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Sticking to the Script
By Jonah Goldberg
Liberals crave a comfortable plot, and they’ll alter the facts of a story to make it fit one.
We are taught to believe that ideology is the enemy of free thought. But that’s not right. Ideology is a mere checklist of principles and priorities. The real enemy of clear thinking is the script. We think the world is supposed to go by a familiar plot. And when the facts conflict with the script, we edit the facts.
So, for instance, David Horowitz is a stock villain on U.S. campuses because he deviates from the standard formula of coddling the usual victims and lionizing the usual heroes. Once a committed left-wing radical, Horowitz now resides on the right. Two of his favorite targets are academia and radical Islam. He leads an extensive network of websites, books, lecture series, pamphlets, and conferences aimed at exposing the folly and dangers of both. Horowitz’s detractors, and even some of his friends, sometimes roll their eyes at his confrontational tactics and rhetoric.
But that doesn’t mean he’s wrong. Horowitz recently spoke at the University of California, San Diego. In it, a young Muslim student from UCSD, Jumanah Imad Albahri, asks Horowitz to back up his attacks on the Muslim Students Association. Horowitz turns the tables on her. In less than two minutes, she reveals herself as a supporter of the terrorist group Hamas. Horowitz then notes that Hezbollah, another terrorist organization, wants all Jews to return to Israel so they can be more conveniently liquidated in one place. Horowitz asks Albahri whether she’s for or against that proposition. She is “for it.”
I asked UCSD, via e-mail, whether the woman in question was censured in any way for endorsing bigotry and genocide, or if the video was somehow misleading. In response, I received boilerplate about how, in the tradition of Aristotle, UCSD treasures “discourse and debate” and how “the very foundations of every great university are set upon the rock-solid principles of freedom of thought and freedom of speech.”
I wrote back, in part: “Thank you for your response. I must say I find it fairly non-responsive. Out of curiosity, if a UCSD student publicly called for the extermination of gays and blacks, would this be your only response as well?”
I then received an even less responsive primer on how student groups are funded on campus.
Now, I could write at length about UCSD’s hypocrisy. After all, the school recently launched a “Battle Hate” campaign in response to some idiotic stunt called the “Compton Cookout” at which a fraternity held a racially offensive event off campus during Black History Month. Administrators went into overdrive, the Black Student Union issued 32 demands, the vice chancellor righteously explained to students that although the event may have been beyond the school’s “legal jurisdiction,” it was not beyond UCSD’s “moral jurisdiction.”
“We have the moral high ground!” the vice chancellor shouted before trying to start a chant of “Not in our community!”
Well, Albahri’s statements were not only within the UCSD community, they were well inside the school’s legal and moral jurisdiction. And yet in response, we don’t get the familiar kabuki of official outrage. Instead we get: This endorsement of genocide is brought to you by Aristotle.
The important point here isn’t the school’s double standard. It’s that on campuses and in the wider intellectual culture, people can’t let go of their dog-eared script. It’s not that conventional racism is no longer a problem, nor is it that the civil-rights era no longer resonates. But freaking out over the vestiges of familiar racism is firmly within the comfort zone of contemporary liberalism. Indeed, it’s an industry. Yet when it comes to students like Albahri — and there are many like her — administrators become brainless and lost. Lacking an adequate script, they resort to bromides about Aristotle.
Off campus, liberals crave a comfortable plot in which bigoted “homegrown” white men are the villains while Muslims are scapegoats. New York mayor Michael Bloomberg was willing to bet that the Times Square bomber might turn out to be an opponent of health-care reform.
What’s the right script? Honestly, I don’t know. But those perched atop the moral high ground will have to climb down to find the facts before they can write it.
While it cannot be proven, there is little reason to doubt that many on the Left are disappointed that the Times Square bomber didn’t turn out to be the “white male” he was originally identified as.
This allegation may be wrong, but it is made on the basis of compelling evidence.
There is a perfectly clear pattern on the Left — the normative Left, not just the “far” Left — that denies the obvious when it comes to Islamic terrorism. Take, for example, Maj. Nidal Hasan, who murdered 13 fellow soldiers and tried to murder the 32 others whom he wounded at Fort Hood, Texas.
For days after the murders, liberal-Left commentators and mainstream media reports attributed Hasan’s mass murders to everything but his Islamic beliefs — even though it was known that he yelled out “Allahu Akbar” (“Allah is the Greatest”) just as he began his shooting.
As “Hardball’s” Chris Matthews (NBC) announced, “It’s unclear if religion was a factor in this shooting,” and then added, “He makes a phone call or whatever, according to Reuters right now. Apparently he tried to contact al-Qaida … That’s not a crime, to call up al-Qaida, is it?”
The New York Times “Week in Review” article on the shootings was titled “When Soldiers Snap.” As I wrote at the time, “The gist of the article was that Maj. Hasan had snapped — even though he had never been in combat. He snapped in advance. Just two sentences in the article were devoted to the possibility that his motives were in any way relatable to his Muslim faith.”
NPR’S Tom Gjelten offered the novel explanation that Hasan, who had never been in combat, may have suffered from “pre-traumatic stress disorder.” Again, psychology, not religion.
On Fox News, Geraldo Rivera said, “I don’t know what motivates him … He could have had a toothache and gone off because of that.”
This time, the same thing happened, with one exception: For two days, it was assumed a “white male,” shorthand for non-Muslim, non-minority American, tried to blow up passersby near Times Square in Manhattan.
New York city Mayor Michael Bloomberg said this to Katie Couric on CBS News on May 3: “If I had to guess 25 cents, this would be exactly that, somebody who’s homegrown, maybe a mentally deranged person or someone with a political agenda that doesn’t like the health care bill or something, it could be anything.”
It’s OK for liberals to speculate that a terrorist might be a Right-wing white American opposed to ObamaCare (aka a tea partier). It is the rather more likely scenario of an Islamic terrorist that liberals not consider, let alone publicly express.
Moreover, only an individual whose politics forces him to deny the obvious can deny that people like Bloomberg hoped that the culprit not be a Muslim, but rather a conservative white American.
Even after the terrorist, Faisal Shahzad, was apprehended, and after he confessed, the liberal-Left world almost never mentioned his religion, and many tried to blame it on factors unrelated to his religious beliefs. As with Nidal Hasan, the culprit in Shahzad’s case was the terrorist’s psychological state. This time, it was the stress he experienced over his house going into foreclosure.
Thus the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein wrote on May 4:
“You of course don’t want to speculate on why someone ‘really’ did something. The hearts of men are opaque, and motives are complex. But it’s a reminder that foreclosures generate an enormous amount of misery and anxiety and depression that can tip people into all sorts of dangerous behaviors…”
Widely ridiculed — in the comments section of the Washington Post itself — for what he wrote, the next day, Klein tried to do undo the damage to his credibility: “In case there’s actual confusion … I do not believe that foreclosure leads to terrorism.”
I think that most honest observers would argue that all the confusion was on Klein’s part, not the readers’. But, in any event, even in his explanatory column, he made no reference to Shahzad’s religious beliefs as the terrorist’s motivation.
Instead, he re-emphasized that it was impossible to even speculate what Shahzad’s motive might be: “Speculating about why a terrorist commits a terrorist act is a mug’s game … People who desire the murder of innocents qualify, I think, as pretty disturbed.”
Klein was not alone on the Left associating home foreclosure with Shahzad’s attempted mass murder. Annie Lowrey, an editor of Foreign Policy, wrote: “I think it’s a bit above my pay grade to speculate on the broader sociological meaning of this. But for what it is worth, the arrested subject of this past weekend’s Times Square bomb plot is a homeowner in the midst of foreclosure.”
A long background piece on Shahzad by the Associated Press — the most widely reprinted news source in America — had the title, “Times Square bombing suspect’s life had unraveled.” Not one of the article’s 1,076 words mentioned Shahzad’s Islamist beliefs as even a contributory factor. It was all about his economic misfortune and his walking around depressed.
This is but one more example of how Leftism permeates the upper echelons of American (and Western) society and has people mouthing sentiments that those not on the Left regard as morally absurd.
The best chance America has in retaining its greatness, let alone its exceptionalism, is to understand the Left. And the Left’s explanations for what makes a Faisal Shahzad or a Maj. Hasan seek to slaughter Americans are key to understanding the Left.
A defining characteristic of the Left is its inability to identify — and therefore confront — evil: from Jesse Jackson and Dennis Kucinich’s expressions of support to Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, to decades of Leftists around the world praising Cuba’s Fidel Castro, to the mainstream media’s denial of moral culpability to the arsonists, murderers and rioters in Los Angeles over the Rodney King verdict (“Understanding the Rage” was the title of the daily Los Angeles Times special section devoted to the riots), to the universal liberal outrage at President Ronald Reagan’s characterization of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire,” to the Left’s virtually unanimous hostility to Israel.
The Left’s inability to identify the religious beliefs of Islamic terrorists and instead ascribe their murders of Americans to the terrorists’ psychological tensions and economic problems — while at the same time utterly certain that conservative white Americans have only the most vile motives — is an expression of the Left’s failure to recognize and confront real evil.
Just remember this: If Shahzad had not been identified as the would-be bomber, the mainstream (i.e., liberal) news media and leading Democrats would have told us repeatedly that a white male — surely a conservative white male — was the Times Square terrorist, and that we should therefore be looking suspiciously at our fellow Americans on the Right, especially those attending tea parties. For while liberals claim not to know the motives of Muslim terrorists, they are always certain of conservatives’ motives: racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia.
When, one day, the Left exits from history’s stage, its epitaph will read: “Those who do not understand evil will not understand good.”
The Dismantling of America
By Thomas Sowell
With the passage of the legislation allowing the federal government to take control of the medical care system of the United States, a major turning point has been reached in the dismantling of the values and institutions of America.
Even the massive transfer of crucial decisions from millions of doctors and patients to Washington bureaucrats and advisory panels— as momentous as that is— does not measure the full impact of this largely unread and certainly unscrutinized legislation.
If the current legislation does not entail the transmission of all our individual medical records to Washington, it will take only an administrative regulation or, at most, an Executive Order of the President, to do that.
With politicians now having not only access to our most confidential records, and having the power of granting or withholding medical care needed to sustain ourselves or our loved ones, how many people will be bold enough to criticize our public servants, who will in fact have become our public masters?
Despite whatever “firewalls” or “lockboxes” there may be to shield our medical records from prying political eyes, nothing is as inevitable as leaks in Washington. Does anyone still remember the hundreds of confidential FBI files that were “accidentally” delivered to the White House during Bill Clinton’s administration?
Even before that, J. Edgar Hoover’s extensive confidential FBI files on numerous Washington power holders made him someone who could not be fired by any President of the United States, much less by any Attorney General, who was nominally his boss.
The corrupt manner in which this massive legislation was rammed through Congress, without any of the committee hearings or extended debates that most landmark legislation has had, has provided a roadmap for pushing through more such sweeping legislation in utter defiance of what the public wants.
Too many critics of the Obama administration have assumed that its arrogant disregard of the voting public will spell political suicide for Congressional Democrats and for the President himself.
But that is far from certain.
True, President Obama’s approval numbers in the polls have fallen below 50 percent, and that of Congress is down around 10 percent. But nobody votes for Congress as a whole, and the President will not be on the ballot until 2012.
They say that, in politics, overnight is a lifetime. Just last month, it was said that the election of Scott Brown to the Senate from Massachusetts doomed the health care bill. Now some of the same people are saying that passing the health care bill will doom the administration and the Democrats’ control of Congress. As an old song said, “It ain’t necessarily so.”
The voters will have had no experience with the actual, concrete effect of the government takeover of medical care at the time of either the 2010 Congressional elections or the 2012 Presidential elections. All they will have will be conflicting rhetoric— and you can depend on the mainstream media to go along with the rhetoric of those who passed this medical care bill.
The ruthless and corrupt way this bill was forced through Congress on a party-line vote, and in defiance of public opinion, provides a road map for how other “historic” changes can be imposed by Obama, Pelosi and Reid.
What will it matter if Obama’s current approval rating is below 50 percent among the current voting public, if he can ram through new legislation to create millions of new voters by granting citizenship to illegal immigrants? That can be enough to make him a two-term President, who can appoint enough Supreme Court justices to rubber-stamp further extensions of his power.
When all these newly minted citizens are rounded up on election night by ethnic organization activists and labor union supporters of the administration, that may be enough to salvage the Democrats’ control of Congress as well.
The last opportunity that current American citizens may have to determine who will control Congress may well be the election in November of this year. Off-year elections don’t usually bring out as many voters as Presidential election years. But the 2010 election may be the last chance to halt the dismantling of America. It can be the point of no return.
Is the U.S. Too Big to Fail?
By David Solway
We have heard from the Obama administration that companies like General Motors or various major banks are simply “too big to fail”—a mantra whose meaning is ambiguous. On one interpretation, the sense is that such enormous enterprises, owing to the fallout attendant upon their collapse, should not be allowed to fail and need to be propped up by vast infusions of cash. At the same time, the implication is that what we might call “maximal structures” generate their own survival momentum, and while some tweaking here and there may prove beneficial they will continue to lumber on regardless. We must, it seems, have confidence in the incommensurably large. We must believe that what is “too big to fail” will either not fail or will not be permitted to fail.
Analogously, we have been instructed that countries, unlike individuals and certain corporations, are too big to go bankrupt. Walter Wriston, former director of Citibank, is a firm believer in the fiscal resilience of nations. This is no consolation, however, to the people of Zimbabwe today or the citizens of Argentina between1999-2002 during the great economic meltdown. Christopher Booker and Richard Fernandez warn that Britain is on the verge of crashing: the accumulating debt to GDP ratio is frankly unsustainable. When the welfare cheques stop coming, when inflation goes through the roof, when banks invest in padlocks, when essential services are no longer provided and salaries are a fond reminiscence, a nation is effectively in bankruptcy—which is merely another term for failure. The French word for bankruptcy says it all: faillite.
There are, of course, many ways for a nation to approach the tipping point of potentially irreversible miscarriage. Economic implosion, as we have seen, is one; defenseless borders in times of conflict are another; unchecked immigration leading to ballooning social costs and a dilution of civic sentiment, as well as internal subversion, is a third; a flaccid, poorly educated and self-indulgent public unwilling to embrace austerity when necessary or bestir itself to the preservation of the polity is yet a fourth. Taken together, these factors amount to a perfect storm that will bring even a colossus to its knees.
Size in itself has nothing to do with viability. In fact, some things may be too big not to fail. The Roman Empire was pretty big and so was the Muslim imperium, but their long and undoubted success was the precondition for their inevitable collapse. Such dromocratic constructs tend to grow topheavy or the lines of communication between center and periphery weaken and fray. They peter out from misrule, debauch, apathy or torpor, or succumb to invasions and repeated military defeats, their scope and volume notwithstanding. This is also the case for more coherent entities. Classical Athens was a political and civic triumph until it began to expand far in excess of the optimal polis census of 5000 freeborn citizens.
But why stop there? By all accounts, the universe is a rather big place, but cosmology informs us that it will either dilate toward inescapable death by entropy or will reach a point when it begins to reverse its expansion, leading to a “big crunch.” “Either way,” as the Greek tragedian wrote in the Oresteia, “ruin.” If the universe can “fail,” then, presumably, anything can, irrespective of magnitude.
Which brings us to the United States of America, considerably smaller than the universe but large enough to inspire assurances of invulnerability among those inured to the lessons of history or given to intellectual complacency. The Bridge Mix of social, political and economic programs—redistribution of wealth, a bloated bureaucracy, reduction of military power, amnesty for illegals, toleration of inimical communities, government takeover of the marketplace, ideology supplanting pragmatics—adopted by the American liberal-left and rapidly being put in place by the current administration are hurtling the nation toward its moment of truth when it will have to decide whether it survives as the United States of America or devolves into something that, until just a few years ago, would have been almost unimaginable.
Often what seems to be inconceivable is only the prelude to what may well become unavoidable.
In the case of America such a scenario is all too possible. For America has only three options looming before it in a rapidly foreclosing future. The best case scenario is that, assuming a concerned citizenry, the growing Tea Party movement, a return to strict budgetary rectitude and a revival of the wisdom of the Constitution and the Founders, the United States may weather the storm of social and political dismemberment it is presently undergoing and recover its essence as a constitutional republic. To accomplish this aim, however, the policies of the Obama administration must be resisted at every turn. What Henry David Thoreau wrote in On the Duty of Civil Disobedience in 1848 has a proleptic ring to it and is truer today than it ever was: “How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.”
On the other hand the calamity of disintegration, as happened to the Soviet Union not so long ago, is a deeply troubling likelihood. The drive toward secession or what is called “disunion” along red state/blue state lines appears to be acquiring strength by the day. It is in the air. The threat of dissolution cannot be wished away or conveniently ignored. Whether such a parting of ways can be achieved peaceably and rationally or would entail violence and bloodshed remains an open question. But what resembles a bitter marriage between cultural incompatibles, the statist Left and the conservative Right, who have nothing to say to one another and disagree on just about everything, makes an eventual divorce by no means unthinkable. The clash between a pervasive scavenger mentality of collective entitlement and the ancestral belief in the values of personal initiative and individual responsibility cannot, it increasingly appears, be resolved amicably.
The third possibility is that America under the stewardship of Barack Obama and the Democratic Party will become an impoverished, socialist, Muslim-friendly country, much like the United Kingdom today or Sweden tomorrow, with devastating consequences for the majority of its citizens. As David Horowitz remarks of the U.S., “its constitutional order is threatened by a political left whose values remain socialist and whose agendas are subversive.” Such is the fundamental transformation promised by the Democratic candidate five days before his election: the intent to legislate outcome at the expense of input, to ensure a syndicalist homogeneity of status among the population while installing a privileged managerial class in the seats of power, and ultimately to transform America’s most industrious entrepreneurial sector into over-taxed and over-regulated obsolescence. Where have we seen this before?
These, then, are the three alternatives between which America will have to choose: recovery, dissolution, socialism. Regarding the latter two, to cite Aeschylus once more, it’s “either way, ruin.” Clearly, the moment of decision is not far down the road. Even a one-term administration for Barack Obama and his cohorts may be sufficient to wreak irreparable damage; a two-term presidency would probably spell the end of the noble and unique American experiment in republican democracy. For there can be little question that Barack Obama and the Democratic ascendancy together form the single greatest disaster to befall the United States in the modern era. If the country does not right itself sooner rather than later, it will find itself broken down the middle or wake up one day to discover that it is now nothing more than another socialist or quasi-Marxist Republic, which is a republic in name only.
Thoreau is on the mark again. Deploring the effects of a “wordy” and ever-compliant Congress which had “not yet learned the comparative value of free-trade and freedom” and which was devoid of “talent for comparatively humble questions of taxation and finance, commerce and manufactures,” he argues that without the “seasonable experience…of the people, America would not long retain her rank among the nations.” And we remember, too, that the United States was a much smaller political entity in 1848 than it is in 2010.
Now is not the time to take refuge in the smug conviction of indestructibility. America is not too big to fail and it may well be too big not to fail. But one thing is undeniable. As it approaches the eleventh hour, its survival depends on a determined and informed citizen “army” of genuine patriots capable of restoring the practical ideal of limited government and of conserving the proper balance between the state and the nation, the governors and the people, the collective and the individual, equality and liberty. Should that come to pass, America may recoup its forfeitures and at least partially retrieve the grandeur of its heritage.
And this, it goes almost without saying, is the real meaning of hope and change.
BARACK OBAMA: ENEMY WITHIN
By Matt Barber
[W]e will achieve our destiny to be as a shining city on a hill for all mankind to see
– Ronald Wilson Reagan
Our nation is chosen by God and commissioned by history to be a model to the world.
– George Walker Bush
America does not presume to know what is best for everyone.
We have a president loath to acknowledge American exceptionalism. Indeed, the weight of the evidence suggests that our chief executive, through both word and deed and with malice aforethought, seeks to undermine – if not dismantle – that exceptionalism. At one time we properly called such activity anti-American, seditious or even – under certain circumstances – treasonous. Today we call it "progressive."
Abraham Lincoln – also from the Prairie State – perhaps forecast his presidential progeny when he observed: "America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
We are destroying ourselves. Of course, by "we" I mean those egalitarian ideologues who presently control the reins of government: liberals in Congress, President Obama and his stable of cracked czars and policy advisers. Their demonstrated antipathy toward America's uniquely grand place among world nations is unambiguous.
Consider comments made recently by John "forced abortion" Holdren, Obama's science czar, to students at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In a rallying cry that could only be mustered by a true patriot, Holdren proclaimed: "[America] can't expect to be number one in everything indefinitely." (Self-fulfilling prophecy, anyone? Go team! That'll sure fire 'em-up before they hit the field.)
But what's most outrageous is the demonstrable reality that Obama's legislative agenda is intentionally designed to do just that – to ensure that America devolves to the lowest common denominator, lining-up as but another "also-ran" in today's neo-Marxist, internationalist horse race.
In addition to his humiliating world apology tour, the president recently gave us a sneak peek into this egalitarian mindset while preaching to the choir at his April 12 Nuclear Security Summit:
"Whether we like it or not, we (the United States) remain a dominant military superpower," he said.
"Whether we like it or not"? That Obama would even preface recognition of America's precarious role as the "last remaining superpower" with "like it or not" betrays his fixed membership among the camp of self-loathing "or nots."
I've been reluctant to climb aboard the "Obama wants to destroy America" conspiracy train. I'm no longer reticent to do so. As Newt Gingrich recently observed, we know this administration to be "far and away the most radical administration in American history."
Although he may not seek to destroy America outright, we can only conclude – based upon his grossly irrational and irresponsible governance – that Obama remains determined to destroy America both as we know her and as our Founding Fathers intended her.
It's our own fault, really (by "our" I mean "you" if you voted for him). We should have taken this radical ideologue at his radical word.
Remember? During his Inaugural Address, Obama promised to "begin again the work of remaking America." That's "remake" America, not "improve" America or even "reform" America. It has always been this man's "hope" to "change" our nation by wiping clean the slate – "remaking" an America in his own secular-humanist, neo-Marxist self-image.
And that's exactly what he's doing. Obama has embarked upon the most brazen, slash-and-burn socialist restructuring scheme in our nation's history. This president is many things, but he's not stupid. He knows full well that his massive government takeover of health care, coupled with his global warmist "cap-and-trade" tax scheme – and his broader tax-and-spend-during-deep-recession game of economic Russian roulette – are undeniably unsustainable.
Not only will these policies bring down the private insurance industry (part of the plan), they will – if let stand – bring down the whole of private industry, crashing our entire free-market system (again, part of the plan).
It's already happening. AT&T, Verizon, Deere and Caterpillar are but the first among an anticipated cavalcade of major corporations expecting to suffer a multi-billion dollar bloodbath at the hands of Obamacare – merely one of the president's radically sweeping, game-changing initiatives. (Congratulations, Mr. President.) As every good Marxist knows – to include the "man-child president" (as dubbed by Rush Limbaugh) – it's all unsustainable. Scary thing is: It'll work if they're not stopped at the ballot box come November.
As reported by FoxNews.com: "'The future of the economic might of this nation is at stake,' Jim Kessler, vice president for policy at Third Way bluntly observes.
'President Obama's budget forecast for the next decade (grossly underestimated) projects an additional $10 trillion in deficit spending, more than doubling the current national debt to a staggering $20 trillion.'
'The gloomy forecast leads some analysts like former Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin to suggest our economy is headed for a cliff.'
'This looks like Thelma and Louise to me. I mean, you know, there's the Grand Canyon and we're going to hit the accelerator. Why? You should hit the brake and then turn the car around.'"
But Thelma and Louise never intended to turn the car around.
Neither does Barack Obama.
There's no other way to say it. As goes the war to preserve liberty, national sovereignty, national solvency and American exceptionalism: Intelligence suggests we have an enemy within.
Published originally at EtherZone.com
Obama’s “Stunning Naiveté”
By Deborah Weiss
Last week at the Heritage Foundation, Former Ambassador John Bolton delivered a speech titled, “Protecting National Sovereignty in the Age of Obama.” The focus of the speech laid emphasis on the importance of maintaining American sovereignty in order to ensure the preservation of freedom. In this context, Bolton reviewed Obama’s policies on national security, charging the President with a worldview that demonstrates “stunning naiveté.”
On one side of the debate are the Americanists who believe, as the Founding Fathers intended, that the Constitution of the United States is “the supreme law of the land.” On the other side of the debate are the globalists who advocate that “customary and international law,” international organizations, conventions and resolutions should take precedence over national sovereignty. In this worldview, nations which constitute the beacon of liberty and human rights would hold no sway over those which snuff out freedom and human dignity.
Bolton pointed out the near-theological weight that Obama places on treaties, international organizations, and multi-lateral collaborations. He is indeed a “post-American President.” As Evan Thomas from Newsweek explained, Obama is “standing above the country, above – above the world, he’s sort of God….He’s going to bring all different sides together.” Central to Obama’s worldview is his obvious rejection of American exceptionalism, made clear in numerous prior statements. This view maintains that the US is merely one of 192 UN members, with no special role over that of other countries.
Obama’s positions stem from the false assumption that all countries, cultures and religions share common values, interests and goals. This gross misconception has led the President down the dangerous path of advocating treaties and policies which will drastically weaken America’s national security and reduce her ability to defend herself. The President’s ultimate vision is that of a nuclear-free world. His “stunning naiveté,” as Bolton phrased it, has led the President to believe that if America takes the first steps toward disarming herself, she will set a virtuous example for the rest of the world, and her enemies will then follow suit. This misguided belief has inspired Obama to pursue the following national security goals:
-Become signatory to the International Criminal Court ceding prosecutorial jurisdiction to the international community. Countries that may themselves be human rights violators would be able to prosecute Americans for alleged violations of human rights to which their countries have no connection. For example, Obama has refused to promise that he would disallow former Bush officials to be criminally tried in foreign courts for implementing enhanced interrogation techniques in the War on Terror.
-Sign the new bilateral Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), thus “re-setting” American-Russian relations. This treaty will obligate Russia and the US to reduce their number of nuclear warheads by 30%. Obama hopes that Tehran will follow America’s lead in nuclear stockpile reductions.
-Become signatory and ratify a number of multi-lateral treaties including the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty, the Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty; and the Landmines Convention.
Additionally, though not mentioned in Bolton’s speech, Obama has already cut the American national security defense budget substantially, and impeded our ability to update expired nuclear weapons.
