I'm not scared of what KSM has to say in court either. I'm scared of what a federal judge might say and do.

Mohammed already has said, "I was responsible for the 9/11 operation from A to Z." By handing the 9/11 Five over to the federal court system, the Obama administration has opened the door for other federal judges to issue rulings that affect or delay the trial and/or punishment.

I'm...]]> Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600 A recent Gallup poll found that 55 percent of Americans have an unfavorable view of the mass media. Hence, many readers may have felt little outrage when they read a few weeks ago that Scott Gerber, then communications director for California Attorney General Jerry Brown, recorded interviews with reporters -- most notably, my friend and colleague Carla Marinucci -- without notifying them.

The unauthorized recordings, however, were sufficiently serious to result in Gerber's resignation -- as his actions conflicted with a California law requiring that all parties consent to a recording of their conversations. Conviction on a first offense could result in a $2,500 fine, one year in...]]> Sun, 15 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600 EDINBURGH -- Do not believe that Scotland was united behind Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill's decision to grant "compassionate" release to the terminally ill convicted Pan Am 103 bomber Abdel Basset al-Megrahi in August.

When al-Megrahi flew home to a hero's welcome in Libya, Member of Scottish Parliament Richard Baker recalls "universal outrage" among Scots at the sight of Scotland's flag "being waved to welcome home the Lockerbie bomber in Tripoli. It just turned stomachs" -- and produced among sensible Scots "profound shame and embarrassment."

Al-Megrahi was released after the former Libyan intelligence officer served a mere eight years in Scottish prison for his...]]> Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600 There have been two views on what happened last week when Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan opened fire on unarmed military colleagues at Fort Hood, Texas, killing 12 soldiers and one civilian. The politically correct version blames a lonely soldier's personal meltdown, precipitated by the fear of being deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. The politically incorrect view portrays Hasan, the son of Palestinian immigrants, as a homegrown Islamic terrorist, whether he coordinated with any terrorist groups or not.

In the end, it may turn out that both views are correct -- in that Hasan would not be the first unstable person to immerse himself in an extremist ideology before he turned his rage on his...]]> Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600 The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee health care bill includes a provision that would allow parents to keep their children as dependents on their health care policies until age 26. Not to be outdone, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced last month that, as Congressional Quarterly reported, the House bill "will allow young people to stay on their parents' policies until age 27."

Do I hear age 28? Why not 30? As long as Washington is giving away private health care coverage, why not eliminate the age cap entirely?

The House plan enjoys the support of a new group, "the Young Invincibles," an organization, Pelosi explained "formed to get young adults...]]> Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600 The Council on American-Islamic Relations sent out its usual roundup Tuesday of news stories alleging the mistreatment of Muslims in America. There was a story critical of the FBI harassment of Muslims in Queens, N.Y., in the wake of the arrest of a suspected terrorist. Another story concerned calls for an investigation into an FBI shooting that left Detroit Imam Luqman Ameen Abdullah dead. There were also notices of CAIR banquets.

There was no story about Noor Faleh Almaleki. Her father, Faleh Hassan Almaleki, has been arrested for running down his 20-year-old daughter, as well as the mother of her live-in boyfriend, on Oct. 20 in an Arizona parking lot with his 2000 Jeep Grand...]]> Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 No journalist who has followed Lt. Gov. John Garamendi over the years could be surprised at his answer to the final question at Monday night's debate at St. Mary's College among candidates competing to replace Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Walnut Creek, in Tuesday's special election. When an opportunity for fulsome flattery presents itself, Garamendi does not miss a beat.

Reading a question from the audience, Contra Costa Times columnist Lisa Vorderbrueggen asked the five participants -- Democrat Garamendi, Republican David Harmer, Peace and Freedom's Mary McIlroy, American Independent Jerry Denham and Green candidate Jerry Cloward -- if they'd be willing to hold at least three annual...]]> Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Mayor Gavin Newsom's office has argued that San Francisco's "sanctuary city" policy protects undocumented immigrants who are otherwise law-abiding residents.

But as The Chronicle's Phil Matier and Andrew Ross reported Monday, San Francisco has a new policy starting on Nov. 1 that prevents city cops from automatically impounding cars driven by giving never-licensed drivers 20 minutes to find someone with a valid license to drive their car. Only if an unlicensed driver is caught again within six months, is there an automatic 30-day impound, which can cost around $2,500.

