Justice Alito comes in in his USSC robe, Cindy Sheehan goes out in handcuffs - ladies and gentlemen, the State of the Union is good.

...there is a difference between responsible criticism that aims for success, and defeatism that refuses to acknowledge anything but failure. Hindsight alone is not wisdom. And second-guessing is not a strategy.

Nice.

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Michelle Malkin has a roundup of speech reaction.

There's a rash of stories out today about the "huge" profits being earned by Exxon-Mobil Corp. Here's some of the Washington Post version:

Exxon Makes U.S. Corporate History With High Profits

Exxon Mobil Corp. reported today that its 2005 earnings totaled $36.13 billion, the largest annual profit ever for a U.S. company.

The company's annual profit was up 43 percent from the year before.

Exxon Mobil, the world's largest publicly traded oil company, also reported a $10.71 billion profit for the last quarter, an increase of 27 percent from the year before.

Those are the largest reported net income numbers in U.S. history, according to Howard Silverblatt, an analyst for Standard & Poor's in New York. He said the previous records were set by Exxon in the third quarter of last year and in 2004.

We ran through all this just a couple of months ago when the last series of stories about "excessive oil company profits" hit the media. The same answer applies today - a 10% profit margin is not excessive. Every story that doesn't mention the profit in terms of percentage is being disingenuous, and that's all of them. We couldn't find any accounts that mentioned the profit margin as a percentage. AP, Reuters, CNN, the WaPo - they all reported the raw dollar figure without putting it in any context. Unless there's some evidence it's been attained unethically, success should be celebrated in America, not demonized.

Previous:
Econ 101 and “windfall” oil company profits
Big Oil: Too bad they can’t bottle Senators’ hot air and sell it
Senator Boxer “really angry” about free market

Linked at The Mudville Gazette.

The Washington Post has a front page analysis of the progress, or lack thereof, in rebuilding the region hit by hurricane Katrina.

What the article demonstrates is the glaring problem of unrealistic expectations.

Nearly five months after Hurricane Katrina swamped New Orleans, President Bush's lofty promises to rebuild the Gulf Coast have been frustrated by bureaucratic failures and competing priorities, a review of events since the hurricane shows.

First, five months isn't very much time in the context of a project of such magnitude, much too early to evaluate overall success or failure in the rebuilding effort. Of course there should be ongoing evaluation of the progress and adjustments need to be made as problems are found, and of course everyone would like the whole region to be back to normal yesterday, but people need to be realistic.

Second, anyone who is surprised to find the federal government beset by waste, inefficiency, and bureacratic fumbling must have recently arrived from another planet. And they certainly can't lay all that at the feet of President Bush. You go to a massive regional cleanup operation with the federal bureacracy you have, not the one you'd like to have. This is big government in action, or inaction. If the federal government were more focused on its core constitutional responsibilities, rather than trying to run every aspect of society from Washington D.C., they would likely be more effective in those core responsibilities.

We noted several days ago that Senator John Kerry had posted on left-wing hate site Daily Kos, demonstrating the increasing difficulty of distinguishing between the kook fringe and the "mainstream" of the Democratic Party.

Today, via Michelle Malkin, we see that Senator Ted Kennedy is also aligning himself directly with the Kos-Kooks.

But they support the troops!

On a related note, The Washington Post has an article today about the influence of liberal blogs on the Democratic Party:

Democrats are getting an early glimpse of an intraparty rift that could complicate efforts to win back the White House: fiery liberals raising their voices on Web sites and in interest groups vs. elected officials trying to appeal to a much broader audience.

These activists -- spearheaded by battle-ready bloggers and making their influence felt through relentless e-mail campaigns -- have denounced what they regard as a flaccid Democratic response to the Supreme Court fight, President Bush's upcoming State of the Union address and the Iraq war. In every case, they have portrayed party leaders as gutless sellouts.

More from The Volokh Conspiracy and Captain's Quarters.

* For the uninitiated, the title of the post refers to the owner of The Daily Kos website, whose reaction to hearing of four of his fellow Americans being brutally murdered in Fallujah was "Screw them."

The decision by Google to acquiesce to China's demand that Google censor search results is exhibit one in rebuttal to liberal claims that "big business is conservative." In most cases, they are not conservative, they go where the money is, even if the money is in oppressive communist China.

Michelle Malkin is collecting photoshopped Google logos, check it out.

Update: Michelle has added more logos here. We especially like the one with the man standing in front of the tank. Well done.

Imagine for a moment what the reaction would be from the Democratic Party establishment and their friends in the MSM if a number of Republican politicians, from congressmen to state legislators, signed on in support of a demonstration spearheaded by an American neo-Nazi group, or the KKK, or anything like that. Remember how much trouble Trent Lott got himelf into just with some vaguely racially insensitive comments at Strom Thurmond's birthday party a few years ago.

Well, a group calling itself "World Can't Wait" is organizing a rally on the day of President Bush's State of the Union address on January 31st. Michael Medved had a woman on his show today who is a leader of the effort, named Sunsara Taylor. She is a self-described communist and is affiliated with the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA. When asked for an example of a "good" communist country, she named China under Mao, who is of course responsible for the deaths of millions of people.

Supporters include California Assemblyman Mark Leno, California Assemblyman Leland Yee, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, Congressman Bobby Rush, former Democratic presidential candidate Al Sharpton, the group Progressive Democrats of America, Congressman Major Owens, California State Senator Carol Migden, along with the usual suspects like Ed Asner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Susan Sarandon, Sean Penn, Cindy Sheehan, Martin Sheen, etc. These folks should be criticized every bit as much as would be a conservative who affiliated himself with a radical far-right group. We won't hold our breath.

