Jed Babbin has today’s top story at Human Events. It seems the Emanuel Death Watch is continuing.

White House chiefs of staff come and go, arriving with fanfare and departing — usually — in celebration or silence.  Only one exception comes to mind. When Don Regan swapped jobs with Ronald Reagan chief of staff James Baker there began an epic battle with the president’s wife which — to no one’s surprise but Don Regan’s — he lost.

Hamilton Jordan played Sancho Panza to Jimmy Carter’s Don Quixote.  H.R. Haldeman was Cardinal Richelieu to Richard Nixon’s Louis XIII.  But Rahm Emanuel, who has that lean and hungry look, seems to be auditioning for the part of Cassius to Obama’s Caesar.  

Rahm Emanuel, famous for declaiming that a crisis should never be allowed to go to waste, is now engaged in an epic battle not only with President Obama’s closest advisers but with the president himself.

Jed Babbin has the top story today at Human Events.

When Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind) announced his retirement, the media revived their drumbeat that our government is broken.  As the indispensable Brent Bozell pointed out last week, Democrats and the media only complain of broken government when the liberals can’t get their agenda enacted.

The problem isn’t that our government isn’t working: it’s that President Obama’s agenda is entirely perverse. It reverses the essential order of priorities, devoting the energy of government exclusively to his plans to revolutionize our country.  

Since last June, congress and the White House have been consumed by President Obama’s plan to impose government control on our healthcare system.  With time outs for the occasional earthquake or celebrity scandal, their attention has been drawn from more important issues, and of our most precious asset — time — nine months have been wasted and cannot be recovered.

Jed Babbin has the top story at Human Events today.

Senate Democrat “moderates” probably slept well last night, but no House Blue Dog should have.  In the marathon Blair House healthcare “summit,” the Chicago Obama family made it perfectly clear that the Senate Dems are protected “made men” but the House members are expendable in Obama’s pursuit of nationalizing healthcare.

The summit convened after a round of new polls showed — again — that most Americans don’t want Obamacare.  A Quinnipiac poll showed Americans disapproved of Obama’s healthcare plan by 54-35 percent.  Rasmussen said 56% opposed and 41% approved, and both Pew Research and PPP said 50% were opposed to it.  The opposition will almost certainly rise after yesterday’s media event.

For that is what it was.  It was precisely as Republican Conference Chairman Mike Pence (R-Ind) characterized it to me last night. The “summit” wasn’t anything resembling an honest debate or a real negotiation.  Pence pointed out that Obama opened the meeting with comments that directly contravened his stated objectives for the summit.  Instead of opening the “summit” to a debate and negotiation of both sides’ positions, Obama began by stating that his purpose was to make the case for his healthcare bill.

Jed Babbin has the top story at Human Events today and previews a number of races around the country.

I’ve got to take issue with one though. Jed writes: “Retired Navy pilot Mike Lee is challenging Sen. Bob Bennett for the Republican nomination this year. Lee seems like a great guy and some day may be a great candidate. But Bennett’s conservative credentials — though imperfect (he’s an earmark lover) are pretty solid.”

Mike isn’t a retired Navy pilot and in my mind Bennett has few conservative credentials to stand on.

Bennett is in favor of federal same sex marriage benefit laws, in favor of government funding of abortion, in favor of massive earmarks, in favor of an individual mandate for health care, in favor of amnesty and the Bush immigration plan, in favor of the bailouts and TARP, opposed to the balanced budget amendment, opposed to earmarks reform, and the list goes on and on.

Bennett’s conservative credentials consist of three letters and a typographical symbol: R-UT

People just assume with those, he must be conservative. But nothing could be further from the truth.

All that said about my current soapbox issue, Jed nails it with Ovide Lamontagne in New Hampshire, Les Phillips in Alabama, Allen West in Florida, and Tim Burns in Pennsylvania, among others. It is well worth a read.

Jed has the top story today at Human Events.

As they ponder President Obama’s invitation to the February 25 Blair House “summit” on health care, the GOP leadership can save themselves a lot of time and money. Instead of commissioning expensive polls or seeking advice from their Gucci-shod consultants, they can get all the advice they need in an M&Ms commercial that ran during the Superbowl.

It shows a Plain and panting M&M running away, against the inexorable force of a grocery conveyor belt delivering him to the checkout gal. Surrendering to the inevitable, he sits himself on the scanner and is popped into a bag next to one that holds his pal, the Peanut M&M.  Peanut’s not a genius.  He exclaims, “Hey, look: we’re on the guest list.”  Rolling his eyes skyward, an exasperated Plain responds, “It’s the menu.”

