Just won’t quit, will they?

Activists who have spent years protesting President Bush admit their chances are slim of seeing Bush or any members of his administration face legal recourse for what they say are “crimes against humanity.”

Several activists hoped to squeeze out a few parting shots against the outgoing president…

…On Monday, a group called AfterDowningStreet.org was scheduled to hurl footwear at the White House, an apparent slap at the president reminiscent of a recent press conference in Iraq. Other anti-war groups were set to gather at the Pentagon on the same day.

On Tuesday, a coalition of activist groups will hold an event called “Yes We Can Arrest Bush,”…

Seriously, guys, get some therapy – you’re beginning to worry us here. Hatred destroys, but stupid hatred is just plain and simple messed up.

I’ll give more to Jindal than they do, but that’s just me:

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is the front-runner to win the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, according to online oddsmakers.

Despite a slew of negative press this fall about Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) running mate, online gaming site Superbook.com puts Palin’s odds at 3.5-1, the best among Republican hopefuls.

Other top GOP contenders include former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, whose odds are set at 4-1, and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, at 5-1.

Former Rep. Bobby Jindal (R-La.), who is now governor of Louisiana, has a 6-1 shot of claiming the nomination.

Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford and former Speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.) are each listed at 12-1 to win the Republican nomination on Superbook.com.

Gen. David Petraeus and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani are 15-1 dark horses while Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and McCain are considered 20-1 long shots.

I’d put Jeb and McCain in the 1,000,000-1 bracket, myself. I like both men, but I think we GOPers are rather done with the Bush family for quite a while, and McCain lost, so he’s permanently damaged political goods.

Amazing what you can accomplish when there isn’t a global warming kook-socialist in charge:

Aiming to tackle Alaska’s energy crisis, the state’s long awaited energy plan was released today with some initiatives to eventually gain energy independence.

Governor Sarah Palin wants half of Alaska’s electricity produced from renewable resources by the year 2025 and she says the plan to achieve energy independence is not going to be easy but it is attainable.

“The message today is that we are willing and able to responsibly build and produce and provide opportunity for our resources to be available for our citizens,” said Palin.

Here in Alaska, we use more energy than any other state in the country as we depend on fuel, electricity, and heat in our daily activities. And it’s the costs of that energy which has literally trapped those that live here.

“The money we spend for energy in Alaska doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when we own the resources,” said Palin.

To change it the state unveiled its plan.

“Our energy plan is going to result in a wide variety of actions,” said Palin.

Actions including creating new power generation sources for the Fairbanks, Mat Su Valley, Anchorage, and Kenai Peninsula areas and utilizing local alternative sources for the rural areas of Alaska.

“This will help communities focus their efforts to make electricity and heat in their homes using local available resources,” said Steve Haagenson, the state’s energy coordinator.

“Geothermal, to hydro, to instate natural gas pipelines, much can be achieved,” said Joe Balash, a special assistant to the governor.

The plan is entailed in a guide named “Alaska Energy” a first step toward energy independence where it prioritizes the projects and identifies potential funding sources.

To help gain that independence, Palin wants Alaskans to be involved. “Alaskan communities are empowered to identify there best most sensible options, and work at a regional level to prioritize projects” says Palin.

“This approach is different, we are trying to learn from our past issues, what succeeded, what didn’t succeed,” said Haagenson.

Notice that – no form of energy is off the table, using local authorities to figure out what is best for local needs, shooting for energy independence so that Alaska never has to pay anyone to power their economy. Pity we opted for a bunch of socialist greenies who will actually work diligently to make energy more expensive and less available (oh, they’ll say they’re doing otherwise, but that is just because socialists and environmentalists haven’t a clue about what they’re doing).

Ah, well, there’s always 2012.

Cool…errr, I mean, cold:

Al Gore is now a wintertime fixture in Fairbanks.

Well, make that an ice sculpture of the 2007 Nobel Prize winner and leader in the movement to draw attention to climate change and global warming.

Local businessman Craig Compeau unveiled the frozen likeness on Monday.

The 8 1/2-foot-tall, 5-ton sculpture dominates a downtown street corner from its perch on the back of a flatbed truck.

