Exit polls from the 2008 Presidential election showed that Obama received around 77% of the Jewish vote. I’m at a loss to understand why. Guys like this claim that Obama “represents the values of (their) community” but fail to describe what those “values” are.

And now we see that support for Israel’s action against Hamas is coming largely from the GOP side. Per Rasmussen:

Sixty-two percent (62%) of Republicans back Israel’s decision to take military action against the Palestinians, but only half as many Democrats (31%) agree. A majority of Democrats (55%) say Israel should have tried to find a diplomatic solution first, a view shared by just 27% of Republicans.

While 75% of Republicans say Israel is an ally of the United States, just 55% of Democrats agree. Seven percent (7%) of Democrats say Israel is an enemy of America, but only one percent (1%) of Republicans say the same. For 21% of Republicans, Israel is somewhere in between, and 28% of Democrats agree.

And the guy that 77% of Jewish Americans supported in the election has exactly nada to say about the situation.

Now I know that the Jewish population in the US has pretty much always voted overwhelmingly for the Dem candidate, and there’s more to the vote than Israel. But it really doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. If the percentages more mirrored the general popular vote, I could see it. But the overwhelming skew of the exit polls, coupled with the apparent Dem ambivalence (at best) towards Israel’s interests just baffles me. I know - I’m naive.

On Tuesday, James Bopp Jr., RNC vice-chairman, submitted a resolution to the RNC that labels the recent “bailouts” of the finance industry and the Big 3 as “socialism”. This is a bit different for the RNC, as the organization normally does not involve itself in policy-oriented activity (past establishing the party platform). Fox news reports:

The statement says the rescue packages are “moving our free-market based economy another dangerous step closer toward socialism.”

“What was needed, and is still needed, to fix the banking industry is not a bailout, but rather a commitment to fiscal responsibility,” the resolution says. “Members of the Republican National Committee call for all members of Congress to oppose any and all future bailouts that might come before the Congress, including President-elect Obama’s public works program.”

Unfortunately, only a small percentage of the RNC members (24 out of 168) have signed off on this resolution so far, most likely because of the somewhat incendiary nature of it…after all, it basically calls out the sitting GOP president. Now that President Bush has less than a month in office, it seems that Republicans are holding back less and less on calling him out for some of his recent actions, including this resolution. The dynamics are interesting, as RNC chair candidate Ken Blackwell also spoke out on this topic this week. In an article published Wednesday, Blackwell refers to the President’s Big-3 bailout as a “Big Government Gambit” and “Bush’s most significant mistake.” Blackwell says:

Out of all the options available to President Bush, he took the worst-possible course.

His actions may not even be legal. Congress considered this bailout and rejected it, while Mr. Bush’s treasury secretary publicly said that using the original bailout funds for automakers would be unlawful without congressional action. The legality of these actions cannot be challenged unless the right party brings a lawsuit, but the fact that ordinary taxpayers cannot bring a lawsuit against federal spending does not change the fact that everyone agreed the first bailout could not be extended to automakers. President Bush therefore usurped the legislative function, doing something Congress refused to do.

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One of the hot buttons of the Bush presidency and the 2008 presidential campaign was illegal immigration and how to slow or stop it. Bush’s plan was decried as amnesty, and many conservatives have excoriated McCain over his softness on illegal immigration.

Some interesting developments have occurred in this area over the last several months:

• “Self-deportations” have begun to take place as individual states have cracked down on illegals and forced them either to other states or to return home to Mexico and/or other countries. Arizona and Oklahoma have been particularly effective in driving out illegals via new, tough laws - but many of those illegals are simply moving to greener US pastures, such as Texas. This appears to lend credence to the theory that self-deportation, or “attrition through enforcement” could have a significant impact in forcing many illegals out by means other than overt deportation.
• The “border fence” IS being built. A map on the Customers & Border Protection web site shows the progress on the fence/wall, which is in various stages of construction all the way from San Diego to El Paso. As Mark Krikorian points out at The Corner, this isn’t just the “virtual fence,” but is the real deal.
• The economy seems to be having a substantial impact on the ability of illegals to find work in the US. In fact, as one would hope, US citizens are now “intruding” on a job market that was previously almost solely populated by illegal immigrants. The WSJ reports this week that U.S. workers are “crowding out” immigrant labor.