There is no doubt that contrary to the President’s assertions, enemies of freedom who seek the demise of America will view America’s reduced ability to defend herself as weakness, not virtue. They will likely seize the opportunity to gain military advantage. This puts America’s safety and national security at greater, not lesser risk.
Additionally, it places America in a position where it is more difficult to achieve success in diplomatic negotiations, a tactic which Obama seems to place as high priority. The President advocates meeting with terror states, rogue states and hostile states without pre-condition in diplomatic efforts. However, without a healthy national security system in place, the leverage he needs to attain his goals is substantially reduced.
President Reagan had it right: the maintenance of a healthy military, an effective missile defense system, and cutting edge weaponry is not tantamount to an invitation to war. Rather, these can be used as leverage in diplomatic negotiations in addition to serving as protection against enemy forces, should the need arise. In the age of Obama, Americans must stand their ground and insist that the policies set forth by elected officials will produce “peace through strength.” After all, it is “we the people” to whom they must answer.
The Coming Deficit Disaster
The president says he understands the urgency of our fiscal crisis, but his policies are the equivalent of steering the economy toward an iceberg.
By Douglas Holtz-Eakin
President Barack Obama took office promising to lead from the center and solve big problems. He has exerted enormous political energy attempting to reform the nation's health-care system. But the biggest economic problem facing the nation is not health care. It's the deficit. Recently, the White House signaled that it will get serious about reducing the deficit next year—after it locks into place massive new health-care entitlements. This is a recipe for disaster, as it will create a new appetite for increased spending and yet another powerful interest group to oppose deficit-reduction measures.
Our fiscal situation has deteriorated rapidly in just the past few years. The federal government ran a 2009 deficit of $1.4 trillion—the highest since World War II—as spending reached nearly 25% of GDP and total revenues fell below 15% of GDP. Shortfalls like these have not been seen in more than 50 years.
Going forward, there is no relief in sight, as spending far outpaces revenues and the federal budget is projected to be in enormous deficit every year. Our national debt is projected to stand at $17.1 trillion 10 years from now, or over $50,000 per American. By 2019, according to the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) analysis of the president's budget, the budget deficit will still be roughly $1 trillion, even though the economic situation will have improved and revenues will be above historical norms.
The planned deficits will have destructive consequences for both fairness and economic growth. They will force upon our children and grandchildren the bill for our overconsumption. Federal deficits will crowd out domestic investment in physical capital, human capital, and technologies that increase potential GDP and the standard of living. Financing deficits could crowd out exports and harm our international competitiveness, as we can already see happening with the large borrowing we are doing from competitors like China.
At what point, some financial analysts ask, do rating agencies downgrade the United States? When do lenders price additional risk to federal borrowing, leading to a damaging spike in interest rates? How quickly will international investors flee the dollar for a new reserve currency? And how will the resulting higher interest rates, diminished dollar, higher inflation, and economic distress manifest itself? Given the president's recent reception in China—friendly but fruitless—these answers may come sooner than any of us would like.
Mr. Obama and his advisers say they understand these concerns, but the administration's policy choices are the equivalent of steering the economy toward an iceberg. Perhaps the most vivid example of sending the wrong message to international capital markets are the health-care reform bills—one that passed the House earlier this month and another under consideration in the Senate. Whatever their good intentions, they have too many flaws to be defensible.
First and foremost, neither bends the health-cost curve downward. The CBO found that the House bill fails to reduce the pace of health-care spending growth. An audit of the bill by Richard Foster, chief actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, found that the pace of national health-care spending will increase by 2.1% over 10 years, or by about $750 billion. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's bill grows just as fast as the House version. In this way, the bills betray the basic promise of health-care reform: providing quality care at lower cost.
Second, each bill sets up a new entitlement program that grows at 8% annually as far as the eye can see—faster than the economy will grow, faster than tax revenues will grow, and just as fast as the already-broken Medicare and Medicaid programs. They also create a second new entitlement program, a federally run, long-term-care insurance plan.
Finally, the bills are fiscally dishonest, using every budget gimmick and trick in the book: Leave out inconvenient spending, back-load spending to disguise the true scale, front-load tax revenues, let inflation push up tax revenues, promise spending cuts to doctors and hospitals that have no record of materializing, and so on.
If there really are savings to be found in Medicare, those savings should be directed toward deficit reduction and preserving Medicare, not to financing huge new entitlement programs. Getting long-term budgets under control is hard enough today. The job will be nearly impossible with a slew of new entitlements in place.
In short, any combination of what is moving through Congress is economically dangerous and invites the rapid acceleration of a debt crisis. It is a dramatic statement to financial markets that the federal government does not understand that it must get its fiscal house in order.
What to do? The best option would be for the president to halt Congress's rush to fiscal suicide, and refocus on slowing the dangerous growth in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. He should call on Congress to pass a comprehensive reform of our income and payroll tax systems that would generate revenue sufficient to fund its spending desires in a pro-growth and fair fashion.
Reducing entitlement spending and closing tax loopholes to create a fairer tax system with more balanced revenues is politically difficult and requires sacrifice. But we will avert a potentially devastating credit crisis, increase national savings, drive productivity and wage growth, and enhance our international competitiveness.
The time to worry about the deficit is not next year, but now. There is no time to waste.
_____________
Mr. Holtz-Eakin is former director of the Congressional Budget Office and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. This is adapted from testimony he gave before the Senate Committee on the Budget on Nov. 10.
Data provided by Nick Schulz
Obama to America: Bend Over and Cough
By Larry Elder
Americans resoundingly reject ObamaCare. What, then, accounts for the Democrats’ determination?
Democrats believe health care is a right. Start with that premise and everything else makes complete sense. Rights — whether the right to vote or to freely assemble or to avoid self-incrimination — exist independent of popular feeling, poll numbers or even, in the case of health care, the Constitution.
Democrats don’t care how much ObamaCare costs. When President Barack Obama addressed Republicans, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., carefully outlined the costs of this “reform.” He explained why costs figure to go up, not down. To someone truly interested in a cost-benefit analysis, these points warrant a rebuttal. But as MSNBC host Ed Schultz said, when it comes to health care reform and money, “I don’t care how much it costs.” An owner of an NFL team fired his coach despite the team’s winning record. He explained, “I gave him an unlimited expense account — and he exceeded it.” To Democrats, “economic justice” knows no price tag.
Democrats consider election losses a small price to pay for health care “reform.” Predictions range from moderate fall election losses to a bloodbath resulting in a Republican takeover of the House and possibly even the Senate. To this Democrats say, “So what?” Once health care reform becomes law, that’s that. Only a Republican charge with a filibuster-proof Republican supermajority in the Senate could undo it. Besides, President Bill Clinton got re-elected when the Republicans took over the House. And although he gives Republicans no credit, Clinton thereafter governed closer to the center, turned House Speaker Newt Gingrich into a convenient whipping boy, cruised to re-election and left office with a budget surplus. Obama, Democrats figure, could do a lot worse.
Democrats blame Americans’ confusion about ObamaCare’s virtues on Republican “lies.” Democrats claim that ObamaCare would decrease costs while retaining the same or better health care quality.
Republicans say the opposite. Massachusetts’ RomneyCare, which is similar to ObamaCare, has failed to reduce costs. The three big entitlement programs — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — are all in deep financial trouble. At inception, the programs’ cost estimates were wildly underestimated. None of this provides cautionary lessons. Republicans lie.
Democrats believe that they truly care about people and that Republicans don’t. Obama tells of an uninsured self-employed Ohio woman receiving cancer treatment at the Cleveland Clinic.
The woman, he says, faces the prospect of losing her home because of the hospital bills. Never mind the Cleveland Clinic offers millions of dollars of non-reimbursed care annually. Never mind that the world-renowned medical facility said it has no intention of going after her home. And never mind that the woman, according to the hospital, is likely eligible for several charitable programs.
Democrats say, “If you like things as they are, don’t worry.” Eighty-five percent of Americans have health insurance, and 89 percent of them are satisfied with it. This poses a problem for “reform.”
MSNBC’s Chris Matthews once wrote that because HillaryCare failed to calm the satisfied, it collapsed. “People,” said Matthews, “saw their hard-won benefits and options being siphoned off to fund the health needs of all comers. Instead of securing the health care of the ‘working family,’ Hillary Clinton was offering ‘universal coverage’ for those who didn’t work, financed by those who did. It was an offer people were eager and quick to refuse.”
Democrats say, “If you like your plan and your doctor, you can keep them.” But won’t some employers drop their employee plans, pay the fines and slough the costs onto the taxpayers? And won’t some doctors, as polls suggest, restrict their practices or quit altogether? No, because, well, they just won’t.
Democrats bask in an Obama-loving liberal traditional media. The media cheerlead for health care “reform” and desperately want to give the President a “victory” — while accepting preposterous claims at face value. ObamaCare promises to extend health insurance to 30 million people; promises financial assistance to those unable to afford insurance; requires all employers to offer health insurance or pay fines; requires every American to obtain insurance or pay a fine; and promises to attack “unwarranted” insurance premium increases while requiring insurers to enroll those with pre-existing illness without dropping anyone’s coverage. And it would lawfully achieve all of this without increasing the deficit!
Democrats believe that if people are too dumb right now to see the benefits of ObamaCare, someday they will. If not, opponents will be powerless to do anything. Some people refuse to see what’s best. That’s why God created Democrats.
Democrats ultimately want a Canadian-style single-payer system. ObamaCare will result in cost overruns, caregivers driven out of business, declining quality, rationing, reduced innovation and bureaucrats determining who gets what, how and when. What then?
When the complaints grow loud enough, Democrats will be ready — with a plan to “reform” the “reform.”
Reflections on the Revolution in America
By Victor Davis Hanson
America’s Extreme Make-over
These are exciting though scary revolutionary times, akin to the constant acrimony in the fourth-century BC polis, mid-nineteenth century revolutionary Europe, or — perhaps in a geriatric replay — the 1960s. This is an era when the fundamental assumptions of the individual and the state are now being redefined, albeit in a weird, high-tech, globalized landscape.
Radical But Well Off
A word of caution: we are not talking about hoi polloi versus hoi oligoi, or the commune on the barricades fighting the estate owners. No, not this time around.
Instead, the present attempt to remake America is the effort of the liberal well-to-do — highly educated at mostly private universities, nursed on three decades of postmodern education, either with inherited wealth or earning top salaries, lifestyles of privilege indistinguishable from those they decry as selfish, and immune from the dictates they impose on others.
Such are basically the profiles of the Obama cabinet and sub-cabinet, the pillars of liberalism in the Congress and state legislatures, the public intellectuals in the universities and foundations, the arts crowd, and the Hollywood elite. Let us be clear about that.
The Distant Poor
They are all battling on behalf of “them,” the poorer half of America, currently in need of some sort of housing, education, food, or legal subsidy, whom the above mentioned elite, in the way they live, send their children to school, socialize, and vacation so studiously avoid. (The New York Times owners are likely to follow the cut-throat business practices of Wall Street, live in the most refined areas of New York, and assume privileges indistinguishable from other CEOs; the difference is that they so visibly care about those they never see or seek out).
Note well the term “poor.” These are not Dickensian or Joads poor, but largely Americans who by the standards of the 1940s would be considered lucky. Partly because of globalized Chinese consumer goods, and partly redistributive practices of a half-century, our current “underclass” has access to clothes, electronics, entertainment, apartments, cell phones, transportation, etc., undreamed of by the middle class of the recent past. I live in one of the poorest areas of one of the poorest counties in a bankrupt state; and those I see poor are not like those I saw 40 years ago in the same locale.
No, the revolution is not one of the abject poor and starving storming the Bastille, but of the angry and self-righteous well-off— angry as hell that the less well-off are living lives quite differently from the very well-off. (A trodden down poor person today flies standby from San Francisco to LAX; a very rich person gets into his $50 million Gulfstream — but note modernism’s paradox: the poor person’s United Airlines pilots are as good, he gets there as safely and in some comfort, and not much later as well.)
Funny Revolutionaries
Some of the revolutionaries are guided by genuine noblesse oblige. Others act out of guilt and can justify their own consumption if they “care” for a distant poorer other. Still more explain their own privilege through using government to redistribute income. A few are driven by genuine hatred — stemming from the fact that the highly educated academic or artist makes far less than the doctor, lawyer, CEO, or — heaven forbid — tire store owner, family orthodontist, or owner of a half dozen Little Caesar pizza franchises.
How can that be that the PhD who reads Old English, or the painter who emulates Pollock, or the writer who is the next Fitzgerald, or the AP teacher is given so much less by society than the crass, smug captain of industry, who reads less, has no real taste, and hardly understands his own existential dilemma? Should not salary and capital be predicated on good intentions, high education, rhetoric and argumentation, and a bit of necessary sarcasm?
Liberal Endangered Species
Over the last fifty years it was received wisdom that a liberal Democrat could not be entrusted to run the U.S. LBJ’s Great Society had largely failed. Its legacy were debts, high taxes, bloated bureaucracies, the destruction of the inner-city family, and welfare dependency.
Jimmy Carter’s administration was forever known for 1979, the annus terribilis in which all of his prior sanctimonious preaching came home to roost in one year — the Chinese invaded Vietnam, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the Iranians invaded our embassy in Teheran, the communist government in exile invaded Nicaragua, along with the rise of radical Islam, the abdication of the shah, and so on. I’ll pass on his simultaneous rising unemployment, rising interest, and rising inflation.
Bill Clinton, who never received 50% of the vote, wisely after 1994 governed from the left/center. In both the trivial (school uniforms, grandstanding about some subsidies for more policemen, etc.) and the profound (welfare reform, balanced budgets), he finally rejected Carterism — albeit with the same symbolic leftist appointments.
That Perfect Storm, Again
We have discussed, with the advent of Barack Obama, the liberal clouds lined up in perfect storm fashion as never before: a) Obama waged a brilliant stealth campaign, as the Senate’s most partisan member. The Rev. Wright devotee, Wall Street favorite, and rejecter of public campaign financing somehow ran as centrist, purple state anti-Wall Street populist; b) ennui after 8 years of Republicans helped; c) so did the good will about the landmark candidacy of our first serious black presidential candidate; d) the September 2008 meltdown destroyed McCain’s 2-4% lead for good (even though Wall Street had given far more to Obama, and its bad actors were empowered by the Freddie/Fannie mess); e) the McCain campaign at times seemed to want to lose nobly than to win in a Chicago barroom fight.
The New America?
The result is that we are witnessing a quiet but insidious revolution. At home, if successful, the state and its vast array of newly hired employees, will administer our health care system, as well as education loans (and that will need a sort of new agency like the Postal Service or DMV). We now take for granted take-overs of much of the automobile industry and financial organizations. Should cap and trade pass, the administration would be dictating energy use. If you add it up — going to the doctor, driving a car, stopping by an ATM, flipping on the lights, taking out a student loan — you could run bump into a lot of new federal bureaucrats. And that’s the point, isn’t it after all?
I doubt anyone in the administration believes that these new public sectors of the economy will be better run. (After all, the Obamas themselves did not wish to live in a city-run housing tract, or send their children to an inner-city public school: wishing to be paid by the government is rather different than relying on the government).
So What’s the Plan?
So the point instead is I think fourfold:
a) those who profit from running these new agencies will be our new anointed class, at the top, Ivy-League technocrats, and lower down among the ranks, the politically deserving: power and patronage;
b) the resultant cost increases will require more taxes on those whose ill-gotten gains should be properly redistributed to the commune; gorge the beast;
c) in political terms, a constituency that either administers or receives federal larges (think of an ACORN/SEIU hybrid) will prove a predictably loyal base in future elections: dependent future voters;
d) federal and state wages and pensions will remind us all during tough times that government “service” is the only steady, reliable, and fair employer: we will all end up the same.
Some readers point out — “But wait, this is insane: they will kill the golden goose. What fuels redistributive government are taxes from the creation of private wealth that demands open markets, incentives for profit, reasonable taxes to allow enjoyment of profits, principled exploitation of natural resources, and government enhancement rather than restriction of business.”
Why Do They Do it?
But I think the Obamians either have not read history and so do not appreciate how statism/socialism/communism have impoverished all that they have touched, or they assume capitalism solely is run by nice-guy billionaires like Buffet, Gates, and Soros who apparently clapped their hands, made a few billion, and then are happy to live on a billion or two and give the rest away to progressive causes.
There is no appreciation that scrappy, often grubby Americans this minute are scrambling on their computer terminals, on their forklifts, in their commuting cars to run a business, provide a service, or move up the employment ladder in hopes of improving their lot and leaving behind something for their kids. They are the engines of capitalism and they don’t often go to Yale, or Rev. Wright’s church, or work at Human Resources Department. And when they all do, we will be in sorry shape.
America Flipped
Abroad, the world is confused. They want to, and still do, mouth the old stale anti-American envy. But even our critics sense that America is morphing into something more like, well, themselves. (When Obamians brag that the world is beginning to like us, they sort of have a point: the world’s communitarians (the majority on this planet) do like us becoming like them.)
There is a lot of irony here to be sure. Europe played good cop to our bad and posed as the soft-power utopian, while assuming American military power was always there to support Western interests. Not now. We are gravitating to the left of Europe on issues in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. Our Latin American policies seem closest to Brazil’s. In the Middle East we see eye to eye with Jordan. Whatever Britain seems to do, we either ignore it, take it for granted, or vote present on it. Israel is a neutral now, not an ally; bowing to the Saudi autocrat is not “insulting,” an announcement that Jerusalem might build some apartments apparently is.
We laugh at the lunatic appointments like a Van Jones or Anita Dunn, or some of the lawyers at Justice who seemed so worried about the plight of terrorists at Guantanamo. But they were logical appointments, not aberrations, and are matched by hundreds of the more anonymous now working in government. We shall meet new names and new faces when a comprehensive immigration bill comes up (=blanket amnesty), and cap and trade is reintroduced.
The Mind of the Revolutionary
Where do these ideologies derive? Again, I wish I could say that they are grassroots driven, by the muscular classes who are victimized by business and, in their cry-from-the-heart protests, demand a fairer cutting of the pie. But so often the utopianism is from above, and predicated on abstract education, relative affluence, and little exposure to business or indeed much beyond the metrosexual world in general.
So fascinating these modern revolutionaries. A Buffet does not choose to pay the high income tax rate on his earnings, though he surely could in lieu of lecturing how taxes are too low. A Gates Sr. does not plan for his offspring to pay into the strapped treasury needed inheritance taxes, though he remonstrates that they must be raised on everyone else. A Geithner does not comply with the tax code, though he assumes it should be raised on others. A Gore lectures on honesty and truth and science on his way to a $100 million con that turns him from an affluent ex-politician into a global grandee.
I’m sorry — I don’t take seriously much of anything from this wannabe revolutionary bunch.
Fishing Gone?
By Rich Trzupek
Last week the blogosphere erupted with outrage, as conservatives declared that Barack Obama was going to ban recreational fishing, while liberals rolled their collective eyes in response and said that such claims were utterly absurd. As usual, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. The Obama administration isn’t trying to ban sport fishing – at least not yet – but it is putting the mechanisms in place to restrict fishing in the future, as the slow bureaucratic wheels of “progress” inevitably grind forward.
The root cause of angler concern was the “Interim Framework For Effective Coastal and Marine Spatial Planning” issued by the Interagency Ocean Policy Taskforce (latest version dated December 9, 2009). That document, which we can shorthand “CMSP,” does not call for an outright ban on recreational fishing. However, the CMSP report specifically lists “recreational fishing” as an activity that needs to be “better managed” (page two of the report). Perhaps “better managed” translates into “leave fishermen alone,” but one may be forgiven for thinking not.
The CMSP report details a typically grandiose progressive vision. The oceans and the Great Lakes are in danger. How do we know this? Never mind the details, just take the government’s word for it. There’s a problem and the Obama administration is here to fix it. That fix naturally entails every human activity remotely connected to the sea. Among the activities that Ocean Policy Taskforce will examine are the following: commerce and transportation (i.e., shipping); commercial fishing; oil and gas exploration and development; recreational fishing and traditional hunting; and fishing and gathering.
The taskforce will start by dividing up the aquatic world into nine zones, called “Regional Planning Areas,” that stretch from American possessions in the western Pacific to the Caribbean Sea. At that point, the taskforce will determine the best way to “manage” (aka: regulate) the various activities within each Regional Planning Area that might affect the health of the oceans and Great Lakes. Of course, activities like commercial fishing, oil and gas exploration and shipping are already subject to heaps of regulation designed to protect the environment. Many would argue, myself included, that this regulatory structure, however bloated, has been pretty successful. Lake Erie, which environmentalists proclaimed “dead” back in the seventies, is teaming with marine life today, for example.
It should be noted that there are problem areas in the oceans, like dead zones that appear periodically in certain coastal areas around the world. Global warming zealots believe that these dead zones are caused by climate change, but then global warming zealots are sure that climate change is responsible for practically everything bad that happens on planet earth, up to and including blizzards. The more likely culprit is agricultural runoff that consumes dissolved oxygen in the water. In any case, existing regulatory strictures, like the Clean Water Act, are more than capable of analyzing and dealing with such problems.
One can reasonably expect that “Effective Coastal and Marine Spatial” Planning will lead to certain recommendations that will – of course – be based on the best scientific knowledge available. The Obama administration is always blathering on about the way it relies on science when making environmental decisions. Somehow, the best scientific knowledge available always seems to dovetail quite nicely with environmentalist agendas. It makes you wonder who the EPA has been employing in its planning and research departments for the last few decades.
Perhaps this relationship will change when it comes to coastal and marine spatial planning, but I wouldn’t place any bets. Obama’s EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has the methodology down pat: create a crisis, pick out some “independent” scientists who you know will give the answer you want and use their foregone conclusions to justify the actions that your pals at the Sierra Club have been urging for years.
Not that industry won’t have a role in figuring out spatial planning. The EPA always includes stakeholders when it comes up with a new set of regulations and the Interagency Ocean Policy Taskforce promises more of the same as it tackles spatial planning. Representatives of the oil and natural gas industry, for example, will surely attend meetings, offer comments and produce research, the vast majority of which will be politely ignored so that the Obama administration can say that they “listened” to industry before promulgating their latest and greatest set of rules to hamstring industry.
Further restrictions on sport fishing seem inevitable, although such restrictions wouldn’t be put in place immediately, but farther down the road when the all-important alarming narrative has been given a firm foundation and further crisis management is therefore “necessary.”
The most immediate worry is that the taskforce will conclude that further oil and gas exploration in coastal areas, while desirable for economic reasons, would cause too much environmental harm to be allowed. Obama would then shed the appropriate crocodile tears and explain how, while he really, really would have loved to increase domestic energy production, it’s just not worth the risk. And – gosh – according to the scientists, the damage would cost more than oil and natural gas would be worth anyway. So let’s go get those green jobs everybody! After all: “what’s good for the environment is good for the economy!” (You can expect to hear that last slogan approximately fourteen thousand times between now and November 2012).
One must say this about progressives: they are relentless and imaginative. The Ocean Policy Taskforce’s plans seem innocent enough at first blush, but what they represent is merely a first step down the long, familiar road of establishing a pressing need that only big government will be able to address.
The Audacity of Extremism
By James Lewis
Audacity is supposed to be a talent in great generals — at least some of them. That’s where the phrase comes from: “L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace!” It’s attributed to the Kaiser Friedrich der Grosse, to Georges Danton, (one of the big head-choppers of the French Revolution), and to Napoleon Bonaparte.
Audacity can be effective in warfare, because surprise assaults can break through a Maginot Line.
But another word for audacity is “gambling.” The price you often have to pay is overreach and defeat. Napoleon’s audacity led straight to an historic defeat for Imperial France in Russia. France never recovered — it’s had two straight centuries of military defeats since Napoleon. His invasion of Russia also caused unimaginable suffering, just like Hitler’s invasion a century later. Audacity is not necessarily a good thing.
When Obama uses the phrase “The Audacity of Hope,” we hope he’s talking about peaceful audacity. But we can't be sure — because Obama and his inner circle are extremists in any reasonable meaning of that word, certainly by the standards of normal American politics. That's why Obama seems so foreign. That is what “radical” means; it’s another word for “extremist.” These folks love to preen themselves on being radical. Rules for Radicals is their Bible, and it’s Obama's manual for “community organizing” — which looks just like community destruction. Alinsky dedicated Rules for Radicals to Lucifer, because Lucifer is the symbol of destructive extremism. Don't tell me these folks are mainstream Americans. No way.
Obama is running the most extremist administration in American history. It’s chockfull of wild-eyed bizarros like Van Jones, Rahm Gawdhelpus, and the whole Chicago Gang. How many presidential chiefs of staff have publicly yelled “Dead! Dead! Dead!” while stabbing a steak knife into a dinner table, just to show what he wanted to do to his political enemies? Rahm Emanuel’s the only one. How many have done the Godfather schtick by sending a dead fish to a journalist? Rahmbo wants to scare people, and Obama knew that when he hired him. It can't be an accident that Rahm is Obama’s Capo di tutti Capi.
That’s extremism. Maybe it’s normal in Moscow or Khazakstan. In American politics it’s extremist.
Obama's Foundation Funded the Former "Communist Party" Leader By Matt Hadro CNSNews.com
A foundation chaired by Barack Obama that was designed to improve Chicago public schools gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Small Schools Workshop, an organization led by former Weatherman Bill Ayers and by Michael Klonsky, a former chairman of both Students for a Democratic Society and, according to The Washington Post and New York Times, a group called the “Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist).”
"Ayers and an old comrade from SDS, Mike Klonsky, run the Small Schools Workshop to mentor and provide guidance and technical support to educators seeking to start small schools,” The Chicago Tribune reported on Sept. 16, 2001.
In a September 6, 1977 article headlined “China’s Ideal American; U.S. Marxist Gets Red-Carpet Welcome in China,” The Washington Post said Klonsky was “chairman of the newly organized Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) of the United States of America.”
“Secretary of State Cyrus Vance got a good reception in Peking last month, but nothing like the red-carpet treatment received by that distinguished representative of the American people, Michael Klonsky,” the Post reported, before asking: “Michael who?”
Answering its own question, the Post said: “Klonsky, as it turns out, is the chairman of the newly organized Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) of the United States of America, an amalgam of various pro-Peking leftist troops whose memberships are not thought to total more than a few hundred people--if that. Klonsky enjoyed a period of notoriety during the late 1960s when he headed Students for a Democratic Society and, for the first time, brought a radical Communist rhetoric to that New Left organization.”
