There was a great commentary today by Bill McGurn regarding the state of religious freedom in America today, and where that’s trending (hint, not up). McGurn’s opinion cited a recent case, Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which the Supreme Court agreed to hear shortly.

The background of the case centers on a teacher working at this small religious school who was fired for breaking a church belief of taking church disputes outside the community (in this case punitive action against the teacher due to absenteeism). But what’s really on trial here isn’t one teacher or one school, rather the idea that the First Amendment guarantees the freedom to exercise ones religion (not just a freedom to believe, but exercising it) based on the rules that religion.

At the core of their concern is just this: the politically correct rewriting of the First Amendment. Post-1791, what made America’s religious freedom truly radical was not simply that it allowed people to worship (or not to worship) as they saw fit. The radical part was the guarantee it gave to corporate freedoms: to hold property together, to own newspapers, to run schools, to open hospitals and clinics, etc.

That understanding is now up for grabs. Last week, Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear said approval for a local merger that would create a new Catholic hospital system will depend on maintaining a “public mission”—by which he means the performance of procedures, such as sterilization, at odds with church teaching.

In San Francisco, opponents of circumcision recently attempted to outlaw it via state ballot. The California State University system has been found within its legal rights to deem a Christian fraternity and sorority unfit for recognition. Meanwhile, the National Labor Relations Board declared that two Catholic colleges are not in fact Catholic.

These are not cases of people trying to impose their beliefs on the rest of us. Instead they involve the question whether faith communities are free to live their own beliefs in their own institutions. Somehow the more “tolerant” we become, the more difficult that becomes.

Given: in cases of a religion forbidding modern medicine or pharmaceuticals, etc., which leads to death, particularly that of a child who has no power to decide for themselves, this issue becomes more complex. But in the case of a an adult teacher joining a private institution knowing full well its rules, I have no sympathy. When you join a particular group, you submit to that communities values and policies — and this, by the way, is a principle pillar of rationale behind the 10th Amendment and Federalism (The U.S. Constitution defined specific power, yielding all others to the states and the people, i.e. communities, whereas the states could define any powers except those bestowed to the federal government via the Constitution. Don’t like your state, you can move and force the other 49 to compete).

That is, if one can simply force a group to mend its beliefs — albeit justified when being deprived of life, liberty or pursuit of happiness — the very definition of a “group” becomes meaningless.

“I can’t imagine that Muslims [actually] want a mosque at this particular location, because it will become an arena for the promoters of hatred, and a monument to those who committed the crime. Moreover, there are no practicing Muslims in the area who need a place to worship, because it is a commercial district. Is there anyone who is [really] eager [to build] this mosque?…

“Those pushing to build this mosque may be construction companies, architect firms, or political groups who want to exploit this issue. The individual who submitted the building application – I do not know whether he [really] wants [to build] a mosque that will promote reconciliation, or whether he is [just] an investor looking for quick profits. Because the idea of a mosque right next to a site of destruction is not at all an intelligent one. The last thing Muslims want today is to build a religious center that provokes others, or a symbolic mosque that people will visit as a [kind of] museum next to a cemetery.

“What the citizens of the U.S. fail to understand is that the battle against the 9/11 terrorists is not their battle. It is a Muslim battle – one whose flames are still raging in more than 20 Muslim countries… I do not think that the majority of Muslims want to build a monument or a place of worship that tomorrow may become a source of pride for the terrorists and their Muslim followers, nor do they want a mosque that will become a shrine for the haters of Islam… This has already started to happen: [the Islamophobes] are claiming that a mosque is being built over the corpses of 3,000 U.S. citizens who were buried alive by people chanting ‘Allah akbar‘ – the same call that will be heard from the mosque…”

– ‘Abd Al-Rahman Al-Rashed, Al-Arabiya TV director-general and former editor of London daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat.

In and interview with the Daily Caller, Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, president and founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy went even further, basically affirming that the attempt to put an unnecessary mosque at Ground Zero goes so against any attempt to foster goodwill that it can only be a planned and purposeful confrontation.

“This is not a humble Islamic statement. A mosque such as this is actually a political structure that casts a shadow over a cemetery, over hallowed ground. 9/11 was the beginning of a kinetic war, it is not an opportunity for cultural exchange. It was the beginning of a conflict with those who want to destroy our way of life… Jasser said that the building of this mosque is ‘fitna,’ a religious term meaning mischief-making, which is severely frowned upon in Islam. “‘Fitna’ is anything that causes chaos in society,” he said. “This mosque is causing chaos, it is causing ‘fitna’ and that is not the Islamic thing to do … This is ‘fitna’ and ‘fitna’ is wrong.”

[Tarek Fatah, founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress] Fatah agreed saying that ‘fitna’ is an ethical and moral issue that ought not be taken lightly. “If a step taken by an individual causes disharmony then it is ‘fitna.’ [The mosque] has caused so much pain. There are many mosques already in New York, nobody has ever opposed a mosque, if there is opposition to a mosque on grounds of hatred I would be the first to confront it. But over here it is a matter of sensitivity and there is no residential community even near the community center.”

[NY Times] WASHINGTON — President Obama delivered a strong defense on Friday night of a proposed Muslim community center and mosque near ground zero in Manhattan, using a White House dinner celebrating Ramadan to proclaim that “as a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country.”

As usual, the great “uniter” in chief, misses the point. One cannot throw a stone in downtown New York City without it hitting a church, temple or mosque, and thus nobody is arguing that Muslims have no right to practice their religion. But conversely, as recently pointed out by Charles Krauthammer, nobody is proposing we build a theme park at Gettysburg, a German cultural center at Normandy or Auschwitz, or a Japanese embassy at Pearl Harbor. Or for that matter, since there’s this whole supposed separation of church and state — but only when it’s convenient — why not build a shrine to atheism at Ground Zero?

(And as the State Department recently sent the Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf abroad as part of a taxpayer-funded government outreach program, I’m sure Obama supporters everywhere would have no problem whatsoever if the State Department sent some fire and brimstone Baptists abroad too, right? Once again, the sheer hypocrisy of the “church-state separation” Leftists never ceases to amaze me.)

NYC Mayor Bloomberg’s offer to build the mosque at any other number of locations — echoed similarly by many others — has been rebuffed, and this underscores that the objective of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf has nothing to do with outreach or building bridges. He may as well be proposing to build a fountain filled with urine that can perpetually desecrate the graves of the 3,000 Americans buried there.

So, here we are then. As long as we wrap something up in the garb of “diversity” apparently anything that defies common sense or courtesy is fair game.

I wonder if the president would support the offer to — “in an effort to break down barriers and reduce deadly homophobia in the Islamic world” — build a gay Islamic bar right next to the proposed Ground Zero mosque.

The world is laughing at the Great Uniter’s lack of unifying ability. And at the rest of us as well.

This is astounding… creepy too.

[Mark Steyn] Last week, the American Association of Pediatricians [AAP] noted that certain, ahem, “immigrant communities” were shipping their daughters overseas to undergo “female genital mutilation.” So, in a spirit of multicultural compromise, they decided to amend their previous opposition to the practice: They’re not (for the moment) advocating full-scale clitoridectomies, but they are suggesting federal and state laws be changed to permit them to give a “ritual nick” to young girls.

A few years back, I thought even fainthearted Western liberals might draw the line at “FGM.” After all, it’s a key pillar of institutional misogyny in Islam: Its entire purpose is to deny women sexual pleasure. True, many of us hapless Western men find we deny women sexual pleasure without even trying, but we don’t demand genital mutilation to guarantee it. On such slender distinctions does civilization rest.

Der Spiegel, an impeccably liberal magazine, summed up the remorseless Islamization of Europe in a recent headline: “How Much Allah Can the Old Continent Bear?” Well, what’s wrong with a little Allah-lite? The AAP thinks you can hop on the sharia express and only ride a couple of stops. In such ostensibly minor concessions, the “ritual nick” we’re performing is on ourselves. Further cuts will follow.

To say that this is multiculturalism and diversity tolerance run amuck is to give the word amok a bad name. If this is the recommendation of  pediatricians then one may as well go back to seeing one’s barber for surgery. Pass the leaches. The apologists make the false comparison to circumcision, but while religiously traditional it’s not a sexual control.

Steyn is right. If we can’t draw the line here we may as well start paying our jizya “protection money” as dhimmis. If you don’t know what that is yet, don’t bother Googling it, for we may learn the hard way in our lifetime.