Compeau says he’s a “moderate” critic of global warming theories. He used Monday’s unveiling of the sculpture to invite Gore to Fairbanks — where it was 22 degrees on Monday — to explain his global warming theories.

He says it will stand through March, unless it melts before then.

Big question: Will anyone be able to tell it from the real Gore?

A good thing to, and too long in coming:

In his final acts of clemency, President George W. Bush on Monday commuted the prison sentences of two former U.S. Border Patrol agents whose convictions for shooting a Mexican drug dealer ignited fierce debate about illegal immigration.

Bush’s decision to commute the sentences of Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean, who tried to cover up the shooting, was welcomed by both Republican and Democratic members of Congress. They had long argued that the agents were merely doing their jobs, defending the American border against criminals. They also maintained that the more than 10-year prison sentences the pair was given were too harsh.

Rancor over their convictions, sentencing and firings has simmered ever since the shooting occurred in 2005.

Ramos and Compean became a rallying point among conservatives and on talk shows where their supporters called them heroes. Nearly the entire bipartisan congressional delegation from Texas and other lawmakers from both sides of the political aisle pleaded with Bush to grant them clemency.

Bush didn’t pardon the men for their crimes, but decided instead to commute their prison sentences because he believed they were excessive and that they had already suffered the loss of their jobs, freedom and reputations, a senior administration official said.

And that is just President Bush all over – always wary of overturning the verdict of a jury. This is wise for an executive – the opposite is what Bill Clinton did, which was to put pardons up at fire sale prices in his last month in office. But the central defense of American liberty is the jury – and even if we don’t like what a jury does, we should still carefully abide by it except in extraordinary circumstances. Liberals spend enough time eroding the power and influence of juries, we conservatives must never join them in that task.

But I am pleased with this commutation – the sentence was, in my view, excessive; there was, in my view, no actual crime involved here as the officers were defending our borders in the incident. If there was a cover up, then loss of employment should have been as far as it went. But all is well that ends well, and Ramos and Compean can now return to their families.

While the media has a collective orgasm over Obama tomorrow, I’ll be safely at work and thus not even able to see the circus…I’ll be able to read Obama’s speech without the distractions of media hype and thus be able to see if it really says anything of consequence. The Mrs has scheduled a hair appointment. Not sure what Dad will be up to, though the 9am time slot for Dad usually seems to be filled with him arguing on a blog of sorts with a bunch of atheist kooks…but they might be busy at that time salivating over Obama, so perhaps Dad will tune in. The in-laws will avoid the idiot box – and idiots thereon – like the plague. What will you be doing?

With The One set to save us all (or, at least, his donor base and selected special interest groups) tomorrow, you’d think this sort of story wouldn’t pop up:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is receptive to the idea of prosecuting some Bush administration officials, while letting others who are accused of misdeeds leave office without prosecution, she told Chris Wallace in an interview on “FOX News Sunday.”

“I think you look at each item and see what is a violation of the law and do we even have a right to ignore it,” the California Democrat said. “And other things that are maybe time that is spent better looking to the future rather than to the past.”

Rep. John Conyers, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, announced Friday he wants to set up a commission to look into whether the Bush administration broke the law by taking the nation to war against Iraq and instituting aggressive anti-terror initiatives. The Michigan Democrat called for an “independent criminal probe into whether any laws were broken in connection with these activities.”

President-elect Barack Obama has not closed off the possibility of prosecutions, but hinted he does not favor them.

“I don’t believe that anybody is above the law,” he told ABC News a week ago. “On the other hand, I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

Smart Obama, dumb Pelosi, idiot Conyers – we’ll see where this leads. To be sure, we can expect that Obama’s Justice Department will only move on bogus charges generated by the kook left and Congressional allies if forced to do so…but a great deal of mischief can be done, as well has keeping the hatred of the past 8 years at a white hot level, which bodes ill for any cross-party cooperation in the long run.

Ultimately, this is related to one thing and one thing only – the fact that President Bush managed to prevent Al Gore from stealing Florida’s electoral votes in 2000. Some lefties can’t let it go and are still looking for revenge on it.

We are bombarded with references to Lincoln and King these days and, of course, how Obama is the answer to both their questions – but there is one question relating to what Lincoln and especially King did which is not being asked much:

What would Martin Luther King say to a nation where an African-American baby is 5 times more likely to be killed in the womb than a Caucasian baby?

