having been accused of writing things that were in error, say things like:

I have neither the time nor...background to figure out who's right.

I didn't write that. Joe Klein did, and it comes from Editor & Publisher, November 29, 2007, and reads:

Klein, under persistent pressure since, backtracked to some extent in recent days, offering repeated updated clarifications, which critics also deemed inadequate. Finally he wrote, "I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who's right." Now the next issue of Time magazine, due out Friday, runs a correction of sorts that Greenwald and others may still find lacking as it suggests the factual matter is under dispute. The Chicago Tribune, however, which carried Klein's column, ran a full-fledged, unqualified correction, today.

Yes, Mr. Klein, we can all make mistakes, and some of us seek to correct them quickly and apologize with sincerity, without pressure or equivocation. Yesterday I wrote this (4:59) in the comments at AT:

The source I relied on for the news about the supposed Obama thesis and the quotes that appeared "Obama Not Getting Media Coverage He Deserves!" was Michael Ledeen at PJM. He has now retracted his story and apologized for any trouble his post has caused to any, stating that he was taken in by what was either a fraud or a satire. I too sincerely apologize to American Thinker, its readership and Rush Limbaugh, for my part in having spread what turned out to be entirely false. I should have checked further than a single source for something with such volatile content.

But then again, Mr. Klein, I'm not a professional journalist who does this for a living or any compensation, so I didn't have to be pressured to make correction to error.

UPDATE: One might almost think there's a pattern of behavior here....

Another blog, Left Coast Rebel, also fell for the satire as being real and then also corrected and apologized without the need for any kind of pressure! Gosh!

Rush should make CNN an offer it can't refuse

CNN just keeps embarrassing itself. Oddly enough, Rush Limbaugh could help them out, while doing himself a little good at the same time.

Following close on its much-derided ‘fact checking' of an SNL skit poking fun at President Obama, and the humiliating pat-on-the-head it got as an Obama administration-certified legitimate news organization, CNN has now queried a psychiatrist as to why folks listen to conservative talk radio, especially Rush Limbaugh. CNN's Carol Costello interviewed psychiatrist Gail Saltz. (Video courtesy of Breitbart. Watch it!)

Read the rest at American Thinker.