Also linked at The Mudville Gazette.

There's a great deal of disbelief and anger around the world at the news today that terrorist group Hamas has won a majority of seats in the Palestinian parliamentary election held yesterday. But we prefer to look at the glass as half full - it's not like the other choice was much better. Fatah is after all also a terrorist organization, founded by terrorist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Yasser Arafat.

As Ed Morrissey wrote:

It's not like the Palestinians gave themselves much in the way of choice for their first Parliamentary elections in ten years, but in a surprise, the hardline Hamas terrorists took a bigger slice of the vote from the more moderate terrorists of Fatah in today's vote.

The choice facing the Palestinian voters was essentially between a terrorist organization calling for the destruction of Israel, versus one that no longer admits that goal openly. So the news is bad, but it's not a huge shift. A majority of Palestinians want to annihilate Israel, and they've said so with their votes. The world needs to be honest about that fact and deal with it accordingly.

Michelle Malkin has a good reaction roundup. And some thoughtful comments from David Bernstein at The Volokh Conspiracy.

From the AP:

WASHINGTON -- Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton called President Bush's explanations for eavesdropping on domestic conversations without warrants "strange" and "far-fetched" Wednesday in blistering criticism ahead of the president's State of the Union address.

But that phrase, "eavesdropping on domestic conversations" is right out of a Howard Dean press release. Intercepting conversations between a person in another country suspected of being associated with al Qaeda and an individual within the United States is not a "domestic conversation." The Democrats and the AP are spinning the issue to make it sound like the NSA is listening in on phone calls between innocent Americans.

It's another case of the Democrats and their press allies putting politics above national security concerns. If the AP wants to work for the DNC that's fine, it's a free country. They should simply be honest about it.

From the Washington Post:

Sexual harassment is common on campus, according to a national online survey by the American Association of University Women released yesterday, with 62 percent of college students saying they had received a comment or gesture they found inappropriate.

This is a shocking statistic.

We'd expect that somewhere near 100 percent of college students had received "a comment or gesture they found inappropriate."

The real problem of course is calling a comment or gesture "harassment."

The roughly 2,000 18- to 24-year-old college students who responded to the survey in May were told that sexual harassment was unwanted behavior and could include anything from suggestive glances to spreading sexual rumors and forced contact.

What these people are doing is "defining normalcy down," calling normal human behavior "harassment," to create the illusion of a larger aggrieved victim group. What leads so many liberals to preach being "non-judgmental" about any sort of bizarre and deviant behavior, yet so intolerant of entirely normal behavior?

This column in the Los Angeles Times by Joel Stein, Warriors and wusses, has been getting some attention today, mainly in the form of outrage that anyone would come right out and admit they "don't support our troops." He tries to bury his point in snarky humor, but it's pretty clear he really believes the central theme of the article.

First, we must applaud Mr. Stein for at least being honest. Sure, his viewpoint is morally confused drivel, but at least he doesn't hide his real view, like so many on the left do these days: "This is an illegal, immoral, unjust, fascist, Hitler-esque, neo-con war to enrich Bush's oil buddies - but I support the troops!" It's that formulation that's truly insulting.

But the part of his article that really stuck out was this paragraph:

But when you volunteer for the U.S. military, you pretty much know you're not going to be fending off invasions from Mexico and Canada. So you're willingly signing up to be a fighting tool of American imperialism, for better or worse. Sometimes you get lucky and get to fight ethnic genocide in Kosovo, but other times it's Vietnam.

It's interesting because it illustrates what seems to be a common position on the left - approval of U.S. military action in Kosovo, but complete disapproval of military action in Iraq. The left was either supportive or silent when President Clinton ordered the action in Kosovo. They certainly weren't taking to the streets en masse with "Clinton=Hitler" signs. In what parallel universe is there any rational basis for reconciling these two positions? There was no assertion that Kosovo was pursuing WMD or posed any security threat to the United States. Remember, these folks opposed the invasion of Iraq before the invasion and subsequent investigation found no stockpiles of WMD in Iraq, when when the consensus view was that Iraq had such weapons. Some argue now as if they knew there were no WMD (not that the existence of WMD stockpiles was the sole rationale for the invasion, but no need to rehash all that now) when they opposed the invasion before it began. But that's gross revisionism.

We suspect in this case that Stein isn't what you'd call a deep thinker and likely just went along with the liberal zeitgeist - Vietnam bad, Kosovo good, Iraq bad, etc. - without giving it much thought. (Update: Mr. Stein is being interviewed on the radio by Hugh Hewitt, and confirming this hypothesis.)

More reaction from The Mudville Gazette, Michelle Malkin, Donald Sensing, and Hugh Hewitt.

Update: Here is that great essay on the "voice of the neuter" that's been getting lots of attention the last few days. Worth a read.

...But he supports the troops!

Via The Corner, it appears failed presidential candidate John Kerry has posted at the left-wing hate site "Daily Kos" (no link, we don't link to obcenity-laced hate sites).

Just more evidence how difficult it has become to tell the unhinged lunatic fringe from the mainstream of the Democratic Party.

Also linked at The Mudville Gazette.

On a related note, Austin Bay discusses some more unhinged Kos-Kookiness here.

* For the uninitiated, the title of the post refers to the owner of The Daily Kos website, whose reaction to hearing of four of his fellow Americans being brutally murdered in Fallujah was "Screw them."

Another day, another activist judge decided to take it upon herself to redefine the central institution of our society. From the Washington Post:

Baltimore judge ruled yesterday that Maryland's law banning same-sex marriage is discriminatory and "cannot withstand constitutional challenge," throwing open the possibility of a bruising legislative battle over a constitutional amendment.