Smart Diplomacy?

U.S. secretly trained Egyptian rebel leaders.

The American Embassy in Cairo helped a young dissident attend a US-sponsored summit for activists in New York, while working to keep his identity secret from Egyptian state police.

On his return to Cairo in December 2008, the activist told US diplomats that an alliance of opposition groups had drawn up a plan to overthrow President Hosni Mubarak and install a democratic government in 2011.

I wonder how much Obama and/or Hillary were involved in this. It doesn't seem to have come via Wikileaks.

Update: It may have come through Wikileaks, and since this was first posted, HotAir has posted that the Obama administration canceled efforts to support Egyptian protesters.

“Things are never so bad they can’t get worse.”

Who ever told you that the left is non-violent?

When I was a kid, one of the things that turned me toward conservatism was the fact that the "pacifists" were burning flags, destroying property, burning people in effigy and constantly clashing with police. So I knew they were lying about the tea partiers or at least projecting. It's only when they're losing the argument that they start complaining about the "vitriol" in the other side's rhetoric.

Change in Egypt--Too fluid now to know how it will fall out. The Muslim Brotherhood, democrats, Mubarak and the Egyptian army are all in the mix.

Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission issues its report showing that the roots go back a long way and that both banks and regulators are to blame.

Jennifer Rubin's Final Thoughts on the SOTU and Paul Ryan is well worth reading, especially if you didn't listen to them. Obama's continued failure to understand what makes America work never ceases to amaze me. Can anybody really be this naive?

Did he never hear the fairy tale about the goose that laid golden eggs and what happened when the greedy owner killed the goose to get all the gold at once? How much time and treasure will we waste on progressive myths?

Signs that the end is near

I am NOT one who pretends to know the time of the Second Coming. The signs have been with us since the 1800s, but they are increasing, and we had better pay attention. One of the major signs is the threshing of the nations (See Habakkuk 3:12), the breaking down of national powers that resist freedom.

Here's one. The destruction of the Iron Curtain, the collapse of Tunisia's regime and this unrest in Egypt. No one except God knows how this will unwind itself, but the general trend will be toward more freedom and more opportunities to spread the word of God.

Ryan's response in a nutshell:

Ryan did what Obama did not: He explained why his approach is superior his opponents'

Fisking the President is getting too easy when he does it for you.

Ann Althouse on the SOTU:

At stake right now is not who wins the next election – after all, we just had an election.

Ha. What a lie! The next election is completely at stake. As for the last election, some of us think it was really important. But you're saying: Eh, it's over. Let's turn away from electoral politics. But we know damned well you're working on 2012, and you opponents want some attention paid to what just happened last November.

This is why I don't watch SOTUs anymore. If anybody had said "You lie!" during the speech, it would have been treated as calling for violence, but everybody knows a politician is lying when his lips are moving.

Read the whole thing. It's pretty much what I would say if I could type.

The Origin of the Sputnik Moment

James Taranto:

Sure enough, our suspicions were confirmed by a book review in the Sept. 9, 2008, edition of the New York Times: "Thomas L. Friedman's latest book is a plea for a new Sputnik moment."

No wonder it struck me as stupid.

Sputnik?

“Half a century ago the Soviets beat us into space with the launch of a satellite called Sputnik. We had no idea how we’d beat them to the moon. The science wasn’t there yet. NASA didn’t exist. But after investing in better research and education, we didn’t just surpass the Soviets; we unleashed a wave of innovation that created new industries and millions of new jobs. This is our generation’s Sputnik moment.”

Did you notice he didn’t call it a NASA moment?

He couldn’t.

Last year Barack Obama cut NASA funding.

What on earth made him think that Sputnik would galvanize his support among the people? And what does this have to do with the current economy? He could have recalled Kennedy's call to win the space race by putting a man on the moon, but, of course, that would have reminded us that he had just defunded manned space exploration.

Hope gets Changed

The new health care law probably won't hold costs down and it won't let everybody keep their current health insurance if they like it, Chief Actuary Richard Foster told the House Budget Committee on Wednesday.

Once again, I took a pass on the SOTU. They always fill me with despair and panic--"How do I get out of this CS outfit?"

Rahm Schmahm This was supposed to be the genius adviser at the White House. No wonder Obama's administration has been such a disaster.

The first Underreported Scandal of the year.

The Kermit Gosnell abortion mill in Philadelphia that was allowed to fester for forty years while being ignored by the state, during the terms of Republican and Democratic governors. So far, the proprietors have been charged with 7 murders of babies delivered alive. The link is the latest of the ugly stories coming out about this atrocity.

Funny how the news media decide what we should know about. And sometimes sickening.

I was watching Bill O'Reilly who had a segment with Bernie Goldberg about the departure of "he who must not be named" from MSNBC. They talked about the descriptions of "this anchor" as being the highest rated on MSNBC, which Goldberg compared to saying he was the tallest midget in the room. They also pointed out the comments of Baltimore Sun media critic David Zurawik who has called "this anchor" as a modern McCarthy, a character assassin. The link is to a segment on Reliable Sources in which Zurawik debates "this anchor's career" with David Schuster, whose main defense was to attack Fox News as having no "journalistic standards."

Meanwhile, Goldberg says, Rachel Maddow is being given the celebrity treatment by other media.

I tuned to MSNBC and Lawrence O'Donnell came on talking about what Keith would have done with a eulogistic tone. Weird.