It’s not often that one person plays key roles in two — count ‘em, two — trillion-dollar disasters. Welcome, my friends, to the world of well-connected Democrat Jamie Gorelick.

You’ve been warned.

Third time’s the charm! Though if Gorelick does to Amazon what she did to Bill Clinton’s nascent non-war on terrorism and then to Fannie Mae, they’re in heap big trouble. Amazon has run roughshod over first Borders and then Best Buy — what happens to the Internet if the 800 pound gorilla of online retailing falls?

The big news today: according to family members, by the end of his life Osama bin Laden was telling his family to “Go to Europe and America and get a good education.”

What? The great Islamic umma, center of global culture and light of the world has no universities where the children of the Great Jihadi can get a decent education?  The clueless, hell-bound infidels of Europe and America make the Sons of the True Faith look incompetent and backward on the vital matter of educating the young?  It isn’t enough to sit on a dirt floor in Pakistan memorizing the Koran and learning how to wear a suicide bomb vest?

But what about the obligation to take up the cause of jihad and violence and crush the evil doers in the West?

Never mind about all that, Osama supposedly told his children and grandchildren.  “Do not follow me down the road to jihad,” he said.  “You have to study and live in peace and don’t do what I am doing or what I have done.”

All those Salafi ideologues promoting the idea of jihad against the West as a sacred obligation compulsory on all Muslims are presumably choking on their beards as they read these words.  The homosexual-hangers and the adultress-stoners are having a bad morning. No doubt they will tell themselves that this story is yet another lie from the cynical west, but they will have to wrap themselves ever more tightly in the delusions and wishful thinking that blinker their thoughts — and undermine their political effectiveness.

They’ll give up on jihad right around the same time that ClimateGate convinces the a different group of religious zealots to change their own destructive course. (QED)

Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus announced Friday that the next Independence variant littoral combat ship will be named after Gabrielle Giffords, the former Arizona congresswoman who survived being shot in the head last January when a gunman opened fire as Giffords met with constituents outside a Tucson grocery store.

Six others, including nine-year-old Christina Taylor-Green, [and George H.W. Bush-appointed federal judge John M. Roll, whom the Tribune either forgot to mention, or doesn't want to include because it clutters the narrative -- Ed] were killed in the shooting and 13 others, including Giffords, were wounded.

Mabus said the ship’s sponsor will be Roxanna Green, Taylor-Green’s mother. In naval tradition, a ship’s sponsor’s “spirit and presence guide the ship throughout its service life,” according to a Defense Department statement.

Giffords was presented with an artist’s rendering of what will be the USS Gabrielle Giffords at a Pentagon ceremony Friday afternoon.

You can see an illustration of the ship here. Curiously, it isn’t powered by windmills, nor does the Tribune seemed too upset about the potentially inflammatory rhetoric tacit in the ship’s ultimate purpose.

Today’s speech by Iran’s Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, about the sanctions on his country and its determination to persist in its quest for nuclear capability was a significant news event. Khamenei served notice on the United States that he would not be bluffed into giving up his nuclear plans. Though he conceded the economic pressure on his country has hurt, he said Iran is undaunted and would retaliate against the United States should its nuclear facilities come under attack. All this was reported in newspapers around the world, including the New York Times, which posted a story on the speech Friday morning.

However, there was something missing from the Times report of Khamenei’s speech that was reported elsewhere. Other accounts noted that in addition to threatening the United States, Khamenei said this: “The Zionist regime is a cancerous tumor and it will be removed.” While we don’t know how or why a mention of this element of the speech managed to get excised from the account in the Times, it’s a question worth pondering.

Any discussion of the nature of the Iranian nuclear threat that ignores the regime’s murderous intentions toward Israel is clearly incomplete.

As we noted when Jill Abramson became the paper’s lead editor last year, “The Gray Lady Sure Knows Her Way Around an Airbrush.”

Of course, conventional wisdom in the West holds that the Arab Spring spontaneously combusted when Mohamed Bouazizi, a fruit vendor, set himself ablaze outside the offices of the Tunisian klepto-cops who had seized his wares. This suicide protest, the story goes, ignited a sweeping revolt against the corruption and caprices of Arab despots. One by one, the dominos began to fall: Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya — with rumblings in Saudi Arabia and Jordan as well as teetering Syria and rickety Iran. We are to believe that the mass uprising is an unmistakable manifestation of the “desire for freedom” that, according to Pres. George W. Bush, “resides in every human heart.”

