President Barack Obama is asking Americans to "withhold judgment" until after the "facts" are known why Major Nidal Hasan, a devout Muslim who believed Muslims shouldn't be in the Army because they might have to kill other Muslims, gunned down 13 innocent fellow soldiers at Ft. Hood while shouting "Allahu Akbar!"

This is the same president who, while knowing virtually no facts about why Cambridge police entered the home of black Harvard Prof. Louis Gates, immediately assumed it was because Gates is black.

What would you call the act of a lone gunman who laid in wait for hundreds of shoppers at a farmer’s market in Kabul and then opened fire on them with two guns? And, if you learned that gunman had, over weeks, terminated his rental contract and given away his furniture (and leftover broccoli) while saying good-bye to his neighbors, would his murder of as many unarmed and unsuspecting infidels as he could kill seem to be the act of one who suddenly snapped? And, what would you have thought upon learning that he shouted “Allah is Great” as he opened fire on the helpless victims? Would you have concluded that the murderer acted in random fashion as a crazy person?

It is true that we do not know if Nidal Malik Hasan originally joined the military with intentions to agitate against American wartime initiatives. We do know that he was not prepared to serve unless the declared military campaign suited his personal agenda. When, in response to the attacks of 9-11, the US went to war against states that perpetrate Islamist terror, he consistently expressed opposition to the goal of defeating Al Qaeda. He also used his position as Army psychiatrist to preach Islam to returning war vets that he was assigned to counsel. The rants against the war effort and in favor of Islam earned him a poor job performance rating at Walter Reed and a transfer to Fort Hood. His internet postings drawing moral equivalence between suicide bombings and heroic acts of American troops to die in attempt to save comrades later earned him a place on the FBI watch list.

Jihad, known generally as the holy war waged by Muslims against infidels, has been characterized in our time by suicide killers who announce that Allah is great before activating a bomb vest, crashing planes into buildings, or firing into groups of unarmed people. These rampages only stop upon death of the jihadist. The act is intended to make a signature statement and expected to instill fear and horror in a community – as well as the civilization at large.

The hard dichotomy for many westerners to confront is that jihad is not personal. Jihad is a generalized attack on a way of life and a way of thinking. Thus, the tendency to describe the suicide killers’ senseless acts as random seems rational and offers some comfort to dazed westerners. These Islamist killers are often described as respected professionals as were the doctors that planned the London and Glasgow terror attacks. Many who knew Hasan have spoken, like his landlord and uncle, in bewilderment and surprise when acknowledging his act of mass murder. But the jihadist’s war is not against the nice people encountered along the way but against a consensual political compact that directly repudiates his favored Sharia-inspired doctrinal tyranny.

Why is it important to call this barbaric and cowardly act, jihad? Although painful, we must recognize there are those among us, some were even born to America, that have joined a conspiracy to destroy all that is American. In the name of all victims of jihad, including those who died on 9-11, we have a responsibility to recognize and declare jihadist attacks for the evil they represent to liberty loving Americans.

At a time when tension is high, it is important to recognize the western-oriented American Muslims who live among us and who sincerely condemn acts of jihad. But we also must preserve the freedom to judge a terrorist act by its design. Just as a jihadist distinguishes between individual westerners and his general hatred of the permissive democratic system that they embrace, so too must westerners find a way to identify and resist terror actors who mean us grave harm while still accepting individual Muslim citizens who contribute positively to our democratic and pluralistic way of life. 

As the suicidal Democratic congressmen proceed to rubber-stamp the Obama health care reform despite the drubbing their party took in the '09 elections, the president trotted out the endorsements of the AMA and the AARP to stimulate support. But these -- and the other endorsements -- his package has received are all bought and paid for. Here are the deals:

The American Medical Association (AMA) was facing a 21 percent cut in physicians reimbursements under the current law. Obama promised to kill the cut if they backed his bill. The cuts are the fruit of a law requiring annual 5 percent to 6 percent reductions in doctor reimbursements for treating Medicare patients. Bravely, each year Congress has rolled the cuts over, suspending them but not repealing them. So each year, the accumulated cuts threaten doctors. By now, they have risen to 21 percent. With this blackmail leverage, Obama compelled the AMA to support his bill ... or else!

The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) got a financial windfall in return for its support of the health care bill. Over the past decade, the AARP has morphed from an advocacy group to an insurance company (through its subsidiary company). It is one of the main suppliers of Medi-gap insurance, a high-cost privately purchased coverage that picks up where Medicare leaves off. But President Bush-43 passed the Medicare Advantage program, which offered a subsidized, lower-cost alternative to Medi-gap. Under Medicare Advantage, the elderly get all the extra coverage they need plus coordinated, well-managed care, usually by the same physician. So more than 10 million seniors went with Medicare Advantage, cutting into AARP Medi-gap revenues.

