The horror!

Wait, it gets worse:

At a million-dollar San Francisco fundraiser today, President Obama warned his recession-battered supporters that if he loses the 2012 election it could herald a new, painful era of self-reliance in America.

“The one thing that we absolutely know for sure is that if we don’t work even harder than we did in 2008, then we’re going to have a government that tells the American people, ‘you are on your own,’” Obama told a crowd of 200 donors over lunch at the W Hotel.

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Do tell!

From the Gray Lady today:

LAS VEGAS (AP) — President Barack Obama tells donors at a luxury casino in Las Vegas that the country is suffering from an economic crisis and from a political crisis. And, the president says, "people are crying out for action."

He noticed! -- Dan Ford

Religious intolerance in Illinois

The US Department of Justice has wrung a $75,000 settlement out of the school district of Berkeley, Illinois, which also has to provide sensitivity training to all its personnel as a result of denying a request from a Muslim teacher. As the delightful Dorothy Rabinowitz parses the offense:

The school teacher in question, Safoorah Khan, a middle school math lab instructor, had worked at the school for barely a year when she applied for some 19 days unpaid leave so that she could make a pilgrimage to Mecca. The school district denied the request: She was the only math lab instructor the school had, her absence would come just at the period before exams, and furthermore, the leave she wanted was outside the bounds set for all teachers under their union contract.

Thank goodness the Obama administration is on top of the case! -- Dan Ford

But only two thousand of them?

Historians have more or less settled on a figure of twenty-two thousand as the number of Polish officers, noncoms, intellectuals, professionals, and just unlucky men (and one woman) shot by the Russian secret police in the Katyn Forest massacres in the spring of 1940. Moscow has now admitted that they were innocent of any crime--but has reduced the number by ninety percent, according to the Associated Press:

MOSCOW — Moscow is ready to declare thousands of victims of a World War II-era massacre that continues to strain relations with Poland innocent of any crimes, Russia’s foreign policy chief announced Friday.

About 2,000 [sic!] Polish officers and other prisoners were executed by Soviet secret police in the Katyn forest of western Russia in 1940 on charges they were enemies of the Soviet state.

The Katyn massacre has been a source of tension between Russia and Poland for decades since the Soviet Union blamed the killings on the Nazis. It was only last year that Russia formally took the blame when the lower chamber of Russian parliament admitted the executions were ordered by Soviet leader Josef Stalin.

Prosecutors closed the criminal case against the Polish officers in 2004.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in a radio interview on Friday that Moscow is “ready to consider a perfectly legitimate request to declare these people innocent.”

Several Polish families went to the European Court of Human Rights to prove the victims’ innocence. Lavrov said Russia is anxious to work out a solution that would “satisfy families of the Polish officers and keep Russia within the legal framework.”

Russia’s ambassador to Poland said earlier this year that Russia made a political decision to declare the officers innocent of any crimes against the Soviet Union.

Lavrov confirmed Friday that Moscow and Warsaw are still thinking about how to settle the issue.

They could of course start by getting the figures right. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

On missing Dad

One of the great things about Friday is the opportunity to read Peggy's Noonan's column in advance. (Noonan was a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, so we know she's a conservative, but she was also an early and bitter critic of George W. Bush.) Here's the keystone from her Saturday essay in the Wall Street Journal:

Sorry to do archetypes, but a nation in trouble probably wants a fatherly, or motherly, figure at the top. What America has right now is a bright, lost older brother. It misses Dad. [Mitt] Romney's added value is his persona. He's a little like the father in one of those 1950s or '60s sitcoms.... He's like Robert Young in "Father Knows Best," or Fred MacMurray in "My Three Sons: You'd quake at telling him about the fender-bender, but after the lecture on safety and personal responsibility, he'd buck you up and throw you the keys.

As for that bright, lost older brother in the White House, she concludes her essay by saying: 'Sometimes he lectures America. But he doesn't buck it up, and he must know in his heart that it's coming for the keys.' Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

To the back of the bus!

Dispatching a second-class citizen to the back of the bus has an ugly history in America, so it comes as something of a shock to discover that the practice is alive and well and living in Brooklyn, where the B110 bus runs into Manhattan with men at the front and women at the back. The bus company is privately owned, but it competed for and won a city contract, so Mayor Bloomberg argues that it's bound by the city's  non-discrimination rules. “Private people: you can have a private bus,” he added. “Go rent a bus, and do what you want on it.” I don't often agree with Hizzoner, who is prone to enforcing his own liberal opinions on the rest of us, but here he has a case. Indeed, I would go further: Guys, if you don't want to sit with women on your way to work, you can get down from the bus and walk. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Trillion-dollar Barack

The line to notice is 2008, when things were considered so bad that many of us voted for "hope and change" in the primaries and the general election. How did that work out for us? Four trillion dollars in deficit spending, with at least another trillion certain for the fiscal year that began on October 1.

The value of a soldier

We now know the precise value of an Israeli soldier as compared to his Palestinian peers: one thousand to one.

I'm happy for Sergeant Shalit and his family, who will see each other for the first time in five years, but I am skeptical that his release will advance the cause of peace in the Mideast. For sure, Hamas is even now looking for the next Israeli soldier to kidnap. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Coach

Just back from TWO successive nights on airplanes. I got the middle seat on the long jump from Fiji to Los Angeles, and Sally got it on the red-eye to Boston.

Both flights were full. I came to the conclusion that protesters would do better to occupy the airlines than Wall Street, especially American Airlines. What was once gracious (I am old enough to remember complimentary drinks whenever anything went wrong with the schedule) has become a truly awful way to travel. As is now customary, every flight was a full one, and nobody cracked a smile when the AA gate attendant came out with her "exciting offer" to gate-check excess bags without charge. Most of the people with three and four carry-ons ignored her, since they had already ensured that they would be the first to board, hence to fill the overhead racks with suitcases, backpacks, and garbage bags packed with souvenirs.

There were two bright spots on the trek. One was the string band that serenaded us onto the 747 in Fiji; the other was the complimentary Samsung recharging station at LAX.  Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Worst thing that ever happened, 8 Oct 1939

Seventy-two years ago today, western Poland was annexed by Germany as part of the Third Reich, to be resettled with ethnically pure Aryans. The central part of the country will be administered as a colony called the General Government, with the Christian population to slave for the Reich and the Jews to be exterminated. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Worst thing that ever happened, 6 Oct 1939

Seventy-two years ago today, the last effective Polish resistance ended. In this photo, German and Russian officers shake hands over their dismembered victim, which would not be truly free again until December 1990. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Governor Perdu imitates Blackadder

From Blackadder:

Vincent Hanna: Master William Pitt the Even Younger, no votes, are you disappointed?

Pitt the Even Younger: Yes, I'm horrified! I smeared my opponents, bribed the press to be on my side, and threatened to torture the electorate if we lost! I fail to see what more a decent politician could have done!

From Governor Bev Perdue of North Carolina, who instead of toruring the electorate would rather do away with us altogether:

"I think we ought to suspend, perhaps, elections for Congress for two years and just tell them we won't hold it against them, whatever decisions they make, to just let them help this country recover. I really hope that someone can agree with me on that."

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Killing from behind

One of the few positive accomplishments of the Obama administration--indeed, perhaps the only one--is the targeted killing of Al Qaeda leaders and their associates, from Anwar al-Awlaki to Osama bin Laden himself. I've never been comfortable with the notion of assassination, especially when carried out by military forces--not so much because of the horrors of extrajudicial killing, but because of the effect upon the troops who must carry it out. But I'm glad these murderous nutters are gone. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford