Yesterday, U.S. Representative Thaddeus G. McCotter filed the maximum 2000 petition signatures required to seek Michigan’s 11th Congressional District seat. Rep. McCotter spent filing day the same way he spends every day – working hard for the people of Michigan. While managing the GOP’s time under the House’s Committee of the Whole, his resolution honoring the late Ernie Harwell was sent to the full House.

The nation posted another 85,000 lost jobs this morning – keeping the jobless rate at 10%. The numbers were worse than the 8,000 lost jobs analysts had expected. The bad jobs numbers demonstrate, yet again, that the massive stimulus pack is failing to create jobs.

As “alleged” terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab heads to court today in Detroit, experts agree there isn’t much “alleged” about it. It’s fairly cut and dry when six foot flames shoot from your underwear.

Experts say that with so much evidence stacked against Abdulmutallab, his defense team is left with few options as the case moves forward.

Attorneys outside the case say the 23-year-old’s lawyers can challenge incriminating statements to the FBI, seek a mental-health exam for Abdulmutallab — and seriously consider a plea deal.

“This is not a case of mistaken identity or a whodunit. For the defense, it’s damage control,” said Joseph Niskar, a defense lawyer who was involved in a 2001 terrorism case in Detroit that fell apart for the government.

Dave Janda looks at the Obama-Pelosi-Reid health care bills, the unaccountable panels empowered to oversee them, and the frightening lengths to which the Democrats have gone to guarantee they last forever. His conclusion? This is a weapon of mass destruction worse than any Al Qaeda attack.

To make matters worse, Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) identified language in the Senate version, which should make every American question the underlying purpose of this legislation. On Page 1020, referring to The Medicare Advisory Board, the Senate version states:

“It shall not be in order in the Senate or the House of Representatives to consider any bill, resolution, amendment, or conference report that would repeal or otherwise change this subsection.”

It becomes evident this legislation is not about creating affordable, available and quality based health care. It is about controlling every American’s life.

Thomas Sowell has a piece up on RealClearPolitics today. Sowell takes a look at the cynicism of passing bad health care legislation simply to say you have passed “any” health care legislation.

Supporters of government health insurance call its passage “historic.” Past attempts to pass such legislation– going back for decades– failed repeatedly. But now both houses of Congress have passed government health care legislation and it is just a question of reconciling their respective bills and presenting President Obama with a political “victory.”

In short, this is not about improving the health of the American people. It is about passing something– anything– to keep the Obama administration from ending up with egg on its face by being unable to pass a bill, after so much hype and hoopla. Politically, looking impotent is a formula for disaster at election time. Far better to pass even bad legislation that will not actually go into effect until after the 2012 presidential election, so that the public will not know whether it makes medical care better or worse until it is too late for the voters to hold the administration accountable.

The utter cynicism of this has been apparent from the outset, in the rush to pass a health care bill in a hurry, in order to meet wholly arbitrary, self-imposed deadlines. First it was supposed to be passed before the August 2009 Congressional recess. Then it was supposed to be passed before Labor Day. When that didn’t happen, it was supposed to be rushed to passage before Christmas.

Sowell rightly points out that while the costs of this folly will be felt immediately, any possible benefit (though more likely the chaos of actual implementation) was held off until after the elections of 2012. Punting responsibility down the road while frontloading costs is the worst kind of arrogance.

From around the web today come a number of interesting stories. John Batchelor points to Janet Napolitano’s comments about the “criminal justice investigation” into the attempted terrorist attack on Christmas Day.

[H]er rejoinder to Candy Crowley’s not unsympathetic and hardly direct questions suggests that Janet Napolitano does not aim to speak to the facts of any of it. “That’s part of the criminal justice investigation that is ongoing…” Wrong answer. This was an attack against the national security of the United States. It was not the act of a lone criminal named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

Treating the attempted detonation of of an airliner as though it were no different than an attempted robbery of a 7-11 is the wrong approach to protecting the security and freedom of the United States.

There are a few items of interest in the news today that we’d suggest taking a look at.

First up, former UN Ambassador John Bolton takes a look at “universal jurisdiction” and the way it is being used/abused by human rights activists to bring charges against legitimate actions by freely elected governments.

It is no accident that arrest warrants never seem to be issued for the likes of Kim Jong Il or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, since the real targets of universal jurisdiction these days are Western nations. Ultimately, what it targets is the very ideas of sovereign accountability and political independence. These goals largely motivated the 1998 Rome Statute that created the International Criminal Court, itself a step toward constraining states’ abilities to police their own affairs, and an institution that the Obama administration yearns to join.

Transferring accountability for decisions from democratic politics to the criminal justice system understandably intimidates policy makers from making perfectly justifiable choices, such as defending against terrorist threats. Moreover, “command responsibility” has been transmogrified from liability for failing to stop known criminal activity, to liability when officials “should have known” their subordinates were committing crimes.

Eight years ago, when terrorists declared war on the United States by murdering three thousand souls in New York City, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C.
Now, the Obama Administration has announced its decision to try 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other terrorists in a U.S. civilian court in New York City, one of the very [...]