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And I really like this video, especially considering that the guitarist is playing a Taylor:

(ht: Between Two Worlds)

So here’s an open thread for today. Enjoy the week and remember who Christmas is all about.

Oh, and in case someone wants to buy me a Christmas present, this would be interesting.

According to this morning’s news, banks are refusing to reveal what’s being done with the money that was provided under the $350B (so far) TARP bailout money.

“We’ve lent some of it. We’ve not lent some of it. We’ve not given any accounting of, ‘Here’s how we’re doing it,’” said Thomas Kelly, a spokesman for JPMorgan Chase, which received $25 billion in emergency bailout money. “We have not disclosed that to the public. We’re declining to.”

“We’re declining to” Well, there’s a fine “how do you do”. The taxpayer bails these folks out, but they apparently don’t see fit to reveal where OUR money is being spent. The hubris of these corporations is astonishing.

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You be the judge.

(ht: multiple)

Looks like taking money from the TARP fund to support an auto bailout isn’t as much of a slam-dunk as it appeared yesterday. It’s being reported this evening that the WH isn’t quite ready to pull the trigger on a bailout. From Reuters:

President George W. Bush said on Monday an announcement on a auto industry rescue was not imminent, leaving the industry’s fate clouded in uncertainty for a little longer.

Interestingly, this seems to correspond with the appearance of a story that popped from Heritage last night demonstrating that it would be illegal to use TARP money for anything other than financial bailout. The Heritage article reports:

More problematic, however, is Treasury’s lack of statutory authority to direct TARP dollars to the automakers. While the statute, passed by Congress in October, grants the Secretary extremely broad discretion to decide how to employ the funds, it clearly limits the recipients to “financial institutions.” The definition of that term is quite clear:

FINANCIAL INSTITUTION- The term `financial institution’ means any institution, including, but not limited to, any bank, savings association, credit union, security broker or dealer, or insurance company, established and regulated under the laws of the United States or any State, territory, or possession of the United States, the District of Columbia, Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, American Samoa, or the United States Virgin Islands, and having significant operations in the United States, but excluding any central bank of, or institution owned by, a foreign government.

This definition does not leave much room for interpretation.

Oooopsies. That’s a little hard to argue with, as Heritage states. Now I wouldn’t be surprised to see them try to pull it off anyway, but it would seem to me that they’d have to go back to Congress for a modification of the TARP bill, and based on the rejection of the Big 3 bailout in the Senate, I’d say the odds of such a mod would be pretty slim. But perhaps there are other shenanigans maneuvers that the WH can conduct to get around this restriction. I doubt there would be much reluctance to pull out the stops to get this done since President Bush seems bound and determined to make this happen.

It just gets more interesting every day, doesn’t it?

All too rarely we see examples of people whose love and grace shine above what we normally see in the world. This week we saw one of those.

On Monday, December 8th, a Marine F/A-18D fighter experienced a power failure on approach to Miramar Naval Air Station in San Diego. The pilot ejected, and his plane crashed in a nearby neighborhood, destroying a home and killing the occupants - Young Mi Yoon, Grace and Rachel Yoon, and Young Mi’s mother, Suk Im Kim. The father, Don Yoon, was away from home at the time.

Normally in situations such as this, we see outcries to punish the government, the pilot, or anyone who could serve to take the blame and be the scapegoat for the unfortunate event that occurred. The public’s thirst for blood normally takes over and is stoked by the outcries of the media. But in this case, it hasn’t happened. At least in part, this is a result of the gracious and loving attitude of Mr. Yoon.

The LA Times published a great story on Friday describing Don Yoon’s response to this family tragedy. Rather than criticizing the pilot and/or the government for his loss and any potential fault, he showed love in his response. Yoon said

“I heard the pilot is safe. Please pray for him not to suffer from this accident. I know he is one of our treasures for our country. I don’t blame him. I don’t have any hard feelings. I know he did everything he could.”

In fact, Yoon blamed himself, as he spoke of his father-in-law on the way from South Korea to grieve for his lost wife, daughter and granddaughters. “I don’t know what to tell him. I don’t know how he’ll ever forgive me.”

