This is a pretty astounding clip from an Obama press conference yesterday. Obama was waxing poetic about the obligation of the Senate to confirm whatever judicial nomination he throws up there when a reporter stunned Obama into literal silence with what should have been an easily foreseeable question. When Obama finally stumbled and fumbled his way into an answer, he basically admitted that he and his party were a major part of the problem with judicial nominations.

The sudden death of Justice Antonin Scalia has sharpened the divide between the progressives’ idea of technocratic federal power, and the Constitution’s limited government that Scalia eloquently championed for almost 30 years. This division has a long history that transcends the failed presidency of Barack Obama.

The Democratic Party grew out of opposition to the elitist Federalists, whose president John Adams was known as “His Rotundity” for his girth and alleged aristocratic tendencies. James Madison in 1792 established the contrast between the two parties that persists to this day: the Federalists were “more partial to the opulent,” and believed that “government can be carried on only by the pageantry of rank, [and] the influence of money and emoluments.”

Those who would become Democrats, Madison wrote, believed “in the doctrine that mankind are capable of governing themselves,” and he charged that power lodged “into the hands of the few” is “an insult to the reason and an outrage to the rights of man.” In short, the Democrats were about power to the people rather than to privileged elites.

Obama’s visit to a pro-terrorist radical Moslem mosque last week (2/03) is a clear signal of how he intends to spend his last year in office. It tells us that during this period, Obama will adopt ever more extreme positions regarding radical Islam.

 Obama’s apologetics for radical Islamists is the flipside of his hostility for Israel. This too is escalating and will continue to rise through the end of his tenure in office.

 The US Customs authority’s announcement on January 23 that it will begin enforcing a 20-year old decision to require goods imported from Judea and Samaria to be labeled “Made in the West Bank,” rather than “Made in Israel,” signals Obama’s intentions.

 Part of the reason Obama is acting with such urgency and intensity is that he knows that regardless of who is elected to replace him, the next president will not be as viscerally hostile to Israel or as emotionally attached to Islam as he is.

This is true even if it is a Democrat – but far more so if it is a Republican.

The global oil industry is caught in a self-feeding downward spiral as falling prices cause producers to boost output even further in a scramble to service $3 trillion of dollar debt, the world’s top watchdog has warned.

The Bank for International Settlements fears that a perverse dynamic is at work where energy companies in Brazil, Russia, China and parts of the US shale belt are increasing production in defiance of normal market logic, leading to a bad “feedback-loop” that is sucking the whole sector into a destructive vortex.

“Lower prices have not removed excess capacity from the market, but instead may have exacerbated it. Production has been ramped up, rather than curtailed,” said Jaime Caruana, the general manager of the Swiss-based club for central bankers.

The findings raise serious questions about the strategy of Saudi Arabia and the core OPEC states as they flood the global crude market to knock out rivals in a cut-throat battle for export share. The process of attrition may take far longer and do more damage than originally supposed.