And speaking of the latter item, Allahpundit writes:

It’s 10:45 ET and it looks like the final vote is coming within the next 15 minutes. I held out hope this morning that we might get a humpbot cameo tonight, but it looks like we’re in for an appearance by the melting bunny of death instead. Heart-ache.

Update: My prediction for the final vote, as of 10:52: 224-211.

Update: It was closer than I thought: 220-215, 39 Dems voting no and a solitary Republican — Joe Cao, who replaced “Dollar Bill” Jefferson in a blue district in Louisiana — voting yes. Take heart, righties: Reid is incompetent, which makes the likelihood of 60 votes in the Senate, especially after a vote this narrow, very slim indeed.

But for now, we grieve.

Click over for the uber-depressing polar opposite of Allah’s trademarked humping robot video.

Duane Patterson, Hugh Hewitt’s producer and “generalissimo” adds, “so nancy twisted arms, got 220 to pass bill that won’t see light of day in the senate? yawn. target’s always been killing reid’s bill.”

Help us Dr. No, you’re our only hope!

Update: Steve Green adds, “This Is Not the America I Knew“:

How do you cure high unemployment and sluggish growth?

Proven methods include reducing regulation and lowering taxes.

So it comes as no surprise that the House has just approved one of (if not the) biggest increases in taxes and regulation after virtually zero debate and in the middle of a weekend night when almost no one is paying attention.

They’re cowards. Shrewd cowards, but cowards still.

As Steve asks, “If no one has done the math on this one, I wish they would. Which is the greater number: Pages in the bill the House just passed, or the minutes spent debating it?”

Update: You stay classy, Mr. President:

Mr. Obama, during his private pep talk to Democrats, recognized Mr. Owens election and then posed a question to the other lawmakers. According to Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, who supports the health care bill, the president asked, “Does anybody think that the teabag, anti-government people are going to support them if they bring down health care? All it will do is confuse and dispirit” Democratic voters “and it will encourage the extremists.”

(Via the Rhetorican, whose email noted “It’s Not Garofalo. It’s Obama”; though other than the lack of visible tats, quotes such as the above sometimes make it seem hard to tell the difference.)

As the Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby once wrote, “That which is permitted to Massachusetts congressmen is not permitted to congressmen from other states.”

Just refer back to Ted Kennedy’s underwater adventures, John Kerry’s duplicitous record, and now this:

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As John Hinderaker notes:

A Boston TV station discovered that Barney Frank was present in 2007 when police raided his boyfriend’s home in Maine and confiscated marijuana, bongs and marijuana plants. Somehow this didn’t come out until now. In the TV interview below, Frank professes ignorance of the contents of his boyfriend’s house–he was on the porch when the police arrived!–and says he wouldn’t recognize a marijuana plant if he saw one. It’s a wonderful image, really: the boyfriend has these weird, spiky house plants scattered around the premises and Barney thinks they’re ferns or something. And he didn’t recognize the bags of marijuana, the marijuana smoke or the bongs because he “only smokes cigars.”

A caller to our radio show today wondered whether this revelation will imperil Frank politically. Given that he professed similar ignorance of the fact that a previous boyfriend was running a male prostitution ring out of Barney’s home, a fact which Massachusetts voters found entirely unexceptionable, I don’t think a little dishonesty about dope will hurt him any.

This TV interview does contain the most credible statement I’ve ever heard Frank make: “I’m not a great outdoorsman.”

Just as he earlier did for Robert Gibbs, Moe Lane proffers a helpful refresher course for the beleaguered senator.

Update: One of Moe’s commenters note that Frank gave a speech at NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, back in 2001. So something tells me that while he is indeed not a great outdoorsman, Frank could recognize the stickiest of the icky if need be.

“The Prometheus Device”; it’s Johnny Storm meets Peter Parker! As Jonathan Last writes, this might be the coolest — or perhaps hottest — device ever built in a garage.

Shooting Raises Fears For Muslims In US Army

As Mark writes:

Really? Right now the body count stands at:

Non-Muslims 13
Muslims 0

I was reading from some of this kind of coverage on the Rush Limbaugh show today. Even if you are concerned that it would be terribly unfair if all Muslims were to be tarred by Major Hasan’s brush, it is, to put it at its mildest, the grossest bad taste to default every single time within minutes to the position that what’s of most interest about an actual atrocity with real victims is that it may provoke an entirely hypothetical atrocity with entirely hypothetical victims. I refer you yet again to this note-perfect parody:

British Muslims Fear Repercussions Over Tomorrow’s Train Bombing

This kind of media coverage is really a form of mental illness far more advanced than whatever Major Hasan’s lawyers eventually enter in mitigation, and apparently pandemic, at least among the Western media.