So otherwise law-abiding residents now refers to people who only violate federal immigration law and the...]]> Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Why isn't Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner doing better in his bid for governor? On paper, Poizner is a solid contender.

He's the only Republican elected to statewide office in California who hasn't starred in a blockbuster film. He's a successful entrepreneur who struck it rich developing global positioning technology for cell phones. Later in life, he turned to public service, first as a volunteer schoolteacher, then as a candidate for state Assembly. He is a pro-choice Republican who has been able to reach out to the party's conservative base.

Yet in the latest Field Poll on the GOP primary, Poizner placed last -- garnering support among 9 percent of likely GOP...]]> Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The Obama White House's war on Fox News heated up when President Obama appeared on five Sunday talk shows in September, but snubbed Fox's Chris Wallace. Then White House Communications Director Anita Dunn told CNN's Howard Kurtz, "Fox News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party." On ABC's "This Week" Sunday, Obama guru David Axelrod commented on Fox mogul Rupert Murdoch's "talent for making money" -- and added that Fox News programming is "not really news."

Such scruples, you may marvel, from the office of a president who just spent quality time on CBS's "The Late Show" with David Letterman. President Obama quipped that...]]> Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 It's hard to instill confidence in the U.S. economy when Washington keeps finding new and creative ways to spend money it doesn't have.

Take President Obama's proposal to send additional $250 checks to Social Security recipients -- on top of the $250 checks they already received as part of the president's $787 billion economic stimulus package.

Because seniors don't need a cost-of-living increase, the president wants to give them a bonus. Don't even try to follow the logic. You can't find it.

Last week, the Obama administration announced that for the first time since automatic Social Security cost-of-living increases were instituted in 1975, there will be no...]]> Sun, 18 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 If the Democrats' health care package is so great, why are President Obama and Dem congressional leaders so hungry to share the credit for its passage with a Republican?

It's not as if D.C. Dems are opposed to hogging the glory when a federal program is popular. So why did Obama feel the need to announce after the Senate Finance Committee passed a health care measure with the support of Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, that the measure "enjoys the support of people from both parties" -- when this one bill enjoyed the support of one lone-wolf Republican?

Obama doesn't need Snowe's vote to pass a measure if he can draw the support of the Senate's 58 Democrats and two left-leaning...]]> Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 On Oct. 17, 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake brought down a chunk of the upper deck of the Oakland-Bay Bridge onto the lower deck. Anamafi Moala Kalushia, 23, of Berkeley died. Twenty years later, some 280,000 cars use the bridge daily -- and it still isn't safe.

In that time, Iraq has been in two wars and replaced bombed bridges over the Tigris River twice. In little more than a year, Minneapolis rebuilt a bridge that collapsed and killed 13 in 2007. In 1994, when the Northridge earthquake destroyed freeway overpasses in Southern California, GOP Gov. Pete Wilson had the two Santa Monica Freeway bridges restored within 84 days.

The construction of the east span of the Bay...]]> Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 "What happened to global warming?" read the headline -- on BBC News on Oct. 9, no less. Consider it a cataclysmic event: Mainstream news organizations have begun reporting on scientific research that suggests that global warming may not be caused by man and may not be as dire and eminent as alarmists suggest.

Indeed, as the BBC's climate correspondent Paul Hudson reported, the warmest year recorded globally "was not in 2008 or 2007, but 1998." It's true, he continued, "For the last 11 years, we have not observed any increase in global temperatures."

At a London conference later this month, Hudson reported, solar scientist Piers Corbyn will present evidence that...]]> Sun, 11 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker opened the gates to hell this month when he ruled that strategists for Proposition 8 -- the 2008 ballot measure, passed by 52 percent of California voters, that limited marriage to a man and a woman -- must release internal campaign documents to measure opponents.

Political activists of all stripes beware: Unless this ruling is overturned, the word will be out that sore losers who can't beat you at the ballot box and probably can't beat you in court can file a lawsuit designed to pry away proprietary information that they later can use to embarrass you.

And be clear: Every campaign has its dirty laundry. Including, I would imagine,...]]> Sat, 10 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 At the Democratic National Convention in Denver last summer, then-Sen. Barack Obama pledged to "finish the fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan."