The August 26, 1977 New York Times, citing Klonsky as leader of the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist), reported that he was one of only five Americans other than Secretary of State Vance and former President Richard Nixon and two Chinese-American scientists to have met with new Chinese Communist Party Chairman Hua Kuo-feng.
According to publicly available IRS 990 documents, the Small Schools Workshop that Klonsky ran with Bill Ayers received at least $800,000 from the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) between 1998 and 2002. Obama chaired the CAC.
Leftist Activist Klonsky “spent his college years in the late 60’s and early 70’s as an activist at what is now California State University, Northridge,” according to a March 5, 2000 story in The Chicago Tribune.
It added: “Mike Klonsky, who teaches education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, was a member of the Students for a Democratic Society and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).”
Klonsky in 1968 “was national chairman of the S.D.S. and a demonstration organizer” during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, The New York Times reported on Aug. 26, 1996.
In an Aug. 24, 1996 piece in the Toronto Star that described Klonsky as an “angry student organizer” during the 1968 Democratic convention, Klonsky was quoted as saying he had entered the “political process.”
“He heads a project to revitalize Chicago's inner city schools,” the Star reported. “He shows up at the office in jeans and a T-shirt. He is speaking out against racism, working with the poor and railing against the rise of right-wing politics in America.”
“We have to keep our guard up, make sure that progressive people are still active and conscious and aware," Klonsky told the Star. “I’ve become part of the political process.”
When the SDS splintered in 1969 – in what The Chicago Tribune described as “a showy and disastrous split”--Ayers, his now-wife Bernardine Dohrn and others formed the violent Weatherman faction.
“I led the fight against the Weatherman,” Klonsky told the Tribune in Sept. 2001. “I wasn’t big on blowing up toilets and statues.”
Klonsky then founded the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) (CPML) in June 1977 in the Midwest, according to the Washington Post’s September 1977 article, after which he traveled to China in July 1977 and met with the Chairman Hua Kuo-feng of the Chinese Communist Party, who gave him, according to the Post, “what still stands as the warmest reception ever given an American by the new Chinese leader.”
“Vice Premier Li Hsien-nien told Klonsky at the banquet that the founding of the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) of the United States reflects the aspirations of the proletariat and other working people of the United States and is a new victory for the Marxist-Leninist movement in the United States,” the Post reported.
The Post continued: “Klonsky replied, according to the Chinese news agency, ‘As a Marxist-Leninist party in one of the two superpowers, and recognizing our responsibility to lead the struggle to topple the U.S. imperialist ruling class, we are determined as well to make a contribution to the worldwide struggle against the two superpowers, the United States and Soviet social-imperialism, the main enemies of the peoples of the world.’”
The party collapsed in 1981, however.
“Between 1979 and 1981, the CPML, which had become internationally recognized as China's favorite American party (CPML chairman Mike Klonsky was repeatedly feted with state-dinner-level visits to Beijing), dissolved in a rapid series of factional splits and departures,” Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Garrow wrote in July 9, 2002 Village Voice review of “Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che” by Max Elbaum.
School reform advocate In the 1990s, Klonsky became a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he and Bill Ayers would join forces in the Small Schools Workshop.
“We started the Small Schools Workshop in 1991, with the goal of supporting Chicago’s reform-minded teachers as they tried to create new, smaller learning communities,” Klonsky and Ayers wrote in a February 2006 article they jointly authored for Phi Delta Kappan magazine, titled “Renaissance 2010: The Small Schools Movement Meets the Ownership Society.”
The bio-line for the article specified that Ayers founded the Small Schools Workshop in 1991 and that Klonsky “has served as the workshop’s director since 1993.”
“Our vision of small schools was closely connected with issues of social justice, equity, and community,” they wrote.
Klonsky repeatedly has been identified as “co-director” or “director” of the Workshop.
An Aug. 26, 1996 Associated Press story noted: “Mike Klonsky, a former SDS leader and ’68 protester, is helping reform Chicago’s troubled public schools as co-director of the Small Schools Workshop at the University of Illinois-Chicago.”
A March 5, 2000 Chicago Tribune story said Klonsky “remains active as co-director of the Small Schools Workshop based at UIC (University of Illinois at Chicago).”
A 2006 news release from Nova Southeastern University in Florida, announced Klonsky’s arrival there, identifying the educator as “director of the Small Schools Workshop in Chicago, Illinois.”
Of his collaboration with Ayers, Klonsky told the Chicago Tribune in 2001: “Now we’re on the same train. We still disagree about things, but . . . as long as we don’t talk about ’69, then we’re OK.”
“We’ve learned how to work within the system. The fight to save and improve public education embodies all the issues we were fighting for back then,” he added.
Reached by phone by CNSNews.com, Klonsky declined to be interviewed.
The Audacity of Irony By Victor Davis Hanson
“Hope and change” meet reality. The ironies bring us back to the unlamented days of Jimmy Carter. We have seen irony before, when the moralist Jimmy Carter chastised us with sermons about our paranoid, inordinate fear of Communism and our amoral unconcern with human rights, even as the dividends of his policies were the Soviets in Afghanistan and the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran — and even greater global misery than before.
For the last 24 months a youthful Barack Obama has daily offered unspecified “hope and change” idealism — all set against the supposed cynical wrongdoing of the tired Bush administration. In the unhinged manner in which his supporters turned a center-right president like George Bush into some sort of sinister reactionary, so too they deified a rookie senator as the long-awaited liberal messiah.
How could irony not follow from all that?
For the past seven years the United States has seen no repeat of 9/11, although plots were uncovered and threats from radical Islam were leveled in serial fashion. The ability to intercept and hold terrorists overseas, to tap into cell-phone calls abroad, to detain terrorists caught on the field of battle, and to ensure that intelligence agencies freely swapped information was critical to our unexpected salvation.
Like Lincoln, Wilson, FDR, Truman, and other wartime presidents (though none of the above witnessed 3,000 Americans butchered on the soil of the United States by foreign agents), George Bush, with strong bipartisan support, enacted new wartime protocols in the effort to protect the security of the United States. Only a fool would suggest that these homeland-security efforts were unnecessary, or that, in unprecedented fashion, they shredded the Constitution.
But such foolish criticism was exactly the sort leveled against the Bush security protocols by candidate Obama. And so almost at the minute he assumed governance, the now President Obama discovered that his Bush the Constitution-shredder had been a clumsy caricature of Bush the sober commander-in-chief. For Obama on the stump, the choices were endless; in the Oval Office suddenly only bad and worse. So the new president, the favorite of the ACLU, is now in the ironic position of maintaining the hated Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act reforms, keeping the repugnant Patriot Act, retaining “extraordinary renditions,” and continuing — task forces and promises aside — operation of the Gulag at Guantanamo.
There were many legitimate critiques of the Iraq war. But insisting, as Barack Obama did, that we invaded recklessly and in haste was not one of them. From the fall of the Taliban in December 2001 to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the Bush administration deliberately and in public fashion sought debate in the Congress for over a year, received bipartisan authorization, and tried for months to win sanction from the United Nations.
In contrast, Barack Obama immediately upon entering office demanded the largest government expansion in the history of the nation. The staggering debt program will require nearly a trillion dollars in borrowing to fund all sorts of entitlements and redistributive efforts, and in revolutionary fashion redefine the role of government itself. Obama pronounced the current economic crisis the moral equivalent of war, and he wanted a national mobilization to meet it — pronto.
But unlike the Bush administration, which took 15 months to prepare the country for a real war in Iraq, the Obama administration gave the public only a few hours to read the final draft of the legislation before it was made into law. Where the polarizing partisan George Bush managed to obtain the vote of majorities in both parties to remove Saddam Hussein, the healing bipartisan Barack Obama lacked the support of even a single Republican in the House and won over a mere three Republicans in the Senate.
Liberals who once screamed that congressional opponents of the Iraq war were being unfairly tagged as unpatriotic by the Bush administration now yelled louder that the opponents of the Obama debt program were, in fact, unpatriotic.
Bush was pilloried for supposedly hyping al-Qaeda in order to create a security state. Obama trumped that by proclaiming that the present recession is a catastrophe, a disaster, a Great Depression. He ceased his scare-mongering only when he had exhausted the vocabulary of doom. “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” bragged Rahm Emanuel, reminding us that the envisioned Obama socialism could take root only if a climate of fear was created.
In foreign policy the irony is more telling still.
Obama on the campaign trail either did not grasp that Bush’s second-term foreign policy was largely centrist — or found it politically advantageous to ignore that fact. Either way, irony followed. The problem with Europe’s failing to get tough with Iran, or failing to fight in Afghanistan, or appeasing Russia, was not George Bush, but the nature of Europe. Bush inherited, he did not create, Osama bin Laden, Putin’s authoritarianism, Ahmadinejad’s Iran, Chávez’s Venezuela, Kim Jong Il’s North Korea, Qaddafi’s Libya, or the Dr. A. Q. Khan laboratory.
More often, Bush ameliorated, rather than exacerbated, these problems, by being both tough and, yes, multilateral — as friendly governments in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, and India attested. Yet by demonizing George Bush — and that is how Team Obama prefaces each announcement of a new initiative — Obama has only set himself up for more irony. He can continue his first few weeks of damning Bush and emulating Jimmy Carter. But if he does, he will soon see another 9/11-like strike, more Russian pressure on Europe, more North Korean missiles, a bomb in Iran, the restarting of Dr. Khan’s nuclear franchise and its appendages in Libya and Syria, and a theocratic nuclear Pakistan.
One can make many criticisms of the Bush administration — occasional hubris, an inability to communicate its ideas, excessive federal spending, unnecessary bellicose rhetoric not matched always by commensurate action — but corruption is not really one of them. While the Republican Congress gave us Duke Cunningham, Larry Craig, and Mark Foley, the Bush administration itself was one of the most corruption-free in recent memory — no Monicas, no serial Clintongates, no pay-to-play presidential pardons, no shaking down donors for a library and a spousal Senate campaign.
So when Barack Obama of Chicago lineage — with former associates like Tony Rezko, Gov. Rod Blagojevich, Mayor Richard Daley, and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright — began offering moral platitudes about his soon-to-be-enacted revolutionary ethics, we expected the irony that always follows such hubris and brings in its wake nemesis.
Now we are witnessing one of the most scandal-plagued incipient administrations of the last half-century. And these ethical embarrassments are doubly ironic. The Treasury secretary and nominal head of the IRS is a tax dodger. The egalitarian liberal Tom Daschle, who was going to make health care accessible for the masses, was caught hiding from the tax man tens of thousands of dollars in free limousine service. Reformist cabinet nominees like Bill Richardson (who has already withdrawn) and Hilda Solis cannot themselves follow the laws they were asked to enforce. The would-be performance czar, Nancy Killefer, did not perform on her taxes. We are now awaiting a third try for commerce secretary. The more Obama railed about his new no-lobbyist policies, the more he issued exemptions for the dozen or more insider lobbyists he hired.
The list of ironies could be expanded. Reps. Maxine Waters, Barney Frank, and Gregory Meeks — infamous for their Fannie Mae laxity — now interrogate supposedly incompetent or greedy bank CEOs. Nancy Pelosi, who demanded that the Speaker of the House in novel fashion receive a government-financed private jet, rails against government-enabled private jets. Bush supposedly politicized the White House, so in reaction Obama moves control of the census — the very linchpin of the American political system — for the first time into the White House. Big Brother comes not through tapping a terrorist’s phone, but, perhaps soon, through having the state collect and centralize everyone’s medical records or monitor the content of talk radio.
Why again the audacious irony of Barack Obama?
First, George Bush was not Judas Iscariot nor was Obama Jesus Christ. In the vast abyss between those two caricatures was plenty of room for hypocrisy. The more Obama claimed moral culpability on the part of the sober Bush, the more he proved his own — either by ratifying in hypocritical fashion many of the Bush policies or by reminding the public that if Texas perennially gives us spurs, six-guns, and bring-’em-on lingo, Chicago entertains us with the likes of Tony Rezko, the Daley machine, Rahm Emanuel, and Blago.
Second, Obama did not duly appreciate the sort of pernicious culture that permeates Washington in general, and the Democratic Congress in particular. While it was easy to say that Jack Abramoff and Duke Cunningham typified a culture of Republican corruption, the truth was always that they were just the flip side to Sen. Chris Dodd and Rep. Barney Frank taking cash from Fannie Mae as it exploded, or Rep. Charles Rangel overseeing the tax code that he serially ignored, or Rep. William Jefferson stashing payoff cash in his fridge. A true messiah would have lamented the bipartisan rot in Washington, and then in Lincolnesque fashion figured out a way to clean up his own party first, and the opposition second.
The truth is that Americans don’t take well to self-appointed holy men like Woodrow Wilson or Jimmy Carter. Yes, we’ve had our rare saints, but they were reluctant moralists like Washington and Lincoln, who were recognized as such only after they had saved the nation and stoically endured slander by enemies in war and at home.
Obama can end his irony only when he accepts that he and his supporters were never saints, and his predecessor not a notable sinner, and then accepts that history will judge him on what he does rather than what he says he might do.
NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Praying for Socialized Medicine
By Mark D. Tooley
The apparent political implosion of Obamacare after Scott Brown’s Massachusetts win is already enraging the Religious Left. To have been so close to fulfilling a decades long crusade only to face defeat can be infuriating. When government controlled health care is seen as portending the advent of God’s Kingdom, then the fury is even greater.
Writing for Jim Wallis’ Sojourners, activist Valerie Dixon impatiently urged “congressional courage” to defy public opposition to Obamacare. It’s a typical Religious Left theme: Help the people even when they don’t want it!
“Now is not the time to read more into election results than we ought,” Dixon anxiously cautioned. “And even if the election were a referendum on health-care reform, so what? This is a representative democracy. It is a republic because we expect our leaders to lead.” How wonderful that the Religious Left is now interested in political and constitutional theory. More frequently, they demand virtual rule from the streets.
But Dixon explained that we should expect Congress, when overriding the people’s opposition to government-controlled health care, to summon the “moral vision to lead us forward and to have an enthusiasm and a commitment to that vision which is so strong that we will see the vision too.” In other words, maybe Americans will awake to the beauty of Obamacare if Congress will presciently force it upon an unwilling public. After all, “We need our elected officials to demonstrate the virtues necessary to do what is right for the American people.”
Evidently Dixon, like the rest of the Religious Left, does not believe that Obamacare proponents are obligated actually to persuade Americans of the merits of their “vision.” Just pass it, at whatever cost, and hope that public opinion will supinely surrender when they have no option left. “We need them to demonstrate the virtues of responsibility, commitment, complexity, and love,” Dixon serenely opined about Congress, which is so well known for these noble traits. “Now is the time for courage.”Contrary to Dixon’s insistence that a republic is supposed to be about leaders stubbornly defying the public will, America’s divided form of government is supposed to inhibit radical agendas that lack consensus support. Famously, if apocryphally, America’s founders supposedly framed the Senate especially to be a “cooling” saucer that resists the heated “vision” of zealots, with or without majority support, who want to impose what many Americans ardently oppose. “The country needs the moral clarity that universal health-care legislation will bring,” Dixon insisted. But if such a vision arouses such widespread resistance, its proponents, at least in American democracy, are obliged to argue more persuasively before the nation must kneel before it. Evidently, the Religious Left realizes its arguments have failed, but it still demands the coercive powers that Obamacare would grant.
Similarly, another Sojourners columnist bewailed the collapse of public support for Obamacare. “The insurance, pharmaceutical, medical, and financial industries are simply delighted that a majority of Americans are now unwilling to do what it takes in order to have a fair, compassionate, and reasonably priced health-care system,” fretted LaVonne Neff. “We like the health care we currently have, even though our insurance premiums and copayments increase every year as our coverage decreases and our claims are denied. We don’t want to change our system in any way. Except, of course, to make it better. And cheaper. Without actually changing anything.” She snarkily concluded “We believe in magic.”
The real “magic,” of course was the proposal that government directed health care could, through centralization and force, provide better and more expansive health care at reduced cost and increased efficiency. Neff cited the usual and now discredited claims that other Western countries have better health statistics because of government health care. Americans do have greater health problems because of behaviors not as common to Europe’s homogenous and more static societies. But America remains virtually the best place to actually receive care once sick.
Immune to factual data, history and human nature, government-controlled health care has long been and remains the object of the Religious Left’s frenzied faith. What tent-revivals once were for evangelicals, Obamacare rallies have been for the Religious Left. Last month, United Methodist, Presbyterian, and United Church of Christ lobbyists joined with Vermont socialist Senator Bernie Sanders and Moveon.org at a Capitol Hill Obamacare candle light vigil and rally. United Methodist Board of Church and Society chief Jim Winkler unthinkingly defended the Senate’s version of Obamacare’s abortion coverage, which would become one cause of its demise. “American families should have the opportunity to choose health coverage that reflects their own values and medical needs,” he implored. “A principle that should not be sacrificed in service of any political agenda.”
Surreally, Winkler further cluelessly pleaded that Congress “should stand up for the people who could be most helped by health-care reform” by “enacting meaningful legislation now that includes a strong public option.” A little later, Winkler convened a press conference with Michigan Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow and, perhaps sensing the impending collapse, became a little histrionic: “Authentic health-care reform has been delayed by insurance companies seeking to protect vast profits and grotesquely inflated executive salaries.” He further angrily alleged: “Demagogues have frightened many U.S. citizens — including the so-called “teabaggers” who are demonstrating on Capitol Hill today — into believing their health care is at risk.”
Even last month, Winkler was complaining at his press conference: “One disappointment has followed another,” while warning recalcitrant Congressmen that “they risk facing the same prophetic judgments once visited upon the rulers of Israel,” and insisting: “Now is the time for moral courage in the face of money and power.” In other words, Winkler realized most Americans opposed Obamacare but desperately demanded that Congress approve it any way. After all, it’s the Lord’s will, or so the Religious Left insists.
Winkler shrilly complained that pro-life “faith leaders of various stripes have placed their ideological and financial agendas ahead of the needs of the American people” by opposing Obamacare.
Unselfconsciously, he actually was describing the Religious Left’s own zealous and apparently failed imposition of health care statism on an unwilling nation.
Supreme Court Overturns Key Part of McCain-Feingold
By Seth McLaughlin
The US Supreme Court Thursday struck down a major portion of the landmark McCain-Feingold campaign finance laws that prevented union and corporate paid issue ads in the final 30 days of election campaigns. The court also ruled that corporations can spend as much as they want to support candidates running for Congress or President.
The historic 5-to-4 decision in Citizens United v. FEC overturned a 20-year-old ruling that said corporations can be prohibited from using money from their general treasuries to pay for their own campaign ads and rolled back centuries-old law about corporate spending. Under the ruling, corporations and unions will still be prohibited from giving direct contributions to candidates.
The ruling in many ways reflected the argument of advocates who claimed that stricter limits on campaign finance amounted to unconstitutional muzzle on free speech.
"The censorship we now confront is vast in its reach," Justice Anthony Kennedy said in his majority opinion, joined by his four more conservative colleagues.
In the dissenting opinion, Justice Paul Stevens wrote that the court made an error in treating corporate free speech the same as an individual speech free speech and that opening the door to unlimited cooperate spending increase the chances of corruption in the political system.
"The court's ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions around the nation," Justice Paul Stevens wrote in the dissenting opinion. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor joined Stevens' dissent.
The case was brought by Citizens United, a conservative advocacy group that challenged restrictions on its ability to air a 90-minute film that was highly critical of then-Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton during her 2008 presidential bid. The cased centered on whether the restrictions on political expenditures by corporations and unions stifled protected speech.
“This is a victory for Citizens United, but even more so for the First Amendment rights of all Americans,” Citizens United President David Bossie said after the ruling was released. “The fault line on this issue does not split liberals and conservatives or Republicans and Democrats. Instead, it pits entrenched establishment politicians against the very people whom they are elected to serve.”
The decision sent shock waves -- both legalistic and political -- across Capitol Hill, rattled the White House, and shook America's political landscape. The ruling is expected to reshape the way elections are conducted and have a big impact on the 2010 midterm elections, where corporations will have more financial freedom to attack Democratic efforts to reform healthcare, curb climate change, and institute financial regulations on Wall Street.
"The Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics," President Obama said in a statement released by the White House. "It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans. This ruling gives the special interests and their lobbyists even more power in Washington--while undermining the influence of average Americans who make small contributions to support their preferred candidates.”
Obama said it would immediately start to work with Democrats and Republicans on a solution to mitigate the rulings impact.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell applauded the decision.
“For too long, some in this country have been deprived of full participation in the political process,” the Kentucky Republican said. “With today’s monumental decision, the Supreme Court took an important step in the direction of restoring the First Amendment rights of these groups.”
Congressional Democratic called the decision “radical,” claimed it “undermined Democracy,” and warned that it will allow corporations to “unduly influence elections and casts a shadow of corruption on our government.”
“The Supreme Court has just predetermined the winners of next years elections,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, of New York. “It won’t be Republicans, it won’t be Democrats, it will be corporate America.”
Schumer called the decision “un-American” and said he will hold hearings on it in coming days. Schumer is chairman of the Senate Rules Committee.
Schumer added, “we will not let this decision go unchallenged” and that the goal is to try and get something that would affect the 2010 elections.
Meanwhile, Sen. John McCain, the Republican mastermind of the McCain-Feingold law, released a rather subdued statement. “I am disappointed by the decision of the Supreme Court and the lifting of the limits on corporate and union contributions," he said. "However, it appears that key aspects of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA), including the ban on soft money contributions, remain intact.”
His Democratic counterpart, Sen. Russ Feingold, of Wisconsin, was more critical of the decision, calling it, “a terrible mistake.”
“The American people will pay dearly for this decision when, more than ever, their voices are drowned out by corporate spending in our federal elections,” Feingold said.
Advocacy groups on both side of the issue line up outside Congressional building to sing their praise and air their disappointment with the decision.
Steve Simpson, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, called the ruling a “ringing endorsement” of the core principles of First Amendment and a victory for the marketplace of ideas.
“The Supreme Court recognized today that the purpose of the First Amendment is to allow individuals and Americans to speak out as loudly and as robustly as they please,” he said. “That applies whether an individual chooses to speak out alone or whether he chooses to associate with others and speak out as a group - whether that group is a corporation, an unincorporated association, a non-profit or any other sort of group.”
Others said the court decision showed “their political activism” and opened the door for foreign countries and foreign investors to influence America’s political system.
"It's the Super Bowl of bad decisions," said Common Cause president Bob Edgar, a former congressman from Pennsylvania. “Corporations aren’t individuals. Some of them are larger than countries. We need to recognize that money has influenced the debate here in Washington too long.”
The case began after Citizens United made the 90-minute documentary critical of then-Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as she sought the Democratic presidential nomination.
Citizens United wanted to air ads for the anti-Clinton movie and distribute it through video-on-demand services on local cable systems during the 2008 Democratic primary campaign.
But courts said the movie - though it resembled a movie, it sounded like a long campaign ad - should be regulated under campaign finance laws.
The High Court first heard arguments in March. Then they convened a in a special argument in September to consider whether corporations and unions should be treated differently from individuals when it comes to campaign spending.
_______________
Mr. McLaughlin is a former Washington Times reporter.
The Lies of Obama
By John Ellis
When politicians are caught out in lies, their supporters often resort to the old cliché: all politicians lie. But that is itself a lie: most don’t. Even among those who do, there are enormous differences in the importance and frequency of the lies. And it is surely now clear that this nation has a far from routine problem in the scale and regularity of President Obama’s lying.
When politicians lie they are usually trying to avoid political damage, or to make themselves look good. Bill Clinton lied (and got himself impeached) to save himself from embarrassment about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Hillary Clinton lied about being under fire in Bosnia to enhance her non-existent foreign affairs profile. Richard Nixon was forced from office because he lied to cover up his involvement in a political dirty trick. John Kerry lied about his Vietnam combat experience to blunt his anti-military reputation. But Barack Obama’s lies are far more corrosive and destructive, because they go the heart of legislation and governance, and so seriously undermine trust in government. His lies generally take a specific form: they attempt to persuade people to vote for him or his policies by categorically assuring them that they need not have the anxieties that they have been expressing. The lies say, essentially: trust me, support what I want, and I promise that what you fear will never happen. But in every case it soon becomes clear either that he knew perfectly well that what the public feared would in fact happen, or that he was giving a firm assurance that he was in no position to give, or that he had no intention of following through on his promise.
The accumulated weight of Obama’s deceit is overwhelming:
* During his campaign for the presidency and since, Obama repeatedly assured us that he would protect Medicare against cuts; but he now presses for passage of bills that include savage cuts in Medicare.
* To obtain passage of his first stimulus bill, Obama assured us that 90% of the jobs created would be in the private sector; but as he well knew, most of them were to be in the public sector.
* Early in the health care debate, Obama assured us that he had not said that he favored a single payer system; but he was on record as having said exactly that.
* Obama gave primary voters a firm assurance that if he became the nominee of the Democratic party he would (unlike Hillary Clinton) abide by the campaign finance limits of public funding; but as soon as he became the party’s nominee, he reneged on that pledge.
* During the presidential campaign Obama criticized the presence of former lobbyists in the Bush administration and solemnly assured us that he would appoint no lobbyists to his administration; but once elected he proceeded to appoint even more lobbyists than his predecessors.
* Obama criticized the size of George Bush’s deficit and promised to stop deficit spending if elected; but he has already quadrupled the size of the deficit he objected to and recklessly continues new federal spending in the trillions.
* When campaigning Obama criticized bills before the congress that were too long for anyone to be able to read and promised to stop that; but the bills he has been backing throughout his first year are infinitely longer (2000+ pages) than the ones he criticized.
* Candidate Obama promised an end to the corruption of earmarks and pork, but in the bills he has supported this year there have been more and bigger earmarks than ever before.
* Candidate Obama promised us that CIA personnel involved in the interrogation of terrorists would not be prosecuted; but his administration is now doing exactly that.
* Obama assured a joint session of Congress that the health bill he supported (pre-Stupak) would not provide public funding for abortions; but bitter resistance on the part of House Democrats to inclusion of language to that effect soon proved that it did.
* Candidate Obama promised that he would make sure that there was always enough time for the public to read legislation before it was enacted; but he has done exactly the opposite, repeatedly pressing for even faster passage of even longer bills.
* Candidate Obama met fears that he would be a tax and spend liberal by promising, emphatically and repeatedly, that those earning under $200,000 would see no increase in their taxes of any kind; but he now urges passage of a healthcare bill that breaks that pledge in many different ways, and his unrestrained increase in federal spending makes more tax increases inevitable.