On a related note, from David Horowitz: “Is everybody out of their mind?”

Bonus: “We’re the ones who love death — our own.”

Meanwhile, here’s a choice quote from the Jawa Report; click over to hear the audio:

Thanks to DB in the comment section who directs us to this post, which features a BBC interview by Gavin Lee with a member of the Killeen, Texas mosque outside Ft Hood, the Islamic Community Center of Greater Killeen, where Malik Nidal Hasan was currently attending.

In the interview (the whole interview can be heard here), mosque member “Duane” not only refuses to condemn Hasan, but justifies their murder because “they were troops who were going to Afghanistan and Iraq to kill Muslims”.

Here’s the relevant portion of the interview:

Duane : I’m not going to condemn him for what he did. I don’t know why he did it. I will not, absolutely not, condemn him for what he had done though. If he had done it for selfish reasons I still will not condemn him. He’s my brother in the end. I will never condemn him.

Gavin Lee : There might be a lot of people shocked to hear you say that.

Duane: Well, that’s the way it is. I don’t speak for the community here but me personally I will not condemn him.

Gavin Lee : What are your thoughts towards those that were victims in this?

Duane : They were, in the end, they were troops who were going to Afghanistan and Iraq to kill Muslims. I honestly have no pity for them. It’s just like the majority of the people that will hear this, after five or six minutes they’ll be shocked, after that they’ll forget about them and go on their day.

Meanwhile, Dr. Helen asks, “Why wasn’t Hasan Investigated?”

This man was being entrusted with the mental health of soldiers, and no one could be bothered to take the time to find out if he was mentally stable himself? After a poor review, remarks that make you wonder which side this guy was on, and possible writings on a web posting that are troubling, he was not investigated?

Was it political correctness and concern for his Muslim heritage that kept officials from looking further into his mental health? Was the army so desperate for a psychiatrist (there is always a shortage) they didn’t dare do anything?

The public deserves an explanation.

In wondering how Hasan functioned in the Army for so long, I can’t help but flashback to an earlier Steyn piece from 2005, referring back to, as he dubbed it, “the defining encounter of the age”:

WITH hindsight, the defining encounter of the age was not between Mohammed Atta’s jet and the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, but that between Mohammed Atta and Johnelle Bryant a year earlier. Bryant is an official with the US Department of Agriculture in Florida, and the late Atta had gone to see her about getting a $US650,000 government loan to convert a plane into the world’s largest crop-duster. A novel idea.

The meeting got off to a rocky start when Atta refused to deal with Bryant because she was but a woman. But, after this unpleasantness had been smoothed out, things went swimmingly. When it was explained to him that, alas, he wouldn’t get the 650 grand in cash that day, Atta threatened to cut Bryant’s throat. He then pointed to a picture behind her desk showing an aerial view of downtown Washington – the White House, the Pentagon et al – and asked: “How would America like it if another country destroyed that city and some of the monuments in it?”

Fortunately, Bryant’s been on the training course and knows an opportunity for multicultural outreach when she sees one. “I felt that he was trying to make the cultural leap from the country that he came from,” she recalled. “I was attempting, in every manner I could, to help him make his relocation into our country as easy for him as I could.”

So a few weeks later, when fellow 9/11 terrorist Marwan al-Shehhi arrived to request another half-million dollar farm subsidy and Atta showed up cunningly disguised with a pair of glasses and claiming to be another person entirely – to whit, al-Shehhi’s accountant – Bryant sportingly pretended not to recognise him and went along with the wheeze. The fake specs, like the threat to slit her throat and blow up the Pentagon, were just another example of the multicultural diversity that so enriches our society.

For four years, much of the western world behaved like Bryant. Bomb us, and we agonise over the “root causes” (that is, what we did wrong). Decapitate us, and our politicians rush to the nearest mosque to declare that “Islam is a religion of peace”. Issue bloodcurdling calls at Friday prayers to kill all the Jews and infidels, and we fret that it may cause a backlash against Muslims. Behead sodomites and mutilate female genitalia, and gay groups and feminist groups can’t wait to march alongside you denouncing Bush, Blair and Howard. Murder a schoolful of children, and our scholars explain that to the “vast majority” of Muslims “jihad” is a harmless concept meaning “decaf latte with skimmed milk and cinnamon sprinkles”.

