The Obama Administration’s Air Force One Photo Op gaffe, which cost $328,835, is now truly $328,835 gone down the drain as the photos taken during that 9/11-esque stunt won’t be released to the public.

The $328,835 snapshots of an Air Force One backup plane buzzing lower Manhattan last week will not be shown to the public, the White House said yesterday.

“We have no plans to release them,” an aide to President Obama told The Post, refusing to comment further.

The sole purpose of the secret photo-op, which sent thousands of New Yorkers running for cover, was to take new publicity shots of the presidential jet over the city.

“The photos . . . are classified — that’s ridiculous,” Councilman Peter Vallone Jr., said.

The photos have not technically been “classified,” a White House aide said, but they are being kept from public view.

New Yorkers said they could not understand how a president who shares intimate snapshots from the White House could justify keeping these secret.

“So we’re not gonna see the fruits of this cruel joke?” said Frank Antonelli, 39, one of the Wall Street traders spooked by last week’s flyover.

“I’m not surprised. Obama . . . wouldn’t further all the bad publicity by putting out those pictures.”

This White House truly is the most incompetent… hell, some of them can’t even spell.

Another French rightwing extremist:

Now, legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways. Thus we have an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, benefits, subsidies, encouragements, progressive taxation, public schools, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed profits, minimum wages, a right to relief, a right to the tools of labor, free credit, and so on, and so on. All these plans as a whole—with their common aim of legal plunder—constitute socialism. – Frederic Bastiat

Or be now and forever the party of corruption:

The headquarters of Murtech, in a low-slung, bland building in a Glen Burnie business park, has its blinds drawn tight and few signs of life. On several days of visits, a handful of cars sit in the parking lot, and no trucks arrive at the 10 loading bays at the back of the building.

Yet last year, Murtech received $4 million in Pentagon work, all of it without competition, for a variety of warehousing and engineering services. With its long corridor of sparsely occupied offices and an unmanned reception area, Murtech’s most striking feature is its owner — Robert C. Murtha Jr., 49. He is the nephew of Rep. John P. Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat who has significant sway over the Defense Department’s spending as chairman of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee.

Robert Murtha said he is not at liberty to discuss in detail what his company does, but for four years it has subsisted on defense contracts, according to records and interviews.

Democrats: Jack Murtha, your anti-war hero of yore, is stealing the taxpayer’s money to enrich himself and his family. There is absolutely not doubt of this – only a purblind idiot can’t see what is going on here. So, you have your choice: be complete idiots, or call for Murtha’s resignation. You ran in 2006 with a promise to end the alleged GOP “culture of corruption”. Matt and I warned you – in Caucus of Corruption – that you’ll get nowhere fighting corruption unless you hold your own side to the same standard you hold the GOP. This is plain as a pikestaff – this doesn’t take any deep thought or intense investigation of a tangled web: Murtha is corrupt as the day is long.

What will you do?

From Rasmussen:

Just 18% of Americans think the United Auto Workers union and the federal government will do a good job running Chrysler and General Motors, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.

Forty-seven percent (47%) believe the union and the government will do a bad job, while 35% are not sure.

That 18% must be the number of Americans who also think the people who brought us the DMV are the people to organize our health care, too. Just where did we get the people in this country who actually think something as corrupt as the UAW and as clueless as the US government can run a for-profit enterprise? Think about this – if the poll is correct (and we’ve no particular reason to think its out of the question), then there are literal tens of millions of Americans (ie, enough to sustain a movement which appears to have broad support) who think that the Euro-socialist model is a good one…this in spite of the clear failure of such a system.

The Founders would be shocked at so many of their progeny having the mentality of serfs…

Well, it is dying from Applied Liberalism:

Under Arnold Schwarzenegger, the best governor the states next to California have ever had, people and businesses have been relocating to those states. For four years, more Americans have moved out of California than have moved in.

California’s business costs are more than 20 percent higher than the average state’s. If, since 1990, state spending increases had been held to the inflation rate plus population growth, the state would have a $15 billion surplus instead of a $42 billion budget deficit, which is larger than the full budgets of all but 10 states.

Since 1990, the number of state employees has increased by more than a third. In Schwarzenegger’s less than six years as governor, per capita government spending, adjusted for inflation, has increased nearly 20 percent.

While the government shares a large amount of the blame for California’s woes, we must not let the people of California off the hook. As one small example, 63.5% of the people of California in November of 2008 essentially voted to kill California’s poultry industry, as well as greatly decreasing the pig and cattle industries. This was done via Proposition 2, Standards for Confining Farm Animals – a measure which, among other things, prohibits chickens from being kept as chickens are kept in our egg-producing farms. The chickens – egg-layers destined for the soup pot, in the by and by – must be allowed to stretch their legs…thus vastly increasing the cost of production to the point that such businesses will either die, or move to other States. Prevention of cruelty to animals has been conflated with Chicken Run and so the people of California voted for a nonsense, “animal rights” bill.

