Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Chris Satullo says we don’t deserve to celebrate the Fourth of July this year:

Put the fireworks in storage.

Cancel the parade.

Tuck the soaring speeches in a drawer for another time.

This year, America doesn’t deserve to celebrate its birthday.

What follows is some self-flagellating pap about how we’ve taken away everyone’s civil liberties.

Tell ya what, Chris Satullo. You sit at home and contemplate your navel this July 4th. Feel free to scourge yourself if you like. I have a spare cat o’ nine tails in the shed; make sure and clean off the blood before you return it.

Even better, keep it. You’ll need it again, I’m sure.

As for the rest of you, I’ll see you on the beach.

The Washington Post reports:

A top adviser to Sen. John McCain said that a terrorist attack in the United States would be a political benefit to the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, a comment that was immediately disputed by the candidate and denounced by his Democratic rival.

Charles R. Black Jr., one of McCain’s most senior political advisers, said in an interview with Fortune magazine that a fresh terrorist attack “certainly would be a big advantage to him.

Brilliant. But why stop there?

Why, it would be even more beneficial if the attack hit a blue state, wouldn’t it? As long as Mr. Black is on the subject, why not provide the list of states where a huge terror attack would be most beneficial to John McCain?

Oh, and hey — it seems like it would be beneficial to John McCain if the attack took out Barack Obama. Wouldn’t it? It would be even more beneficial to John McCain if it also took out other likely replacements for Obama, like Hillary Clinton or Al Gore.

In all this talk about what would be beneficial to John McCain, I just thought of something that would not be beneficial to John McCain.

Saying this kind of stuff to Fortune Magazine.

I can see that — and I’m not even a top political adviser!

Close enough, anyway.

S.F. Gate columnist Mark Morford gives us one of the most nauseating paeans to Obama yet:

Barack Obama isn’t really one of us. Not in the normal way, anyway.

. . . .

Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.

The unusual thing is, true Lightworkers almost never appear on such a brutal, spiritually demeaning stage as national politics. This is why Obama is so rare. And this why he is so often compared to Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., to those leaders in our culture whose stirring vibrations still resonate throughout our short history.

Amusing theories about where this nonsense came from at Mrs. Peel and doubleplusundead, who says it all derives from video games. [UPDATE: Well, not exactly, but sort of. doubleplusundead explains below in a comment.]

Alcee Hastings:

At the beginning of our great country’s history my ancestors were counted as only 2/3 of a person.

(Via Tully at Stubborn Facts.)

Posted by WLS:

I’ve watched with dismay as Dan Abrams has lowered himself into the sewer over at MSNBC by going completely in the tank for Obama, and turning the network into a full-time operative of the DNC.  But Abrams is clearly one of the principal players behind that move, as it began after he gave up his prior show a couple years ago to be program director for the network.  I never imagined he was anything but a New York liberal, but in his prior incarnation when his show focused mainly on legal affairs, I found him to be a fair and insightful inquisitor of his guests and their viewpoints.

Abrams new show is only marginally less partisan than Dolpermann’s, but last night he reached a new low for himself.

At about the halfway mark the show he did a segment on the new video that emerged yesterday of the South Side Catholic Priest Michael Pfleger and his ridiculous “sermon” last Sunday at Obama’s church in Chicago.  Pfleger is a long-time ally retired Rev. Wright, and has appeared with and spoken glowingly of Louis Farrakhan.

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On Thursday, deadbeat Congresswoman Laura Richardson denied her home was in foreclosure:

In a carefully written statement released Wednesday evening, she challenged Capitol Weekly’s story about “the residential property that I own in Sacramento,” and said that it had not been subjected to foreclosure. She also said that she renegotiated a loan in connection with the transaction, but did not provide details.

“I have worked with my lender to complete a loan modification and have renegotiated the terms of the agreement — with no special provisions. I fully intend to fulfill all financial obligations of this property,” she said.