Thursday’s attack at Fort Hood is an enormous reminder of the consequences of reverting back to the mindset of September 10th, no matter how tempting the idea of collective retrograde amnesia might be.

Update: And of course:

• “President Obama says ‘we cannot fully know’ what led Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan to kill 13 people and wound 38 others at Fort Hood, Texas Thursday.” Guess it’s not a teachable moment, then.
• “Chris Matthews: We may never know if religion was a factor at Fort Hood.”

Update: “Report: Hasan attended same radical mosque as 9/11 hijackers.” Pay no attention; nothing to see here. These aren’t the droids you were looking for. They can go about their business. Move along.

Update: Roger L. Simon explores “Political Correctness as Murder Weapon”:

As a reminder, political correctness is derived from the more intellectually respectable doctrine of cultural relativism (it’s sort of CR’s public “happy face”). In essence, cultural relativism holds that an individual’s beliefs and activities should only be understood in terms of his or her own culture. It’s the ultimate version of “who are we to the judge?” If Ayatollah Khomeini wishes to oppress all the women and homosexuals in Iran, it’s their way. If Mao seeks to knock off seventy million of his countrymen, so be it. Let the Chinese decide. We shouldn’t impose our values.

On our increasingly tiny globe, this theory – when spelled out – is nothing short of preposterous. It fairly invites a return to the mass murdering ideologies of the Twentieth Century – Nazism, communism, etc – and opens the door wide for Islamism.

Even so, its “happy face” partner political correctness continues to permeate our culture and our media. And, alas, as we are now painfully aware, it has infected our military – badly. How else to explain that Nidal Hassan was passed through the Army system for years despite making numerous public pronouncements that sounded as if they were ripped from the pages of an al Qaeda training manual?

This sad infection of our military is the most disturbing and self-destructive achievement of political correctness yet. Still, cable television spends hours trying to probe the “motivations” of Hasan, as if a Muslim bumper sticker torn from his car could explain his actions or even (oh, hope) exonerate him. That way we would not have to deal with the ideology behind him and, more importantly, not have to confront our own pathology.

But that pathology of political correctness has now been laid bare before us. More than the two handguns, it was the murder weapon in that room at Fort Hood. Those thirteen innocent people are indeed PC deaths because it was PC that allowed Hasan to be there. The question is, as it is with all emotionally loaded learning, what will we do with this new information?

To begin with, we must explore what attracted us to political correctness in the first place. Several explanations suggest themselves: political expediency, increased power in certain quarters, the desire to be left alone, the desire to be loved, even psychosexual masochism. There are more, I am sure. But they must be ventilated. Nothing can bring back the thirteen who were killed. But the most fitting memorial to them would be that their murders would signal the death knell of political correctness.

Indeed. But if 9/11 couldn’t do it, this disgusting but comparatively much smaller incident sadly won’t, either.

Update: Don Surber adds up his daily Good/Evil scorecard, including this item:

President Obama in his weekly address continued to deny that Army Major Nidal Hasan attacked and killed 12 fellow soldiers and civilians because Hasan is a jihadist. Obama: “They are Americans of every race, faith, and station. They are Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus and nonbelievers. They are descendants of immigrants and immigrants themselves. They reflect the diversity that makes this America. But what they share is a patriotism like no other. What they share is a commitment to country that has been tested and proved worthy. What they share is the same unflinching courage, unblinking compassion, and uncommon camaraderie that the soldiers and civilians of Ft. Hood showed America and showed the world.”

That is true. I totally agree with that. More Muslims have taken a bullet for our country than have fired them.

But a few people in every religion are zealots. Rather than acknowledge the obvious, the president went all PC: “We cannot fully know what leads a man to do such a thing.”

Suffering a president in denial, alas, is…

EVIL.

Well, it’s the Diet Coke of evil. Or perhaps the Billy Beer of evil, given Obama’s pitch-perfect resemblance to Billy’s more famous, if equally feckless brother.

