Only a small part of the $787 billion ’stimulus package’ – money stolen from future tax-payers by the Democrats in power –  has been spent, but a second such governmental act of theft is already being mooted. On what have the ill-gotten government gains  so far been spent?

Mona Charen gives examples in Townhall:

The Social Security Administration admits that it mailed out 10,000 checks (using stimulus funds) to “deceased persons.” The SSA blamed pressure to spend the money quickly.

A non-existent lake in Oklahoma is going to get $1 million for a guardrail.

Union, N.Y., (population 56,000) was notified that it would be receiving a $578,661 stimulus grant to prevent homelessness. The town fathers were nonplussed as 1) they had never applied for the grant, and 2) they do not have a homelessness problem. But note the number: It’s so non-round, so specific. Is there a department at HUD responsible for inventing plausible-sounding numbers?

The state of Wisconsin, Coburn reports, has 1,256 structurally deficient bridges, more than Florida, Colorado, Arizona and Alaska combined. Yet no stimulus funds are flowing to repair those bridges. Instead, the feds are sending $15.8 million in transportation stimulus money to repair 37 rural bridges that hardly anyone uses. Why? It seems the rural projects were more “shovel-ready” and got pushed to the head of the queue.

But perhaps the most emblematic example of your tax dollars at work is this one: Road signs are being purchased at a cost of $300 apiece advertising that “This construction project” is being paid for with stimulus funds. Illinois alone has already spent $150,000 on such signs.

    Read the whole article here.

The Obama administration quietly announced last week that as much as $16.1 million from the stimulus program is going to save the San Francisco Bay area habitat of, among other things, the endangered salt marsh harvest mouse.

That has revived Republican criticism that the pet project was an “invisible earmark” in the massive spending bill for Mrs. Pelosi, whose San Francisco district abuts the bay, and epitomizes the failure of stimulus spending to help an economy still shedding jobs.

“Lo and behold, the government has announced that the mouse is getting its money after all,” House Minority Leader John A. Boehner said while standing beside a poster of the furry varmint. “Speaker Pelosi must be so proud.”

In a situation like this, Barak Obama was not powerless to affect the outcome, as his defenders suggest.  As spokesman for the most powerful nation on earth, he was in a position to make a real difference to the all-important psychology on both sides—and that is exactly what he did.  But instead of building up the confidence of the protesters (and simultaneously undermining that of the security apparatus) with encouragement and a ringing endorsement of what they were doing, what he actually did was to give comfort to the forces of repression and undermine the confidence of the Iranian people. 

Was this factor important enough to affect the outcome?  We can never know for sure, but we can say two things with certainty.  First, that this was evidently a close call for the regime, and that, to judge from the visible uncertainty of the security forces in the early going, the tipping point was nearly reached.  And second, that Obama’s words discouraged the protesters in the street, and gave aid and comfort to the Ahmadinejad regime.  We can only conclude that it is quite possible, though not certain, that in a closely balanced situation Obama’s words retarded momentum that had neared the tipping point and thus saved the day for the regime. 

What about his later self-correction?  There can be no doubt that it was completely irrelevant.  The crisis of confidence had already passed.  Obama spoke up only after the security forces had begun to seriously crack down—in other words, only after they knew what the outcome would be, as did the protesters.  By the time he changed his tune, what he said no longer had any power to affect the outcome.  

The stakes in this potential Iranian revolution were enormous.  Iranian mischief-making throughout the Middle East could have been ended, and a force for the good in the region could have replaced its most persistent source of evil.  Obama had claimed that his diplomatic skill could solve the Iranian nuclear threat where George W. Bush had failed, but when an opportunity was presented to him to do much more than this, he squandered it in one of the worst foreign policy blunders since Jimmy Carter.

We aren’t so sure about ‘a force for the good’ replacing the present Iranian regime if the incipient revolution had succeeded. We aren’t sure that any likely or possible change in Iran would be all that great. But some change might have brought some relief. Anyway, we agree that Obama once again betrayed the better side.   

Obama’s position on Honduras is part of an emerging, and very sad, pattern. His bogus catch-phrases may vary (”meddling,” “illegal,” or whatever), but the result always seems to be the same. Whether the venue is Honduras, Russia, or Iran, Obama instinctively sides, in the first instance, with the enemies of freedom and the rule of law. And it doesn’t hurt at all if that party is also hostile towards the U.S.

We only question whether reporters will tell the truth when they are shown it in the ways that Colonel Kemp advises. With reason, we do not trust the mainstream media. They have demonstrated amply and often that they are, for the most part, on the side of the terrorists.  They are the ugly.

We hope that Israel will destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities by force. We have noticed that talking to Iran  accomplishes nothing.

Obama’s anti-Israel administration is plainly trying to make it hard for Israel to take action against Iran.  

But Israel is a sovereign state and will make its own defense decisions.   

When Sarah Palin said so, her media critics called it ’stupid’.

When Joe Biden says it  … 

James Taranto writes in the Wall Street Journal:

Over the weekend, as we noted yesterday, Vice President Biden said that if Israel decides it needs to take military action against the Iranian nuclear-weapons program, the U.S. will not “dictate” otherwise. A reader points out that Sarah Palin, who ran against Biden in last year’s election, said much the same thing in a September interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson:

Gibson: What if Israel decided it felt threatened and needed to take out the Iranian nuclear facilities?