That proclamation came in the heady days of 2004, when the democracy project was still a Panglossian dream, not the Pandora’s box it proved to be as Islamic parties began to win elections. Like its successor, the Bush administration discouraged all inquiry into Islamic doctrine by anyone seeking to understand Muslim enmity, indulging the fiction that there is something we can do to change it. Inexorably, this has fed President Obama’s preferred fiction — that we must have done something to deserve it — as well as the current administration’s strident objection to uttering the word “Islam” for any purpose other than hagiography. In this self-imposed ignorance, most Americans still do not know that hurriya, Arabic for “freedom,” connotes “perfect slavery” or absolute submission to Allah, very nearly the opposite of the Western concept. Even if we grant for argument’s sake the dubious proposition that all people crave freedom, Islam and the West have never agreed about what freedom means.

Once again, a reminder that 1984 was a warning, not a user’s guide:

Winston was struck, as he had been struck before, by the tiredness of O’Brien’s face. It was strong and fleshy and brutal, it was full of intelligence and a sort of controlled passion before which he felt himself helpless; but it was tired. There were pouches under the eyes, the skin sagged from the cheekbones. O’Brien leaned over him, deliberately bringing the worn face nearer.

‘You are thinking,’ he said, ‘that my face is old and tired. You are thinking that I talk of power, and yet I am not even able to prevent the decay of my own body. Can you not understand, Winston, that the individual is only a cell? The weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism. Do you die when you cut your fingernails?’

He turned away from the bed and began strolling up and down again, one hand in his pocket.

‘We are the priests of power,’ he said. ‘God is power. But at present power is only a word so far as you are concerned. It is time for you to gather some idea of what power means. The first thing you must realize is that power is collective. The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual. You know the Party slogan: “Freedom is Slavery”. Has it ever occurred to you that it is reversible? Slavery is freedom. Alone — free — the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal. The second thing for you to realize is that power is power over human beings. Over the body but, above all, over the mind. Power over matter — external reality, as you would call it — is not important. Already our control over matter is absolute.’

Or to put it another way, “Islam fits me really well,” a 34-year old music teacher in post-Christian Stockholm, Sweeden was quoted as saying in the L.A. Times in 2010 after he converted. “I am completely against capitalism.”

(H/T: 5′F.)

Twitter gave as examples of restrictions it might cooperate with “certain types of content, such as France or Germany, which ban pro-Nazi content.”

A Twitter spokeswoman declined to elaborate on the blog.

“Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country while keeping it available in the rest of the world,” the Twitter blog said.

Twitter’s decision to begin censoring content represents a significant departure from its policy just one year ago, when anti-government protesters in Tunisia, Egypt and other Arab countries coordinated mass demonstrations through on the social network and, in the process, thrust Twitter’s disruptive potential into the global spotlight.

As the revolutions brewed last January, Twitter signaled that it would take a hands-off approach to censoring content in a blog post entitled “The Tweets Must Flow.”

“We do not remove Tweets on the basis of their content,” the blog post read. “Our position on freedom of expression carries with it a mandate to protect our users’ right to speak freely and preserve their ability to contest having their private information revealed.”

And last year, Twitter General Counsel Alex Macgillivray declared that the company was “from the free speech wing of the free speech party.”

In the interest of transparency, Twitter said Thursday, it has built a mechanism to inform users in the event that a Tweet is being blocked.

I’m sure Twitter’s nascent attempt at censorship has nothing at all to do with this Wall Street Journal report from late December:

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia—Prince Alwaleed bin Talal has made a $300 million investment in Twitter Inc., expanding his media empire into social-media sites and giving the Saudi billionaire a stake in an online forum that was widely used by activists in this year’s Arab uprisings.

The investment was made several months ago when existing Twitter shareholders sold $400 million of shares, according to people familiar with the matter. At the time, Twitter also raised $400 million from a direct investment led by Russia-based DST Global, known for its investments in social media companies including Facebook Inc. The identities of other investors weren’t disclosed.

In an emailed statement from Prince Alwaleed’s Kingdom Holding Co., Prince Alwaleed stressed both the investment potential and growing clout of the short-messaging social network in announcing the purchase, which he said was part of a drive “to invest in promising, high-growth businesses with a global impact.”

San Francisco-based Twitter, whose investors include several venture-capital firms, was valued by analysts in October at about $8.4 billion, suggesting that Prince Alwaleed’s stake is equivalent to 3.6% of the company.