The voters be damned: That seems to be Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s attitude in the wake of big Democratic losses on Tuesday. “House Democratic leaders, undeterred by delays in the Senate or this week’s Republican electoral triumphs, plan to call a vote Saturday on the most sweeping overhaul of U.S. health-care policy in four decades,” Bloomberg reports:

The House will move on the $1.05 trillion legislation that would cover 36 million uninsured people and create a government plan to compete with private insurers even after the election of Republican governors in New Jersey and Virginia. President Barack Obama will go to Capitol Hill tomorrow to meet with House Democrats, as they seek the 218 votes they need to pass the bill, a Democratic leadership aide said.

Politico reports that “leaders expect a close vote, with a one-or two-vote margin, and no Rs.” They plan to pass this monstrosity without bipartisan support and with the bare minimum of support from their own party. “Pelosi has reportedly told fellow Democrats that she’s prepared to lose seats in 2010 if that’s what it takes to pass ObamaCare,” The Wall Street Journal reports. Is she mad?

No, not really. Or we should say only ideologically, in that she loves the monstrous idea of socialized medicine. Given that, though, her actions make perfect sense in terms of practical politics. After all, this is likely to be the high-water mark for liberal Democrats. They’re likely to lose House seats next year anyway, and there’s no guarantee President Obama will be re-elected. At 69, Pelosi stands a good chance of facing a death panel before she leads a majority of this size again.

Besides, her seat is in no jeopardy. She comes from a safe ultraliberal district. The same is true of the Democratic committee chairmen, who had to be able to win re-election even in lean years like 1994. According to Wikipedia, no member of the left-wing Congressional Progressive Caucus has lost re-election in a general election (Rep. Cynthia McKinney of Georgia lost a primary to another CPC member).

So Pelosi will probably still be speaker a year from now, even if her caucus is diminished. In the worst-case scenario, she’ll be minority leader, with hopes of returning to the speakership on the strength of President Obama’s re-election coattails. This is a small price to pay for the privilege of seizing control of Americans’ health care.

Or as Mark Steyn has written:

When the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan dumped some of his closest cabinet colleagues to extricate himself from a political crisis, the Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe responded: “Greater love hath no man than to lay down his friends for his life.”

His, her — in Pelosi’s home district of San Francisco, they’re pretty flexible about that stuff.

Meanwhile, on the floor of Congress today, Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit has video of a haggard looking Charlie Rangel (D-NY) saying “he won’t answer Rep. John Boehner’s question because he doesn’t want to violate House Ethics laws.”

PJTV Salutes You, Mr. Tax-Law-Writing-Tax-Evader!

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Related: “The Coming Margolies-Mezvinsky Effect?”

For my recent video interview with Malone on his previous book, The Future Arrived Yesterday: The Rise of the Protean Corporation, tune in to the video below:

Nebraska, for example, discovered that its former residents were fleeing to warmer climates in Texas, Florida and Arizona, with the greatest percentage settling in California. It made sense, then, for Nebraska Works, a workforce development initiative created by the department of economic development (nebworks.ded.state.ne.us), to hold a career fair in California.

However, campaign creators didn’t think it made sense for them to compete with California’s high-tech Silicon Valley image. Instead, they played up the lifestyle available to workers if they moved to Nebraska.

“Californians are amazed at our state’s housing costs,” says Patty Wood, workforce development supervisor for Nebraska in Lincoln. “We also have the best student-to-teacher ratio in the country, a low crime rate, less traffic, small communities and a slower pace.” She says the state hopes these attributes will attract former Nebraskans and workers looking for a lifestyle change.

It seems to be working. Last fall, Nebraska Works ran stadium ads during an important college football game that draws a lot of out-of-state fans. Approximately 14,000 users visited the web site set up for the campaign and nearly 800 people requested job applications and Nebraska living packets.

Wood’s department also piggybacked onto Nebraska’s nationwide “Genuine Nebraska” tourism campaign by creating links from the tourism web page to “Work, Play and Stay” pages that itemize Nebraska’s cost of living and quality of life. In the future, Nebraska Works would like to target military personnel affected by base closures, as well as to continue its job fairs and targeted advertising.

“We’d also like to create workshops on ‘best practices’ in recruitment and retention to deliver [to employers] across the state,” says Wood. “These workshops should be ready by the fall of 1999 or early in 2000. Retention is a huge part of this, not just recruitment.”

Minnesota’s campaign, “Come Home to Minnesota,” also targets former residents, particularly among professional and technical job seekers. “Our ‘Minnesota Living’ brochure, which describes the quality of life, education, outdoor and recreational opportunities and the like, should trigger memories from former residents,” says Gary Fields, deputy commissioner of the state’s department of trade and economic development in St. Paul.

