Gun-Grabbing Democrats Exploit Tragedy to Push Radical Agenda

A great segment from Hannity's last night:

Stay with that video until the 6:00 minute mark or so, with the brutal discussion of Sam Donaldson and the progressive elite.

Also at Power Line, "Democrats Seek the Holy Grail of Gun Control." (Via Memeorandum.)

The Year the Dreams Died

From Victor Davis Hanson, at National Review (via BCF and Memeorandum):

Barack Obama in 2008 won an election on an upbeat message of change amid hopes that the first black president would mark a redemptive moment in American history. Four years later, the fantasies are gone. In continuing dismal economic times, Obama ran for reelection neither on his first-term achievements — Obamacare, bailouts, financial stimuli, and Keynesian mega-deficits — nor on more utopian promises.

Instead, Obama’s campaign systematically reduced his rival, Wall Street financier Mitt Romney, to a conniving, felonious financial pirate who did dastardly things, from letting the uninsured die to putting his pet dog Seamus in a cage on top of the family car.

Obama once had mused that he wished to be the mirror image of Ronald Reagan — successfully coaxing America to the left as the folksy Reagan had to the right. Instead, 2012 taught us that a calculating Obama is more a canny Richard Nixon, who likewise used any means necessary to be reelected on the premise that his rival would be even worse. But we know what eventually happened to the triumphant, pre-Watergate Nixon after November 1972; what will be the second-term wages of Obama’s winning ugly?

Well, it won't be impeachment, that's for sure. The Democrat-Media Complex has got Barack's back.

Continue reading.

Women Pose With Assault Rifles They Got For Christmas

At Instapundit, "A HEARTWARMING PHOTO GALLERY."

Just a Bunch of Bloggers Get NBC's David Gregory in Whole Heap o' Trouble

Here's the background with video, "NBC's David Gregory Under Investigation by Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police."

And here's William Jacobson, "D.C. Police — NBC requested and was denied permission to use high capacity magazine in news segment." (Via Memeorandum, where just a whole lot more bloggers are also reporting.)

Laws are for little people, I guess. But I wonder, is that really a "planned vacation" for Gregory next Sunday? He won't be hosting "Meet the Press." Arrest the f-ker, I say. He and his producers should be prosecuted.

News of White House Petition to Deport Piers Morgan Goes Viral

I've avoided the Piers Morgan controversy. I've tried to be fair-minded, but the dude makes it really hard. I watched his town hall program on CNN last week and Morgan was just screaming at gun advocate John Lott. It was over the top. And he's been emotionally obsessed with the issue on Twitter.

Team Twitchy goes in for some snarky lulz, "Piers Morgan pathetically wallows in deportation petition attention, British start petition demanding he’s not sent back":

The attention-seeking ghoul has once again taken to Twitter to exploit a tragedy for his own benefit.

No doubt.

I am now trending in the United States because of this deportation threat. This is getting ridiculous.
— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) December 24, 2012

And there's a stoic White House petition request to "not send Piers Morgan back to us in the UK."

AP is now reporting on this (via Memeorandum and Moonbattery).

Oh boy. What a Christmas holiday!

Still more from Twitchy, "Givers! Happy warriors offer ideas for Piers ‘Musket’ Morgan deportation gifts."

Newsweek's Last Print Issue

Via Twitter:

And from Andrew Romano, at Newsweek (Online), "‘The First Rough Draft of History’."

Newsweek was my favorite political magazine when I was in college. I used to get both Time and Newsweek in the mail, but Newsweek was always more hip --- and funnier. I rarely read it online nowadays but I'm not pleased to see it going out of print. All sides should be represented in the marketplace, but, alas, the marketplace has spoken in this case. The online version might not last that much longer. But we'll see.

Top "Global Thinkers" in the U.S.

Two Top Thinkers

The journal Foreign Policy has named its "Top 100 Global Thinkers" for 2011 [h/t 3 Quarks Daily].  Lists like this tend to be arbitrary and even a bit silly. Nevertheless, compared to, e.g., TIME magazine's list of 100 Best Non-Fiction Books, about which I blogged back in August, FP's list is--and might be in the future--of somewhat more interest in U.S. intellectual historians.  FP is a far more intellectually serious publication than TIME. At the very least, FP is closely enough connected to the foreign policy establishment that a list like this probably tells us something about who that policy elite is paying (or perhaps will be paying) attention to.

Rather than review the entire list, I'm going to focus on the U.S. "thinkers" who appear on it (in the interest of inclusivity, I've counted some foreign nationals who permanently reside in the U.S.).

Below the jump you'll find their rankings and links to their FP blurbs....


1 (tie with various leaders of the "Arab Spring"). Gene Sharp
10. Ben Bernanke
11. Barack Obama
12. Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice
13. Bill and Melinda Gates
17. Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg
20. Bill and Hillary Clinton
23. Gene Cretz, Elizabeth Dibble, Robert Godec, Carlos Pascual, and Anne Patterson
25. Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff
30. Nouriel Roubini
32. Paul Krugman
33. Joseph Stiglitz
34. Elizabeth Warren
35. Amy Chua
36. Terry Engelder, Gary Lash, and George P. Mitchell
38. Mike Mullen
40. Paul Ryan
41. Robert Zoellick
43. Edward Glaeser and Saskia Sassen
44. David Scheffer (along with Luis Moreno-Ocampo)
45. Robert Gates
46. Christina Romer
48. Steven Pinker
49. Andrew Sullivan
50. Ron Paul
51. John McCain 
53. Samantha Power
54. Mohamed El-Erian
58. Thomas Friedman
60. Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo
64. Joseph Nye
65. Nancy Birdsall
66. Barry Eichengreen
67. Robert D. Kaplan
68. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita
69. Kenneth Roth
70. Daniel Kahneman
72. Tyler Cowen
73. Joi Ito and Ethan Zuckerman
78. Lester Brown
82. Clay Shirky
83. Jared Cohen and Alec Ross
84. Paul Farmer
90. Anne-Marie Slaughter
93. Lant Pritchett
96. Mari Kuraishi
97. Arvind Subramanian

Some random thoughts on this (sub)list:

• In what sense are these folks "thinkers"?  FP doesn't really say what it means by the word, other than describing its entire article as "a unique portrait of 2011's global marketplace of ideas and the thinkers who make them."  
• While the list is certainly global, it includes an awful lot of Americans (forty-seven of the hundred slots are occupied, at least in part, by US citizens and permanent residents).
• Apparently the "global marketplace of ideas" does not include the arts (high-, low-, or middle-brow) or the humanities.
• What it does include are an awful lot of politicians, pundits, and social scientists. Especially economists.  Given the track record of the economics profession, its dominance of this list is a little surprising. Then again, given the state of the world, perhaps it really isn't.
• There's a lot of careful balancing being done here: men and women, Republicans and Democrats, famous and (relatively) obscure, new media and old media.
• Despite these balancing acts, the list doesn't seem to include anyone who FP sees as important but villainous.  The political balancing only involves US and European politics. Both sides of the mainstream U.S. political divide are presented, but while prominent dissidents around the world are featured in the longer list, the Arab opposition to the "Arab Spring" is nowhere in sight, nor are Putin or Medvedev, Castro or Chavez, Ahmadinijad or Khamenei.  
• While the leaders of the Arab Spring top the list, Occupy, in its various manifestations, is utterly absent.
• At least one person on the list is a reader of this blog.  Does that mean USIH is participating in the global marketplace of ideas?