Monday Morning Quarterbacks

Tulsan Stan Geiger isn’t opposed to the idea of the federal government displaying a heavy hand when it comes to the pay of executives running companies that take federal money. "If nothing else, such a move fires a round across the bow of any executive in this country that thinks he or she can drive a company into the ground, get bailed out with gubment money, and still grab off those personal millions,” he writes at stan-geiger.com. But Geiger said the same standards ought to stand for taxpayer-funded elected officials, referencing New York Sen. Charles Schumer. "I mean if executives of companies shouldn’t be able to pocket millions because the companies that employ them have accepted billions in tax money once, why should a senator be allowed to pocket millions while he is employed by an entity that accepts trillions in tax money every freakin’ year? Hypocrisy to the max. That’s what I love about politicians.”

"When I heard that Obama was selected for this year’s Nobel Laureate, I felt a bit embarrassed for him, and given his comment in the Rose Garden, he must have felt a bit embarrassed as well,” writes syndicated columnist Walter Williams. "He said, ’To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who have been honored by this prize, men and women who’ve inspired me and inspired the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace.’” Maybe, Williams contends, the choice was about affirmative action or because of the goodwill he has created in Europe (and even among some longtime U.S. enemies). Williams offers some advice: "President Obama could rise several notches in my book if he refused the Nobel Peace Prize, with a nice letter to the Nobel Committee that might read: Since you did not see fit to award Ronald Reagan, the U.S. president who did the most for world peace in this century, by peaceably shutting down the Soviet Union, I respectfully decline your offer.”

One of the arguments about bringing terror detainees to this country from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is that they wouldn’t be a danger to Americans because of the modern, ultra-secure prisons in this country. No one has ever escaped from a "Supermax,” is the line most often used. Yet, John McCormack at weeklystandard.com writes that there’s cause for concern, highlighted by a shootout last week in Michigan that left radical Imam Luqman Ameen Abdullah dead. The FBI said Abdullah was the leader of part of a group called Ummah ("the brotherhood”), mostly black converts to Islam who wants to establish a separate Sharia-law governed state within the U.S. The Ummah is ruled by Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, formerly known as H. Rapp Brown, currently incarcerated at the Supermax in Florence, Colo. Two of the most mentioned locations being considered by the Obama administration for Gitmo detainees are a federal prison in Michigan and the Supermax in Colorado, McCormack writes. "One of the left’s core arguments in the debate rests on the belief that the security provided by such a facility would render Gitmo’s terrorists totally unable to organize and convert fellow prisoners eager to learn from the jihad-masters. In this case, not only did a domestic Islamic terrorist organization arise from within the walls of our prison system, but the ‘Supermax’ facility currently serves as the headquarters for this radical group. It appears FBI Director Robert Mueller’s ‘relevant concerns’ about bringing Gitmo’s terrorists to the United States are not so far-fetched after all.” McCormack adds: "So far as we know, no terror cells are currently being run from inside Guantanamo.”

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger gets an "F” from John J. Pitney Jr. for coarsening the culture in a recent veto message. It seems the first letters of the middle paragraphs in the message line up to spell an epithet that starts with the F-word, Pitney writes at corner.nationalreview.com. Although the governator’s spokesman said it was a coincidence, Pitney says the odds against those seven letters appearing in that specific order are 8,0341,810,176 to one. Speculation is Schwarzenegger was firing back at a left-wing Democrat who had shouted vulgar insults at him recently. "Granted, cussing is not the deadliest sin,” Pitney writes. "In moments of anger, many of us mutter expletives. ... But this case is different. Schwarzenegger deliberately etched an obscene word into the official public record, where it will stay forever.” As bad, Pitney writes, someone in the governor’s office took the time, amid a deep financial crisis, to devise the acrostic. "Nobody should expect elected officials to be perfect in their private lives. But we can expect them to behave like adults in their public lives. By pulling a stunt that would land a junior-high-school kid in detention, the governor has flunked this standard.”

The Obama administration’s railing against Fox News prompts David Limbaugh to wonder what the howl from the political left would’ve been like if former President George W. Bush had tried the same tactics with media outlets he thought had treated him unfairly. "Liberal politicians have been spoiled with mainstream media favoritism for so long that they believe anything other than sycophancy is mistreatment,” Limbaugh writes at davidlimbaugh.com. "In fact, Fox News seems much more conservative than it is because no other television network over the past half-century has been anything but decidedly liberal. When the media norm is liberal, liberals equate liberalism with objectivity and deviations from it as bias, just as liberals preach tolerance toward all ideas — except conservative ones. Their self-delusion is surreal.” Limbaugh says the attack on Fox is about more than just the network. "It is about his and his fellow liberals’ intolerance for political dissent and their war on political criticism from any corner. Unless you shower Obama with adulation 24/7, you are ripe for targeting.”

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