Evidently, it was a success, as Minnesota’s broadband is now straining under the weight of it use:

Internet speeds in more than four-fifths of Minnesota are too slow to support technologies that could draw new jobs, take cars off the roads and bring new services to people in their homes, a new report said Friday.

The Minnesota Ultra High-Speed Broadband Task Force is calling for minimum Internet speeds of 10 megabits per second for the entire state by 2015, setting a standard 15 times faster than the current federal definition of broadband.

By that measure, 83 percent of the state needs an upgrade.

The group’s report describes broadband as “an economic and social necessity for all citizens of the state no matter where they are located.” It says faster Internet could enable everything from more telecommuting for workers to telemedicine linking patients and doctors through two-way high-definition video.

“It’s an important economic tool as we try to attract and retain the best companies here so we can have good jobs,” said Rick King, chief technology officer at Thomson Reuters Legal and the task force’s chairman.

King presented the report during a hearing before two legislative panels, where lawmakers said slow Internet service is a drag on the state’s economy. They hope Minnesota will compete successfully for federal stimulus grants to expand broadband in rural areas.

“It’s time to start thinking of broadband as a baseline utility accessible to every Minnesota home and business,” said Sen. John Doll, a Democrat from Burnsville.

Based on the number of great bloggers in the region (Fraters Libertas, James Lileks, Ed Morrissey, and two-thirds of the Power Line guys come immediately to mind), I thought it already was!

At a press conference this morning with House Republican Leaders, Joint Economic Committee (JEC) Ranking Republican Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX) employed a colorful metaphor in his effort to describe the vast new government bureaucracy that will be established if Speaker Pelosi’s $1.3 trillion government takeover of health care becomes law.  Video and remarks follow:

We developed this chart based on Nancy Pelosi’s new health care plan….The new chart shows more than 90 of these new mandates, commissions and agencies.   The true number is well over 100, we simply ran out of space.

In terms of sheer bureaucracy, if the IRS and Medicare had a baby, it would look like this.  And the question is how is that going to make our health care more affordable?

Meanwhile, Big Government has a video flashback to 1989, and “Rostenkowski, Health Care and the Original Town-Hall Protest”:

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• From PJTV’s Trifecta series, PJM Political host Steve Green and St. Louis talk radio sensation Dana Loesch interview Scott Ott of Scrappleface about what he learned running for office in his hometown of Lehigh County, PA.
• Five Questions For James Lileks — including questions about the off-year elections and The Big Episode of Mad Men last week.
• Joe Hicks of PJTV.com on the GOP’s Epic NY-23 Fail during Tuesday’s elections.
• Ed Driscoll interviews author/historian Jennifer Burns about her new book, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right.
  
• Glenn Reynolds reports from the recently concluded 17^th annual State Policy Network meeting in Ashville, NC.
• From PJTV’s Poliwood, Pajamas CEO Roger L. Simon and fellow Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Lionel Chetwynd debate the controversial statements from Rocco Landesman, National Endowment for the Arts chairman conflating the writings of President Obama with…Julius Caesar?!
• Produced by your humble narrator!

Click here to listen.

Also, note that the interview with Burns was heavily edited for time; click here for the full length 18-minute “Director’s Cut” edition of the interview, and video of Burns’ recent appearance on Reason.tv.

“[Robert] Gibbs: Can you imagine if, five years ago, protesters had compared our government to Hitler?”

As Allahpundit writes, “You know what? I think I can.”

On the other hand…

• Moveon.org
• Janeane Garofalo
• John Glenn
• Harry Reid
• Democratic Congressional Candidate Paul Hackett
• Democratic Congressional Candidate Colleen Rowley
• Harry Belafonte
• Dick Durbin
• Keith Ellison
• Al Gore
• George Soros
• Hunter S. Thompson
• Kurt Vonnegut
• Linda Ronstadt
• Julian Bond
• The BBC
• Rolling Stone magazine
• The New Yorker
• Glenn Greenwald in Pat Buchanan’s (!) American Conservative magazine
• Naomi Wolf
• Charles Rangel
• Whoopi Goldberg
• The cast of Family Guy

…And all of these folks could not be reached for comment.

Update: Welcome Insta-readers; and check out this video reminder that Moe Lane helpfully produced for the press secretary:

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