On and on it goes – Californians have doomed themselves at the behest of the liberal elite who sucker then, again and again, into backing suicidal ballot initiatives which, curiously enough, never seem to adversely affect the ability of the liberal elite to remain rich and powerful (you know, you can get a ban on smoking in California but you can’t seem to force the rich liberals to provide public access to the public beaches in Malibu). The fact that the liberals in California government are just quicker about destroying the goose which lays California’s golden eggs doesn’t change the fact that Californians have got the government they deserve…and they’ve gotten it good and hard.

It is to be hoped that, finally, the people of California will recover from their liberal stupor and that California conservatives will finally get their act together and provide a credible alternative to more of the same liberalism. Of course, it could be too late – the people with sense in California seem to have been moving out of late (as George Will points out, for the past four years more Americans have moved out of CA than moved in), so there simply might not be enough Californians with the wit to draw the proper conclusions. Meanwhile, it is our conservative job nationally to highlight what liberalism has done to California, and make people understand that it is just what Obama and his Democrats want to do to the rest of the United States – make us into a nation of double-digit unemployment but laws to protect the rights of chickens while the State pays for abortions…

Will we be able to do it? Will we, that is, be able to educate the people faster than Obama can destroy America? Time will provide the answer…

Interesting sketch by Jeffrey Rosen of the good and bad, in a preliminary sense, about Judge Sotomayor, the supposed front-runner for Souter’s Supreme Court seat. Well worth a read.

Video clip of White House reporters standing for Obama, remaining seated for Bush…in defense of the reporters, it might be that Obama’s people have instructed the reporters to stand as that is more in keeping with the determination that Obama will only be confronted with adulation…meanwhile, Bush didn’t give a hoot what anyone – least of all the White House press corps – thought about him.

The first Republican rightwing extremist:

America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves. – Abraham Lincoln

Newt Gingrich issues a timely warning with which I heartily concur:

Former US House Speaker Newt Gingrich on Sunday blasted the Obama administration for setting itself on a collision course with Israel and endangering the Jewish state.

“They are systematically setting up the most decisive confrontation that we’ve ever seen,” the leading Republican politician told The Jerusalem Post, referring to news reports about the administration’s approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“There’s almost an eagerness to take on the Israeli government to make a point with the Arab world,” he said, speaking to the Post ahead of his speech before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual conference.

He called US President Barack Obama’s program of engagement on Iran a “fantasy,” and his Middle East policies “very dangerous for Israel.” He summed up Obama’s approach as “the clearest adoption of weakness since Jimmy Carter.”

Among the things I fault President Bush over is his failure to act decisively against Iran in the 2005-06 time frame. It was, in the end, Iranian support which kept the Iraqi insurgency going and it is Iran, with its insane nuclear program, which threatens not just peace, but the very survival of the Israelis as a people. There is still time to act against Iran’s nuclear program in such a manner as to prevent any desire on the part of Israel to strike – indeed, such action may still be taken with a minimal risk of loss of life. But the time to take it is now.

My preferred course of action remains as it has been for years – blockade on the export of Iranian oil (which blockade will actually be applauded by all other oil-producing States, as well as providing no ability for the Iranian mullahs to portray Iranians as suffering…food and other aid could still be delivered…heck, we’d help deliver it, if necessary; it just cuts the mullahs off from the money supply they need to purchase nuclear technology as well as buy the goon squads which keep the Iranian people down), destruction of Iran’s oil-refining capacity; lift the blockade and assist in rebuilding Iran’s refining capacity after the Iranian nuclear program is dismantled under American supervision (or, failing that, the supervision of some nation like Switzerland…I don’t trust the UN to do a proper job). In fact, just the threat of a export blockade could force Iran to back down. If the threat and the actuality doesn’t, then we would have to so bomb the Iranian nuclear sites that Iran is knocked back at least 5-10 years in its nuclear program…five to ten years for Iran to change and for other, new combinations to form which might obviate the need for aggressive American action.

Obama can play with his fantasy that Iran’s government will become reasonable based on the theory that Iran’s government was only un-reasonable because Bush was President – he can play this, but it risks the lives of millions. More than likely, Obama’s willingness to meet the mullahs is viewed in Tehran as a sign of weakness…just as Clinton and Carter’s efforts to conciliate America’s enemies was viewed as weakness. We’re not dealing, in our enemies, with people who have Ivy League degrees and who have attended conflict resolution classes. We’re dealing with hard, cruel and wicked men who want their own way and who have no compunction at all about killing to get it – people thus sunk into moral degeneracy are not usually amenable to the velvet touch…rough men usually need someone equally rough to take care of them.

We’re balanced on a knife edge – on one hand stands the prospect of an Israeli strike against Iran and all our work in Afghanistan and Iraq undone in a fit of Moslem anti-Israel fervor; on the other stands the vast relief of most of the Moslem world that we took Iran’s nuclear program down. Its Obama’s choice of what to do; I hope he chooses wisely.

Bill Bennett offers a tribute.

As for me, I liked Jack Kemp from when he first came to my notice early in the Reagan years and I hoped, one day, that he’d be President of the United States. In his clear zest for political battle combined with gentleman’s grace and manners, I thought (and still think) that we had in Jack Kemp that rare combination of skill and judgment necessary for a great President. Unfortunately, the political fates decided otherwise – but we still had, for decades, the service and good counsel of this man, and he’ll be missed.