Gore Vidal is so washed up and irrelevant it’s kind of a waste of time to further comment on his angry contradictory ramblings. But I’m posting this because to me it’s a typical attitude of the Sixties hard-core leftist to project their shortcomings onto others — in this case, that America will decline into a “military dictatorship” even as Vidal recommends President Obama rely on just that to pass his health care agenda because the American public is too stupid to know what educated Leftists know: that socialist medicine is what’s best for you dumb lemmings.

[Vidal:] Another notable Obama mis-step has been on healthcare reform. “He f***ed it up. I don’t know how because the country wanted it. We’ll never see it happen.” As for his wider vision: “Maybe he doesn’t have one, not to imply he is a fraud. He loves quoting Lincoln and there’s a great Lincoln quote from a letter he wrote to one of his generals in the South after the Civil War. ‘I am President of the United States. I have full overall power and never forget it, because I will exercise it’. That’s what Obama needs — a bit of Lincoln’s chill.”

You got that? “The country wanted it.” Just ignore those latest polls showing by 56% to 41% Americans oppose Obama’s federal option. Those 56% are just the Republicans, I suppose, or what Vidal terms “Hitler Youth, based on hatred — religious hatred, racial hatred.” Continue reading the article. The only one professing hatred is Vidal himself. In this case, Vidal seems to be suggesting that the way to solve healthcare is for Obama to use the same brute force that Abraham Lincoln found necessary to exercise during the American Civil War. Because, you know, Americans who oppose state-run health care is the same thing as 11 states seceding from the Union.

Vidal continues:

Instead, America has “no intellectual class” and is “rotting away at a funereal pace. We’ll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn’t realise how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is. Benjamin Franklin said that the system would fail because of the corruption of the people and that happened under Bush.

Is that what Franklin said? Really? And was this a country founded on “holding things together”? Funny, but I thought it was a country founded on the notion of individual liberty — the right to choose a health care plan on the open market, for example. Oh, never you mind. Don’t attempt to understand the ramblings of the enlightened Sixties radical.

Here’s a little more projection from Vidal, and it sure is a educating paragraph:

Vidal became a supportive correspondent of Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 killing 168 people. The huge loss of life, indeed McVeigh’s act of mass murder, goes unmentioned by Vidal. “He was a true patriot, a Constitution man,” Vidal claims.

Yeah, what was it Obama’s buddy Bill Ayers said: ”I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.”

Birds of a feather, all.

They’re crazy. Absolutely crazy.

[Live Science Journal] For people who are looking for ways to reduce their “carbon footprint,” here’s one radical idea that could have a big long-term impact, some scientists say: Have fewer kids.

A study by statisticians at Oregon State University concluded that in the United States, the carbon legacy and greenhouse gas impact of an extra child is almost 20 times more important than some of the other environment-friendly practices people might employ during their entire lives — things like driving a high mileage car, recycling, or using energy-efficient appliances and light bulbs.

“In discussions about climate change, we tend to focus on the carbon emissions of an individual over his or her lifetime,” said study team member Paul Murtaugh.

We can only hope and pray that these environmental extremists take their own advice… It’s amazing. It smacks of Statism — one cannot imagine anything less free than a government dictating how many children one can have. But, say THESE scientists, “we’re not advocating policy.” Oh, it always starts thus, with such innocently misguided intentions, from Nazi euthanasia — for “humane purposes” — to China’s current “one child” policy.

The funny thing is, we’re almost there without the climate change hysteria. The Western populations are shrinking at an alarming rate. As Mark Steyn noted in his book America Alone, the West is in many cases just at or much lower than the “replacement rate” of 2.1 children per family. The US is right at 2.1, but Japan, Italy and Russia are particularly low, dangerously and unprecedentedly low. (17 European nations are at a 1.3 fertility rate. Australia 1.7; Canada 1.48; Europe as a whole 1.38; Japan 1.32; Greece 1.3; Italy 1.2; Russia 1.14; Spain 1.1; Scientists consider 1.3 births per couple the lowest-low birth rate from which no society has ever recovered.) Most of Europe and Canada are likewise well below the 2.1 figure. Even India and China are below the replacement rate. Their populations are actually shrinking.