Hardly a typical response to such an event. At the scene of the crash, Yoon said

“I know there are many people who have experienced more terrible things. Please tell me how to do it, because I don’t know what to do.”

Adrian Hong, the author of the LAT story, responded perfectly:

He showed us exactly what to do, and reminded everyone watching of the better angels of our nature.

Exactly. We need to learn from Mr. Yoon’s example. When faced with adversity and tragedy, we should not look to blame. We should try to avoid self-pity. His strength, grace and respect for his father-in-law and the F-18 pilot showed an attitude we should all strive for.

So President Bush is in Iraq today, and during a press conference he was apparently assaulted by a reporter who threw his shoes at the President.

Something tells me that the Secret Service might have responded a wee bit more “assertively” had that happened with an American reporter here in the USA.

P.S. I’m not as big of a smart-aleck as some of my co-contributors, so I’m opening this one up for shoe jokes.

From the Law of Unintended Consequences Show, Episode 1,245,853. There are those out there who apparently are willing to welsh on their mortgages in order to get on the US government handout gravy train. What a surprise! Did we not see this coming ahead of time? Oh, and if you answered “no” to that semi-rhetorical question, hearken back to this gem from before the election:

Yes, there are people out there who think the government and our Dear Leader-To-Be exist solely to line their pockets.

“The attitude is starting to move toward, ‘How can the government help me,’ ” says Chad Olivier, a certified financial planner in Baton Rouge. “We are seeing it on Wall Street, and now we are seeing it with the public.”

Talk about stating the obvious. And are the government and our friends on the left trying to dissuade this behavior? Of course not. The citizens are just taking the hint from GM, Citigroup, and all the other leeches that are sucking the blood out of the nation.

…to demonize people of faith…especially Christians. Let’s take a look at some of this week’s hits:

Kathleen Parker - again

Not satisfied with angering Christian conservatives the first time, Kathleen Parker comes back for another helping. She received so much attention for her previous cutesy use of “oogedy-boogedy” that she thought she’d milk it for another column. So, just to make her feel better, I’ll bring it back to life here. Unsurprisingly, her new one is just as incoherent as the other.

Parker seems to have a phobia for God, since she spends so much time criticizing those who believe in Him. She’s even dipping into the Democrat Talking-Point-o-Matic with this blather:

That’s a start, but let’s take it another step. How about social conservatives make their arguments without bringing God into it? By all means, let faith inform one’s values, but let reason inform one’s public arguments.

That was and remains my point. It isn’t so much God causing the GOP problems; it’s his fan club.

Here Ms. Parker now implies that faith is unreasonable. Nice. She might wish to leave the “It’s not Christianity, it’s Christians” argument to the left, lest she be mistaken for one of them (I fear it may be too late for that, however). A little reality check for KP: faith drives values, and values drive public arguments. Which means, of course, that faith drives public arguments by nature. If one’s faith is true faith, it will frame their entire worldview. It is inseparably coupled with all parts of life, including politics. People of (true) faith do not check their beliefs at the door of the church when they leave there on Sunday morning.

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There is a minor little skirmish going on in feminist-land over the quasi-revelation that Michelle Obama will be spending more time raising her kids than in trying to be the Assistant President. It seems the fems are looking more for a Hillary activist-type than a Jacqueline Kennedy-style Cosmo fashion plate & stay-at-home mom. For right now, Mrs. Obama appears to be headed down the mommy path.

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This article is intriguing, even though I’m not sure I really believe it in total. But he makes a couple of interesting observations:

Most conservatives did show up on Election Day, but a significant number voted Democrat. Mr. Obama picked up one-third more conservative voters than Sen. John Kerry, at 20 percent. Self-identified conservatives in exit polling comprised 34 percent of voters in both 2004 and 2008, yet the number who called themselves Republican dropped from 37 percent to 32 percent. In an evenly split nation, the GOP losing 14 percent of its base overwhelmed almost everything else.

and

Two key right-leaning constituencies deserted Republicans: security moms and Catholics. Though the media has made the “gender gap” a household term, the more apt classification was a “marriage gap.” Single women were heavily Democrat, and married women leaned Republican. “Security Moms” became the label for married mothers attracted to the hawkishness of the GOP.

Hmmmm.