Even before President Obama issued his February 12 invitation to GOP congressional leaders, some were eagerly proclaiming themselves Peanuts.  Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) — apparently worried that he wouldn’t be on the menu — sent a letter to Obama on February 9, saying, “I am pleased that you plan to convene a bipartisan meeting to discuss proposals to achieve needed reforms to our health care system and look forward to sharing some ideas that will put us on the path to achieve your stated goals…” That obeisance didn’t earn Gregg an invitation.

Amen to this.

Even before he accepted the Democratic presidential nomination, Barack Obama proclaimed he wanted to appoint a Lincolnesque cabinet, a “team of rivals.”

Lincoln, as ABC’s Jake Tapper reminded us way back in May 2008, appointed three of his rivals for the GOP presidential nomination to his cabinet, people who disagreed with him and at least one — Edward Stanton, who became Secretary of War — who had hurled personal insults at Lincoln, calling him a “long-armed ape.”

But Obama’s cabinet is no team of rivals, and his national security team is a concatenation of radical liberals like himself, a curious admixture of fools, miscreants and worse.

Jed Babbin has the top story at Human Events today.

Yes, George W. Bush spent too much and proved redundantly that the term “big government conservative” is an oxymoron. And yes, when Bush left office our economy was in trouble.  But how long will Obama claim that the only way for our economy to recover is to continue a spending spree that will leave us unable to recover from government debt?

Apparently, forever.  In his State of the Union speech, Obama said, “One year ago, I took office amid two wars, an economy rocked by a severe recession, a financial system on the verge of collapse, and a government deeply in debt.  Experts from across the political spectrum warned that if we did not act, we might face a second depression.  So we acted — immediately and aggressively.  And one year later, the worst of the storm has passed.” 

But it hasn’t.  Unemployment is still nearly 10% and — according to Reagan administration economist Arthur Laffer — the “recovery” we are in is a false one.  With the Bush tax cuts about to expire, and both capital gains taxes and estate taxes to rise next year, we’re headed into a far worse economic crisis than we suffered last year.  But that doesn’t deter the president one bit.

This is an interesting column by Jed Babbin.

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) popped a surprise on the Republican Conference in their January 20 meeting.  President Obama had accepted his invitation to appear at their Baltimore retreat scheduled for January 29, two days after the State of the Union speech.

According to several dismayed conservative members that attended the meeting and sought me out in the two days that followed, North Carolina Rep. Virginia Foxx asked Boehner whose idea it was and was told it was “the leadership.”  When Foxx pressed him on precisely who among the leadership came up with the idea, Boehner demurred.  So what is the point to the invitation?

Boehner’s high-risk strategy apparently is to engage the newly-weakened president on Republican alternatives on health care and the economy in the hope that he will admit that the ideas are worth including in his 2010 agenda.  If he does so publicly, it will be a huge Republican win. But if he doesn’t — and Obama is too smart to fall into this obvious trap — Republican ideas will again be cast aside and Obama’s agenda revived.

Either way, it appears Boehner could be setting Obama up for a loss.

Jed Babbin has the top story at Human Events today.

Soon upon us will be the one-year anniversary of President Obama’s inauguration.  It’s time to ask, are we safer or in more danger than we were a year ago?  

By every objective measure — what we know about Islamic terrorism, its intentions and capabilities — the answer is no. We are far less safe now than we were then.

To ask how much danger are we in is fatuous. You may as well ask, “[H]ow much danger is there”? The president has taken actions that — again objectively — have increased our vulnerability tremendously. Two of the actions he took immediately after taking office prove the point. And the actions he and Attorney General Eric Holder have since taken only increase the danger.

Good post by Jed Babbin over at Human Events.

Americans are often smarter than those they elect to govern them.  According to a December 31 Rasmussen poll, “Fifty-eight percent (58%) of U.S. voters say waterboarding and other aggressive interrogation techniques should be used to gain information from the terrorist who attempted to bomb an airliner on Christmas Day.”

Instead of being shipped off to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is lawyered-up in a Detroit jail, beyond the reach of CIA interrogators.  And forget waterboarding.  Thanks to the McCain Amendment of 2005, waterboarding — which was legal when it was applied to Abu Zubaydeh, KSM and others — is now probably illegal under US law. I say “probably” because the McCain amendment made a clear definition of “torture” so vague that it’s probably unconstitutional.  

But no matter: President Obama has prohibited the use of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” which served to save lives during the Bush administration.  

As Jed notes in the column, Human Events and RedState (well, Human Events all the heavy lifting on this one) created a petition to oppose the KSM trial in New York. We’re going to collect the names and we’re going to get this petition delivered to the powers that we. We all feel very strongly about this one.

Please join us in signing the petition against the trial.