Purposely limiting the brainpower of a society is hardly a way to solve that society’s problems. Consider England, circa the 1800s. This tiny island ruled the planet economically, militarily and culturally due to a population explosion that rivaled its competitors. Had they taken the advice of the “environmentally conscious” they’d have been crushed by a rival power.

And all this fearmongering is based on the most propagated junk science ever pushed.

Here’s Marlo Lewis to underscore that point and close this post:

However, the main era of “anthropogenic” global warming supposedly began in the mid-1970s, and ongoing research by retired meteorologist Anthony Watts leaves no doubt that in recent decades, the U.S. surface temperature record–reputed to be the best in the world–is unreliable and riddled with false warming biases.

Watts and a team of more than 650 volunteers have visually inspected and photographically documented 1003, or 82%, of the 1,221 climate monitoring stations overseen by the U.S. Weather Service. In a report summarizing an earlier phase of the team’s investigation (a survey of 860+ stations), Watts says, “We were shocked by what we found.” He continues:

We found stations located next to exhaust fans of air conditioning units, surrounded by asphalt parking lots and roads, on blistering-hot rooftops, and near sidewalks and buildings that absorb and radiate heat. We found 68 stations located at wastewater treatment plants, where the process of waste digestion causes temperatures to be higher than in surrounding areas.

In fact, we found that 89 percent of the stations–nearly 9 of every 10–fail to meet the National Weather Services’s own siting requirements that stations must be 30 meters (about 100 feet) or more away from an artificial heating or radiating/reflecting heat source. In other words, 9 or every 10 stations are likely reporting higher or rising temperatures because they are badly sited.

Read the rest.

Here’s an interesting letter to the Washington Post editor which underscores that the law of unintended consequences is generally far more relevant and far-sighted then your average unelected egghead bureaucrat who designs our CAFE laws, etc.:

The Prius’s reputation as a “green” car is completely undeserved. The culprit is its nickel metal hydride battery.

The nickel is mined in Sudbury, Ontario, and smelted nearby, doing damage to the local environment. The smelted nickel is shipped to Wales, where it is refined. Then it is sent to China to be made into nickel foam. Then it goes to Japan, where it is made into a battery. Then it goes into cars, some of which are shipped to the United States and some of which go to Europe. All of that seaborne transport consumes a lot of fossil fuel.

CNW Marketing rates cars on the combined energy needed “to plan, build, sell, drive and dispose of a vehicle from initial concept to scrappage.” A Prius costs $2.87 per lifetime mile. By comparison, an H3 Hummer costs $2.07 per lifetime mile. Then there will be the problem of disposing of the used batteries.

This is not a “green” car; it is a “brown” one.

JAMES CLIVIE GOODWIN

There was a great commentary recently by Jim Manzi of the Manhattan Institute regarding the cost-ineffectiveness of the proposed cap and trade bill written by Reps. Henry Waxman and Edward Markey, both Democrats from Taxachusetts. Great because Manzi gets back to basic strategy — conservatives need to concentrate their energy on one basic theme, because it is what most American citizens will best process: “What do we pay, and what do we get?”

So, sure, conservatives can make the arguments that the science behind climate change is unsound (indeed, the reason advocates now call it “climate change” rather than “global warming” is because the records now dispute the warming); and they can make the philosophical arguments — that it’s religion disguised in environmental garb (“save the planet”), that it’s socialism (redistribution of wealth), but the argument that will best stick in the minds of everyday America is one of insurance.

The advocates of climate change argue the precautionary principle: that even if the science is not proven, why not avoid the worst-case scenario and buy the insurance? Here’s why: offer a man insurance for a dollar a day and he’ll likely take it; offer it to him for $1000 a day and he’ll take his chances.

The mechanism for mitigation proposed in the Waxman-Markey bill is a “cap and trade” plan. The idea is quite simple: The government sets a fixed annual limit to total carbon-dioxide emissions and distributes ration cards for the right to emit a portion of this amount (that’s the “cap”); it also allows those who receive ration cards to sell them (that’s the “trade”). Now, “distributes” is an artfully chosen word: How would the government decide who gets the ration cards? One method is to sell them; another is to give them away, theoretically based on some objective criterion such as historical emissions, but in practice more likely based on campaign contributions. Waxman-Markey doesn’t specify how the distributing is to be accomplished. The Obama administration expects to sell ration cards, bringing the government $80 billion a year in revenue over the next decade. This revenue represents a cost increase for more or less any company that uses lots of fossil-fuel energy in one way or another (i.e., most of the economy). Like all raw-material cost increases, these will be passed along to consumers in the form of higher prices. So in reality this is a backdoor tax on energy that conscripts private companies into being collection agents.