This is probably the most asked question presently in America since the end of the Civil War, but I am wondering: who is asking it more? Due to the historical implications and the political climate throughout the world, the Global spotlight is clearly on the United States. The world wants to see how Barack Obama will navigate the tumultuous course ahead of him.

In his Election Night Acceptance Speech he referenced Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous and prophetic speech, “I’ve been to the mountain top.” Barack Obama said, “We may not get there in one year or four years.” It was at that point there seemed to be a degree of uncertainty and this is totally understandable when one considers the state of economic and social affairs of our country and global unrest. I would personally encourage and insist the nation ask another question along with the previous inquiry: ‘where do we go from here and what will it look like when we get there?’

In Dr. Martin Luther King’s last and most radical presidential address to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he entitled his message just what we find ourselves asking at the moment: “Where Do We Go From Here?” Martin said, “First we must massively assert our dignity and worth, we must stand up amidst a system that will oppress us and develop an unassailable and majestic sense of values.” Martin Luther King then says that the priority in getting to your destination, are your values, not economy. If that’s what’s needed then the journey must be delayed indefinitely until we gain those unassailable, unmovable, indestructible values that are divine, lofty and exalted.

But where do we go from here? We can go nowhere until this nation recognizes all of its citizens, especially our most vulnerable, many whose ‘unalienable Rights’ are presently denied. Until our national values reflect the Giver of our rights — “endowed by their Creator” — as the Declaration of Independence describes to us, there will be no ‘there’ there when we arrive. In so saying, as Martin Luther King was speaking at a church conference in Nashville Tennessee, he spoke across the decades these profoundly portentous words:

“There must be the recognition of the sacredness of human personality. Deeply rooted in our political and religious heritage is the conviction that every man is an heir to a legacy of dignity and worth. Our Hebraic Christian tradition refers to this inherent dignity of man in the biblical term the image of God. This innate worth referred to in the phrase the image of God is universal, shared in equal portions by all men. There is no graded scale (not pay scale) of essential worth; there is no divine right of one race that differs from the divine right of another. Every human has etched in his personality the indelible stamp of the creator. The idea of dignity and worth of human personality is expressed eloquently and unequivocally in the Declaration of Independence.”

It is precisely this sort of question which I suspect Obama is entirely unaware of, and therein lies our great danger. But, also, therein lies our great opportunity: in the matter of Life, Obama is pretty much a blank slate. Oh, to be sure, he’s made statements in favor of the Culture of Death and cast votes for same – but when Obama opined that the question of when life begins is above his pay grade, he indicated clearly that he’s never thought the matter through. Obama’s pro-abortion positions seem a bit pro-forma; things a liberal is expected to do, much as any conservative is expected to say nice things about lowering taxes, even if that isn’t the particular conservative’s political hobby. I might be wrong, but the father of those two beautiful girls might be open to new ideas on the matter of Life.

We won’t get Obama to advocate a Life amendment to the Constitution – that would be too far an advance. But we might be able to get Obama to help us, ultimately, cut the Culture of Death off at the knees. There is an idea I’ve been ruminating on for some months now as a means of changing the terms of debate on abortion – I’d like to have a National Endowment for Life. And a big spending liberal who wants to make what he’ll view as a gesture of bipartisanship and who is unaware of just how the Life issue works might just be our man to sign off on it.

Over the past few years it has become clear to me that with the ban on partial birth abortion and the imposition of informed consent, we’ve gone as far as we can towards limiting abortion in a serious way unless we can convince ever larger numbers of Americans that abortion is just the plain and simple wrong it is. This is a difficult task because, at the back of the mind in the broad middle, is that concern – born mostly out of a misunderstanding of what mercy entails – that someone might need an abortion and thus it should remain generally legal, at least early on in the pregnancy. We won’t get that solid, Constitution-amending majority to understand that no one ever needs an elective abortion until we make real our insistence that each life be welcomed with open arms and unquestioning love. That is what the Endowment is for.