* * * * *

Prince Alwaleed has focused his investments on banks, hotels and media companies, building sizable stakes in companies such as Citigroup Inc., News Corp., Apple Inc. and Time Warner Inc. News Corp. owns Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal. He is also developing a new Arabic-language satellite-news channel with Bloomberg LP.

Is a $300 million investment enough to get your own kill switch?

Those are questions that Bill Kristol asks at the Weekly Standard:

Well, let’s think about an America that looked more like the military. That America would have a culture that’s at times tough and even harsh. It would have a mode of organization that’s strictly hierarchical and at times unforgiving. It would feature a regimen that weeds out those not up to the task and subordinate individual comfort to the achievement of a difficult mission. But that isn’t the America Obama wants to bring within reach. That isn’t the kind of America Obama’s policies seek to produce. Obama’s America is soft, understanding, forgiving, and entitled. But that America doesn’t work so well, or sell so well, anymore. So now Obama pretends his America is the troops’ America.

Near the end of his speech, the president claimed that “Those of us who’ve been sent here to serve can learn from the service of our troops.” What can we learn? That ”when you put on that uniform, it doesn’t matter if you’re black or white; Asian or Latino; conservative or liberal; rich or poor; gay or straight. When you’re marching into battle, you look out for the person next to you, or the mission fails.” What Obama doesn’t say is this: It’s not just that you look out for the person next to you, or the mission fails. It’s also that you endure tough and demanding training, or the mission fails. You subordinate your own wishes, or the mission fails. You wash out many of those who wish to serve, or the mission fails. You insist on fitness and discipline and good character, or the mission fails. You do away with any sense of entitlement, or the mission fails. But Obama isn’t interested in the truth about why a mission succeeds or fails. He’s interested in using the prestige of the military to justify the nanny state.

Our liberal president claims to want to help us all “get each other’s backs,” just as military missions only succeed if “you know that there’s someone behind you, watching your back.” But welfare state liberalism is all about scratching each other’s backs; nanny state liberalism is all about rubbing each other’s backs; and entitlement state liberalism is all about stroking each other’s backs. None is about protecting each other’s backs—let alone driving away our enemies and turning around to bravely face the future. The fact is that if the military is in some respects an example for us, it’s not an example that speaks in favor of contemporary liberalism.

But it does speak to the origins of an earlier form of liberalism, and it’s the latest reminder that Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism was meant as a warning, not a how-to guide. As Jonah noted in several places in his book, and reiterated to Salon magazine four years ago (in an article titled, “We’re all fascists now,” foreshadowing a similar headline from a rival leftwing publication a year later):

What appealed to the Progressives about militarism was what William James [called in 1906] this moral equivalent of war. It was that war brought out the best in society, as James put it, that it was the best tool then known for mobilization … That is what is fascistic about militarism, its utility as a mechanism for galvanizing society to join together, to drop their partisan differences, to move beyond ideology and get with the program. And liberalism today is, strictly speaking, pretty pacifistic. They’re not the ones who want to go to war all that much. But they’re still deeply enamored with this concept of the moral equivalent of war, that we should unite around common purposes. Listen to the rhetoric of Barack Obama, it’s all about unity, unity, unity, that we have to move beyond our particular differences and unite around common things, all of that kind of stuff. That remains at the heart of American liberalism, and that’s what I’m getting at.

And this is far from the first time Obama has proven himself to be a remarkably antediluvian thinker. Not to mention echoing sentiments uttered a generation earlier by Jimmy Carter.

– Instapundit reader Trevor Dahl.

Plus a few more words on the same subject from Ezra Levant:

In her Saturday New York Times column, Maureen Dowd offers her most biting critique of President Obama since his inauguration:

Times have been bad and sad, and The One did not turn out to be a messiah, just a mortal politician who ruefully jokes that his talent is hitting the “sweet spot” where he makes no one happy, neither allies nor opponents.

I had expected such a lamentation to be followed immediately by a broadside against the Right; perhaps with the typical Reid-esque charges of obstructionism, or cynicism, or “politics,” or anything that implies that culpability lies outside of the West Wing. Instead, she trains her fire on the president and keeps it steadily there. The thrust of Dowd’s argument is that the president feels “disappointed” by us. An “introvert,” he shares Jimmy Carter’s incredulity that our boisterous democracy does not bend happily to his definition of the rational. And so, hurt by America’s failure to appreciate his brilliance, he and Michelle have become physically and emotionally reclusive, preferring the company of a small clique of friends that recognize his gifts:

The portrait of the first couple in Jodi Kantor’s new book, “The Obamas,” bristles with aggrievement and the rational president’s disdain for the irrational nature of politics, the press and Republicans. Despite what his rivals say, the president and the first lady do believe in American exceptionalism — their own, and they feel overassaulted and underappreciated.