Lately Obama has toned down his rhetoric when it comes to succeeding in Afghanistan. "I'm always worried about using the word 'victory,' because, you know, it invokes this notion of Emperor Hirohito coming down and signing a surrender to MacArthur," the president told ABC in July.

Apparently the "the audacity of hope" approach does not apply to the U.S. military fighting against al-Qaida and the Taliban.

I can only imagine the jeers that would have followed if Bush Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had suggested that...]]> Tue, 06 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 If you want to understand why some conservatives were gleeful over Chicago's fourth-place finish in its bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympic Games -- after President Obama and the first lady flew to Copenhagen to pitch the American city to the International Olympic Committee -- consider this quote in the New York Times from Anita DeFrantz, an IOC member from the United States: "I hate the fact that these elegant people were here, and then our country got treated that way."

These elegant people? So the other folks who didn't win for their cities are what? Slobs? You see in that sentence all the presumption of Obama and his political base. The 2008 presidential campaign reveled in...]]> Sun, 04 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 It's been a long, strange trip since Gavin Newsom became San Francisco's mayor. When he first ran for City Hall's top job, Newsom led with a campaign to do something about the city's homeless population. Well, the homeless are still here, but Newsom has moved on to a new target -- he is running to be the next governor of California by picking on the personal habits of people who for the most part work hard and pay taxes.

Example: Ask some out-of-towners to walk Market Street from the Ferry Building to City Hall. They'll tell you how beautiful San Francisco is, but it's too bad that the farther they traveled from the waterfront, the grungier, smellier and scarier Ess Eff's Main...]]> Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 On Tuesday, Najibullah Zazi, a 24-year-old Afghan immigrant who was a teenager in Queens during the Sept. 11 attacks, pleaded not guilty to federal terrorism conspiracy charges in New York.

This is a scary story. Police stopped and searched Zazi's rented car on the George Washington Bridge on Sept. 10, as the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks loomed and President Obama was about to join world leaders at a U.N. confab.

According to the U.S. attorney's office, Zazi flew to Pakistan in August 2008 to receive bomb-making instructions, returned to use the Internet and nine pages of handwritten bomb-making notes he had e-mailed himself from Pakistan to purchase and mix...]]> Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Our Betters in Europe, of course, are outraged that Switzerland arrested and may allow the extradition of film director Roman Polanski, 76, a fugitive from California justice after he pleaded guilty to unlawful sex with a 13-year-old in 1977.

The French culture minister, Frederic Mitterrand, sniffed, "In the same way that there is a generous America that we like, there is also a scary America that has just shown its face." A petition signed by European filmmakers huffed at the impropriety of arresting Polanski on his way to accept a film industry lifetime achievement award.

Everyone sympathizes with Polanski because he has prevailed, despite the Holocaust, which claimed his...]]> Sun, 20 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Democrats seem to have shifted their thinking on a number of issues since President Obama took the oath of office. Figure some Dems have more faith in government with a like-minded man at the helm, and besides, circumstances have changed. But also figure that some Democrats were just looking for sore spots -- and their anti-Bush rhetoric was based not on principle, but raw opportunism.

When Obama picked Eric Shinseki to head the Department of Veterans Affairs, the left applauded because they liked the contrast with President George W. Bush. Shinseki was their hero because he had told Congress that the Bush administration should send "several hundred thousand"
U.S. troops to...]]> Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 I would not go see the film "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan" because I found more cruelty than humor in deliberately exposing unwitting civilians to the easy ridicule of smug sophomores.

Now the right has its own Borat-style entertainment. Equipped with a video camera, conservative activists James O'Keefe, 25, and Hannah Giles, 20, sought the answer to this question: "What if a 'prostitute' and her alleged law school boyfriend walk into ACORN seeking housing for an underage brothel to fund his future congressional campaign?"

The answer, they discovered, was that some of the folks who work at ACORN (the left-leaning...]]> Sun, 13 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Toward the end of his speech on health care Wednesday night, President Obama said that he had been thinking a lot about the phrase "the character of our country."

Too bad the president's speech had all the character of a free lunch. Obama argued for the moral imperative of providing quality health care for all Americans -- but it's not such a moral imperative that most people should have to pay for it.