Obama = The Claw

A number of interesting observations have percolated throughout the Interweb in the aftermath of the 2008 election - arguments about the “youth vote”, the “center-right versus center-left,” pushing aside social conservative issues, etc. But one of the most thought-provoking topics receiving attention is the issue of the presence (or lack thereof) of the Right in the online “Web 2.0″ universe. As a technology geek by trade, this topic is near and dear to my heart.

Much has been made of the aforementioned “youth vote” in the post-election analysis, and within that discussion are implications that the youth were energized by the online presence of the Obama campaign. Tools such as YouTube, Twitter, Friendfeed, numerous blog sites, SMS, etc. were used to not only educate, but to “activate.” A huge portion of Obama’s fundraising was done via the web - small donations that eventually added up to huge numbers (please, let’s not get into the issue of overseas donations, etc. - that’s really not the point). These tools were used to empower activism, through GOTV-type projects, state-by-state campaign events, as well as fundraising. I am not 100% convinced that there is an obvious correlation between the high percentage of the 18-29 crowd that voted for BHO and his online presence…since youth are already steeped in online culture, and youth seem to lean left to start with, it is difficult to assign a direct cause/effect relationship proving that Obama’s leverage of technology led to his success with that demographic. But it certainly didn’t hurt.

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Happy Thanksgiving from the bs family! To commemorate Thanksgiving, I give you the greatest TV scene ever produced.

As they say in the Clint Eastwood movie, Hang ‘em. Hang ‘em high.

I continued to be stunned by the obsession with the rights of the Somali pirates - these “enemies of the human race” (hostis humani generis). They are entitled to a a fair trial, followed by a first class hanging (bonus points if you recognize that movie line).

Using analogies is always risky, as they often fall apart under scrutiny. But in this case, I’ll take the risk. And it’s Sunday, so the Biblical reference is apropos.

In the Old Testament, Moses wrote of the trials of the Israelites as they wandered the desert during their forty years of exile. During this period, the LORD provided the Israelites with manna (”manna from heaven”) to eat. Every night manna appeared on the ground, and the Israelites would gather it and cook it for their food…that was pretty much all they had:

The manna was like coriander seed and looked like resin. The people went around gathering it, and then ground it in a handmill or crushed it in a mortar. They cooked it in a pot or made it into cakes. And it tasted like something made with olive oil. When the dew settled on the camp at night, the manna also came down.(Num 11:7-8)

Eventually the Israelites tired of the manna and complained to Moses about having to eat manna every day (the Israelites complained about a lot of things during those years) and looked back to the “good ol’ days” in Egypt where they didn’t have to eat manna. Rather than manna, the Israelites wanted meat. Moses took their complaints to the LORD, and He responded.

“Tell the people: ‘Consecrate yourselves in preparation for tomorrow, when you will eat meat. The LORD heard you when you wailed, “If only we had meat to eat! We were better off in Egypt!” Now the LORD will give you meat, and you will eat it. You will not eat it for just one day, or two days, or five, ten or twenty days, but for a whole month - until it comes out of your nostrils and you loathe it - because you have rejected the LORD, who is among you, and have wailed before him, saying, “Why did we ever leave Egypt?” ‘ ” (Num 11:18-20)

So what does this have to do with anything RedState-ish?

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I wrote last week on the problem of the Somali pirates. Michael B. Oren, via the WSJ, has done an excellent job of documenting the history of the pirate problem in the Jeffersonian period and how we dealt with it then…and how that applies to today’s situation.

Read it here.

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I’ve been a broken record on this one: there was very little attention paid to socon issues, especially religious ones, during the 2008 election season. And Pew backs me up (well, not personally, but you get the idea) in this great article. They say it best here:

The “culture war” issues that have been prominent in past elections, such as abortion and gay marriage, received minimal attention in 2008. The coverage they did receive tended to come in the form of reaction to statements by the candidates and quickly receded without generating any sustained narrative. When Palin was introduced to the nation as McCain’s running mate, her parenting choices raised the issue of abortion, but only momentarily. In one of the more episodic narratives – evangelical megachurch pastor Rick Warren’s presidential forum held at his church – the candidates’ answers on a question about abortion gained attention in the press the week of the event.

Attention Kathleen Parker: are you listening?