Presto! Obama solved their problem. He eliminates subsidies for Medicare Advantage. The elderly will have to pay more for coverage under Medigap, but the AARP -- which supposedly represents them -- will make more money. (If this galls you, join the American Seniors Association, the alternative group. Contact sbarton@americanseniors.org.

The drug industry backed Obamacare and, in return, got a 10-year limit of $80 billion on cuts in prescription drug costs. (A drop in the bucket of their almost $3 trillion projected cost over the next decade). They also got administration assurances that it will continue to bar lower-cost Canadian drugs from coming into the U.S. All it had to do was to put its formidable advertising budget at the disposal of the administration.

Insurance companies got access to 40 million new potential customers. But when the Senate Finance Committee lowered the fine that would be imposed on those who don't buy insurance from $3,500 to $1,500, the insurance companies jumped ship and now oppose the bill, albeit for the worst of motives.

The only industry that refused to knuckle under was the medical-device makers. They stood for principle and wouldn't go along with Obama's blackmail. So the Senate Finance Committee retaliated by imposing a tax on medical devices such as automated wheelchairs, pacemakers, arterial stents, prosthetic limbs, artificial knees and hips, and other necessary accoutrements of health care.

So these endorsements are not freely given, but bought and paid for by an administration that is intent on passing its program at any cost.

The White House announced last week that the $787 billion stimulus package has "saved or created" more than 1 million jobs.

Yet on Friday we learned that unemployment increased to 10.2%, and the number of unemployed Americans rose by 558,000 in October. If you factor in workers who gave up looking or settled for a part-time job, the real unemployment rate--what's known as U6--is an astounding 17.5%.

Look out now for even more claims about "saved or created" jobs from the Obama administration.

As numerous economists have explained, there is no academic or empirical basis for the category of "jobs saved."
 
Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University says, "no agency--not the Labor Department, not the Treasury, not the Bureau of Labor Statistics--actually calculates 'jobs saved.' "

Dr. Allan Meltzer of Carnegie Mellon University adds, "One can search economic textbooks forever without finding a concept called 'jobs saved.' It doesn't exist for good reason: How can anyone know that his or her job has been saved?"

The fact is, there is no guarantee that the government actually creates a job when it spends stimulus money. There is no way of knowing whether a worker or firm that is engaged in a stimulus-related activity would have been idle or engaged in some alternative activity. But we do know that as the recovery picks up, individuals engaged in government activity will be unavailable for more productive private activity.

That means that the recovery will have trouble truly lifting off if many of our workers have been committed to questionable make-work projects concocted by Speaker Pelosi and President Obama. A Keynesian might be happy to have government workers digging holes and filling them in, but workers occupied in that manner cannot, at the same time, return to the factory floor. The higher the number of such dislocated workers, the higher the policy challenge going forward.

So if the Obama administration is just going to make up formulations like "saved or created" that have no basis in economics, let us offer our own formulation that is a far more accurate characterization of our economic challenges since the enactment of President Obama's $787 billion stimulus package, even if economists currently don't use this measure.

And that is, we have seen more than 4 million jobs "lost and dislocated" since President Obama and the Democratic Congress enacted the stimulus package in February.

This is a much easier formulation to understand.

You begin with the increase in the number of unemployed Americans since the stimulus was passed in February as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That number is 3.2 million, which represents the jobs that have actually been lost since the stimulus package was enacted.

Then, to have a clear sense of the liabilities created by Obama's misguided policies, we should add to our "jobs lost" number an estimate of private workers who have been "dislocated" by the government. Since stimulus actions are meant to be temporary, knowing how many workers have been "dislocated" is essential to forming a realistic long-run economic outlook. The more dislocated workers that Obama creates today, the higher the number of workers that will have to eventually be reabsorbed by the private sector tomorrow when the stimulus winds down.

So what figure should we use for the number of "dislocated" jobs since the stimulus program was enacted?

Thankfully, the White House has, perhaps inadvertently, provided us with an estimate. When the White House says that jobs have been "saved or created" by the stimulus program, then we should say that this is the number of jobs "dislocated" by the stimulus program.

So, using current figures, adding the number of actual jobs lost since February (3.2 million) to the number of jobs that the Obama administration says that they have "saved or created" since February (1 million) means that the economy has "lost and dislocated" more than 4 million jobs since President Obama signed his $787 billion stimulus package.