In fact, he promised a load of goodies, starting with access to health care for America's 47 million-plus uninsured. House Bill 3200 would provide subsidies for families of four making up to $88,000. It also mandates that insurers would have to cover not only individuals with...]]> Wed, 09 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 One of the (many) irritating things about being a Republican in the liberal Bay Area is the certainty that if there is a story out there that makes conservatives look stupid - like the protests against President Obama's Tuesday speech to America's students - then you know that wherever you go, folks are going to ask you about that particular flap. What do you think about Obama's speech to students? Or what about those nutty town hallers? Or what about those nasty people who claim Obama wasn't born in Hawaii?

I'm supposed to be grateful for the opportunity to prove that, unlike "the mob," I'm a reasonable conservative, a good conservative - perhaps even worthy to be included at the...]]> Wed, 09 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 "You Don't Know Jack" is the perfect title for the upcoming HBO biopic starring Al Pacino as Death Doc Jack Kevorkian -- because it is clear that many of Kevorkian's fawning interviewers don't know much about Jack.

Fox News' Neil Cavuto, for example, last week introduced Kevorkian as a "Michigan physician who claims to have assisted in the suicides of at least 130 terminally ill people from 1990 to 1998."

Physician? Not the kind who treats patients. Kevorkian was a pathologist until his medical license was yanked in 1991. In 1999, a Michigan jury convicted him of second-degree murder after he gave a lethal injection to Thomas Youk, a 52-year-old man suffering from Lou...]]> Sun, 06 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 As he campaigned for the presidency, Sen. Barack Obama argued that Afghanistan should become "the central front in the battle against terrorism." Obama has delivered on that issue. U.S. troop levels have more than doubled since the beginning of a troop buildup first begun under President George W. Bush.

The price for that promise is not cheap.

For the moment, more troops mean more combat. As Institute for the Study of War President Kimberly Kagan noted at a Brookings Institute event last month, "As those new troops come in, as we have seen, violence will go up. They did so in Iraq. They will do so in Afghanistan because we are going into areas that the enemy effectively has...]]> Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Since 1999, when he was placed under California parole supervision for a 1976 rape in Nevada, Phillip Garrido, 58, was subject to drug testing, required to wear a GPS device and subject to twice-monthly visits by his state parole officer. In 2006, a neighbor called 9-1-1 to report that children were living in Garrido's backyard in squalor, but the Contra Costa County Sheriff's Department failed to search the registered sex offender's premises.

Last month, UC Berkeley Police Officer Allison Jacobs became suspicious of Garrido, figured out that he was a registered sex offender who was accompanied by two adolescent girls, and contacted Garrido's parole officer. Jacobs told reporters...]]> Sun, 30 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 When he served as deputy attorney general, now Attorney General Eric Holder gave a "neutral leaning positive" recommendation that led to President Bill Clinton's pardoning of gazillionaire fugitive Marc Rich, who was on the lam in Switzerland hiding from federal charges of fraud, evading more than $48 million in taxes, racketeering and trading oil with Iran in violation of a U.S. embargo.

Holder also had a role in the 1999 Clinton pardons of 16 Puerto Rico independence terrorists -- members of the bomb-happy FALN or the splinter group Los Macheteros -- who had been convicted on such charges as bank robbery, possession of explosives and participating in a seditious conspiracy --...]]> Thu, 27 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Earlier this month, three federal judges -- Stephen Reinhardt, Lawrence Karlton and Thelton Henderson -- ordered the release of more than 40,000 of California's 160,000 inmates. No lie: They claimed that releasing one-quarter of state inmates would not have "a meaningful adverse impact on public safety."

They also wrote, "Evidence shows that mentally ill inmates who are released do not, by virtue of their mental illness, present any higher risk than other released inmates."

These three must live in an alternate universe -- one where a quarter of California inmates, many of them mentally ill, can be freed and no one gets hurt in a meaningful way.

It helps if you...]]> Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 When convicted Pan Am Flight 103 killer Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi landed to a hero's welcome in Libya last week, there was no question about it: Our Betters in Europe got rolled.

They were undone by the vainglory of Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill, who authorized Megrahi's "compassionate" early release for terminal prostate cancer. MacAskill explained: Compassion means "remaining true to our values as a people. No matter the severity of the provocation or the atrocity perpetrated." Sure, there's a place for justice -- but smugness first.