Its still a very preliminary idea, but it would work roughly like this – the government provides some billions of dollars as seed money for a privately managed Endowment which will provide funds for pre- and post-natal care with the ultimate design being that any woman, regardless of circumstances or condition, can avail herself of support for her pregnancy and its aftermath. In other words, there will be no condemnation; there will be no lack of care; there will be no lack of support – each child will be welcomed with open arms and unquestioning love, and the child’s mother will have all she needs. This would ultimately dispose of any perceived need for an elective abortion – after all, who but the most heartlessly cruel would elect to kill an unborn child when there is no risk to one’s health, to one’s future or to the child? Once the alleged need is gone, so too will the argument that we’d better keep abortion legal, just in case.

If we are to answer the question of whether democracy is valid or whether we can judge people by the content of their character, then the first requirement is that the people be alive. Furthermore, it is a negation of all Lincoln and King stood for that the very black people Lincoln endeavored to free and King endeavored to raise up should be killed in such large numbers, and before they get even a ghost of a chance to demonstrate to us the content of their character.

We cannot live up to the sacrifices of the Civil War and the Civil Rights eras until all are welcome at the table – regardless of race, color, creed or sex from conception until natural death. Curiously enough, the incoming Obama Administration offers us a chance, if we’ll just take it, and start advocating in new ways and with new means for the cause of Life.

The really sad part about this is the number of liberals in the United States who will refuse to believe this, simply because President Bush was in office:

In my annual medical mission trips to Africa during the Bush administration, I saw the cost of treatment for HIV with life-saving antiretrovirals (ARVs) drop from $4,000 a year to $125. The number of Africans on ARVs jumped from 50,000 to 2.1 million.

And the multiplier effect of Bush making this a presidential global priority was reflected thereafter in every meeting I had as Senate majority leader with the world leaders, including those from Russia, China and India. If you were dealing with the United States, you’d better have made HIV a national priority, because we had.

And it was more than HIV. Six months ago, Tom Daschle, Mike Huckabee, John Podesta, Cindy McCain and I (yes, we five of different persuasions do work together!) went to Rwanda on a fact-finding trip.

Our visits with villagers all over the country opened our eyes to how Bush’s five-year, $1.2 billion effort to combat malaria has provided 4 million insecticide-treated bed nets and 7 million life-saving drug therapies to vulnerable people. Yes, George Bush the healer.

Future historians will also note what today’s pundits ignore: total US government development aid to Africa quadrupled from $1.3 billion in 2001 to more than $5 billion in 2008. What’s more, the Bush administration doubled foreign aid worldwide over the past eight years. You have to go back to the Truman years to match that.

For the past 8 years, Bill Clinton has been in search of a legacy…something he can do to make himself a consequential man in world history. President Bush doesn’t have to. He’s done a fabulous job all up and down the line and history will, I believe, remember him as one of our greatest Presidents…and remember his critics for the sad, mean, small minded people they are.

Sometimes you just stumble across things which work out perfectly – and I happened to be re-reading G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy:

It is true that a man (a silly man) might make change itself his object or ideal. But as an ideal, change itself becomes unchangeable. If the change-worshipper wishes to estimate his own progress, he must be sternly loyal to the ideal of change; he must not begin to flirt gaily with the ideal of monotony. Progress itself cannot progress. It is worth remark, in passing, that when Tennyson, in a wild and rather weak manner, welcomed the idea of infinite alteration in society, he instinctively took a metaphor which suggests an imprisoned tedium. He wrote –

Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.

He thought of change itself as an unchangeable groove; and to it is. Change is the narrowest and hardest groove that a man can get into.

I think that the primary explanation for why we are arguing over the absurd proposition that a man can marry a man is because of this hard, narrow groove of change the left got itself into. Change became an end, and thus each passing year the leftist has to come up with something different – step by step we went from a rather mild disapproval of Christianity’s rules about sexual relations to the bizarre idea that any sort of sex is not just licit, but praiseworthy and something to be proud of. And so it goes with issue after issue – change, change, change and then change some more so that the erstwhile defenders of the little guy are going to bail out corporate bosses; defenders of free speech degenerate into defenders of speech codes; the opponents of one war become the advocates of a different war…

All very strange, but all entirely predictable in people who have, at bottom, cut themselves off from Reason and have been trying to wing it on their own for two centuries now.