* Candidate Obama promised bipartisanship and an end to partisan bickering; but in a display of especially ruthless partisanship his allies have shut Republicans out of all key meetings on his health care initiative, with the unprecedented result that domestic legislation of historic importance garnered not a single Republican vote in the Senate.
* Candidate Obama criticized his opponent’s plan to tax employer paid healthcare benefits, and promised he would not tax them; but the bill he now backs will do just that.
* Obama had promised that he would not sign a healthcare bill that would add one dime to the federal deficit; but the bill he now backs adds trillions in new federal spending, offset only by new sources of revenue that are both uncertain and more properly seen as offsetting the already existing deficit.
* Obama coerced congress into passing his stimulus bill by promising that if it were passed unemployment could go no higher then 8%; but unemployment is now at 10%, and he could not possibly have had good reason to exclude that possibility.
* Obama promised that his cap and trade legislation will create jobs; but its massive tax increases will certainly hobble the economy and destroy jobs, while green jobs in significant numbers can at best be hoped for, but never promised.
* Obama has repeatedly assured the American people that if they like their current health plan they can keep it; but the House bill which he supported created huge incentives for employers to drop their coverage and shift their members to a public option.
* Obama has just as often assured the public that under his health plan everyone will be able to keep their current doctor; but many are certain to lose their doctors when ObamaCare’s large cuts in Medicare funding induce more doctors to withdraw from Medicare coverage, as they also would were employers to transfer patients to a public option to save money.
* Obama assured a joint session of Congress that his health plan would not fund illegal aliens; but his allies had been busy voting down amendments to that effect. (This was the point of Joe Wilson’s outburst.)
* Obama claimed that Caterpillar’s CEO had told him that Caterpillar would begin hiring again as a result of the stimulus bill; but that individual immediately announced that he had said no such thing, and that Caterpillar would in fact be laying off more workers.
* Candidate Obama promised that Guantanamo would be closed by January 1, 2010; but it is still open.
* Candidate Obama promised that his administration (unlike his predecessor’s) would be so transparent that TV cameras (C-Span) would be there for key deliberations; but an unprecedented level of secrecy prevails as the final stages of Obamacare are negotiated behind closed doors and kept so secret that even the Senate majority whip admitted that he had no idea what was going on. Requests for Obama to honor the promise of C-Span cameras are being ignored.
* To gain traction for his attempt to return a would-be socialist dictator in Honduras to power, Obama claimed that he had been overthrown in an illegal coup; but the congressional research service pointed out correctly that ex-President Zelaya had been removed for constitutionally sufficient cause by legal and constitutional means.
* Obama claims that he wants a public option only to increase choice and competition; but the House bill would clearly reduce choice both by squeezing unsubsidized private health plans out of the market, and by setting rigid conditions on acceptable plans that would narrow available options.
* Candidate Obama claimed that violent radical Bill Ayers was just another guy in his neighborhood; but the record shows that the two had worked closely together.
* Obama assured us that his stimulus bill would create or save a million jobs; but he was claiming as fact what could never have been more than a wild (and highly improbable) guess, and his more recent attempts to justify that guess have been fraudulent.
* Obama assured us that his health plan would never ration care, or “pull the plug” on grandma; but the legislation he backs sets up panels to make crucial decisions on when to withhold care, and it makes such deep cuts in Medicare that rationing is inevitable.
* Obama now assures us that health insurance premiums will not go up if ObamaCare becomes law, insisting indignantly that people who say this have not read the bill; but the legislation forces insurers to cover preexisting conditions, which will compel them to raise premiums substantially.
This is an extraordinary record of serial mendacity. One or two instances might charitably be regarded as rash promises later regretted, or as the wishful thinking of someone who had not thought through the implications of what he was saying. But when it happens again and again—and my 30 instances are by no means exhaustive—only one judgment seems possible: this is the record of a habitual, shameless liar, a man who will say anything to get what he wants. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me, goes the old saying. But scores of times? How shameful is that for our society when this disgraceful record is never the subject of a reproachful editorial in the New York Times, the Washington Post, or CBS news? Richard Nixon was removed from office, and Bill Clinton impeached for a single lie. Who could look at Obama’s record without concluding that his lying is in a completely different league to theirs?
President Obama evidently believes that he can solve any problem with a speech. But he really does not care whether what he says is true or not, nor does he feel any responsibility to honor the assurances and promises he makes. As a result, this nation is now in a position where it cannot believe a word that he says, and that amounts to an unprecedented crisis of confidence in the Presidency. Democratic government will atrophy if we allow lying on this scale to count as the business as usual of politics. When will the press and the Congress hold him accountable?
Bending Over Backwards to Excuse Racism
By Warner Todd Huston
In the book Game Change penned by John Heilemann and Mark Halprin, Harry Reid is quoted as saying that people supported Obama because he was “light skinned,” and because he exhibited no “Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” This implies that Reid thinks dark skinned Negroes cannot win election. Since then the left has circled the wagons and refused to treat Reid as they’ve treated Republicans in similar instances. It’s an obvious double standard.
Now, we can look to no better authority on purported racism than The Root Magazine, an Internet publication founded in 2008 by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (he of Beer Summit fame) which is published by the Washington Post. Gates’ online magazine pretty much proves that this double standard is alive and well by its treatment of two situations of obvious racist sentiment from the left. Gate’s magazine summarily rejects the accusations of racism by these lefties.
First up we look at a post by Root writer Omar Wasow who proclaimed Harry Reid in the rights for his comments as reported by Game Change. Wasow wonders what the big deal is with Reid’s comments? He says it is true that white people will vote for a light skinned black over a dark skinned one and that it was true that Obama only utilized a black vernacular “when he wanted to.” Interestingly, Wasow saw nothing wrong with Obama shifting from proper English to black vernacular at will. Wasow said that just made Obama a good politician. He obviously doesn’t see this as a cynical political ploy at all.
Me, I find it insulting. I find it just as insulting when Obama does it — or any other black politicians do it — as I do when whites try it — as Al Gore did in 2000, for instance. I don’t see how anyone could avoid being disgusted by such a ploy.
Wasow also decried the dismissal of “ebonics” as particularly racist against blacks but completely ignores the fact that in much of the country a deep southern accent in whites is treated in the same dismissive way as “ebonics” is treated in blacks. Rightly or wrongly, both are looked on as evidence of ignorance in the speaker, both considered evidence of a lowborn status. Why it is racist only to dismiss ebonics but not racist to assume a deep southern accent is evidence of a “lesser than” person Wasow does not say.
But, let’s be clear here. Wasow and The Root Magazine are not looking for consistency, they are looking for ways to excuse racism by people they support in order to facilitate their success.
A second example concerns the “wise Latina” remark made by Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor. This piece was penned by Sherrilynn Ifill, cousin to PBS News correspondent Gwen Ifill. Sherrilynn is the same woman that in October of 2008 attacked Sarah Palin as “offensive to black women” merely because Palin portrayed herself as a mother as well as a politician.
In her analysis of the “wise Latina” remark, Ifill declared that Sotomayor was not being racist when she said that wise Latina women make better judges than old, white men. The controversial statements were made in a speech the judge delivered at the University of California at Berkeley in 2001. Ifill summarily dismisses the criticism that Sotomayor’s comments were racist and says that anyone that thinks so has a “distorted interpretation of her speech.”
The truth is, however, that there is no other possible way to understand the context of Sotomayor’s speech than as a racial supremacist’s claim. Sotomayor is no less saying that Latina women are inherently better as judges and by dint of their race surpass white men’s inherent capabilities. That is as racist as it gets. You need but to swap the racial designations there to see the stark truth.
Yet, Ifill completely ignored the obvious context of Sotomayor’s racist comment in order to smooth her way to becoming the first Latina Supreme Court Justice. It was all a matter of politics, not “racism.”
These are prime examples of the double standard that GOP Chair Steele is pointing out. Racism is excused if it comes from the left. Reverend Jesse Jackson can call Jews “Hymies” with little fear of consequences. Al Sharpton has a long history of race baiting and suffers no recriminations. Any number of Hollywood entertainers, songsters, and journalists that come from the left end of the political spectrum can say any sort of comment that would be considered wholly racist were they to come from a conservative yet none of them are ever required to suffer any consequences as a result. But let a conservative say anything remotely construed as racist and calls for their head on a pike are heard all up and down the line.
What happened with Reid’s quote right after it became known is typical Democrat spin, too. Naturally, before Reid’s quote was widely known, on Saturday Harry Reid rushed an apology to the press, one quickly accepted and downplayed by now President Obama. Both prepared to move forward as if nothing happened. Republicans have pointed to this as a fine example of a double standard. They recalled that Senator Trent Lott was hounded out of leadership in 2002 for making some complimentary remarks about Senator Strom Thurmond at his retirement party. Republicans have now gone on to call for Reid’s removal as Senate Majority Leader in a similar vein to Lott’s situation. Naturally Democrats have demurred from demanding that Reid step down and Republicans are calling this a classic example of the left’s double standard. It is clear that incidents such as this are used to destroy Republicans but similar incidents when involving Democrats are swept under the rug.
Of this double standard GOP Chairman Michael Steele told reporters, “There is this standard where the Democrats feel that they can say these things and they can apologize when it comes from the mouths of their own. But if it comes from anyone else, it’s racism. It’s either racist or it’s not. And it’s inappropriate, absolutely.”
Not a single Democrat, though, came out against Harry Reid. All said it didn’t matter. It must be remembered that many of these same Democrats led a war party for Trent Lott. Many have attacked Rush Limbaugh for his parody song “Barack the Magic Negro” even though Rush was parodying the actual words of the L.A. Times.
Finally, the White House canceled the Press Pool on Sunday, December 10th leading some to offer conjecture that the White House is trying to “catch its breath” before responding to the revelation of Reid’s comments in the forthcoming book. This respite seems to contradict the speed with which Obama scolded others for what he considered racist comments in the past as Jake Tapper reveals. More of that double standard, no doubt. True to the Old Media’s covering for Obama, little was made of this fact.
Democrats' Health Care Sleight of Hand
By Matt Patterson
Democrats on Capitol Hill are hard at work, trying to hide the real cost of health care reform. But silly lawmakers, we can't be fooled, tricks are for kids.
As a former (recovering) professional magician, I've seen and perpetrated my share of sleight-of-hand. But I have never seen anything quite like the linguistic and budgetary legerdemain Democrats have performed to make President Obama's health-care plan appear "affordable." Congressional Democrats have been forced into such chicanery because of the price goal the president set for his reform, which, he claimed in September, "will cost around $900 billion over 10 years" -- less than we have spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. This $900 billion target is seemingly arbitrary, but is psychologically important - the president must know that the trillion dollar mark would be a deal breaker for many citizens and lawmakers. (Retail goods are labeled "only" $9.99 instead of $10 for the same reason.) Congressional Democrats have bent over backwards, sometimes painfully, to accommodate the president's target price. For example, the $848 billion price tag that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid claims for his new health care overhaul package is a mirage, produced by "assuming unrealistic tax increases and Medicare cuts that members of Congress will not be willing to follow through on," as spoiler-sport Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) points out.
This sort of trickery has been going on all year long. On October 29, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi crowed that her new health-care reform bill "meets President Obama's call to keep the costs under $900 billion over 10 years." -- The claim was pure misdirection, a wild gesticulation to distract from the Congressional Budget Office's estimate that the gross total cost of the bill is $1.05 trillion over ten years. But don't look there! And even that astronomical $1.05 trillion figure is only arrived at because Pelosi's bill backloads the spending in the 2010 to 2019 timeframe - in fact, the vast majority of the spending in that period would not kick in until after 2013! That's three years of little or no spending to artificially bring down your cost. Ta dah! Or how about Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's attempt to palm off a key component of health care reform, the halt in payment cuts to Medicare physicians known as the "doc fix" as a separate, stand alone, $247 billion bill, financed entirely with deficit spending. Fortunately, this trick was so bad that the audience cried "I can see that in your other hand!" and the doc fix died a well-deserved bipartisan death.
Old magician's joke:
A bunny is placed on a pedestal and covered with a screen. The magician promises to change the bunny into a completely different animal. A wave of the hand, and voila! the screen is lifted to reveals the same bunny. The magician claims it is a new animal, one with magical powers. Of course, the children are never fooled. But Pelosi seems to think the American taxpayer will fall for a similar ruse.
When voters got wind that the much vaunted "public option" is really just code for government-run health care, she brazenly renamed it at a Florida senior's center -- and voila! -- the "competitive option" lives! Or is it the "consumer option"? Either way, don't mind those ears, kids, it's an entirely new beast, with the magical powers to increase coverage, reduce cost, and bring down the deficit.
Abracadabra! There's only one thing worse than a bad magic show, and that's bad legislation. Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have given us both at once, which, when you think about it, is some hat trick.
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Matt Patterson is a policy analyst for the National Center For Public Policy Research and a National Review Institute Washington Fellow. Contact him at: Mpatterson@nationalcenter.org.
Democrats Join Calls for Napolitano to Step Down Following Failed Attack
FOXNews.com
Some Democrats have joined in calling for Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to step down following the attempted bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight a week ago.
Though the CIA and an agency under the Director of National Intelligence have been under particular scrutiny in the preliminary review of possible missteps, Napolitano so far has taken the most heat from lawmakers. Not only does her department oversee the Transportation Security Administration, but her initial claim Sunday that "the system worked" was widely ridiculed and interpreted by critics as a sign that she's in over her head.
Some Republicans, who've taken issue with her in the past for calling terrorist acts "man-caused disasters" and other remarks, started calling for her ouster in the spring. The failed bombing on Christmas Day revived those calls.
Now Democrats have joined the chorus.
New Jersey State Senate President Richard Codey, a Democrat, wrote a letter to Napolitano this week calling on her to step down. He said Napolitano, an attorney and former Arizona governor, does not have the experience for the post she is in.
"We should have someone who doesn't need to go in there and learn about terrorism, learn about security," Codey told Fox News. "How close were these 300 people on this plane from losing their lives because homeland security broke down? Boy, it was really close."
The Department of Homeland Security was created in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks and has grown into one of the largest Cabinet departments in the federal government. Charged with keeping the nation safe from terrorist attacks and responding to natural disasters, it covers the TSA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and a slew of other agencies.
Codey said a candidate "well-versed" in intelligence should step into the job.
Democratic strategist Dan Gerstein also said Napolitano's response to the incident should be the last straw.
"I tend to think she will be pushed out in the next couple of months," Gerstein, a former adviser to Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., said.
For now, the administration says it has absolute confidence in Napolitano. She is an active part of the internal review and on Thursday took additional steps to improve security at international airports.
She announced that she's sending senior officials abroad to meet with leaders from international airports to review security measures. Napolitano said she is "fully committed to making whatever changes are necessary to protect the safety of the traveling public."
Napolitano on Monday also clarified that she didn't believe "the system worked" in the run-up to the attempted bombing, which failed because the explosive mixture used did not properly detonate. Napolitano said she was merely referring to the inter-agency cooperation in the aftermath of the attempt.
To Republicans who have lambasted the administration in recent days over its response, the White House accuses critics of playing political games.
"Unfortunately too many are engaged in the typical Washington game of pointing fingers and making political hay, instead of working together to find solutions to make our country safer," Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer wrote on the White House blog.
Republicans, though, have not held back.
Republican Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., said Napolitano does not have the experience for the job, and her remarks only prove that she doesn't take the terrorist threat as seriously as she should.
"She's not doing her job," Burton told Fox News.
Former New York Republican Sen. Alfonse D'Amato also said Napolitano should resign.
But other Democrats are urging lawmakers not to jump to conclusions when the internal review is only now getting underway.
Rep. Bill Pascrell, D-N.J., said that if it turns out the secretary dropped the ball then members of Congress will ask for her resignation.
"I'm not at that point yet," he said.
Global Warming as a Political Tool The modern tale of Jackson and the Goregonauts. By Jonah Goldberg
On Monday, Lisa Jackson, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, formally announced that her agency now considers carbon dioxide to be a dangerous pollutant, subject to government regulation. The finding comes two years after the Supreme Court ruled that CO2 falls under the EPA’s jurisdiction.
A day later, an unnamed White House official told Fox’s Major Garrett that the message for Congress is clear: “If you don’t pass this (cap-and-trade) legislation . . . the EPA is going to have to regulate in this area. . . . And it is not going to be able to regulate on a market-based way, so it’s going to have to regulate in a command-and-control way, which will probably generate even more uncertainty.”
And such “uncertainty” is a huge “deterrent to investment,” which will hurt the economy even more.
Translation: We don’t want the EPA to kick the economy in the groin, but if Congress doesn’t act, well, a-groin-kickin’ we shall go.
This is grotesquely dishonest.
The White House and Congress could, quite easily, do something about the EPA’s threat. President Obama could instruct Jackson to interpret the Supreme Court’s 2007 decision granting the EPA power to regulate greenhouse gases more loosely. He could ask Congress to simply rewrite the Clean Air Act so as to exclude carbon dioxide from its list of official pollutants — the policy the EPA followed for years until the Supreme Court reinterpreted the Clean Air Act.
But no.
As part of the enduring statist desire to penetrate ever deeper into every nook and cranny of our lives, greens have wanted to find a way for the government to regulate CO2, a natural byproduct of fire and breathing, for decades. Now they can.
That is why the White House will use Jackson as a Medusa’s head, to petrify cap-and-trade opponents with the prospect of something even worse: the effective seizing of the means of production. The White House says nothing of the sort is going on. Jackson, the former chief of staff to lame-duck New Jersey governor Jon Corzine, is an independent, disinterested public servant simply following sound science with no concern for politics.
If Jackson cares so much about sound science, why is she basing some of her policies on data from the discredited scientific frat house, the Climatic Research Unit?
If Jackson cares so little about politics, why did she make her announcement to such fanfare at the opening of Climapalooza in Copenhagen?
In fairness, Jackson is only a Medusa’s head to those who care desperately about economic growth and who don’t think draconian taxes on energy and massive wealth transfers for white elephants in the Third World are the answer to our problems. But for others, she represents another icon from Greek mythology: the Golden Fleece.
Jason and his Argonauts set out to find the fleece so they might place Jason on the throne of Iolcus. The original story is one of power-seeking in a noble cause.
It’s debatable whether the modern tale of Jackson and the Goregonauts is quite so noble. But it’s obvious they’re interested in power and hell-bent on fleecing.
Indeed, some of loudest voices have a weird habit of telegraphing their priorities. Tim Wirth, a former senator and now chairman of the United Nations Foundation, once said: “We’ve got to ride the global-warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing, in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.” New York Times columnist and prominent warm-monger Thomas Friedman has repeatedly said (most recently this week) that he doesn’t care if global warming is a “hoax” because, even if it is, the fear of it will force us to do what we need to do.
And it just so happens that with the exception of nuclear power — which most greens still won’t support — global warming fuels nearly every progressive ambition. Wealth transfers from rich to poor nations: Check. The rise of “global governance” and the decline of American sovereignty: Check. A secular fatwa not only to erode capitalism but to intrude on every aspect of our lives (Greenpeace offers a guide to carbon-neutral sex): Check. Weaning us off of oil (which, don’t let the Goregonauts fool you, was a priority back when we were still worried about global cooling): Check. The checks go on for as far as the eye can see, and we will be writing them for years to come. __________
Just like in the Wizard of Oz, the curtain was torn back and leading proponents of anthropogenic (people-caused) global warming have been caught lying.
Called Climategate, the scandal exposes the global warming shysters who are conning the public into a massive restructuring of the global economy, while attempting to silence any dissent. But don’t expect to see this in our mainstream media, because they are the spinsters who promote this manipulation of data and propaganda.
It all began when an anonymous person hacked into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit in England, releasing 61 megabytes of confidential files, including 1079 e-mails and 72 documents onto the Internet. These files are a wealth of information.
The most damning indictment of proponents of global warming hysteria is a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. The e-mails even included fantasies of violence against those who question anthropogenic global warming. These e-mails show disturbing patterns of “conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organized resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more,” says Australian Sun’s Andrew Bolt.
Man-made global warming hysteria has long been fueled by people using junk science, fear and hyperbole to support an agenda that they personally profit from. As they attempt to lead the world into a green revolution, these propagandists are hiding the truth that the average global temperature has fallen since 1998.
The leading profiteering propagandist is Al Gore. After losing the presidential election in 2000, Al Gore became the leader of the hysteria movement. However, this “Eco-Prophet” has hidden a few inconvenient truths of his own. He just happens to be involved with a venture capital firm that has invested approximately a billion dollars in green companies that stand to make a bundle if Cap-and-Trade becomes law.
[Public Records] state that Gore’s net worth now stands at $100 million, when it was $2 million when he left politics. He’s laughing all the way to the bank.
Al Gore has a history of playing loose with the facts.
Recently on TV, while discussing geothermal energy, Al Gore made the outrageous claim that “the interior of the earth is extremely hot, several million degrees.” However, the actual temperature here on earth is between 5,000 and 9,000 degrees. This is a gaffe that if Sarah Palin had made, the media would ridicule as her stupid.
Speaking of hypocrisy, Al Gore is a living embodiment of it. As he lectures the world on energy use, and lobbies Congress to regulate productive American companies out of business, Gore consumes more than twenty times more energy than the average American, according to the Tennessee Center for Policy Research. This doesn’t count the energy consumption of his jet.
Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” is full of instances where he plays loose with the facts. A 2007 British court ruled that Gore’s film has nine significant refutable errors. These are examples of Gore’s scare tactics to induce the public to take radical action (to his financial benefit).
Not only is Gore prone to hyperbole, hypocrisy and blatant distortions, he is also a bully. Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT wrote about scientists being “in the crosshairs” of Gore, who “tried to bully” them into changing “their views and supporting his climate alarmism.” Lindzen also refers to a failed Gore effort to “enlist Ted Koppel (then a TV host) in a witch hunt to discredit anti-alarmist scientists.”
When one side tries to shut another side out of the debate, it is typically because they feel their arguments won’t stand up to scrutiny.
These propagandists use various tactics. A favorite is to make people feel guilty if they don’t jump on the “green” bandwagon, and those who do are praised for helping the environment.
With the Copenhagen meetings just around the corner, expect to see “green” propaganda exponentially increasing. Open your eyes to these manipulators of data and people, who while acting like do-gooders, see great (green as in money) gain.
Climate Change: This is the Worst Scientific Scandal of Our Generation
Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with the Climategate whitewash.
By Christopher Booker
A week after my colleague James Delingpole, on his Telegraph blog, coined the term "Climategate" to describe the scandal revealed by the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, Google was showing that the word now appears across the internet more than nine million times. But in all these acres of electronic coverage, one hugely relevant point about these thousands of documents has largely been missed.
The reason why even the Guardian's George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Professor Philip Jones, the CRU's director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC's key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely – not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.
Dr Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann's "hockey stick" graph which 10 years ago turned climate history on its head by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history.
Given star billing by the IPCC, not least for the way it appeared to eliminate the long-accepted Mediaeval Warm Period when temperatures were higher they are today, the graph became the central icon of the entire man-made global warming movement.
Since 2003, however, when the statistical methods used to create the "hockey stick" were first exposed as fundamentally flawed by an expert Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre, an increasingly heated battle has been raging between Mann's supporters, calling themselves "the Hockey Team", and McIntyre and his own allies, as they have ever more devastatingly called into question the entire statistical basis on which the IPCC and CRU construct their case.
The senders and recipients of the leaked CRU emails constitute a cast list of the IPCC's scientific elite, including not just the "Hockey Team", such as Dr Mann himself, Dr Jones and his CRU colleague Keith Briffa, but Ben Santer, responsible for a highly controversial rewriting of key passages in the IPCC's 1995 report; Kevin Trenberth, who similarly controversially pushed the IPCC into scaremongering over hurricane activity; and Gavin Schmidt, right-hand man to Al Gore's ally Dr. James Hansen, whose own GISS record of surface temperature data is second in importance only to that of the CRU itself.
There are three threads in particular in the leaked documents which have sent a shock wave through informed observers across the world. Perhaps the most obvious, as lucidly put together by Willis Eschenbach (see McIntyre's blog Climate Audit and Anthony Watt's blog Watts Up With That), is the highly disturbing series of emails which show how Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders under freedom of information laws.
They have come up with every possible excuse for concealing the background data on which their findings and temperature records were based.
This in itself has become a major scandal, not least Dr Jones's refusal to release the basic data from which the CRU derives its hugely influential temperature record, which culminated last summer in his startling claim that much of the data from all over the world had simply got "lost". Most incriminating of all are the emails in which scientists are advised to delete large chunks of data, which, when this is done after receipt of a freedom of information request, is a criminal offense.
But the question which inevitably arises from this systematic refusal to release their data is – what is it that these scientists seem so anxious to hide? The second and most shocking revelation of the leaked documents is how they show the scientists trying to manipulate data through their tortuous computer programmes, always to point in only the one desired direction – to lower past temperatures and to "adjust" recent temperatures upwards, in order to convey the impression of an accelerated warming. This comes up so often (not least in the documents relating to computer data in the Harry Read Me file) that it becomes the most disturbing single element of the entire story. This is what Mr McIntyre caught Dr Hansen doing with his GISS temperature record last year (after which Hansen was forced to revise his record), and two further shocking examples have now come to light from Australia and New Zealand.
In each of these countries it has been possible for local scientists to compare the official temperature record with the original data on which it was supposedly based. In each case it is clear that the same trick has been played – to turn an essentially flat temperature chart into a graph which shows temperatures steadily rising. And in each case this manipulation was carried out under the influence of the CRU.
What is tragically evident from the Harry Read Me file is the picture it gives of the CRU scientists hopelessly at sea with the complex computer programmes they had devised to contort their data in the approved direction, more than once expressing their own desperation at how difficult it was to get the desired results.
The third shocking revelation of these documents is the ruthless way in which these academics have been determined to silence any expert questioning of the findings they have arrived at by such dubious methods – not just by refusing to disclose their basic data but by discrediting and freezing out any scientific journal which dares to publish their critics' work. It seems they are prepared to stop at nothing to stifle scientific debate in this way, not least by ensuring that no dissenting research should find its way into the pages of IPCC reports.