We disappointed them.

Dowd writes,”The man who came to Washington on a wave of euphoria has had a presidency with all the joy of a root canal.” I’m pretty sure she called him “boy” in the first draft, though. Fortunately, as Don Surber adds:

Don’t worry. Only 364 shopping days left until he is gone with an anemic legacy of being a soft leader in tough times. Despite his failed $787 billion stimulus, his refusal to work with Republicans, and a foreign policy that is turning the Middle East and North Africa over to Iran, he thinks he is too good for us.

So does Jonathan Alter, writing in the Washington Post:

Obama’s lofty speeches during the 2008 campaign led even his detractors to admit that he is a gifted orator. Some critics try to minimize his skill by saying he relies on a teleprompter — a ridiculous charge considering that he often writes big chunks of his speeches and often speaks off-the-cuff.

That said, there are few examples of Obama’s speeches actually moving popular opinion. That’s because he speaks in impressive paragraphs, not memorable sentences. He is allergic to sound bites, and that keeps him from effectively framing his goals and achievements.

The roots of this allergy may lie in his famous Philadelphia speech on race in 2008, which followed the revelations of incendiary comments by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The speech lacked memorable lines, but it was a big hit. I believe it convinced Obama that the public could absorb complex ideas without bumper sticker lines. He was wrong.

Or as James Taranto paraphrases on Twitter, “Obama isn’t a gifted public speaker because the public is stupid.” The public — why does it have to bipolar? Soaring to lofty heights when it does what the MSM instruct it to do; so boorish when it fails its journalistic betters.

And finally, one of the more infamous rubes has a rare moment of clarity, as Spencer Ackerman lists “Four Contradictions In Obama’s Defense Plan:”

Sometimes the analysis in the strategy suggests a policy choice that the strategy actually disavows. Sometimes it walks back controversial points. Sometimes it makes pledges that sound sensible at first blush — but don’t actually make sense the more you think about them.

No word yet if Ackerman assuaged his guilt by declaring a random conservative pundit racist or suggesting tossing him through a plate glass window.

Elsewhere in the world of the JournoList, the Washington Post’s ombudman goes into full cheat-and-retreat mode:

Deborah Howell, Post ombudsman from 2005 through 2008, said at the end of her tenure that “some of the conservatives’ complaints about a liberal tilt [at The Post] are valid.”

I won’t quibble with her conclusion. I think she was right. I read all of The Post’s lengthier, meatier stories on Obama published from October 2006 through Election Day 2008. That was about 120 stories, and tens of thousands of words, including David Maraniss’s 10,000-word profile about Obama’s Hawaii years, which I liked.

I think there was way too little coverage of his record in the Illinois Senate and U.S. Senate, for example, with one or two notably good exceptions. But there were hard-hitting stories too, even a very tough one on Michelle Obama’s job at the University of Chicago Medical Center.

And that’s what The Post needs to do in covering his reelection campaign this year: be hard-hitting on his record and provide fresh insight and plenty of context to put the past three rough years into perspective.

And they’ll be happy to start, beginning on Wednesday, November 7th, 2012.

And finally, Ed Koch, who flashed momentary glimpses of coming to his senses in recent months, reverts back into rube mode, sad to say. As Jeff Dunetz writes at Big Government, “I should have known better.  Ed Koch is comfortable bashing Obama until he sees the election coming–and suddenly any backbone is replaced by a wet noodle.”

A Des Moines man has been arrested after police say he used, or tried to use, the identity of Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz in a scheme to falsely implicate Schultz in perceived unethical behavior in office.

Zachary Edwards was arrested Friday and charged with identity theft.

The Iowa Department of Public Safety issued a news release saying Schultz’s office discovered the scheme on June 24, 2011 and notified authorities.

Hinderaker adds:

Edwards is a former Obama staffer who directed “new media operations” for Obama in five states during the 2008 primaries. Thereafter, he was Obama’s Director of New Media for the State of Iowa. In the Democratic Party’s lexicon, “new media” apparently includes identity theft.

Edwards now works for LINK Strategies, a Democratic consulting firm with extraordinarily close ties to Iowa Democrat Tom Harkin.

Harkin has had issues in the past with falsifying aspects of his own identity — not to mention history itself:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Update: “I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes, and how.”