This "lost and dislocated" formulation is a much more honest assessment of where we are as a country when it comes to understanding job creation, unemployment and the economic challenges ahead under the so-called stimulus package.
 
If it's not, then the White House should at least explain how "saved or created" is more accurate.

It's a long-time member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, it has been pushing hard to join the European Union, it has been viewed as a model for secularism in the Muslim world, and it's .... planning to host an indicted war criminal next week.  It's Turkey.  This morning, the Wall Street Journal reported that Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, wanted for war crimes over the genocide in Darfur, will visit Turkey ("Turkey Set to Host President of Sudan").  I can assure you Turkey won't be pressuring Bashir to stop the killing in Darfur.   

Turkey and Sudan say their relationship is all about their economies.  And trade has quadrupled over the past three years.  But deeper currents are connecting.  Next week's visit is the latest sign of Turkey's shift away from the West and towards political Islam.  Radical Islam is integral to the ruling party in Khartoum, Sudan.  Last month, Turkey pulled the plug on a routine military exercise with NATO and Israel's air force.  Exercises with Syria are planned though.  Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose Islamist AKP party came to power in 2003, recently called Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "our friend."  Ahmadinejad will be in Istanbul too, by the way, as part of the one day Organization of the Islamic Conference meeting.  As Darfur will be ignored, so too will Iran's nuclear drive.    

This isn't just my hunch.  One Middle East analyst recently noted, "the AKP's foreign policy has not promoted sympathy toward all Muslim states.  Rather, the party has promoted solidarity with Islamist, anti-Western regimes (Qatar and Sudan, for example) while dismissing secular, pro-Western Muslim governments (Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia)." (WSJ editorial: "The Turkish Temptation").  Present-day Turkey's embrace of rogues abroad shouldn't surprise, given that Ankara has moved to "tax" domestic independent media and jail political opponents.  Readers of this space know that aggressive attitudes abroad and bad behavior at home closely track (see North Korea, Iran).

This isn't some two-bit country with a growing radical population.  This is Turkey: a country of 77 million strategically sitting between east and west.  This is a NATO ally, with the accompanying security commitments and access to military technology.  We don't need any more foreign policy headaches, but Turkey's political and social trends are quite troubling indeed.  

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA,) the Vice-Chair of the House Republican Conference just told me in a blogger conference call that not one single Republican is expected to vote for the proposed Democratic healthcare reform legislation expected to be voted on by Congress this weekend.  Rep. Doc Hastings (R-WA) related that one of his colleagues in the House characterized the current debate on healthcare as being between only "the left and the far left," and that you could take it to the bank that the GOP would present a solid front.

McMorris Rodger's comments echoed those of House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA,) who told the protesters attending yesterday's "House Call" in Washington, DC that "Be assured not one Republican will vote for this bill."

Speaking of the "House Call," Rep. McMorris Rodgers said that it created quite a buzz on Capitol Hill yesterday and that it was vitally important for such efforts to continue.  The issue is far from settled yet.  Rep. Hastings said that Speaker Pelosi was pushing the vote more because of legislative deadlines than the fact that the Democrats has the 218 votes necessary to pass the legislation.  The vote count is fluid, and changes from hour to hour.  So fluid in fact, that House Democrats rushed newly elected Bill Owens from New York's 23rd District down to be sworn in.  When the count reaches 218, the Democrats will have the vote.

McMorris Rodgers stated that House Democrats are trying to put a "happy face" on the recent elections in New Jersey and Virginia which have made the Democratics very nervous, particularly more the more conservative "blue dog" Democrats.  The issues of federal funding of abortions and public option for illegal immigrants are still very much in play.  54 Democrats signed a letter opposing abortion in the healthcare reform bill, and many of those are not the same as the 34 who oppose the public option.  But, as this a top priority for the Obama administration, arms are being twisted, and Speker Pelosi wants it to be appear to be on track.  According to McMorris Rodgers, Pelosi is negotiating with pro-life Dems to find what language they would consider acceptable without having to remove the abortion provisions.

Unfortunately, according to Rep. Hastings, what isn't in play is the $730 billion tax increase that this legislation creates with a 5.4% surcharge on those grossing over $500,000 a year.  This surcharge is not indexed, meaning it will go up over time, as well as the employer mandate.

House Republicans have proposed a plan that would reduce health insurance premiums by $5,000 per family by adding more coverage and more choices.  Democrats, however, have chosen to centralize healthcare and thereby reduce choices.

THIS ISN'T OVER YET.  CALL YOUR CONGRESSMAN OR CONGRESSWOMAN TODAY!!!!