Back in 2006, when the eminent US statistician Professor Edward Wegman produced an expert report for the US Congress vindicating Steve McIntyre's demolition of the "hockey stick", he excoriated the way in which this same "tightly knit group" of academics seemed only too keen to collaborate with each other and to "peer review" each other's papers in order to dominate the findings of those IPCC reports on which much of the future of the US and world economy may hang. In light of the latest revelations, it now seems even more evident that these men have been failing to uphold those principles which lie at the heart of genuine scientific enquiry and debate. Already one respected US climate scientist, Dr Eduardo Zorita, has called for Dr Mann and Dr Jones to be barred from any further participation in the IPCC. Even our own George Monbiot, horrified at finding how he has been betrayed by the supposed experts he has been revering and citing for so long, has called for Dr Jones to step down as head of the CRU.
The former Chancellor Lord (Nigel) Lawson, last week launching his new think tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, rightly called for a proper independent inquiry into the maze of skulduggery revealed by the CRU leaks. But the inquiry mooted on Friday, possibly to be chaired by Lord Rees, President of the Royal Society – itself long a shameless propagandist for the warmist cause – is far from being what Lord Lawson had in mind. Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with a whitewash of what has become the greatest scientific scandal of our age.
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Christopher Booker's The Real Global Warming Disaster: Is the Obsession with 'Climate Change' Turning Out to be the Most Costly Scientific Blunder in History? (Continuum, £16.99) is available from Telegraph Books for £14.99 plus £1.25 p & p.
Global Warming Scientists are in a whole bunch of hot water - so to speak.
Viscount Monckton on Climategate: ‘They Are Criminals’
(PJM Exclusive)
The man who challenged Al Gore to a debate is furious about the content of the leaked CRU emails — and says why you should be, too.
This is what they did — these climate “scientists” on whose unsupported word the world’s classe politique proposes to set up an unelected global government this December in Copenhagen, with vast and unprecedented powers to control all formerly free markets, to tax wealthy nations and all of their financial transactions, to regulate the economic and environmental affairs of all nations, and to confiscate and extinguish all patent and intellectual property rights.
The tiny, close-knit clique of climate scientists who invented and now drive the “global warming” fraud — for fraud is what we now know it to be — tampered with temperature data so assiduously that, on the recent admission of one of them, land temperatures since 1980 have risen twice as fast as ocean temperatures. One of the thousands of emails recently circulated by a whistleblower at the University of East Anglia, where one of the world’s four global-temperature datasets is compiled, reveals that data were altered so as to prevent a recent decline in temperature from showing in the record. In fact, there has been no statistically significant “global warming” for 15 years — and there has been rapid and significant cooling for nine years.
Worse, these arrogant fraudsters — for fraudsters are what we now know them to be — have refused, for years and years and years, to reveal their data and their computer program listings. Now we know why: As a revealing 15,000-line document from the computer division at the Climate Research Unit shows, the programs and data are a hopeless, tangled mess. In effect, the global temperature trends have simply been made up. Unfortunately, the British researchers have been acting closely in league with their U.S. counterparts who compile the other terrestrial temperature dataset — the GISS/NCDC dataset. That dataset too contains numerous biases intended artificially to inflate the natural warming of the 20th century.
Finally, these huckstering snake-oil salesmen and “global warming” profiteers — for that is what they are — have written to each other encouraging the destruction of data that had been lawfully requested under the Freedom of Information Act in the UK by scientists who wanted to check whether their global temperature record had been properly compiled. And that procurement of data destruction, as they are about to find out to their cost, is a criminal offense. They are not merely bad scientists — they are crooks. And crooks who have perpetrated their crimes at the expense of British and U.S. taxpayers.
I am angry, and so should you be.
What have the mainstream news media said about the Climategate affair? Remarkably little. The few who have brought themselves to comment, through gritted teeth, have said that all of this is a storm in a teacup, and that their friends in the University of East Anglia and elsewhere in the climatological community are good people, really.
No, they’re not. They’re criminals. With Professor Fred Singer, who founded the U.S. Satellite Weather Service, I have reported them to the UK’s Information Commissioner, with a request that he investigate their offenses and, if thought fit, prosecute. But I won’t be holding my breath: In the police state that Britain has now sadly become, with supine news media largely owned and controlled by the government, the establishment tends to look after its own.
At our expense, and at the expense of the truth.
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The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley is a British politician, business consultant, and policy advisor.
Viscount Monckton on Climategate: ‘They Are Criminals’
Climategate: Violating the Social Contract of Science
The scientific method only works when fellow researchers can implicitly trust the results offered by their colleagues.
On November 19, 2009, climate science was severely shaken by the release of a collection of email messages, together with a collection of data and data processing programs, that were alleged to have been stolen, or hacked, from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU).
So what is this “climate science” of which we speak? Trimmed down to the essentials, what scientists really do comes down to these steps:
1.Look at something happening.
2.Think of a way to explain what’s happening.
3.Make a convincing case, based on evidence and experiment, that this is the best known explanation. Part of this “convincing case” is providing enough information so that a knowledgeable person could, if necessary, perform the same experiments and get the same results. (This should really include some weasel-wording about “within experimental error,” but that’s a technical detail. What’s important is that the knowledgeable third party can get close enough to the same results to satisfy that third part.)
4.Submit that convincing case to other knowledgeable people to review, in order to see if they also find it convincing. This is what is called peer review.
5.Publish that convincing case for the rest of the world, where the results can be seen, commented upon, and challenged.
6.Every so often, others perform the same experiments and confirm or question the results.
Step 4, peer review, is essential to this whole process. To be useful, a peer review should:
•be done anonymously, so that reviews are uncolored by fear of retribution or expectation of reward.
•be done independently, by disinterested third parties; it’s generally bad form to have close associates of the authors doing the reviews.
This is really all about trust. If Professor A. Einstein publishes E=mc2, the fact that the publication has been peer reviewed, the publication includes enough detail that you feel confident it could be replicated, and the results are then subject to challenge means that you can trust what’s in the publication. “Science” is a social contract — an agreement that allows scientists to trust what they’re told by their fellows.
So let’s look at a few of these emails. (All links are to email texts in the searchable index on the website anelegantchaos.org.) Here’s an email from Phil Jones at the CRU to Ben Santer at Lawrence Livermore (quoted in Santer’s reply, email # 1233249393):
"With free wifi in my room, I’ve just seen that M+M have submitted a paper to IJC on your H2 statistic — using more years, up to 2007. They have also found your PCMDI data — laughing at the directory name — FOIA? Also they make up statements saying you’ve done this following Obama’s statement about openness in government! Anyway you’ll likely get this for review, or poor Francis will. Best if both Francis and Myles did this. If I get an email from Glenn I’ll suggest this."
This appears to be Jones informing Santer of the contents of a submitted paper ahead of time, which would seem to say it’s not really an anonymous process. What’s more, the paper criticizes Santer’s own work, and this email appears to suggest that Santer will be a reviewer; this doesn’t seem very independent.
Then there is this email from Tom Wigley to Tim Carter (email # 1051190249):
"PS, Re CR [the journal Climate Research] I do not know the best way to handle the specifics of the editoring. [sic] Hans von Storch is partly to blame — he encourages the publication of crap science 'in order to stimulate debate.' One approach is to go direct to the publishers and point out the fact that their journal is perceived as being a medium for disseminating misinformation under the guise of refereed work. I use the word 'perceived' here, since whether it is true or not is not what the publishers care about — it is how the journal is seen by the community that counts.
I think we could get a large group of highly credentialed scientists to sign such a letter — 50+ people.
Note that I am copying this view only to Mike Hulme and Phil Jones. Mike’s idea to get editorial board members to resign will probably not work — must get rid of von Storch too, otherwise holes will eventually fill up with people like Legates, Balling, Lindzen, Michaels, Singer, etc. I have heard that the publishers are not happy with von Storch, so the above approach might remove that hurdle too."
Hans von Storch is a well-known climate scientist who has been critical of some aspects of the global warming debate. This email appears to suggest that he was seen as too favorable to other opinions; they are discussing how to “get rid of von Storch.” Remember that the reason for independence is to ensure that there’s no fear of retribution nor expectation of reward.
It’s interesting to note that Hans von Storch actually was made editor in chief of Climate Research and then resigned soon after. The reason: he wasn’t allowed by the publisher to publish an editorial critical of the very paper this email discusses.
Von Storch has responded to the email releases on his web page:
"As far as I myself can judge, and according to responses by others, the files are authentic, but not complete... There are a number of problematic statements, which will be discussed in the media and the blogosphere. I found the style of communication revealing, speaking about other people and their ideas, joining forces to 'kill' papers, exchanges of 'improving' presentations without explaining."
Others have noted that the review process for climate change research seems flawed. In the Wegman report, prepared for the Committee on Energy and Commerce by a committee selected under the auspices of the National Academy of Science, a section is included on the connections among the reviewers of various papers, with the interesting observation that published papers are nearly always reviewed by the same small group of people, and almost all of these people are also co-authors on other papers.
The effect is that climate research is produced by a small “in group” who insist on a particular model, and apparently reviewed by the same group. Critics of the particular model, even if they agree in general with the notion of anthropogenic global warming, are then relegated to an “out group.”
Roger Pielke, Sr. of the University of Colorado is a notable climate scientist who has been relegated to the “out group.” Dr. Pielke was the lead author of part of the most recent IPCC report, until the section he was writing was replaced at the last minute. At the time, Dr. Pielke wrote (PDF):
"The process that produced the report was highly political, with the Editor taking the lead in suppressing my perspectives, most egregiously demonstrated by the last-minute substitution of a new Chapter 6 for the one I had carefully led preparation of and on which I was close to reaching a final consensus. Anyone interested in the production of comprehensive assessments of climate science should be troubled by the process which I document below in great detail that led to the replacement of the Chapter that I was serving as Convening Lead Author."
We’re only beginning to analyze and understand the full implications of these emails and the associated data. Among other things, however, these emails suggest that a number of highly reputable climate scientists had been conniving for years to prevent other researchers from obtaining the data needed to replicate climate science results. At the same time, these scientist appear to have colluded to subvert the whole peer review process in order to prevent critical or contradictory results from being published.
This violates the whole social contract that is the basis of what we call science.
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Charlie Martin is a Colorado computer scientist and freelance writer. He holds an MS in Computer Science from Duke University, where he spent six years with the National Biomedical Simulation Resource, Duke University Medical Center. Find him at http://chasrmartin.com, and on his blog at http://explorations.chasrmartin.com.
Climategate: When Scientists Become Politicians
At the dawn of the modern age of science, a few hundred years ago, accounting for the motion of the planets was a mystery, but one driven by a flawed theory. It was thought, going back to the ancient Greeks and Plato, that the motions of the planets, being otherworldly and celestial objects, must be perfect and therefore circular. Unfortunately, actual observations were hard to reconcile with this notion. The ancient astronomers could have fudged the data to make it conform to the theory, but that would have been unscientific, so they fine-tuned the theory to try to make a better fit. Almost two millennia ago, Ptolemy refined the concept of circles within circles, or epicycles, to try to develop a model that would explain the observed planetary motions. The theory reached its height half a millennium ago when Copernicus, with the insight that the earth orbited the sun, like the other planets, came close to modeling planetary motion by adding new epicycles, albeit with a different model for each planet. But it was a very complex system, and still wasn’t quite close enough.
Kepler resolved the issue by demonstrating that the best fit of the motion was not circles within circles, but rather simple ellipses. He came up with simple but powerful and explanatory laws that described the motion of the planets as a function of their distance from the sun. Newton in turn used this finding to validate his own universal theory of gravitation.
But it still wasn’t quite good enough. For centuries, the innermost planet, Mercury, stubbornly refused to conform perfectly to Newton’s laws, and many more modern astronomers postulated a hidden planet elsewhere in the solar system that might account for the discrepancies; they didn’t abandon Newton’s theory. However, despite years of trying, they could never determine its location or mass. But despite this frustration, they never yielded to the temptation of simply denying the planet’s mercurial behavior — they continued to refine the theory, no matter how difficult.
About a century ago, another physicist, Albert Einstein, came up with a new theory of gravitation. A key part of it is that Newton’s laws must be adjusted slightly to account for the near presence of large masses. By Einstein’s new theory of general relativity, of which Newton’s earlier theory was simply a special case for velocities much less than that of light and locations not adjacent to very large masses, Mercury’s motion was perfectly explained by its close proximity to the sun.
Over thousands of years, at each step, the response of the scientists was to continually adjust and refine their theories to conform to the data, not the other way around. This is how science is done and how we developed the knowledge that has given us such tremendous and accelerating scientific and technological breakthroughs in the past century. It is occasionally reasonable to throw out a bad data point if it is in defiance of an otherwise satisfactory model fit, as long as everyone knows that you’ve done so and the rationale, but a deliberate and unrevealed fudging of results in an attempt to make the real world fit one’s preconceptions is beyond the scientific pale. Journal articles have been thrown out for it; PhD candidates have lost their degrees for it.
But such behavior, along with attempts to cover it up and dishonestly discredit critics, is exactly what was revealed in a leak of emails last Friday from a research facility in eastern England. And it was not the behavior of previously unknown researchers on some arcane topic of little interest to anyone outside their own field. It was the behavior of leading luminaries in perhaps the greatest scientific issue and controversy of our age: Whether or not the planet is warming to a potentially dangerous degree as a result of humanity’s influence. It is a subject on which billions — if not trillions — of dollars worth of future economic growth and costs hinge. It was the basis for the massive “cap and trade” bill that passed the U.S. House of Representatives in the spring and seems stalled in the Senate. It is accordingly a subject on which a great deal of money is being spent on research to understand the problem. And when there is a great deal of research funding at stake, often funded by people less interested in truth than in power and political agendas, the temptation to come up with the “correct” answers can perhaps overcome scientific integrity.
It is hard (perhaps impossible) to know the motives of the people who would so betray the basic precepts of science. It is easy to postulate that they have political aims, and there are certainly many “watermelon” environmentalists (green on the outside, “red” on the inside) who see the green movement as a new means to continue to push socialist and big-government agendas, after a momentary setback with the collapse of the Soviet Union two decades ago.
But scientists are human, with human failings. Thomas Kuhn noted half a century ago that science doesn’t always follow the idealized model of the objective scientist seeking only truth; it is often driven by fashions and fads, peer pressure, and a lust for glory and respect by the other courtiers of the court that fund them. So we may never know whether this defense of a flawed theory arose from the sense of power that it might give them over the rest of our lives. Or perhaps it was due to simply an emotional attachment to a theory in which they had invested their careers. Either way, what they did was not science, and they should be drummed out of that profession. They can no longer be trusted.
Many in the climate change community have condemned what they call “skeptics,” often to the point of declaring them de facto criminals and assigning them to the same category as Holocaust deniers. They tell us that “the science is settled” and that we should shut up. But every scientist worthy of the name should be a skeptic. Every theory should be subject to challenge on a scientific basis. Every claim of a model’s validity should be accompanied by the complete model and data set that supposedly validated it, so that it can be replicated. That is how science works. It is how it advances. And when the science is supposedly “settled” and they refuse to do so, it’s not unreasonable to wonder why.
Well, now we know.
In fact, when scientists become politicians but continue to pretend to be doing science, that is the real crime. The theory being promoted by these men was being used to justify government actions that would result in greatly diminished future economic growth of the most powerful economy on earth (and the rest of the world as well). It would make it more difficult and less affordable to address any real problems that might be caused in the future by a change in climate, whether due to human activity or other causes. It could impoverish millions in the future, with little actual change in adverse climate effects. And when such a theory has the potential to do so much unjustified harm, and it has a fraudulent basis, who are the real criminals against humanity?
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Rand Simberg is a recovering aerospace engineer and a consultant in space commercialization, space tourism and Internet security. He offers occasionally biting commentary about infinity and beyond at his weblog, Transterrestrial Musings.
Climate Skeptics See 'Smoking Gun' in Researchers' Leaked E-Mails
FOX News
Hackers broke into the servers at a prominent British climate research center and leaked years worth of e-mail messages onto the Web, including one with a reference to a plan to "hide the decline" in temperatures.
The Internet is abuzz about the leaked data from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (commonly called Hadley CRU), which has acknowledged the theft of 61MB of confidential data.
Climate change skeptics describe the leaked data as a "smoking gun," evidence of collusion among climatologists and manipulation of data to support the widely held view that climate change is caused by the actions of mankind. The authors of some of the e-mails, however, accuse the skeptics of taking the messages out of context, adding that the evidence still clearly shows a warming trend.
The files were reportedly released on a Russian file-serve by an anonymous poster calling himself "FOIA."
In an exclusive interview in Investigate magazine's TGIF Edition, Phil Jones, the head of the Hadley CRU, confirmed that the leaked data is real.
"It was a hacker. We were aware of this about three or four days ago," he told the magazine, noting that the center has yet to contact the police about the data breach.
TGIF Edition asked Jones about the controversial "hide the decline" comment from an e-mail he wrote in 1999: "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd [sic] from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."
He told the magazine that there was no intention to mislead, but he had "no idea" what he meant by those words.
"That was an e-mail from ten years ago. Can you remember the exact context of what you wrote ten years ago?" he said.
"Mike" refers to Jones' colleague Michael Mann, who told the New York Times that the "trick" was simply a way of solving a data problem. In this case, the warming trend of the last century was detected in tree-ring samples only until 1960, but it continued in thermometer readings.
Jones' word choice was poor, Mann told the Times, but the calculations were "not something secret."
The Telegraph has posted some of the more scathing excerpts from these emails, which the newspaper suggests points to manipulation of evidence and private doubts about the reality of global warming, though the much of the scientific language in the e-mails is esoteric and hard to interpret.
Others suggest the comments are simply "scientists talking about science." In an interview with Wired, Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, points out that "if you read all of these e-mails, you will be surprised at the integrity of these scientists."
Still, one notable e-mail from the hacked files clearly describes how to squeeze dissenting scientists from the peer review process:
"I think we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?"
Manipulating Climate Change: Warming to RICO?
By Christopher C. Horner
For some time. several individuals have asked why we don’t just initiate suit against the obviously dishonest tactics and claims by the global warming industry under the Racketeer Influence and Corrupt Organization Act (RICO). This law commissions “private attorneys general” to pursue violations on their own, in essence as proxies for the state.
I have explained with intermittent impatience that just serially lying or exaggerating to deceive are not on their face RICO “predicate” offenses. There must be three instances of a certain type of enumerated behavior over ten years to constitute a pattern in violation of RICO.
I have received an email from someone who has much appropriate training and experience and which causes me to revisit the issue. He writes,
“Well, now it really does look like a massive conspiracy to defraud the government.
When I was in law school, one of my profs noted dryly that once in a while the Massachusetts Attorney General would sternly announce ‘we are going to investigate this matter of ____,’ and the sky of Boston would blacken with the smoke of burning documents.
I bet there was a blip in electricity use this morning from emails being deleted by the climate change community.”
Well, it is certainly true that, on its face this prospect has to be taken seriously barring revelation that words do not actually mean what they appear, in full context of the issue and the email, to mean (which so far has been the principal substantive defense). Fraud is a RICO predicate offense. If what we are seeing unfold is evidence of fraud, a RICO complaint is a possibility, along with what the “discovery” process would reveal. The email and data authors (and massagers, playing “tricks” with the data to “hide the decline” in temperatures) do appear to be true believers in their cause, and often in their data, neither of which is dispositive. They also are candid in ways triggering tortuous arguments explaining how those words don’t really mean what they say. The defenders say the literal readings – that’s plural, not a one-off remark – represent “sinister interpretations” (New York Times), and the implausible is actually the appropriate reading.
For example, we’re now, for the first time, told that calling something the researchers did with data a “trick” to “hide the decline” in temperatures is actually very typical application of common lingo about scientific methods purporting to represent findings. This is the first I have encountered in this context a benign meaning for that. This defense might have currency had not the actions in question already been exposed by private investigations and being, in fact, a “trick” “hiding the decline” in temperatures.
The U.S. taxpayer has much exposure here in the joint projects and collaborations which operated in reliance upon what the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit was doing, on the data CRU have been denying access to and recently claiming simply, if again implausibly, to have lost. As well as on the taxpayer-funded IPCC process, and the peer-review process addressed in these emails as having been corrupted with a particular outcome in mind. Also, there are U.S. taxpayer-funded offices and individuals involved in the machinations addressed in the emails, and in the emails themselves.
The plain reading of what has been revealed so far, if the documents are indeed authentic as a blanket admission yesterday seemed to make clear, does give the appearance of a conspiracy to defraud, by parties working in taxpayer funded agencies collaborating on ways to misrepresent material on which an awful lot of taxpayer money rides. In fact, their centers and careers and reputations ride on there being a “global warming” crisis, or at least there being some semblance of acceptance thereof.
I am not yet drawing conclusions on this, but all of the above is food for thought. I will look into this further when I’m back from travel and able to give it some attention, as will some colleagues. We also must confront the truth hinted at by the jibe about the massive email deleting that has surely taken place in the past 72 hours. The ability to permanently delete such material, and codes and other files, is not something I am at all expert in, but an issue on which the viability of pursuing any such actions would hinge. So, hopefully more later.
Climate Sceptics Claim Leaked Emails are Evidence of Collusion Among Scientists
Hundreds of emails and documents exchanged between world's leading climate scientists stolen by hackers and leaked online.
By Leo Hickman and James Randerson
Hundreds of private emails and documents allegedly exchanged between some of the world's leading climate scientists during the past 13 years have been stolen by hackers and leaked online, it emerged today.
The computer files were apparently accessed earlier this week from servers at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, a world-renowned centre focused on the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change.
Climate change sceptics who have studied the emails allege they provide "smoking gun" evidence that some of the climatologists colluded in manipulating data to support the widely held view that climate change is real, and is being largely caused by the actions of mankind.
The veracity of the emails has not been confirmed and the scientists involved have declined to comment on the story, which broke on a blog called The Air Vent.
The files, which in total amount to 160MbB of data, were first uploaded on to a Russian server, before being widely mirrored across the internet. The emails were accompanied by the anonymous statement: "We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it."
A spokesperson for the University of East Anglia said: "We are aware that information from a server used for research information in one area of the university has been made available on public websites. Because of the volume of this information we cannot currently confirm that all this material is genuine. This information has been obtained and published without our permission and we took immediate action to remove the server in question from operation. We are undertaking a thorough internal investigation and have involved the police in this inquiry."
In one email, dated November 1999, one scientist wrote: "I've just completed Mike's Nature [the science journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."
This sentence, in particular, has been leapt upon by sceptics as evidence of manipulating data, but the credibility of the email has not been verified. The scientists who allegedly sent it declined to comment on the email.
"It does look incriminating on the surface, but there are lots of single sentences that taken out of context can appear incriminating," said Bob Ward, director of policy and communications at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics. "You can't tell what they are talking about. Scientists say 'trick' not just to mean deception. They mean it as a clever way of doing something - a short cut can be a trick."
In another alleged email, one of the scientists apparently refers to the death of a prominent climate change sceptic by saying "in an odd way this is cheering news".
Ward said that if the emails are correct, they "might highlight behaviour that those individuals might not like to have made public." But he added, "Let's separate out [the climate scientists] reacting badly to the personal attacks [from sceptics] to the idea that their work has been carried out in an inappropriate way."
The revelations did not alter the huge body of evidence from a variety of scientific fields that supports the conclusion that modern climate change is caused largely by human activity, Ward said. The emails refer largely to work on so-called paleoclimate data - reconstructing past climate scenarios using data such as ice cores and tree rings. "Climate change is based on several lines of evidence, not just paleoclimate data," he said. "At the heart of this is basic physics."
Ward pointed out that the individuals named in the alleged emails had numerous publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals. "It would be very surprising if after all this time, suddenly they were found out doing something as wrong as that."
Professor Michael Mann, director of Pennsylvania State University's Earth System Science Centre and a regular contributor to the popular climate science blog Real Climate, features in many of the email exchanges. He said: "I'm not going to comment on the content of illegally obtained emails. However, I will say this: both their theft and, I believe, any reproduction of the emails that were obtained on public websites, etc, constitutes serious criminal activity. I'm hoping the perpetrators and their facilitators will be tracked down and prosecuted to the fullest extent the law allows."
When the Guardian asked Prof Phil Jones at UEA, who features in the correspondence, to verify whether the emails were genuine, he refused to comment.
The alleged emails illustrate the persistent pressure some climatologists have been under from sceptics in recent years. There have been repeated calls, including Freedom of Information requests, for the Climate Research Unit to make public a confidential dataset of land and sea temperature recordings that is "value added" by the unit before being used by the Met Office. The emails show the frustration some climatologists have had at having to operate under such intense, often politically motivated, scrutiny.
Prof Bob Watson, the chief scientific advisor at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said, "Evidence for climate change is irrefutable. The world's leading scientists overwhelmingly agree what we're experiencing is not down to natural variation."
"With this overwhelming scientific body of evidence failing to take action to tackle climate change would be the wrong thing to do – the impacts here in Britain and across the world will worsen and the economic consequences will be catastrophic."
A spokesman for Greenpeace said: "If you looked through any organisation's emails from the last 10 years you'd find something that would raise a few eyebrows. Contrary to what the sceptics claim, the Royal Society, the US National Academy of Sciences, Nasa and the world's leading atmospheric scientists are not the agents of a clandestine global movement against the truth. This stuff might drive some web traffic, but so does David Icke."
House Republicans Blast Democrats, Obama Over Alleged ACORN Ties
By Lee Ross
A handful of House Republicans did their best on Tuesday to shame Democrats and the Obama administration for its supposed connections to the controversial anti-poverty group ACORN.
Republicans also voiced complaints that Democrats are not moving forward with investigations into the organization that is alleged to have committed widespread voter fraud to support Democratic candidates, in violation of the group's tax-exempt status.
"ACORN is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party," Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., said at Tuesday's two-hour long partisan forum attended by eight Republicans but no Democrats.
Another source of frustration for Republicans is a legal decision from the Justice Department, made public last week, that says officials at Housing and Urban Development can honor its existing contracts with ACORN despite a recently passed law forbidding federal funds from going to the group.
Congress banned federal funding to ACORN after members of the group were caught in an undercover video offering advice on how to evade tax laws to a couple posing as a pimp and prostitute.
"The White House will do everything it can to make sure ACORN will continue to get federal funding," Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., exclaimed.
Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, who was dubbed the "ACORN king" because of the bucket of acorns displayed prominently by his side, said he's convinced that any investigation of ACORN will reflect poorly on the Obama administration.
"These roads will lead to the White House," King asserted.
But one of the panel's guest speakers said there's no evidence to suggest there's an ongoing FBI or Justice Department investigation. Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation suggested that if the allegations made against ACORN were lodged against a mortgage company, there'd be great fanfare from Attorney General Eric Holder.