… Now consider the potential benefits, of which neither the EPA nor the bill’s sponsors have produced an estimate. Climatologist Chip Knappenberger has applied standard climate models to project that, under the scenario for global economic and population growth referenced above, Waxman-Markey’s emissions reductions would have the net effect of lowering global temperatures by about 0.1°C by 2100. Remember that the estimated cost of a 4°C increase in temperature (40 times this amount) is about 3 percent of global economic output. Assume for the moment that global warming has the same impact on the U.S. as a percentage of GDP as it does on the world as a whole (an assumption that exaggerates the impact on the U.S.). A crude estimate of the U.S. economic costs that Waxman-Markey would avoid sometime later than 2100 would then be about one-fortieth of 3 percent, or about 0.08 percent of economic output. This number is one-tenth of 0.8 percent, the EPA’s estimate of consumption loss from Waxman-Markey by 2050. To repeat: The costs would be more than ten times the benefits, even under extremely unrealistic assumptions of low costs and high benefits. More realistic assumptions would make for a comparison far less favorable to the bill.

So the Environmental Protection Agency and other climate change advocates might argue worst-case scenario for inaction, but they curiously cite best-case economics in their models. Yet even the EPA’s analysis admits that the Waxman-Markey model’s cost is ten times that of its benefit!

For that cost we could instead cure a great number of other, more tangible, more immediately deadly ills: “A regional nuclear war in central Asia, a global pandemic triggered by a modified version of the HIV virus, and a rogue state weaponizing genetic-engineering technology all come immediately to mind. Any of these could kill hundreds of millions of people. Scare stories are meant to be frightening, but we shouldn’t become paralyzed by them.”

In the face of massive uncertainty on multiple fronts, the best strategy is almost always to hedge your bets and keep your options open. Wealth and technology are raw materials for options, and a much more sensible strategy to deal with climate risk would emphasize technology rather than taxes. The role for the U.S. federal government is to fund prediction, mitigation, and adaptation strategies.

The danger here, of course, is that we may end up back in the failed game of industrial policy. The federal government, after all, was the key sponsor of, for example, the shale-oil and large-scale-wind-turbine debacles in response to the energy crisis 30 years ago. Setting the right scope for such a program and managing the funding process carefully would be essential, to prevent it from becoming corporate welfare.

… The British entrepreneur Richard Branson has offered a $25 million prize to anyone who demonstrates a device that removes significant amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. What if the U.S. government upped the ante to $1 billion and pledged to make any resulting technology freely available to the world? That would solve any global-warming problem that might develop, at a one-time cost of less than 0.01 percent of U.S. GDP. Of course, this agency would still be a government program, and therefore rife with inefficiencies. But consider that its costs would be on the order of 1/100th of the costs of imposing a large U.S. carbon tax.

What do we pay, what do we get? To date, with every proposed carbon cap and trade model, we get a backdoor tax, a massive drain on our economy and incomes, and no measurable benefit. Once pressed the advocates resort to a feel-good defense. In short, environmentalism curbs their guilt. But the Catholic church tried this hundreds of years ago. They called it the paid indulgence.

Here’s Victor Davis Hanson:

Whatever a well-meaning President Obama thinks, occasional American outbursts against Muslims are not analogous with the terrorism directed at Westerners or the hostility toward Christianity shown in most of the Muslim world. Try flying into Saudi Arabia with a Bible, as compared to traveling to San Francisco with a Koran. One can easily forsake Christianity; one can never safely leave Islam. European worries about headscarves are not the equivalent of the Gulf states’ harassment of practicing Christians. Sorry, they’re just not.

… Conflating Western misdemeanors with Middle Eastern felonies is classical conflict-resolution theory, and laudably magnanimous. But privately the world knows that Muslims are treated better in the West than Christians are in Muslim countries. That Muslims migrate to the lands of Westerners, and not vice versa. That disputes over a border between Palestinians and Israelis do not explain the unhappiness of the Arab masses, suffering from state-caused poverty and wretchedness. That American military assistance to Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, and Somalia, direct aid to Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinians, and moral condemnation of Chinese, Russian, and Balkan treatment of Muslims, coupled with a generous U.S. immigration policy, are not really cause for apology or atonement.