But last night, the AP reported, she acknowledged that it was:

Rep. Laura Richardson claimed Friday that her Sacramento home was sold into foreclosure without her knowledge and contrary to an agreement with her lender.

D’oh!

Here’s the kicker:

She said that she is like any other American suffering in the mortgage crisis and wants to testify to Congress about her experience as lawmakers craft a foreclosure-prevention bill.

She is unlike “any other American suffering in the mortgage crisis” in a few important respects, however. She makes nearly $170,000 per year, and receives a per diem from the State of California as well.

Oh — and she has defaulted on three properties, not just one:

Rep. Laura Richardson, who lost her Sacramento home in a recent foreclosure auction, has also defaulted on properties in Long Beach and San Pedro, records show.

Richardson, D-Long Beach, was able to bring her payments up to date on the Long Beach home relatively quickly, but the San Pedro property lingered in the foreclosure process for almost eight months, and still has a pending auction date.

I agree with her on one point, however. I, too, want to see her testify before Congress about all of this.

(Links above mainly found through the L.A. Times blog L.A. Land.)

Posted by WLS: 

Now that there is a presumptive Dimocrit nominee for the general election, I’m going to start a recurring series of postings commenting on non-answers given by Obama to direct questions posed to him by the media and others. 

The problem I expect to see develop in the very near term is the dramatic curtailment of Obama’s availability to answer questions in a format that provides for any level of candidness.  He is clearly an effective speaker when working with a teleprompter and a script, but his impromptu responses to media questions are largely void of substance.  When they do have substance they often amount to a dodge of the issue, but sometimes they contain some nugget of information about the stealth candidate that is illuminating with respect to his real beliefs.  As these more revealing comments appear I’m going to highlight them, and the implications of those comments in future policy issues.

Yesterday Obama appeared on Wolf Blitzer’s show on CNN.  As an initial entry in this series, I present the following “answer” on a simple question about whether he might advocate an increase in the capital gains tax rate:

[Blitzer]   Because they’re arguing already that you want to increase capital gains taxes, for example, on investments, and stocks, and things like that.

(CROSSTALK)

BLITZER: A lot of middle-class people have those kinds of accounts. If they’re…

OBAMA: If they have, — Wolf, if they have a 401(k), then they are going to see those taxes deferred, and they’re going to pay ordinary income when they finally cash out. So, that’s a phony argument. And this is something that you have seen the Republicans consistently do, is they try to make this broad- based argument about, he’s going to raise your taxes as a cover for them eliminating taxes for people like myself and you, who can afford to pay a little bit more…

Now this was a pretty straight-forward question — whether he’s suspectible to GOP claims that he will raise the capital gains tax rate, and what that means for middle class Americans.   

Rather than address the question — by saying, for example, that the capital gains tax rate it too low and should be raised, or that  it is fine where it is and will be left alone — he answers with a complete obfuscation. 

401(k) plans have nothing to do with capital gains taxes.  Contributions to 401(k) plans are made with pre-tax earnings, and the withdrawals upon eligibility are taken as ordinary income and taxed accordingly at the tax rate applicable to the retiree — including that part of the plan’s funds the constitute appreciation/ capital gains.    

Wolf Blitzer is too much of an idiot to follow-up by pointing out that Obama hadn’t answered the question, and the issue of raising the capital gains tax rate extends far beyond simply raising taxes on the “rich”.  

To suggest that American households only own stocks in their 401(k) plan — and to ignore completely the issue of capital gains taxes on investment accounts, college savings accounts, on the sale of homes, farms, or other real property –  reflects either ignorance of basic tax issues, or an unwillingness by Obama to state his positions honestly.

Frankly, I think its more of the former than the latter. 

Obama would be only the most recent example in my life of a Harvard Law School egghead who lacked a basic comprehension of day-to-day issues facing ordinary Americans.  Some of the dumbest people I’ve ever met — including some of the worst lawyers I’ve ever encountered — were graduates of elite East Coast academic institutions.   