A Justice Department spokesman simply said "we decline comment" when asked about plans to investigate ACORN. (That really means "Yes, in due time" folks.)
The lawmakers also heard from Anita MonCrief, a former ACORN worker-turned- whistleblower who said she saw organized illegal activity in what she described as a "culture of dishonesty." She talked about how ACORN was armed with a list of "maxed out" Obama campaign donors who were solicited for funds to help voter registration efforts.
MonCreif also discussed how the voter registration workers were pressured to meet daily quotas and even threatened with prosecution if they failed to keep pace.
"The poor will be better served when ACORN is no longer the go-to place for the poor," Issa declared.
Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita blamed ACORN for producing hundreds of bogus registration in just one Northern Indiana County.
Rokita, a Republican, said the problem of intentional fraudulent voter registration threatens to undermine the democratic process.
"This is an American issue," he said. "This is a constitutional issue. Americans should be mad."
Representatives from several House Democratic offices did not immediately respond to Fox News' questions about the Republican forum.
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Fox News' Mike Levine contributed to this report.
What Happens When a PI Dumpster Dives Behind a San Diego ACORN Office?
By Doug Giles
What happens when a PI dumpster dives behind a San Diego ACORN office?
He strikes the flippin’ mother lode! At least that’s what happened to private investigator Derrick Roach at the National City (San Diego) ACORN office. Yep, Roach scored big-time on the cockroaches of ACORN when he staked out their San Diego workplace.
According to señor Roach via BigGovernment.com, after the release of the San Diego ACORN sting videos—which my daughter Hannah, James O’Keefe, and Andrew Breitbart dropped on the Nation’s head—and following Governor Schwarzenegger’s call for a probe into this batty zoo, Roach took it upon himself to get busy and see if he could ferret out more funky filth from this nefarious gang.
And, as stated, Roach scored more than Dwayne Wade would playing hoops against blind five-year-old, one-legged narcoleptic midgets.
What did Papa Roach come across? Well, my children, it was stuff like…
• Information exposing the inner workings of ACORN in California.
• Sensitive personal information belonging to employees, members and ACORN clients, such as social security numbers, driver’s license numbers, immigration records, and tax returns.
• ACORN’s political agenda is also laid bare, with thousands upon thousands of documents revealing the depth of the political machine that is ACORN and its disturbing ties not only to public employee labor unions but some of the most radical leftist organizations in existence (I wonder which politicians we will discover are in cahoots with these goofy clowns?).
The timing of this 20k plus page paper plunk of sensitive and incriminating 411 is kinda interesting as well. Check it out:
• On October 1st, 2009 California Attorney General Jerry announced that he was going to do a little look-see inside ACORN’s hull to determine if their San Diego office was as innocent as Bertha Lewis, David Lagstein and the Mange Stream Media screamed them to be.
• “Coincidently,” just a few days prior to when AG Brown was slated to pay them a howdy-doo, low and behold, on October 9th ACORN San Diego decided to do a bit of midnight spring cleaning and dump all their docs in a public dumpster to spruce up the joint before the AG’s arrival.
• Unfortunately for poor ACORN, PI Derrick Roach was parked outside waiting for them to do something stupid like dump 20,000 plus pages of their corporate papyrus and their clients’ personal records in a trash bin behind their slim shady facilities.
By the way, are there laws governing how personal info like social security numbers, tax returns, driver’s license numbers and stuff like that should be handled? I’m thinking there would be. Hmmm, I don’t know. Maybe Media Matters will look into it; if there are laws demanding stringent care and disposal of sensitive info, it looks like ACORN, prima facia, could be in deep crap with a stack of folks for placing their private stories in a public dumpster.
I would now like to address you, Mr. Roach. Good job, old chap! As Hannah Giles’ father and one who has been on the receiving end of the ACORN/Mange Stream Media stick, please take my advice and brace for the vilifying crunch from these numb nuts.
They’re are going to hit you with retarded stuff like…
• How dare a conservative PI jump into a dumpster and steal trash?! It’s unethical.
• You’re not a legitimate trash man. You’ve never been to trash man school.
• The trash did not give its consent to be removed from the dumpster.
• California law requires garbage to give its go-ahead before it is embraced by another.
• FOX News paid you 100 kadrillion dollar$ to dumpster dive.
• You tried this at thousands of other ACORN dumpsters and came up snake eyes.
• No other ACORN office would ever dispose of their clients’ records like this, except, of course, for that Oklahoma ACORN branch that left all their computers and crap on the curb after they got kicked out of their building for not paying the bills.
ACORN, naturally, is going into full damsel in distress mode, stating it was an accident and a coincidence that it occurred right before Brown and his boys were to perform their investigative colonoscopy into ACORN’s corrupt underbelly.
ACORN also blathered that Roach stole their trash. Stole your trash? Hey ACORN, once you place your clients’ sensitive info and your political playbook into le garbage it is public domain. Every hooker running a whorehouse with underage sex slaves knows that.
Lastly, will the little darlings on the left report this? Will Eric Holder call for a brutal investigation into the ACORNucopia of corruption of which BigGov and some citizen soldiers have uncovered? Garsh… who knows! I guess we poor little serf’s of Obamaland will just have to wait and see.
NYC to Obama: "No You Won't!"
By Kevin McCullough
The Obama administration grossly underestimated the response of the American people in it's decision to try war-field combatants as common thieves in criminal courts handed down this week by Attorney General Holder. The American people were also not impressed that President Obama ducked responsibility in calling it a "prosecutorial" decision. The American people see the waste that these trials will be, and the harm they could generate by allowing them to proceed. Yet if all these things are true of Americans at large, the residents of NYC realize them in greater magnification.
Realizing that any criminal proceedings to move forward would take place on the same 13 by 2 mile island where the single biggest act of war against our nation was ever committed, New Yorkers feel strongly that such enemy combatants, taken directly off the battlefields, should never be afforded Miranda and other rights associated with being citizens of the United States.
President Obama and Attorney General Holder have also grossly mistaken the ferocity with which this case will bubble up and that the inevitable media circus that will ensue will doom the welfare of America in multiple ways.
These trial proceedings will reopen the still mending emotional, psychological, and physical wounds of 9/11. In deciding with such reckless abandon to make a political pay-off to the far left, and the radical Islamic sympathizers they ignorantly embolden, President Obama is ripping the stitches out of the hearts of those that have wondered if closure will ever come. When the Attorney General promises court room cameras and complete transparency of the proceedings, he seems to ignore the possibility of radicals on camera shouting inaudible commands, jibes, and insults at those in the room as well as those sitting in caves across the globe.
The proceedings will create a bulls-eye again specifically on the most attractive target in America, and be used as an on-going tool of recruitment. Without question, terrorists may have been upset over the treatment of their colleagues at Gitmo, but striking back at the base was a logistical impossibility. Not so with a city of endless train and subway tubes, elevator shafts, a metro area with a nuclear reactor only miles away, and an island that could be isolated and brought to a halt given the right combination of carnage and chaos.
The proceedings are an unnecessary move on the part of the administration to try these particular four terrorists at all. They have all confessed, and even bragged, on the record, of their exploits and parts played in the single worst moment in America's history. With on-the-record confessions, the seeking of the death penalty was insured through military tribunal. What New Yorkers are now left with after the administration's move are mere words that Holder will "seek" the death penalty. And President Obama added his "assurance" that they would receive "the most exacting form of justice" possible. Yet if that was a foregone conclusion, why must he give assurances?
The proceedings are a not-so-veiled attempt to continue to throw negative attention on to the previous administration. In a move that gives birth to crass classlessness, the real endgame of this matter is to reveal military and intelligence secrets for the public and our enemies to judge for themselves as to their legitimate use. The goal of Attorney General Holder in essence becomes the beginning of the re-election campaign for President Barack Obama, and to create a way for George Bush to still be part of the discussion when the trial finally becomes a reality two to three years from now.
The proceedings are also a move that spends enormous amounts of money in an era where we have none extra to spend. The process for each of these four terrorists now begins all over again.
Discovery, testimony, evidence that has all been worked and diligently put in place for dealing with enemy combatants taken in acts of war from the battlefield must now be sifted through a different standard. Depending on the political leanings of the judge assigned the case, it is even likely that many gaps will be left in the evidence path, and thus a jury will be instructed not to consider certain sections of otherwise admissible evidence.
I am hesitant to believe that even the Obama administration with all of it's harshest left leanings would genuinely and truly want the mastermind and associates of 9/11 to ever walk free. But that possibility exists.
When O.J. Simpson was found innocent, they had his blood, mixed with Nicole Brown Simpson's on the scene, and in trails from one room to the next. And yet he walked. Should a similar outcome occur in this case, it would not shock me if we as tax-payers would be responsible for the cost of transporting them to their jihadist homelands where they go right back to work attempting to strike America again.
The average New Yorker understands all of this, as does easily the average American.
They also clearly see that President Obama and his minions like Holder are willing to play games with national security in order to make a pandering play to the minimalist base that still supports them strongly.
This travesty will not sit well in New York elections in 2010 and 2012 and unless President Obama decides to make a move that concedes these basic concerns as legitimate by those who lost the most in our nation's worst nightmare, he best consider the consequences.
New York City may be a town of liberals, but even we New Yorkers, in large numbers, on the issue of national security are willing to set aside many other concerns to insure the safety of our nation and our children. And along those lines Congressman Peter King pledges to fight with all his might for the next 45 days to overturn this amazing mistake by what can now easily be seen as the most arrogant administration ever.
One last parting note needs to be tucked in the back of the minds of the Obama administration, even if it doesn't give them much comfort.
I wonder what a Democratic Presidential Primary candidate in 2012 by the name of Hillary Clinton will have to say to her fellow New Yorkers about such a wrong-headed and utterly foolish gesture.
Stay the course Mr. President, and we might just get an answer to that question.
(Editor's Note: It won't make any difference for Hillary - Obama will be the sitting president in 2012 and she won't find a liberal short of digging up Stalin to throw support her way. Wait! Never mind Stalin... Obama will get him too. Besides, No Secretary of State - as ridiculous as it is that she has that title in the first place - has ever gone on to win the presidency. Nope. And Hillary won't either. Too bad, so sad - I know Bill wants to check out the new crop of White House interns, but.... You Clintons are a done deal, thank you very much. On the other hand, a republican challenger with the initials SP may benefit greatly from this, especially when NY is not beyond voting conservative when their lives depend upon it. Just food for thought. Zilla)
The Democrats’ Coming Defeat The tide is running very much against the Democrats. By Mona Charen
“There is a tide in the affairs of men.” William Shakespeare
Yes, but undertows too. As Obama, Pelosi, and Reid rush to transform America into a European-style social-democratic state, they must be nervous; they must feel the sand sliding under their feet. The 2010 elections are just over the horizon and the omens are not encouraging for them. Thomas Jefferson warned that “great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities.” Maybe so. But the Democrats may be calculating that a slender majority is better than an anorexic majority, or no majority at all.
In 2006, it was Republicans who couldn’t catch a break. The Iraq War was going very badly. The federal response to Hurricane Katrina had, fairly or not, further tarnished the Bush administration’s reputation for competence. And Mark Foley, a Florida Republican, was caught in a sex scandal with Congressional pages. Between September 17 and October 8, identification with the Republican party dropped from 48 percent (even with the Democrats) to 36 percent. Scandal has always played a large role in American politics. That November, the Democrats regained control of the House of Representatives and Speaker Pelosi promised “to restore integrity and honesty in Washington, D.C.” The Democrats, she proclaimed, “intend to lead the most honest, most open, and most ethical Congress in history.”
Yes, well, about that — not going so well. Rep. Charles Rangel, a familiar face of the Democratic party after 40 years in the House, failed to report as much as $1.3 million in income in what even the New York Times editorially described as “a lengthy docket of bizarre-to-outrageous behavior.” Yet Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic caucus shielded Rangel when the Republicans voted to expel him from the chairmanship of the tax-law-writing Ways and Means Committee.
Two enterprising young people armed with little more than a zest for combat and a video camera have single-handedly discredited and disgraced ACORN, the busiest (and it need hardly be added, least punctilious) voter-registration foot soldiers for the Democratic party. Revealed as corrupt beyond the most partisan imaginings, ACORN has been swiftly defunded, thus sidelining the organization in upcoming elections and dealing a public-relations blow to the Democrats.
Sen. Harry Reid himself may not be returning to the Senate in 2011. Polls in Nevada suggest that 54 percent of voters have a negative view of the senator, and match-ups with either of his two likely opponents show him losing by 7 to 10 points.
Sen. Arlen Specter, who left the Republican party out of a principled belief in his own indispensability, is facing a tough race as a Democrat in Pennsylvania. A primary challenge, which he fled the Republicans to avoid, has surfaced in the Democratic party as well. Meanwhile, he trails the likely Republican nominee, Pat Toomey, by 5 points, whereas Joe Sestak, his primary opponent, is running even with Toomey.
In off-year races that are interpreted as harbingers, the Virginia (likely) and New Jersey (possible) governorships may be gained by Republicans.
Congress’s approval rating stands at 21 percent. Seventy-one percent of Americans are unhappy with the way things are going in the country.
Non-presidential contests often go badly for the party in power, and there are indications that 2010 may be even more painful than most. The extremely high turnout among African Americans that marked the 2008 race is unlikely to be repeated without Obama on the ballot. Democrats in general seem less enthusiastic this time than Republicans. A Washington Post poll of Virginia voters found that only 50 percent of those who voted for Obama planned to vote in 2010 compared with 66 percent of those who voted for McCain. Further, the group with the most consistent record for turning out in off-year elections is older voters, and they are not happy with the health-care overhaul making its way through Congress. Obama won 66 percent of the votes cast by those between the ages of 18 and 29. But younger voters tend not to vote as heavily in non-presidential years. Election maven Charlie Cook envisions 2010 as the year of the “angry white seniors” as older voters turn out in force to oppose health-care reform.
Much can change in a year, of course. But for now, the tide is running very much against the Democrats. ________________
House Republicans Dispute Claim That Gitmo Relocation Would Be Jobs Engine
(PHOTO RIGHT) A cell house at Thomson Correctional Center is seen from one of the guard towers at the facility north of Thomson. (AP)
House Republicans on Monday disputed claims that moving Guantanamo Bay detainees to rural Illinois would bring thousands of local jobs to the community, saying a proposed detention facility in Thomson would amount to little more than "the new Gitmo."
Rep. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., released a statement claiming that a Republican colleague was told in a private Pentagon briefing Sunday that up to 1,500 soldiers would be posted at Thomson to guard the detainees, and that the Bureau of Prisons says the plan would only generate between 450 and 500 extra jobs, with no preference given to local residents.
"By moving the Al Qaeda core to Thomson along with 1,500 U.S. troops, the United States will publicly brand Illinois as the new Gitmo," he said. Kirk and other Republicans warn that Thomson could become a terrorist target and say the economic benefits would be relatively slight.
But Democratic officials in Illinois say the conversion of the near-empty prison in Thomson to a federal penitentiary could pump up to $1 billion into the local economy over four years and generate more than 3,000 jobs. In a reversal of the not-in-my-backyard approach many communities have taken to the idea of housing terror detainees stateside, the thirst for prison-centered employment has caused Thomson and several other towns to plead with federal officials to let them become permanent hosts to dozens of alleged killers.
"At a time when Illinois is facing recession ... this is a lifeline. This is an opportunity," Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., told reporters Monday, predicting that high-paying jobs with benefits packages would accompany a proposal to bring up to 100 detainees, in a revamped federal prison, to his state. "These people deserve a fighting chance to save their communities ... and this project will give them that chance." Durbin called it a "competition."
Gov. Pat Quinn said in a statement that such a facility could cut the unemployment rate of Carroll County, where the prison is located, in half from its 10.5 percent level as of September. Quinn predicted local income could increase by up to $223 million annually.
Regardless of where the money goes, the relocation represents a big federal expense. Charles Stimson, a former deputy assistant defense secretary for detainees, told FoxNews.com that costs would include spending up to $200 million to upgrade a facility, another $100 million a year for an operating budget and an unknown shift of annual federal homeland security funds to pay for additional terror threat monitoring and security for the community hosting prisoners.
"You're going to have to harden the facility so that people cannot commit acts against it. ... It will be a homeland security bonanza," he said. He warned that fraud and abuse would surely be commonplace in the process -- but also recalled an argument from former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in saying the cost of keeping such a facility is slight compared to the $3 trillion in losses to the global economy caused by the Sept. 11 attacks.
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman stressed Monday that no decision has been made as to where the federal government will relocate the prisoners.
But Thomson's not the only city looking for some detainee stimulus.
Other communities that have expressed interest include Hardin, Mont.; Marion, Ill.; Standish, Mich.; and Florence, Colo.
The surrounding Big Horn County in Montana has an unemployment rate of 10.2 percent, which approaches Carroll County's. Hardin's got a 460-bed detention center that's been sitting empty for two years. The city argues that the relatively new, modern facility would be easy to upgrade to accommodate the prisoners now in Cuba. And it's remote enough to make escape considerably difficult.
The county where Marion is located also has a relatively high unemployment rate, though below the national average, at 9.6 percent, according to September statistics.
"Bring them on," Mayor Robert Butler said of the detainees over the summer.
Housing detainees would entail restoring the medium-security prison to its former high-security status. But the restoration could also bring with it the return of lost jobs.
In Standish, the county unemployment rate was a whopping 15.8 percent in September. Local officials there were looking to land a detainee deal to keep their shuttering local prison open, and the facility has been reviewed by prison officials.
Florence, which has a lower unemployment rate of 7.7 percent, has also pitched its federal Supermax prison as a potential home for Guantanamo detainees. Prison officials also have looked at the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C.
But as the prospect of gainful employment wins over supporters to such host-city plans, several lawmakers say housing detainees locally carries too many risks.
"Instead of focusing attention on policies that will create good private sector jobs for the future, they're offering us their prisons and calling this a dream come true," Rep. Judy Biggert,R-Ill., said Monday. "I'd like to say it's more like your worst nightmare."
Kirk, a Republican running for President Obama's old Senate seat, circulated a letter among elected officials asking them to write to Obama opposing the plan. He said bringing Guantanamo prisoners to the state would make it a target for terrorist attacks.
"At best, these people will also be able to convert other prisoners to the cause of Jihad against America," he told Fox News. "At worst, the anger and attention that is brought to the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois would make us a target."
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told "Fox News Sunday" that he expects Illinois residents and lawmakers to object and that he and his colleagues will seek to block funding at the federal level.
"Hopefully the Senate and the House will speak on this issue," McConnell said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Republicans De-fund ACORN by Connie Hair
The House yesterday by a vote of 345-75 denied all federal funding for ACORN, the beleaguered community organizing group at the center of yet another series of scandals. All 75 votes against stripping ACORN funding were from Democrats, with two Democrats voting “present.” The full vote breakdown is at the link.
House Republican leader John Boehner of Ohio offered the Motion to Recommit on an unrelated bill yesterday that stripped the funding. The shocker was how quickly the House Democrat majority leadership threw ACORN under the bus.
“There were points of order that lie against [the motion], but I think Mr. Miller and the Majority Leader, Mr. Hoyer, recognized that if they tried to stop this on a point of order, they were likely to fail, and they proceeded,” Boehner said. “Though today’s vote indicates that the writing’s on the wall for ACORN, President Obama must indicate whether he will join the Congress in taking decisive action to break all government ties with this corrupt organization.”
The Senate must now pass the measure, having passed a different ban on more specific funding Wednesday by amendment to the Housing and Urban Development Appropriations bill. Then the President would have to sign the legislation. Obama doesn’t have much of a track record of defending his long list of political allies embroiled in scandals.
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, spoke after the vote of their committee report, “Is ACORN Intentionally Structured as a Criminal Enterprise?”
“We on the committee have been looking at ACORN, publishing an extensive study of their other criminal activities,” Issa said. “The importance of the vote today is that it is the last part of government necessary to rebuke the organization so that we can, in fact, eliminate all of its federal funding and then, if I have my way, seek to look into its non-profit status.”
I asked Issa what this would mean at the state level where ACORN reportedly gets most of its grant funding.
“Governor Schwarzenegger acting to defund ACORN in California -- you’re talking about one out of every nine dollars is spent there,” Issa said. “So I think you’re going to see a sequential effort from governors both Republican and Democratic to defund ACORN in their own states.”
RSC Still Waiting on the President
The conservative Republican Study Committee (RSC), the largest caucus in the House of Representatives, again called on the President to follow through on his repeated public pledges to talk alternative health care proposals with Republicans. After weekly inquiries about setting the date, RSC Chairman Tom Price, M.D. (R-Ga.) says they’ve gotten polite “thank yous” but no meeting.
“As Republicans who seek cooperation on health reform, we can tell you that those pledges have rung hollow,” Price said. “We’ve sought out the President. We’ve asked to work together and we’ve been denied at every opportunity. But we’re not deterred.”
Price, a former orthopedic surgeon, is a co-author of the RSC health care bill. Other RSC members were on hand to discuss their alternative health care legislation with the President through the media, apparently the only way left open to Republicans, despite Obama’s public posturing.
“Today we’re here to put forth a positive vision for health reform,” Price said. “No less than three dozen health bills have been introduced by Republicans this year. And while each bill is unique, they’re all based on one fundamental principle, and that’s that patients and doctors ought to be making decisions not bureaucrats either from the government or from insurance companies. We think that patients should be in control of the system.”
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the ranking Republican on the House Committee on the Budget, is one of those members offering his own bill, co-written with Sens. Tom Coburn, M.D. (R-Okla.) and Richard Burr (R-N.C.), and Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Ca.). It was the very first health care reform bill offered this year back in May.
“The biggest fiscal crisis in America and the fact that our debt is going up so high is because of health care spending,” Ryan said. “If we make the government the single or even the primary spender of health care, then the only way to solve our fiscal crisis, the only way to solve our debt problem is to have the government be in the position of having to ration care. That’s not who we are as Americans. What we’re proving with these bills is that it is unnecessary.”
Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz.) says he has, “written more health care bills than anyone” in the Congress.
“The President said in his address to the joint session of Congress that the proof we need health care reform, and he says it’s proof that we need a government-run plan, is that in many states, as much as 75 percent of the people who buy health insurance in the individual market, have only five plans to choose from,” Shadegg said. “And he pointed out that in one state 95 percent of the people get their plan from only five companies. Well, welcome to the discussion, Mr. President. I offered a bill three years ago to address issue.”
When asked if Republicans were willing to compromise on the government option to get tort reform, Shadegg pointed out that Republicans are the ones who have already made the huge concessions.
“On two of the three biggest issues, universal coverage and pre-existing conditions, Republicans are saying we’re ready, we’re already there,” Shadegg said. “Perhaps we should have held those back and used them as bargaining chips, but those are huge concessions. The notion that we now have to give more to get tort reform? I don’t think so.”
There has been a complete electronic media blockade on the existence of Republican alternative bills. There were five news cameras at the press conference covering the existence of Republican alternative bills. Still waiting on the broadcast reports.
McMorris Rogers Demands Protection for Disabled Children
Rep. Cathy McMorris Rogers (R-Wash.), vice chair of the House Republican Conference, joined more than a dozen parents this week to talk about the dangers a government-run health care system poses to millions of special needs children who rely on our health care system on a daily basis. McMorris Rogers is the mother of a two-year-old son with Down’s Syndrome.
“Throughout the health care reform process, it is very important that those with a disability have a voice in pending legislation,” McMorris Rodgers said.
Health care rationing is a real threat to people with disabilities who require a daily care. The most recent U.S. Census Bureau report released in 2008 says over 54 million people in America report some level of disability. Parents reported nearly six million children under the age of 14 had a disability.
All amendments offered to health care bills in both House and Senate committees that would bar “comparative effectiveness research” (CER) data from being used to ration health care have been defeated by Democrats in committee. These CER methodologies are used as a basis for the denial of benefits to patients against their will using disabilities, “quality of life,” age and life expectancy as criteria.
When government runs health care, keeping costs down means denial of services. Or worse.
Canadian Barb Farlow spoke with McMorris Rogers about her daughter, Annie, who was born with a genetic condition. Annie died in a Canadian hospital 80 days after her birth. When Farlow looked into the circumstances of her daughter’s death, she was horrified to find out that the Canadian government had denied life-saving medical care.
“We later discovered that no diagnostic tests had been done and a ‘do not resuscitate order’ was written before we had provided consent,” Farlow said. “The discovery that our fundamental, parental rights had been violated in such a manner without cause has left us shocked and devastated. Sadly, we believe that to our medical system Annie was not a child but a label with associated statistics and a price tag. We will never know Annie’s potential and so we grieve her death and the life she might have had.”
Welcome to government-run health care. More information on the parents’ stories at this link. http://www.healthcareforgunner.com ________________
Connie Hair is a freelance writer, a former speechwriter for Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) and a former media and coalitions advisor to the Senate Republican Conference.
ACORN Officials Videotaped Telling 'Pimp,' 'Prostitute' How to Lie to IRS
An employee at ACORN's Baltimore office advises a couple posing as a pimp and a prostitute during a videotaped meeting in July.
Officials with the controversial community organizing group ACORN were secretly videotaped offering to assist two individuals posing as a pimp and a prostitute, encouraging them to lie to the Internal Revenue Service and providing guidance on how to claim underage girls from South America as dependents.
The videotape was made public Thursday on BigGovernment.com, a political blog launched by Andrew Breitbart as a companion site to his BigHollywood.breitbart.com blog.
In the videotape, made on July 24, James O'Keefe, a 25-year-old independent filmmaker, posed as a pimp with a 20-year-old woman named "Kenya" who posed as a prostitute while visiting ACORN's office in Baltimore. The couple told ACORN staffers they wanted to secure housing where the woman could continue to maintain a prostitution business.
ACORN — the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now — bills itself as the nation's largest community of low- and moderate-income families "working together for social justice and stronger communities," according to its Web site. The organization has been accused by Republicans and conservative activists with fraud in voter registration drives around the country and has been under fire since last year for its support of President Obama and for its planned participation in next year's census.
A spokesman for ACORN, Scott Levenson, when asked to comment on the videotape, said: "The portrayal is false and defamatory and an attempt at gotcha journalism. This film crew tried to pull this sham at other offices and failed. ACORN wants to see the full video before commenting further."
On the videotape, "Kenya" can be seen telling an ACORN staffer that she earns roughly $8,000 a month. The ACORN employee then suggests to "Kenya" that ACORN could submit a tax return for 2008 showing that she made $9,600 for the entire year — instead of $96,000 — and that ACORN would charge "Kenya" $50 instead of the usual $150 fee for preparing her taxes.