Palin: Well, first, we are friends with Israel and I don’t think that we should second-guess the measures that Israel has to take to defend themselves and for their security.

Gibson: So if we wouldn’t second-guess it and they decided they needed to do it because Iran was an existential threat, we would cooperative or agree with that.

Palin: I don’t think we can second-guess what Israel has to do to secure its nation.

Gibson: So if it felt necessary, if it felt the need to defend itself by taking out Iranian nuclear facilities, that would be all right.

Palin: We cannot second-guess the steps that Israel has to take to defend itself.

Palin reiterated the point in a later interview with CBS’s Katie Couric.

This column agrees with both Biden and Palin and is glad to see that the bipartisan consensus recognizing Israel’s right to defend itself appears sturdy. But we suspected not everyone would be so consistent, so we went back to see what people had said about Palin.

Matthew Yglesias, who when he was young drew much praise for his thoughtful and fair-minded commentary, wrote a blog post titled “Palin: If Israel Wants to Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran, That’s Okay With Me”:

Palin reiterated her absurd view that the President of the United States shouldn’t “second-guess” Israeli policy under any circumstances.

Palin is okay at repeating various “pro-Israel” buzzwords, but she can’t run away from the fact that her underlying position on this topic is stupid.

So when Biden said the same thing, did Yglesias call it “absurd” and “stupid”? Well, is the pope Italian? Here’s what he wrote yesterday:

This is being read by some . . . as a “green light” for an Israeli attack. . . . I think the most straightforward reading of what Biden said is rather different, he’s trying to distance the United States from any possible Israeli military action by making it clear that what Israel does or doesn’t do is decided in Israel rather than in Washington.

The main problem with this, I think, is that probably nobody’s going to believe it. Already you see many Americans taking Biden’s statement that the U.S. doesn’t control Israeli policy to “really” mean that the U.S. is encouraging Israel to attack.

When Palin says it, it’s stupid. When Biden says it, he gets graded on a curve: The problem is that other people are too stupid to understand the deep subtlety of Biden’s thinking.

Then there’s M.J. Rosenberg of TalkingPointsMemo.com. In September, he described Palin as “robotic” and suggested that she is the puppet of a Jewish cabal:

Now we know why among the very first people Sarah Palin sat down with after being nominated was [sic] Joe Lieberman and the head of AIPAC.

She needed the latest talking points and, boy, did she learn her lines. . . .

In other words, under the Palin administration, we won’t second guess Israel. I think I’ve got it.

Palin sure has.

And when Biden said it? Rosenberg kept mum until he was persuaded that the vice president’s words didn’t really reflect U.S. policy. Then he wrote this:

The President said today that he has “absolutely not” given Israel a “green light” to attack Iran.

So Biden either misspoke, was misinterpreted, or has just been corrected by his boss. Israel will get no green light to attack. We will, as Obama said all along, rely on diplomacy to solve the Iran problem.

Fair enough, right? Wrong. Look what Palin said to Charlie Gibson just before he asked about a hypothetical Israeli strike:

Gibson: So what do you do about a nuclear Iran?

Palin: We have got to make sure that these weapons of mass destruction, that nuclear weapons are not given to those hands of Ahmadinejad, not that he would use them, but that he would allow terrorists to be able to use them. So we have got to put the pressure on Iran and we have got to count on our allies to help us, diplomatic pressure.

Gibson: But, Governor, we’ve threatened greater sanctions against Iran for a long time. It hasn’t done any good. It hasn’t stemmed their nuclear program.

Palin: We need to pursue those and we need to implement those. We cannot back off. We cannot just concede that, oh, gee, maybe they’re going to have nuclear weapons, what can we do about it. No way, not Americans. We do not have to stand for that.

What Palin said last year was precisely what Obama and Biden have now said: Diplomacy is the optimal way of dealing with the Iranian nuclear threat, but if it fails, Israel has a right to defend itself. In a way, the inconsistency of some of Palin’s critics is reassuring. It shows that a good deal of anti-Israel sentiment is mere partisanship masquerading as something uglier.

An example of their reasonless vituperation can be found in today’s Investor’s Business Daily in an article by one Richard Cohen, too silly and nasty to quote much of, but here’s a bit of it:

Was it OK with the GOP if the person a heartbeat away from the presidency was — pardon me, but it’s true — a ditz with no national experience whatsoever? You betcha.

This from a guy who presumably voted to put Obama into the presidency – a ditz with no useful experience of any sort if ever there was one!

(Why does the IBD  give space to columnists on the left, who contradict everything the paper stands for? To give us cause to laugh disgustedly and to remind us why we despise the left?  What other reasons could there be?) 

Sarah Palin is a born politician, and one of that rare breed, a politician with integrity. Furthermore, her policies are the best: strong defense, fiscal responsibility, limited government, a free economy, energy independence. 

We doubt that she intends to leave the political arena.  We don’t believe she could. We hope she makes lots of money with her book and through every means she can as a celebrity worthy of being celebrated. We hope she also becomes powerful, for the sake of the American people. Stay with us, Sarah, and soar to the skies!

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Thank you.