Not that long ago, the Los Angeles assistant bureau chief for the Associated Press told his troops: “Now and for the foreseeable future, virtually everything involving Britney is a big deal.”

He wasn’t kidding. From the AP today: Spears in minor accident on Ventura Freeway.

Britney Spears’ motoring misfortunes continue.

The pop star was involved in a minor traffic accident late Saturday, but no one was injured and no vehicles were damaged, authorities said.

Stop the presses, baby!

The L.A. Times is not immune to this silliness. In fact, I found the bombshell story about the Britney accident on the main page for the Los Angeles Times web site today. I wonder how many stories about murders of Compton teenagers will have to be squeezed out of the print edition to make the necessary room for the Britney fender-bender story. [UPDATE: Or, as commenter Sam points out, "non fender-bender story" -- since no fender was bent.]

Allahpundit has the astounding details. Five lies in all.

What a maroon.

[Posted by WLS]

The lastest in a long-line of Pulitzer prize winning “fakesters” appears to be Chuck Philips of the LAT, who wittingly or unwittingly seems to have stepped in it with his latest article seeking to shine a spotlight on the “origins” of the BiCoastal Hip Hop “war” that led to the deaths of Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. The reason for the article is that Philips claims to have solved the heretofore unsolved beating/shooting of Tupac Shakur outside a recording studio in New York in Nov. 1994 — two years before he was fatally wounded in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas. Both shootings are unsolved, but in the aftermath of the 1994 shooting Shakur blamed it on Sean “Puffy” Combs and associates at his “Bad Boy” record label.

Philips’s article says that he has now obtained heretofore undiscovered FBI “302s” — memoranda of interviews — reflecting information given to the FBI by an “informant” establishing that Combs and his associates at “Bad Boy” knew about the shooting before it happened, and were responsible for it. Philips claims this “newly discovered information,” along with “interviews of people at the studio that night,” confirm that it was Combs and his associates that were responsible for the shooting.

But it’s now being widely reported that Mr. Philips has likely been the victim of an elaborate hoax by one Mr. James Sabatino, described by Philips in his article variously as a rap “promoter,” a “fixture” in Combs’s “inner circle,” and … oh yeah, the son of a Captain in the Columbo Crime Family in Brooklyn — according to unnamed “federal authorities.” According to The Smoking Gun, Sabatino’s father describes him as “a disturbed young man who needed attention like a drug.”

But, having read through the entire piece, I have a strong suspicion that it is Mr. Sabatino that is the “informant” mentioned throughout the piece. I have a long breakdown of the article after the jump.

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Posted By WLS: 

I’m in no way enamored of Obama — neither his style nor his politics. 

So, I’m looking at his speech with a very jaundiced eye.  And there are lots of things I don’t particularly like in the text:

I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together…

 From what I’ve read over the last few days, he didn’t learn “togetherness” as a method of problem solving from Rev. Wright.

I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely – just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.

Which remarks have you condemned, and why did it take until this moment for you to condenm them?  Were they not equally worthy of condemnation two weeks ago?  Two months ago?  Two years ago?  Two decades ago — because he’s been saying them as long as you have been a member of his church.  You are the one identifying — without specifying — that he has made comments in your presence that you disagreed with and considered controversial.  Tell us which of his comments you consider controvesial — so that we will know which ones you DO NOT CONSIDER CONTROVERSIAL.  That would tell the voters much more about you than you have told us in the 4 years since you hit that stage in Boston.

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[posted by Justin Levine]

I remain convinced that the U.S. Patent Bar remains one of the most corrupt anti-market, freedom-suffocating institutions of our legal system. This development only confirms my beliefs.

A perfect storm for my regular topics of outrage: A blogger publicly calls out a patent troll and ends up getting sued for defamation in order to try to shut him up since the troll knows that he can’t actually rely on patent laws to help him with his delusional claims.

– Justin Levine