ACORN offers tax preparation and benefits application services free of charge during tax season; it charges nominal fees during non-tax season.
The ACORN staffer can also be seen suggesting that the prostitute list her occupation as a freelance "performing artist."
"It's not dancing, trust me," the "pimp" says.
"But dancing is considered an art," the ACORN staffer replies. "[Exotic dancers] usually go under performing artists, or yeah, they usually go under performing arts, which will be what you are — a performing artist."
The "pimp" later says that he and "Kenya" plan to bring up to 13 "very young" girls from El Salvador to work as prostitutes. Although an ACORN staffer points out their plans are illegal, she also suggests that the girls can be claimed as dependents.
"What if they are going to be making money because they are performing tricks too?" the pimp says.
"If they making money and they are underage, then you shouldn't be letting anybody know anyway," the ACORN staffer says, and laughs. "It's illegal. So I am not hearing this, I am not hearing this. You talk too much. Don't give up no information you're not asked."
The "pimp" then asks ACORN staffers to "promise" not to discriminate against his sex worker because of "who she is and what she does," according to the audiotape.
"If we don't have the information, then how are we going to discriminate?" the ACORN staffer replies. "You see what I am saying?"
If the girls are under age 16, the ACORN staffer says on the tape, then they are not legally allowed to work in the state, regardless of what they do.
"So it's like they don't even exist?" "Kenya" asks.
"Exactly," the ACORN staffer replies. "It's like they don't even exist."
The staffer goes on to suggest that as many as three of the underage girls can be listed as dependents at the home, but a "flag" will be raised if as many as 13 are listed.
"You are gonna use three of them," the staffer says. "They are gonna be under 16, so you is eligible to get child tax credit and additional child tax credit."
The ACORN workers also appear to be promoting the group's services to the "pimp" and "Kenya."
A second ACORN employee can be heard on the audiotape suggesting that the couple join the organization for an annual cost of $120 prior to attending one of its first-time homebuyer seminars, which are underwritten with taxpayer funds.
Later, when the "pimp" asks what would happen if the organization is somehow connected to the scheme, the ACORN staffer replies, "First of all, it's not gonna damage us because we not gonna know. And with your girls, you tell them, 'Be careful.' Train them to keep their mouth shut."
"These girls are like 14, how can we trust them?" the pimp asks.
"Just be very, very careful," the ACORN staffer says. "Whatever you do, always keep your eyes in the back of your head."
Reached by FOX News, O'Keefe said he was "shocked" at the level of assistance provided by ACORN staffers.
"I was prepared for them to call the police, throw me out of the office and be hostile," he said.
"Without hesitation, they helped me every way they could with evading taxes and setting me up with a brothel, with getting around federal tax laws — doing everything they could to help us. I was completely shocked."
House Republicans issued a report in July accusing ACORN of engaging in a scheme to use taxpayer money to support a partisan political agenda. California Rep. Darrell Issa, the top Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, called for a criminal investigation into the group, which dismissed the report as a "partisan attack job."
Edward Kennedy is escorted by troopers as he leaves court in Edgartown, Mass Photo: AP
Ted Kennedy: Chappaquiddick Incident Senator Edward Kennedy's name will be forever blighted by the incident at Chappaquiddick Island where an aide to his brother died in his car.
On the night of July 18, 1969, Kennedy drove his car off a bridge and into a pond on Chappaquiddick Island on Martha's Vineyard. He swam to safety leaving 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne, a campaign worker on brother Robert Kennedy's campaign. Her body was found in the submerged car 10 hours later.
Sen Kennedy told the police that he was driving Kopechne to the ferry after a party on the island when his car left the unfamiliar road.
Senator Ted Kennedy, 77, dies after cancer battle But his failure to report the accident dogged his subsequent attempts to run for the American presidency.
A judge found that there probable cause to believe that Kennedy operated his motor vehicle negligently... and that such operation appears to have contributed to the death of Mary Jo Kopechne."
An attempt to explain his actions on national television was much watched but did not dispel doubts. In the 13-minute appearance, he denied "immoral conduct" and said he was not drunk.
Sen Kennedy, who was then 37, pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident and received a two-month suspended sentence plus a year's probation.
However he was re-elected the following year with 62 per cent of the vote.
The Final Chapter of the Legacy By FrontPage Magazine
Asked recently why he continued to push for a health care overhaul that has alienated large parts of the country, energized the political opposition, and deflated his once-soaring poll numbers, President Obama offered a concise answer: “I promised Teddy.”
The president’s promise was a fitting tribute to the outsize political influence of Ted Kennedy, who died of brain cancer this week at the age of 77. In the context of a particularly polarizing piece of legislation, it was also a reminder that Kennedy’s political career was as notable for his storied pedigree and his impressive longevity – Kennedy spent 47 years in the Senate – as for the aggressively partisan causes he supported, including his longtime goal of “universal” government-run health insurance.
Few would dispute that Kennedy was a highly effective Senate operator and an iconic figure. But as the accolades pour in in praise of the “liberal lion’s” vaunted pragmatism and bipartisan collegiality, some no doubt deserved, it is worth recalling that the nickname was well earned and the legacy Kennedy leaves behind more blemished than some are willing to remember.
Roots of Disaster
Despite his famous name, Kennedy had a humble beginning – and not just because he emerged from the shadow of his more famous brothers. His first major achievement was to be thrown out of Harvard University for cheating on a Spanish exam. And perhaps his most notorious political setback took place early in his career, far from the Senate floor.
On a nighttime drive in July 1969, Kennedy swerved his ’67 Oldsmobile off a bridge at Chappaquiddick Island near Martha’s Vineyard. Although Kennedy managed to flee the wreck, his companion, 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne, drowned in the crash. Worse, Kennedy failed to report the death for over ten hours. For a junior senator who would go on to style himself as a champion of the downtrodden, it was a shockingly callous start to a career, and one he would never completely live down. Kennedy escaped serious punishment for Kopechne’s death, getting off with a suspended sentence for leaving the scene of an accident, but any hopes of winning the presidency ultimately died that night.
A Contentious Cold War Legacy
Kennedy did not entirely redeem himself with his stance during the premier foreign-policy issue of his early career: the Cold War. On one hand, he expressed genuine concern for the plight of political dissidents and Jewish refuseniks under the repressive communist system, even taking the time to meet with persecuted opposition activists during a trip to the Soviet Union – in defiance of Soviet authorities and the KGB. In his book The Case for Democracy, former dissident Natan Sharansky would recall that shortly after the signing of the Helsinki accords in 1975,
“Edward Kennedy boldly decided to see a handful of refuseniks in a midnight meeting that was kept secret from the KGB until the very last moment. In these encounters with political figures from abroad, refuseniks got to brief politicians on the latest news about our movement, such as how many people had been denied visas and who had been arrested. The meetings were an important reminder to Soviet officials that the refuseniks had powerful friends in the West."
Despite these fond remembrances, some have questioned whether Kennedy’s relationship with the KGB was really that adversarial. Author Paul Kengor, for instance, has charged that in 1983 Kennedy may have reached out to Soviet secretary general and former KGB head Yuri Andropov in a calculated attempt to discredit President Reagan’s policy toward the Soviet Union just prior to the 1984 election. Seeing Reagan as the greater threat, Kennedy, according to Kengor,
“suggested a number of PR moves to help the Soviets in terms of their public image with the American public. He reportedly believed that the Soviet problem was a communication problem, resulting from an inability to counter Reagan’s (not the USSR’s) ‘propaganda.’ If only Americans could get through Reagan’s smokescreen and hear the Soviets’ peaceful intentions.”
The substance of the shocking charge, based on a secret KGB communiqué, remains speculative. But it was not out of step with Kennedy’s Cold War-era advocacy, which amounted to a campaign for disarmament on the part of the United States.
Central to that effort was Kennedy’s support for the “nuclear freeze” movement, which would have reduced America’s nuclear capabilities with no guarantee of reciprocal concessions from the Soviet side. Considering the Soviet Union’s repeated refusal to abide by arms-reduction agreements, Kennedy’s sponsorship of nuclear freeze resolutions was, in effect, a declaration of unilateral surrender. As Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, warned at the time, “If the nuclear freeze goes through, this country won’t exist in 1990.” No thanks to Kennedy, that theory was never tested.
Leading the Party of Defeat
Twenty years later, Kennedy again sought to undermine a sitting Republican president in wartime. He opposed the October 2002 resolution authorizing the Iraq war, later calling it “the best vote I have cast in the United States Senate since I was elected in 1962.” But while Kennedy’s opposition to the war was defensible, his often scurrilous campaign to discredit President Bush and shake popular support for the military campaign was not.
Among other damaging and demagogic claims, Kennedy helped popularize the Democratic distortion that the president had lied the country into war by deliberately depicting Saddam Hussein as an “imminent threat.” “There was no imminent threat,” Kennedy declared, earning instant approval from the anti-war Left. In fact, the president had made precisely the opposite argument: that Hussein should be deposed before Iraq becomes a real and present danger to U.S. security. Of the two accounts of the war’s origins, Kennedy’s was by far the less truthful.
Equally to his discredit, Kennedy would help radicalize the anti-war movement by lending credibility to its more conspiratorial conjectures. In decidedly bad political faith, he claimed that the Iraq war was a sinister plot “made up in Texas” and sold to the Congress as a move that “was going to be good politically.” According to Kennedy, “The whole thing was a fraud.”
President Bush had the better of that argument. In 2005, the Senate Intelligence Committee found no evidence of “political manipulation or pressure” to manipulate pre-war intelligence on Iraq. But as support for the war cratered, Kennedy won the political fight. As David Horowitz and Ben Johnson observe in their book Party of Defeat, Kennedy’s attacks on the war, though discredited, “took a damaging toll on the president’s credibility and on the public’s support for the war nonetheless.” Nevertheless, with a grace never publically accorded him by his political foe, the former president was among the first to praise Kennedy after his death.
The People’s Champion?
For all his involvement in foreign affairs, it was domestic policy and politics that Kennedy considered his true calling and his great achievement. To his supporters, Kennedy compiled an impressive record in this regard, and many take on faith the senator’s assurance that he was a lifelong champion of poor and underprivileged. But here as elsewhere, the virtues of the record he leaves behind can be overstated.
One of Kennedy’s signature causes, for instance, was raising the minimum wage. For Kennedy, the issue was uncomplicated: Those Republicans who opposed minimum wages hikes were refusing to “give hard-working men and women the pay they deserve.” But that claim was difficult to sustain in the face of substantial evidence that minimum wage laws hurt precisely those workers on the low end of the income scale that they are intended to help. A 2006 Heritage Foundation analysis was one of many to find that not only do minimum wage increases not alleviate poverty but they may actually perpetuate it by leaving “low-income Americans no better off in the short term and far worse off in the long term.”
A similar paradox was evident in the cause closest to Kennedy’s heart: health care. By his own account, Kennedy had been engaged in the health care debate since 1969, when he first moved to create a national, government-run health care insurance program. Kennedy saw his health care vision as a victory for all Americans, but a host of critics disagreed. While most remember the debacle of “HillaryCare” it’s now forgotten that the administration’s much-maligned plan was actually the moderate alternative to health care legislation proposed by Kennedy. Assessing Kennedy’s plan in 1994, the Heritage Foundation found that while the “Kennedy legislation contains many of the same features as President Clinton’s plan… in several instances, it expands upon the President’s prescription to broaden and deepen the federal government's direct involvement and control in virtually every aspect of America's health care system.” So far from helping Americans across the income spectrum, Kennedy’s plan would have raised premiums and taxes.
Kennedy did not get mellower with time. Of all the health care legislation debated in Washington this summer, the most radical, dramatically increasing government intervention in the health care system, was proposed by none other than Kennedy.
Whatever one’s views of his resolute and sometimes ruthless liberal politics, Kennedy’s clout was undeniable. Notwithstanding the more shameful chapters in his career, he certainly outgrew an early jibe against him, playing on his famous family connections, that a Senate post “should be merited, not inherited.”
Nowhere was that more apparent than in 2008, when he threw his backing behind a popular but less recognizable candidate for the Democratic nomination by snubbing Hillary Clinton and supporting Barack Obama. That the president now feels compelled to carry out his most controversial legislation in Kennedy’s name is perhaps the greatest testament to Kennedy’s place in American politics. Even beyond the grave, Kennedy remains a singularly influential figure.
Normandy - 6 June 1944
What Cruelty In Ourselves, Mr. President? by Joseph A. Rehyansky
D-Day + 20. Years, that is. CBS ran a one-hour special hosted by former President Dwight D. Eisenhower. It would be his last trip to the Normandy beaches that his troops captured at such terrible cost. Only one memory lingers: Ike waved his hand over a big stretch of beach. “Here, you could hardly find sand to walk on for the American dead.”
D-Day + 40. President Ronald Reagan addressed veterans of the invasion at the place where it began. He spoke of the valor of the Rangers, boys mostly, who scaled the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc. There were 225 of them at dawn. The next day 90 were fit to bear arms. He asked them: “Why did you do it? What impelled you to put aside the instinct for self-preservation and risk your lives to take these cliffs? What inspired all the men of the armies that met here? We look at you and somehow we know the answer. It was faith and belief. It was loyalty and love.” His entire speech is still worth reading.
D-Day + 50. What I most clearly remember is a photo of our draft-dodging Philanderer-in-Chief walking along that beach, head down, looking thoughtful and contemplative as only the most brilliant and insightful of men can. One wag superimposed a thought bubble over his head: “I’m sure glad it wasn’t me over here getting my butt shot off.”
D-Day + 60. At Omaha Beach President George W. Bush quoted Gen. Omar Bradley: “Six hours after the landings, we held only 10 yards of beach.” He also quoted from the diary of a Dutch girl who would turn 15 only six days later. She greeted news of the invasion with these words: “It still seems too wonderful, like a fairy tale . . . . I may yet be able to go back to school in September or October.” She never made it back to school. Anne Frank died at Bergen Belsen on a date uncertain in early March 1945, barely two months before the Germans surrendered.
D-Day + 65. Their numbers are dwindling, but former Second Lieutenant Bob Dole was there. Our Apologist-in-Chief is concluding another triumphant tour, breast-beating and genuflecting all the way. He probably goes through kneepads faster than an NBA starter. But you’ve got to give the man credit. He never misses an opportunity to peddle his squishy pabulum, his deviant views of the world we live in, and his apparent desire to retire from office in 2017 to a rousing universal chorus of Kumbaya. “We live in a world of competing beliefs and claims about what is true. It’s a world of varied religions and cultures and forms of government . . . . The nations that joined together to defeat Hitler’s reich were not perfect. They made their share of mistakes, had not always agreed with one another on every issue. But whatever God we prayed to . . . we knew that the evil we faced had to be stopped.”
“[W]hatever God we prayed to . . . .” Now what do you suppose he could have meant by that? Whom do you think he was talking to in his uniquely reassuring and condescending tone? And while we’re at it, how did I -- philistine that I must be -- overlook for almost 63 years the indispensable contribution to the overthrow of tyranny by those of our brothers so deeply committed to freedom and equality, the Nations of Islam?
“[C]laims about what is true.” If he was only talking about determining the truths, if any there are, in organized religion I would agree with him. But do you have the same hunch I do? He’s talking moral equivalence here, the delusions fostered by John le Carre and his cohort: the KGB and the CIA are brothers under the skin. Strangling your daughter because she wants to divorce the husband you forced her to marry is alien to our own beliefs, to be sure, but it’s a cultural difference, you see. Slowly hacking off the head of a helpless hostage is not acceptable, but we’ve been guilty of our own provocations, right? Just take a look at those terrible photos from Abu Ghraib, where the minor delicts of three or four low-level borderline morons were used to justify claims that our entire effort in Iraq is morally corrupt. The truth, objective reality if you will, is something to be determined, not endlessly debated by those whose level of tolerance for “competing beliefs” borders on the suicidal.
Granted, D-Day observances are not an occasion for jingoistic nationalism as the effort involved several nations. It was truly an Allied effort. But it took more than blood, treasure, and guns to demolish Fortress Europa. An unshakable belief in the superiority of Western Civilization as defined by the best that the Judaeo-Christian tradition teaches us was essential. In the words of Winston Churchill, we had to recover our “moral health and martial vigour... arise again and take our stand for freedom as in olden time.” It was a job for warriors sprung from freedom, not milquetoasts debating “what is true.” Obama’s speech was what one would expect from someone who is, in the words of a top advisor to Hillary Clinton, “not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.”
Neither did our President cover himself with glory the day before, when he visited Buchenwald and said that it made him think of the “cruelty in ourselves.”
His obvious reference was to our country’s use of waterboarding and other interrogation techniques, which he courageously disavowed yet again for the umptyninth time in Cairo. Never mind that the Brooklyn Bridge is probably still standing and 10,000 rush-hour commuters are still alive because we waterboarded the right guy.
War scrapes men raw in ways beyond the physical. What is left when the millstone grinds away all pretense is what we are. I have served among young Americans at war and never saw a Vietnamese mistreated. Once I saw one spoken to harshly by a captain who decided that this 60-something-year-old man was a Viet Cong suspect. The captain was an idiot. None of us much liked the Vietnamese. It wasn’t merely because their culture is as alien to ours as one that might have evolved in the Alpha Centauri system. We were stuck there because of them. Yet instead of “the cruelty in ourselves,” I saw GIs toss extra C-rations to the Vietnamese who lined the roads during our mounted convoys; spare change given to the children of our hooch maids; random acts of simple kindness every day.
Many of us have seen the photo on the dustcover of Michael Yon’s Moment of Truth in Iraq. It gives us a more contemporary glimpse of “the cruelty in ourselves.” A U.S. Army major, under fire, is hustling an Iraqi baby girl badly wounded by a terrorist RPG to his medic. Despite his bravery the child died.
No one’s ever accused me of Pollyannaism but if I had to choose between the world views espoused by our posturing President or those of the Dutch girl who died of typhus at 15 in the hell of a Nazi concentration camp, I would choose Anne Frank’s.
One of her diary entries reads: “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.” ___________________
Mr. Rehyansky is retired from the U.S. Army and the Chattanooga, Tennessee, District Attorney's office and now serves as a part-time County Magistrate. He is a former contributor to National Review, and his writings have appeared in The American Spectator and other publications.
Obama Needs to Brush up on Middle East History by Michael Barone
For a man of his impressive educational credentials, Barack Obama has sometimes shown a surprising ignorance of history.
During the 2008 campaign, when challenged on his pledge to meet with foreign tyrants without preconditions, he said that presidents from Franklin Roosevelt on had met with leaders of enemy nations. Funny thing, but in my books on World War II, I haven't been able to find the chapters on the Roosevelt-Hitler and Roosevelt-Tojo summits. In his speech in the Tiergarten last summer, he told us that the Berlin Wall came down thanks to "a world that stands as one." My recollection is that the world was standing as two, and one side wanted to keep the wall up.
The good news is that in his speech to "the Muslim world" in Cairo last week, Obama showed a surer grasp of the past. The bad news is that he still has more to learn.
Obama got some important things right and pounded them home to his audience. Six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. "Denying that fact is baseless, ignorant and hateful." Al-Qaida killed nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11. "These are not opinions to be debated; these are facts to be dealt with." America's bond with Israel is "unbreakable." Good, though perhaps undercut later in the speech. "The richness of religious diversity must be upheld -- whether it is for Maronites in Lebanon or the Copts in Egypt." Very good, though lacking any reference to Saudi Arabia, perhaps because the list of sects not tolerated would be too long.
"I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world," Obama said, "one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect." The unfortunate implication is that the United States did not respect Muslims before his inauguration. But then he went on to make points that George W. Bush made repeatedly in the seven years after Sept. 11.
"America is not -- and never will be -- at war with Islam." "All people yearn for certain things," including free speech, democracy, the rule of law, "the freedom to live as you choose." He also echoed Bush in his criticism of "a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations."
Like Bush and other American presidents, Obama hailed the United States as "one of the greatest sources of progress the world has ever known." And the candidate who treated our mission in Iraq with scorn seems to have felt obliged to acknowledge that "the Iraqi people are ultimately better off without the tyranny of Saddam Hussein" and that the government of Iraq is "democratically elected."
But he still has some history left to learn. "No system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other." But that's what the United States did in Germany and Japan, and in Iraq, as well. As one of the Democratic senators who insisted that the Iraqis meet benchmarks, Obama was a micromanager in that process himself.
"We did not go by choice; we went because of necessity" into Afghanistan. No, it was by choice; we could have stayed out and depended, as we did after the attacks of the 1990s, on homeland defenses. And as for his claim that "Islam has always been a part of America's story," that's a stretch, and one that requires airbrushing out the war against the Barbary pirates.
Most disturbingly, Obama seems to have gotten the history of the Israel-Palestine issue wrong. The plight of the Palestinians since 1948 or 1967 is not the moral equivalent of the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust, as Obama's "on the other hand" segue suggested. Nor are private statements by Arabs accepting the continued existence of Israel the moral equivalent of Israeli governments' public willingness to negotiate with Palestinians.
Obama seems not to have learned from previous presidents' attempts to negotiate an Israeli-Palestinian agreement that no solution is possible without an interlocutor willing to let Israel live in peace. His attempt to muscle Israel into stopping even natural growth of settlements beyond the 1967 line applies pressure to the party already willing to make peace. Obama needs to brush up on the Barbary pirates, but even more so on the last 40 years of Middle East history. ______________________
Mr. Barone is a senior writer with U.S. News & World Report and the principal co-author of "The Almanac of American Politics, published by National Journal every two years.
Suspect detained over 'extremist' bumper sticker 'Don't Tread on Me' puts driver in 'watch' category in DHS report
A Louisiana driver was stopped and detained for having a "Don't Tread on Me" bumper sticker on his vehicle and warned by a police officer about the "subversive" message it sent, according to the driver's relative.
The situation developed in the small town of Ball, La., where a receptionist at the police department told WND she knew nothing about the traffic stop, during which the "suspect" was investigated for "extremist" activities, the relative said.
A man identifying himself as a police officer from Ball called WND later to report that the town's records of traffic stops did not include this situation. He suggested it might have involved one of several other agencies that work in the area.
It followed by only a few weeks the release of a Department of Homeland Security report, "Right-wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment", which prompted outrage from legislators and a campaign calling for the resignation of DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano.
The report, which cites individuals who sport certain bumper stickers on their vehicles as suspect, was delivered to tens of thousands of local law enforcement officers across the nation.
WND is withholding the driver's name and the relative's name at their request.
However, the situation was described on the American Vision blog.
According to the relative, it happened this way: Her brother-in-law was driving home from work through the town, which has a local reputation for enhancing its budget by ticketing speeders. He was pulled over by police officers who told him "he had a subversive survivalist bumper sticker on his car."
"They proceeded to keep him there on the side of the road while they ran whatever they do to see if you have a record, keeping him standing by the side of the road for 30 minutes," she told WND.
Finding no record and no reason to keep him, they warned him and eventually let him go, she said.
The company that sells the bumper sticker is The Patriot Depot, where Chief Operating Officer Jay Taylor told WND the woman had told his staff about the situation while ordering more bumper stickers.
"It's rather shocking," he said. "We supposedly have freedom of speech in our country.
"We joke around every now and then how our spouses will come to visit us in jail," he continued, citing his products that say, "The Audacity of Nope," "Taxed Enough Already," "Born Free, Taxed to Death," "Bring Home Our Troops: Send the Democrats" and "I'll Keep my Guns and Money, You Keep the 'Change'."
"We hope people realize this is serious," he said.
American Vision noted the "background check" that was done on the driver.
"Why? [He] had purchased and displayed a conservative 'Don't Tread on Me' bumper sticker.""
The commentator wrote, "The bumper sticker is based on the famous flag designed by American Revolution era general and statesman Christopher Gadsden. The yellow flag featured a coiled diamondback rattlesnake ready to strike, with the slogan 'Don't Tread on Me!' underneath it. Benjamin Franklin helped make the rattlesnake a symbol of Americans' reluctance to quarrel but vigilance and resolve in defense of their rights. By 1775 when Gadsden presented his flag to the commander-in-chief of the Navy, the rattlesnake was a symbol of the colonies and of their need to unite in defense of threats to their God-given and inherited rights. The flag and the bumper sticker symbolize American patriotism, the need to defend Americans' rights, and resistance to tyranny's threats to American liberty. Those threats included-and include-illegal taxation, profanation of Americans' rights, and violation of the fundamental principles of American law."
American Vision continued: "The notorious Department of Homeland Security memo, which was apparently based on the infamous Missouri State Police Report that described supporters of presidential candidates Bob Barr, Ron Paul, and Chuck Baldwin as 'militia'-type potential extremists and potential terrorists, is not the first effort of leftist radicals to slander their political opponents as 'extremists.'"
"'Liberals' and other leftists have been calling defenders of traditional American limited, constitutional government, free enterprise, and individual liberty 'extremists' since at least the 1964 election," the Vision America statement said. "Small town police misled by phony left wing 'reports' are bad enough. Federal government agencies and their armed agents under the direction of leftist radicals are exponentially worse."
WND reported earlier on the DHS report, which advised about the "extremism" that could be expected from returning veterans, those who support homeschooling and oppose abortion, post certain bumper stickers on their vehicles and other factors.
The DHS not only issued that report, but also an earlier memo defining dozens of groups, members of animal rights organizations, black separatists, tax protesters and others as "threats."
That item, the "Domestic Extremism Lexicon" reportedly was rescinded almost immediately, but Benjamin Sarlin of The Daily Beast recently obtained and published online a copy of the unclassified memo, dated March 26, 2009.
It defines the "tax resistance movement" – also referred to in the report as the tax protest movement or the tax freedom movement – as "groups or individuals who vehemently believe taxes violate their constitutional rights. Among their beliefs are that wages are not income, that paying income taxes is voluntary, and that the 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which allowed Congress to levy taxes on income, was not properly ratified."
It states that tax protesters "have been known to advocate or engage in criminal activity and plot acts of violence and terrorism in an attempt to advance their extremist goals."
Apparently, the DHS analyzes the "threat" level of Internet news websites like WorldNetDaily, for the lexicon defines "alternative media" as "a term used to describe various information sources that provide a forum for interpretations of events and issues that differ radically from those presented in mass media products and outlets."
Tea Partying for Freedom By Bernard Chapin
Americans ignored the smears and the mockery to take a stand for limited government.
