Jim Treacher: Alternate universe: Obama’s WHCD speech
[A little Sunday afternoon levity.  -Cnation]
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you. Thank you, everybody. Good evening. It’s good to be here. It’s been… [checks watch] …wow, over 3 hours since I last gave a speech on TV. Starting to go through withdrawal.

Great to see everybody here tonight. So many good people. We’ve got Joe Biden here. Sheriff Joe. Just look at him. Smiling and laughing like he has any idea what’s going on. There ya go, Plugs, flash those choppers. You paid enough for ‘em. “Just make sure they match the hair I bought, Doc.” Folks, I hereby declare everything from Joe’s neck up a man-caused disaster. more…..

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M. Zuhdi Jasser: Accommodation as an Islamist Political Instrument
Political Islam’s ideological battle fronts are many. They can include the obvious like the liberation of Iraq or the rampant domestic and foreign policy speeches given under the guise of Friday sermons in mosques around America. However, an ideological front which is gaining traction among Islamists is that of religious accommodations (or demands) in our free society. Every week, it seems we are seeing new iterations of the same issue. Soon we must all ask — at what point do Muslim requests for accommodations to religious practices and beliefs cross the line of the fundamental basis of American liberty and freedom? more……

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Mark Steyn: Fun with Dick and Nancy
It’s worth noting that, by most if not all of her multiple accounts, Nancy Pelosi is as guilty of torture as anybody else. That’s not an airy rhetorical flourish but a statement of law. As National Review’s Andy McCarthy points out, under Section 2340A(c) of the relevant statute, a person who conspires to torture is subject to the same penalties as the actual torturer. Once Speaker Pelosi was informed that waterboarding was part of the plan and that it was actually being used, she was in on the conspiracy, and as up to her neck in it as whoever it was who was actually sticking it to poor old Abu Zubaydah and the other blameless lads.

That is, if you believe waterboarding is “torture.” more…..

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Steve Forbes: Don’t Doc American Healthcare
The U.S. medical system is hugely expensive and is not providing as good care to its citizens as socialized systems are in Canada and Europe–that will be a chief argument the Obama Administration employs to justify its new government health insurance plan for the 46 million Americans who are uninsured. The White House will further argue that competition from a public (i.e., government) company will force private insurers to cease underwriting the currently wasteful system. The Administration will also emphasize the alleged horrors of the status quo, claiming, for instance, that most personal bankruptcies in this country are caused by health care debts and that every year nearly 20,000 people die in the U.S. because they are uninsured. more…..

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Roger Kimball: The Meaning of Obama, Part II, with a note from J. L. Austin and an epitaph for cognitive dissonance
It turns out that Bush was a rank amateur when it came to profligacy. His $400 billion deficit, which seemed like a lot of money at the time, is not even a weekend’s “stimulus” bill for Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid & Co. A week or so ago, the White House told us that the budget deficit for the current fiscal year would be $1.75 trillion dollars ($1,750,000,000,000). Somebody forgot to include the party favors, though, because a few days later that estimate was raised to $1.84 trillion ($1,840,000,000,000), a difference of some $90 billion, or more than 4 times the $17 billion in “savings” that Obama announced with such fanfare recently. After the laughter subsided — after all, the President’s Potemkin cuts amount to 1/2 of 1 percent of his budget — Obama shot back: “In Washington, I guess [$17 billion is] considered trivial. Outside of Washington, that’s still considered a lot of money.” more…..

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-Cnation