MacAskill told the Scottish Parliament Monday that Tripoli had promised to handle Megrahi's homecoming in a "low-key and...]]> Sun, 23 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 How do you run for California's top political offices when you often have failed to vote yourself and have no political experience?

Some big names in the GOP have rallied behind former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina as she eyes a run against Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman as she prepares to run for governor. They see attractive candidates with high name identification, impressive personal resumes and deep pockets.

But both former CEOs have a boardroom-sized problem: They have shoddy voting records. Fiorina has voted in about one in four elections since she registered as a Republican in Santa Clara County in 2000. Fiorina didn't vote in the...]]> Thu, 20 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 At a recent Colorado town hall, University of Colorado at Boulder student Zach Lahn asked President Obama how private insurers could be expected to compete with a public health care plan. Lahn, 23, also told Obama, "I'd love to have a debate just all out, anytime, Oxford-style, if you'd like" on health care.

Obama answered that UPS and FedEx are a doing a lot better than the Post Office. (If I were Obama, I wouldn't mention the post office while touting public health care.) Then the president observed, "It's good to see a young person who's very engaged and confident challenging the president to an Oxford-style debate." And: "I like that. You got to have a little chutzpah, you...]]> Tue, 18 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 When Barack Obama was 11, his mother and grandmother took him and his half-sister Maya on the most American of family vacations -- a road trip that included Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon. Last week, Obama passed on that gift as he took his wife, daughters Malia and Sasha -- as well as Maya and her family -- on a four-day trip to two of America's most breathtaking national parks.

"It was nice the entire family was there," National Park Service spokesman Gerry Gaumer noted -- not just the immediate family, but the extended family. "Rather than a presidential visit, it seemed more like a vacation."

Cynics may observe that the geyser and canyon photo ops provided...]]> Sun, 16 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The latest infamous incident of Major Airline Tarmac Dysfunction occurred in Minnesota last weekend when a severe storm curtailed Continental ExpressJet Flight 2816. The flight, bound from Houston to Minneapolis-St.
Paul, was redirected to Rochester, Minn., and landed around midnight. Then, because some person or persons made an unconscionably stupid call, the airline did not release the 47 passengers until 6 a.m.

Passenger Link Christin described the experience as a "nightmare" -- thanks to crying babies, one smelly toilet and no food. The worst part: the whole mess appears to have been eminently avoidable, as the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported that a Delta flight that...]]> Thu, 13 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 First a confession: I've never flown on a private jet. I've never flown on a Gulfstream. Never flown on a private 737 "office in the sky."

So it could be that I am missing the good reasons why the House padded the $636 billion defense budget by adding two additional C-37 Gulfstreams and two additional C-40s (the military version of a Boeing 737) -- even though the Department of Defense never requested the planes.

The good news: This week, Defense Appropriations Subcommittee boss Jack Murtha, D-Pa., announced that the $330 million for the four planes would be pulled from the bill if the Pentagon still didn't want them.

Credit the Wall Street Journal for reporting...]]> Tue, 11 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The first thing you have to know when you read that California's 33 adult prisons -- like the state prison in Chino where riots erupted over the weekend -- are operating at 190 percent capacity is that 100 percent capacity means one inmate per cell, single bunks in dormitories and no beds in spaces not designed for housing. Put two inmates in a single cell and bunk beds in lieu of single beds and you get 200 percent capacity.

The very notion of "capacity" has been somewhat misleading. As Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokesman Seth Unger noted, "There has always been an understanding that you could put two inmates in a cell and have them safely housed."

Yet...]]> Sun, 09 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Imagine it's four years ago and an aide to President Bush posted a blog on the Whitehouse.gov website that bemoaned Internet criticism of the Iraq war, then continued: "These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversations.

"Since we can't keep track of all of them here at the White House, we're asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about anti-war protests that seem fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.''

Substitute the words "health insurance reform" for "anti-war protests," and you get the exact wording of a blog posted by Macon Phillips, the White House director of new media, on...]]> Thu, 06 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 You know that American voters aren't feeling the love for ObamaCare when House members hold town-hall meetings in their districts, only to be heckled and booed.

No worries for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco. On Tuesday, she ditched the town-hall concept in favor of a friendlier closed-to-the-public "roundtable" with health care professionals and consumers at San Francisco General Hospital.