In short, few Arab leaders wish to give a “speech to the West.” They would have to take responsibility, directly or indirectly, for either fostering or appeasing radical Islam, while denying their culpability for its decades of mass murdering. They would also have to lament the global economic havoc caused in part by oil cartels and energy price-fixing.

President Obama’s intent is noble, but therapeutic efforts to disguise the truth never really work.

Here’s James Taranto (another read the whole thing):

The New York Times now seems a bit confused as to the religion of the suspects in the terror plot revealed earlier this week:

Law enforcement officials initially said the four men were Muslims, but their religious backgrounds remained uncertain Thursday. [Laguerre] Payen reported himself to be Catholic during his 15-month prison sentence that ended in 2005, according to a state corrections official. [James] Cromitie and Onta Williams both identified themselves as Baptists in prison records, although Mr. Cromitie changed his listed religion to Muslim upon his last two incarcerations; David Williams reported no religious affiliation.

In the same article, however, is a detail that may bear on David Williams’s confessional leanings: It seems he “lately had grown a beard and taken to reading the Koran on slow nights at a steakhouse job.” Another article from today’s Times quotes Wanda Cromitie, James’s sister:

She added that as far as she knew, he was not a Muslim, but said “they do a little time in jail and they don’t eat pork no more.”

We could just call them “cafeterians” and be done with it. But the sister’s observation that “they do a little time in jail” is an important one. If it is difficult to identify the suspects clearly as Muslim, it is because their involvement with Islam is a recent development. But it seems that at least three of the four suspects were introduced to a violent supremacist strain of Islam while serving time in prison.

The Times article that quotes Miss Cromitie is titled “Suspects in Terror Bombing Plot: Drug Arrests and Prison Conversions.” It consists of a thumbnail profile of each of them. The Times flatly states that Payen converted to Islam while in prison and strongly suggests that James Cromitie and Onta Williams did as well. (For David Williams, according to Williams’s mother, Islam was “a religion he got from his father.”)

The use of prisons as recruiting grounds for violent jihad is a problem of which mainstream Muslims are aware. The Times Herald-Record of Middletown, N.Y., interviewed Hamin Rashada, who encountered Payen while Rashada worked as a “life coach” at the Orange County Transition Center, “a program that helps reintegrate parolees such as Payen”:

[Rashada] also encouraged [Payen] to attend Friday prayers at Masjid al-Ikhlas in Newburgh where Rashada is an assistan imam. Payen had told him he was Muslim, and Rashada figured he must have been introduced to Islam in prison. Misunderstandings of the teachings can occur in places such as prison, Rashada said, because educated teachers may be rarer. Rashada said at the Newburgh mosque, they worked to put teachings in their proper context. Payen attended only occasionally, however, he said. . . .

When Payen did come, he would try to impress other members of the mosque by spouting supposed knowledge of Islam, Rashada said. Often, he was so far off in his statements [that] Rashada would have to correct him in front of people.

Incredibly, even as this story was developing, President Obama was delivering a speech in which he proposed to import hundreds of the most violent Islamic extremists into America and house them in our prisons:

Our courts and juries of our citizens are tough enough to convict terrorists, and the record makes that clear. Ramzi Yousef tried to blow up the World Trade Center–he was convicted in our courts, and is serving a life sentence in U.S. prison. Zaccarias Moussaoui has been identified as the 20th 9/11 hijacker–he was convicted in our courts, and he too is serving a life sentence in prison. If we can try those terrorists in our courts and hold them in our prisons, then we can do the same with detainees from Guantanamo.

Just a day earlier, Politico reports, Obama’s own FBI director, Robert Mueller, testified before the House Judiciary Committee, where he “raised concerns about bringing prisoners to the U.S. and holding them in maximum security prisons, noting that in some gang leaders have run their organizations while in prison.”

In his speech yesterday, Obama declared that “the American people are not absolutist, and they don’t elect us to impose a rigid ideology.” Importing hard-core Islamic supremacists into U.S. prisons is an insane policy. If Obama’s proposing it is not an example of an official being driven by rigid ideology, then the phrase has no meaning.