At a press conference afterward, Pelosi proclaimed that "health care is a right, not a privilege." The House health care bill, she said, would mean Americans could receive health care with no restrictions on pre-existing medical conditions, more benefits for seniors on...]]> Sun, 02 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Because courts can sentence murderers to life without parole, why not get rid of the death penalty? It's a frequent question posed by readers and advocates who oppose the death penalty. For years, my answer has
been: If death-penalty opponents ever succeed in eliminating capital punishment, their next target for elimination will be life without parole -- or as lawyers call it, LWOP.

As if to prove my point, the Sentencing Project just released a report, "No Exit: The Expanding Use of Life Sentences in America," which advocated for -- you guessed it -- the elimination of LWOP. The report also lamented that governors and parole boards are not paroling more prisoners serving...]]> Thu, 30 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 When the Senate passed a federal hate-crimes measure by a 63-28 earlier this month, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., proclaimed, "This legislation will help to address the serious and growing problem of hate crimes."

I'm baffled. Washington passed the first federal hate-crimes bill in 1968 and 45 states have enacted hate-crime laws. This latest bill, the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act, expanded the list of hate crimes -- which originally focused on attacks based on the victims' race, color, religion or national origin -- to include those targeted because of their gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability.

If hate-crime laws prevent hate crimes,...]]> Tue, 28 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The video features an angry woman in red, armed with a birth certificate and a small American flag, scolding Rep. Mike Castle, R-Del., at a town meeting. She is angry, she said, because President Obama "is not an American citizen. He is a citizen of Kenya."

Castle, a descendant of Benjamin Franklin, seemed to not know how to respond. He calmly replied that Obama is a citizen. Some audience members booed. "You can boo," Castle told them, "but he is a citizen of the United States."

There's no good way to address a "birther" -- that's the term for conspiracy theorists who believe that Obama has produced a fake Hawaiian birth certificate to cover up the fact that he really was...]]> Sun, 26 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 In May, President Obama touted $17 billion in cuts he had planned for a budget of more than $3 trillion. Obama was quite proud of these cuts. Really. He told reporters that while $17 billion in cuts was considered "trivial" inside the beltway, "outside of Washington, that's still considered a lot of money."

So forgive me if I am skeptical when Obama -- who called it "painful" to squeeze one half of 1 percent from the gargantuan federal machine -- claims, as he did at Wednesday night's news conference, that two-thirds of his plan to provide universal access to health care for Americans "can be paid for by reallocating money that is simply being wasted in federal health care...]]> Thu, 23 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 In a speech to the Economic Club of Chicago this month, Department of Defense Secretary Robert Gates laid out the case for discontinuing the F-22 Raptor: "The F-22, to be blunt, does not make much sense anyplace else in the spectrum of conflict." In English that means that plane has not been used in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Gates wants to slay the beast, but he understands you have to feed the beast before you can kill it. So the administration supports ending the F-22's long $65 billion flight -- after seven new planes budgeted for 2010 bring the total fleet number to 187, which would be a good thing if America ends up in war against a superpower with high-tech...]]> Tue, 21 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Sacramento is so desperate to erase the state budget's $26.3 billion shortfall that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Democratic Legislature seem poised to end decades of prohibition so that they can tap new revenue from a widely occurring natural resource -- one dear to many Californians and known for its unmistakable aroma.

That's right, Sacramento is considering a budget that would raise as much as $1.8 billion in royalties over 14 years by allowing new offshore oil drilling off the coast of Santa Barbara. As of my deadline, the outcome is uncertain.

The Governator points out that the Tranquillon Ridge project would not open up new oil leases or require new offshore...]]> Sun, 19 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Last weekend, the New York Times reported that after 9/11, the CIA developed a "secret counterterrorism program" to train hit squads to kill top al-Qaida leaders. It seemed like good news to me. After all, why bankroll an intelligence agency if you can't use it to kill an enemy against whom America has declared war?

The news hooks: CIA director Leon Panetta killed the program last month after he told Senate and House Intelligence committees about the program.

And: Congress allegedly did not know about the nonoperational operation because, according to unnamed sources, former Veep Dick Cheney told the agency not to disclose the program to Congress.

The part of the...]]>