“This today isn’t about Republicans and Democrats. It’s about freedom and liberty.” Rush Limbaugh
Ascertaining the differences between right and left in America has never been easier. The tea party events held on April 15 showcased vividly the vast chasm that exists between the left’s political spin and reality. The turnout for the “taxed enough already” protests was vast and occurred in over 700 cities. I attended the Chicago gathering at Federal Plaza. Contrary to the media’s collective opinion, it was peaceful and inspired. About two thousand folks, many of whom held signs, cameras, and placards, conveyed to passersby the feelings that conservatives have about where the country’s headed.
To attendees, the driving force behind participation is governmental obesity. It is time to put the federal budget on a regimen of drastic reduction. The federocracy functions as an “imperial aristocracy” and is rarely responsive to our needs. We propose; the nobles dispose.
The first response of politicians to budget shortfalls is to raise taxes and never propose cuts in spending. There is no accountability in Washington, D.C. Program after program is financed and no methodology exists by which to assess their effectiveness.
Thus, no matter how counterproductive an agency’s impact, the bureaus expand and never contract. In the words of Ronald Reagan, “the closest thing to eternal life that we have here on Earth is a federal program.”
Times are dire … unless you work for the government. The nation’s unemployment rate is 8.5 percent according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the public sector thrives at the expense of the private sector. Further, “according to the BLS, the private sector lost an estimated 3.65 million jobs in 2008, but government jobs increased by nearly 150,000 in the same time period.”
Tea partiers are fed up with statistics like those along with being led by statist sleepwalkers. It’s time to question the madness and that is what we did on Wednesday. Granted, dysfunctionality is a bipartisan affair. RINOs have contaminated the reputation of the right as a Grand Old Spending Party marred the early years of this century.
Grassroots outrage metastasized during the fall of 2008 as a product of the Bush-Paulson bailout psychosis. The executive and legislative branches created TARP and lifted $700 billion from our pockets. Egregiously, no one is even sure how much money remains from the original fund.
The inauguration of Barack Obama exacerbated conditions. His “spread the wealth around” mentality and politics of confiscation are undeniably “a philosophy of violence and coercion.” Redistribution is only possible if equity is first stolen from its rightful owners.
Obama’s budget will put us $9.3 trillion in debt over the next decade, a debacle that will make the deficit four times greater than the one inflated by George W. Bush. Moreover, President Obama’s “stimulus plan” has nothing to do with stimulating the economy and everything to do with generational theft. Plans are even on the table to expand TARP to include life insurance companies.
Government unfunded liabilities are comprised of “accrued civilian and military retirement benefits; unfunded, promised Social Security and Medicare benefits; and other financial obligations” which amount to more than $53 trillion. Our country could use some of his promised “change” in regards to this unsustainable spending but instead we hear lies about cutting taxes.
In his remarks on tax day, Obama asserted that taxes are “used as a wedge to scare people into supporting policies that actually increased the burden on working people instead of helping them live their dreams.” Poppycock! Here is yet another example of the “wedge issue” fallacy being used as a political tool.
For those unfamiliar with the tactic, a “wedge issue” is a phenomenon wherein legitimate arguments are denounced by leftist politicos after it becomes evident that their positions diverge with those held by the general population. It is often used as a red herring to cloak areas of glaring Democratic Party deficiency, such as their shadowy patriotism, desire for unlimited immigration, lust for gay marriage, and confusing excessive taxation for fairness.
When the disparities between widespread opinion and proposals by the leftist elite become known, Democratic pols — and their minions in the mainstream media — insist that conservatives desist in alerting the citizens to their existence, and most Republican politicians comply with their command.
Systemic factors also catalyzed turnout on Wednesday. Specifically, the tax code is byzantine and treacherous. It benefits no one apart from the IRS, tax attorneys, and accountants. Many tea partiers would like to see the current system replaced “with a national sales tax or a flat tax” or a “fair tax.”
In summation, the rationale for meeting up and speaking out was obvious, but the left and their journalist lackeys did not want to deal with our actual contentions, so they resorted instead to their time-tested strategy of burning strawmen.
The major networks attempted to morph the outpouring of dissatisfaction as being the product of astroturfing by wealthy and/or corporate interests. In my own case, I heard about these events separately and simultaneously from two libertarian clubs of which I am a member. Neither has any corporate sponsorship and the brethren appear to be about as light in the wallet as I am.
On CNN, Anderson Cooper attempted to ridicule the tea parties but ended up skewering himself. He effortlessly captured the day’s “too much information” award. In a televised interview he observed, “It’s hard to talk when you’re teabagging.” Anderson, we’ll take your word on it.
Perhaps the “worst outrage ever” in regards to our shameless fourth estate transpired during the Chicago tea party, although I did not witness it firsthand. CNN reporter Susan Roesgen’s behavior simply has to be seen in order to be believed. Roesgen’s attitude towards her subjects was dismissive, condescending, hostile, and bizarre.
Any semblance of objectivity and professionalism was abandoned from her opening statement. She dubbed the convocation “a party for Obama bashers” and claimed that it was “organized by three different conservative groups.”
Like a confined amazon battling both her captors and a chronic case of PMS, Roesgen sauntered about and verbally battled the rubes she met in one of our nation’s toniest zip codes. Instead of listening to her interviewees, she spewed Democratic talking points. Roesgen continuously interrupted as a means of ensuring that their arguments could not be heard.
She defended President Obama to such an extent that it’s hard to imagine James Carville acting any differently. Roesgen then disparaged Fox News, calling it “right-wing” and the “conservative network.” Yet Fox has never displayed any bias approaching the debauched heights Ms. Roesgen breached on Wednesday.
Does anyone actually think that Shepard Smith, Bret Baier, Carl Cameron, Megyn Kelly, or Wendell Goler would (could?) ever treat ordinary Americans in such a contemptible fashion? Roesgen signed off by saying it was not “family viewing.” Ah, but there she’s wrong because the character of Cruella de Vil has been appreciated by children for decades.
Miscellaneous leftists contended that a recent USA Today/Gallup poll invalidates the concerns raised by the tea party social movement. As with every other statistical fact or measurement cited by the media, when one examines the figures closely the original claims become contestable.
The article itself was entitled “Most Americans OK with Big Government, at Least for Now,” yet those “comfortable with big government” represented only 37 percent of the sample results. The 52 percent majority figure was derived by the journalist taking the 37 percent and throwing it in with 15 percent who approved “of current actions but view big government as a long-term threat.”
Only in the details can the truth be discovered. Using those who fear the Leviathan as a way to validate the left’s need for uber-government is highly misleading. The poll also found that 55 percent disapprove of the president’s spending proposals, but that wasn’t a figure USA Today saw fit to place above the writer’s byline.
The right in America has entered its wilderness years, but the left comprehends that our essential arguments still resonate with the public. This undoubtedly was the motivation behind the release of a Department of Homeland Security report warning of increased right-wing extremism on the eve of the tea parties.
Allow me to pose an unanswerable question: what is the line between being a proponent of right-wing ideas and being a right-wing extremist? I guess it’s up to conservatives to determine that on their own.
The network MSLSD had no doubts, however. When discussing the report they featured “the elephant logo of the GOP and the words, ‘New Right-Wing Threat.’” The Obama administration may hope that the inherent ambiguity of its proclamation will intimidate the right. It won’t and we proved that on Wednesday.
Our rank and file are a patriotic bunch who appreciate the country’s history. These gatherings were a part of America’s historical continuum. The tea parties are not the beginning of the end but they certainly are the end of the beginning. ______________
Bernard Chapin wrote Women: Theory and Practice and Escape from Gangsta Island, along with a series of videos called Chapin’s Inferno. He is managing editor at MensNewsDaily.com. You can contact him at veritaseducation@gmail.com.
Texas Governor’s Tea Party Threat Shakes Things Up
While Gov. Rick Perry didn't come right out and use the "s-word" — secede — everyone knew that's what he meant.
The tea party movement had its day and then some on April 15, 2009, as citizens from across the country gathered in large cities and small towns to declare their opposition to excessive taxation from an ever-expanding federal government. In the spirit of the Boston Tea Party of 1773, these gatherings were meant to be a line in the sand, a message for tax and spend Democrats in D.C. to hit the brakes on their agenda. And if that message wasn’t clear enough with the thousands who attended Sean Hannity’s Atlanta tea party or Glenn Beck’s party in San Antonio, it was clear after Texas Governor Rick Perry spoke to a modest gathering of 1500 people outside Austin City Hall.
When Perry addressed those gathered in Austin, he spoke as one of them and mocked the Department of Homeland Security’s warning that tea-party participants could be part of “right-wing extremist radicalization.” Said Perry: “I’m just not real sure you’re a bunch of right-wing extremists. But if you are, we’re with you.” He then told the cheering crowd: “We will not stand our pockets being picked, our children’s future being mortgaged, our rights being taken away.”
Yet as important and poignant as Perry’s words were to those gathered outside City Hall, it’s what he said to reporters afterward that set the blogosphere ablaze: “My hope is that America and Washington in particular pays attention. We’ve got a great union. There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, who knows what may come of that.” While Perry didn’t come right out and use the “s-word” (secede), you can sure bet that’s what he meant, and he made it crystal clear by adding: “Texas is a unique place. When we came into the union in 1845, one of the issues was that we would be able to leave if we decided to do that.”
It seems the folks at thinkprogress.org certainly got the message. Immediately after news of Perry’s post-speech comments broke, they posted the headline: “Gov. Rick Perry: Texas Might Have to Secede.” Below the headline, bloggers for thinkprogress.org posted some really intellectual questions about secession. One of the best was: “The South is going to secede? Again? Are they bringing back slavery, too?”
The idea of secession gets under the skin of liberals like few other things can. And this is so because secession trumps their power grabs. When someone like Perry says his state has the right to leave the union if the federal government doesn’t uphold their end of the bargain, it’s a stark reminder that “the federal government exists by and for the states, not the other way around.”
And Perry has been open to the thought of breaking with the union as a last resort for some time now. Just last week, on April 9, he announced his support for Texas House Concurrent Resolution 50 (HCR 50), one of the many Tenth Amendment resolutions currently being passed at the state level.
According to the Tenth Amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” In light of these words, Perry supported the Texas legislature in demanding that the federal government “cease and desist” the usurpation of states’ rights and its blatant disregard of the U.S. Constitution. The Texas resolution also demands that, “all compulsory federal legislation that directs states to comply under threat of civil or criminal penalties … or that requires states to pass legislation or lose federal funding be prohibited or repealed.”
When Perry announced his support of HCR 50, he said: “I believe that returning to the letter and spirit of the U.S. Constitution and its essential Tenth Amendment will free our state from undue regulations, and ultimately strengthen our Union. … I believe that our federal government has become oppressive in its size, its intrusion into the lives of our citizens, and its interference with the affairs of our state.”
Although 15 other states — Indiana, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Kansas, Washington, New Hampshire, Arizona, Montana, Michigan, Missouri, Oklahoma, Minnesota, and South Carolina — have at least introduced a Tenth Amendment resolution in their state assemblies or legislatures, none have enjoyed the forthright gubernatorial leadership Texas has experienced with Perry.
Texas is its own place, and with a governor like Perry it will certainly remain that way.
When Narratives Collide By Phyllis Chesler
The heroic Capt Richard Phillips is held captive for five days by deadly, mercenary pirates high on hallucinogenic Qat. President Obama refuses to order an immediate rescue, (see conservative combat journalist Jeff Emanuel’s excellent piece about this), the Navy Seals nevertheless expertly rescue Capt. Phillips—and left-liberal British journalist, Johan Hari, immediately insists that we “ are being lied to about the pirates.”
Hari argues that the Somali pirates have been driven to criminal hostage-taking because America and Europe have polluted Somalian waters with radioactive waste, caught all the fish in their ocean, created a failed nation state–and thus, have forced the men to become pirates dependent upon the kindness of strangers’ ransom money.
And yes, with the usual twist of logic, Hari explains that the original British pirates were starved and beaten by cruel British sea captains and therefore turned to piracy which was, in truth, an egalitarian, collective movement which also rescued African slaves on the run. And, in this bid for our sympathy, Hari hopes that we, too, will confuse eighteenth and nineteenth century British-born pirates with the twenty-first century Somalian variety. (Well, Hari also supported those who recently rioted in the streets of London during the G-20 meeting. He viewed the rioters as “on the right side of history.”).
A narrative is also supported by refusing to cover events that do not support it, by pretending they do not exist. According to the left-liberal New York Times, (which used to be my Bible too), there has never been an honor killing in America. There are only “domestic violence” incidents which people-like-me wish to falsely label. (Stand by for a book by conservative journalist, Bill McGowan, Gray Lady Down, which is about the New York Times).
According to the Times, the 2009 Buffalo beheading of Aasiya Z. Hassan was not an honor killing, nor were the 2008 honor killings of Dallas-based Amina and Sarah Said, Atlanta-based Sandeela Kanwal, or Alexandria-based Hawlett Mohammed. In fact, just to be safe, the paper of record chose not to cover these honor killings—not even as incidents of domestic violence. To do so, might dangerously undercut their ruling narrative of injured Islamic innocence bearing up nobly under the onslaught of infidel insults such as Salman Rushdie’s work, the infamous Danish cartoons, etc.
Narratives are supported by presenting only some of the facts, not all of them, or by smoothly slipping in very objectionable facts in a piece that heralds their mirror-opposite.
Just this past weekend, friends pointed out that the Times featured a “Black Imam” from Saudi Arabia as proof that the Saudi King, (yes, the same fellow to whom President Obama bowed, deeply), is dedicated to an anti-racist and anti-segregationist program. Although black and born poor, Sheik Adil Kalbani will now be the “first black man to lead prayers in Mecca.” The portrait paints the advancement of Sheik Kalbani as proof that Saudi Arabia is now committed to tolerance, justice, and non-discrimination. Buried in the article, is the fact that Sheik Kalbani lives with two wives and twelve children.
Thus, polygamy is seamlessly presented as acceptable, even as part of a new era of tolerance—in the New York Times. And the fact that Saudi women are not allowed to be seen in public without a full face-and-body covering, are publicly lashed if they are suspected of talking to men who are not their close relatives, are not allowed to drive, are forced into child marriages to men old enough to be their grandfather, etc—simply does not matter. We are still back in the American 1840s and 1850s, where racial justice for men trumps all concerns about gender justice for women.
But, do these mind-twisting narratives really matter so much? I fear they do.
In the last few years, more and more women have begun to appear on the streets of Brooklyn and Manhattan, veiled Saudi-style. Some even wear dark glasses to cover their “naked” eyes. These women or their parents have immigrated from many countries, some are African-American converts, many seem relatively young. I believe that the college-age, educated women among them truly believe that they are walking symbols of resistance against: racism, white supremacy, western imperialism, western colonialism, “Zionism,” etc. Funny, their male counterparts/superiors dress far more comfortably, whether their clothing is western-or Islamic-style. Many American feminists say that this female willingness to suffer is no different than American women who wear very high heels and tight shoes and who undergo plastic surgery.
I disagree. The ruling politically correct narratives about pirates and American empire and about Islam and women will doom western civilization and all those who share its values if we refuse to understand the difference between civilization and barbarism; if we continue to falsely accuse Israel of “apartheid” and fail to condemn Islam for its gender and religious apartheid.
Finally, the concept of a “narrative” is an armchair philosophy. When the brave Navy Seals rescued Capt Phillips they were acting in the real and very dangerous world, they were not safely narrating a tale.
My deepest congratulations to them!
The Story of a Successful Rescue (and the Obama Adminstration’s Attempt to Claim Credit) by Jeff Emanuel
Despite efforts to spin the pirate tale as evidence of bold leadership by an inexperienced president, the reality was clearly nothing of the sort. (Also read Phyllis Chesler: "When Narratives Collide" POSTED NEXT: SCROLL DOWN)
After four days of floating at sea on a raft shared with four Somali gunmen, Richard Phillips took matters into his own hands for a second time. With the small inflatable lifeboat in which he was being held captive being towed by the American missile destroyer USS Bainbridge, and Navy Special Warfare (NSWC) snipers on the fantail in position to take their shots at his captors as soon as the command was given, the captive captain of the M.V. Maersk-Alabama took his second leap in three days into the shark-infested waters of the Indian Ocean.
This diversion gave the Navy Special Warfare operators all the opening they needed. Snipers immediately took down the three Somali pirates still on board the life raft, SEAL operators hustled down the tow line connecting the two craft to confirm the kills, and a Navy RIB plucked Phillips from the water and sped him to safety aboard the Bainbridge, thus ending the four-day-and-counting hostage situation.
Phillips’ first leap into the warm, dark water of the Indian Ocean hadn’t worked out as well. With the Bainbridge in range and a rescue by his country’s Navy possible, Phillips threw himself off of his lifeboat prison, enabling Navy shooters onboard the destroyer a clear shot at his captors — and none was taken. The guidance from National Command Authority — the president of the United States, Barack Obama — had been clear: a peaceful solution was the only acceptable outcome to this standoff unless the hostage’s life was in clear, extreme danger.
The next day, a small Navy boat approaching the floating raft was fired on by the Somali pirates — and again no fire was returned and no pirates killed. This was again due to the cautious stance assumed by Navy personnel thanks to the combination of a lack of clear guidance from Washington and a mandate from the commander in chief’s staff not to act until Obama, a man with no background of dealing with such issues and no track record of decisiveness, decided that any outcome other than a “peaceful solution” would be acceptable.
After taking fire from the Somali kidnappers again Saturday night, the on-scene commander decided he’d had enough. Keeping his authority to act in the case of a clear and present danger to the hostage’s life and having heard nothing from Washington since yet another request to mount a rescue operation had been denied the day before, the Navy officer — unnamed in all media reports to date — decided the AK-47 one captor had leveled at Phillips’ back was a threat to the hostage’s life and ordered the NSWC team to take their shots.
Three rounds downrange later, all three brigands became enemy KIA and Phillips was safe.
There is upside, downside, and spin-side to the series of events over the last week that culminated in yesterday’s dramatic rescue of an American hostage.
Almost immediately following word of the rescue, the Obama administration and its supporters claimed victory against pirates in the Indian Ocean and declared that the dramatic end to the standoff put paid to questions of the inexperienced president’s toughness and decisiveness.
Despite the Obama administration’s (and its sycophants’) attempt to spin yesterday’s success as a result of bold, decisive leadership by the inexperienced president, the reality is nothing of the sort.
What should have been a standoff lasting only hours — as long as it took the USS Bainbridge and its team of NSWC operators to steam to the location — became an embarrassing four-day-and-counting standoff between a rag-tag handful of criminals with rifles and a U.S. Navy warship.
On Friday, April 9, as the standoff reached the end of its third day, I called on President Obama to take action to free the American hostage from his Somali captors. I outlined three possible operational tactics that could be used to do so; number 1 was the following:
(1) 2 helos, 2 snipers each: pop the [pirates] in their heads, then drop a rescue swimmer to escort the hostage up to one of the choppers. This works best if the hostage is aware of what is happening and can help without getting in the way — say, by hopping overboard as the gunships near, to divert attention and get out of the line of fire.
(This was written before the USS Bainbridge tethered the life raft to its stern, an action which eliminated the need for helicopters.)
However, instead of taking direct, decisive action against the rag-tag group of gunmen, the Obama administration dilly-dallied, dawdled, and eschewed any decisiveness whatsoever, even in the face of enemy fire, in hopes that the situation would somehow resolve itself without violence. Thus, the administration sent a clear message to all who would threaten U.S. interests abroad that the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has no idea how to respond to such situations — and no real willingness to use military force to resolve them.
Any who think they weren’t watching every minute of this are guilty — at best — of greatly underestimating our enemies.
Like the crew of the Alabama, which took swift and decisive action to take back their own ship rather than wait for help from Washington that they knew could not be counted on, Captain Phillips took matters into his own hands for the second time in three days, leaping into the water to create a diversion and allowing the NSWC team to eliminate his captors. The result, of course, was the best that could possibly be expected: three pirates dead, the captain unharmed, and a fourth Somali man who had surrendered late Saturday night in custody.
One thing that will bear watching will be what the Obama DOJ attempts to do with the captive pirate. My money is on a life of welfare checks, a plot of land (in a red state, naturally), and voting rights in Chicago, New York, and Seattle.
In all seriousness, though, who knows? Obama could decide to get tough on the last surviving participant in the first pirating of an American ship since Thomas Jefferson sent the U.S. Marine Corps to root out and destroy the Barbary pirates.
However, given the administration’s track record to date, I won’t be holding my breath on that one. _________________
Mr. Emanuel, a special operations military veteran, is a columnist, a pulitzer-nominated combat journalist, and a director emeritus of conservative weblog RedState.com.
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American Capitalism Gone with a Whimper Source: Pravda.Ru (Russian Publication/English Version)
It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American decent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people.
True, the situation has been well prepared on and off for the past century, especially the past twenty years. The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia and a bloody test it was. But we Russians would not just roll over and give up our freedoms and our souls, no matter how much money Wall Street poured into the fists of the Marxists.
Those lessons were taken and used to properly prepare the American populace for the surrender of their freedoms and souls, to the whims of their elites and betters.
First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas then the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their "right" to choke down a McDonalds burger or a BurgerKing burger than for their constitutional rights. Then they turn around and lecture us about our rights and about our "democracy". Pride blind the foolish.
Then their faith in God was destroyed, until their churches, all tens of thousands of different "branches and denominations" were for the most part little more then Sunday circuses and their televangelists and top protestant mega preachers were more then happy to sell out their souls and flocks to be on the "winning" side of one pseudo Marxist politician or another. Their flocks may complain, but when explained that they would be on the "winning" side, their flocks were ever so quick to reject Christ in hopes for earthly power. Even our Holy Orthodox churches are scandalously liberalized in America.
The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been a record setting, not just in America's short history but in the world. If this keeps up for more then another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Wiemar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe.
These past two weeks have been the most breath taking of all. First came the announcement of a planned redesign of the American Byzantine tax system, by the very thieves who used it to bankroll their thefts, loses and swindles of hundreds of billions of dollars. These make our Russian oligarchs look little more then ordinary street thugs, in comparison. Yes, the Americans have beat our own thieves in the shear volumes. Should we congratulate them?
These men, of course, are not an elected panel but made up of appointees picked from the very financial oligarchs and their henchmen who are now gorging themselves on trillions of American dollars, in one bailout after another. They are also usurping the rights, duties and powers of the American congress (parliament). Again, congress has put up little more then a whimper to their masters.
Then came Barack Obama's command that GM's (General Motor) president step down from leadership of his company. That is correct, dear reader, in the land of "pure" free markets, the American president now has the power, the self given power, to fire CEOs and we can assume other employees of private companies, at will. Come hither, go dither, the centurion commands his minions.
So it should be no surprise, that the American president has followed this up with a "bold" move of declaring that he and another group of unelected, chosen stooges will now redesign the entire automotive industry and will even be the guarantee of automobile policies. I am sure that if given the chance, they would happily try and redesign it for the whole of the world, too. Prime Minister Putin, less then two months ago, warned Obama and UK's Blair, not to follow the path to Marxism, it only leads to disaster. Apparently, even though we suffered 70 years of this Western sponsored horror show, we know nothing, as foolish, drunken Russians, so let our "wise" Anglo-Saxon fools find out the folly of their own pride.
Again, the American public has taken this with barely a whimper...but a "freeman" whimper.
So, should it be any surprise to discover that the Democratically controlled Congress of America is working on passing a new regulation that would give the American Treasury department the power to set "fair" maximum salaries, evaluate performance and control how private companies give out pay raises and bonuses? Senator Barney Franks, a social pervert basking in his homosexuality (of course, amongst the modern, enlightened American societal norm, as well as that of the general West, homosexuality is not only not a looked down upon life choice, but is often praised as a virtue) and his Marxist enlightenment, has led this effort. He stresses that this only affects companies that receive government monies, but it is retroactive and taken to a logical extreme, this would include any company or industry that has ever received a tax break or incentive.
The Russian owners of American companies and industries should look thoughtfully at this and the option of closing their facilities down and fleeing the land of the Red as fast as possible. In other words, divest while there is still value left.
The proud American will go down into his slavery with out a fight, beating his chest and proclaiming to the world, how free he really is. The world will only snicker. _________________
The article has been reprinted with the kind permission from the author and originally appears on his blog, Mat Rodina.
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A Tale of Two Inaugurals By Bill Steigerwald
A national crisis -- the bigger and scarier the better -- always provides a good excuse for a leader to grab more power for himself and his political gang or, in the case of the United States, the federal government.
It happened most obviously with Lincoln in the Civil War, with Wilson in World War I and with FDR in the Great Depression.
When each of these crises ended and life returned to normal, as economist Robert Higgs has shown in several books, Washington was left with much more control over our lives than it had before the crisis began.
History – to be more precise, the criminal stupidity and incompetence of the Republicans and Democrats we foolishly elect and re-elect -- has handed President-to-be Obama an economic crisis said to be of Great Depression proportions.
We’re looking at years of trillion-dollar deficits. We’re looking at new layers of rules and regulations to govern financial institutions that were often wrecked by the old layers of rules and regulations. We’re looking at a future featuring high inflation rates and even bigger, more meddlesome, less escapable government.
We'll see soon enough how Obama handles our national emergency but, for now, everyone's guessing what he will say or propose in his historic inaugural address. The rhetoric and delivery are sure to be superior. But when it comes to tone and substance, let's hope Obama doesn't channel his idol, FDR.
On March 4, 1933, when FDR addressed a broken and dispirited country, he and his brain trust did not have a clue what they needed to do to restart America's frozen economic engine -- as they'd prove repeatedly over the next eight years.
Claiming to have divined "the temper of our people," and claiming a mandate from the people for vigorous albeit unspecified action, FDR sounded like a general who had just taken over a country of 130 million slaves:
"We must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress can be made, no leadership becomes effective. We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline, because it makes possible a leadership which aims at a larger good."
FDR also sounded an ominous warning in his inaugural that sounds creepy even today.
If the executive and legislative branches didn't work in harmony to fix "the national emergency," he said, "I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis -- broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe."
Let's hope that when he tries to end our current crisis, Obama doesn't take FDR's road to serfdom but the Ronald Reagan Freeway.
Reagan, confronted with far less serious troubles than either FDR or Obama, nevertheless put the blame where it belonged in his 1981 inaugural -- on government.
"It is no coincidence that our present troubles parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government," said Reagan, who was always much more libertarian in rhetoric than in practice.
"In the days ahead," he promised, "I will propose removing the roadblocks that have slowed our economy and reduced productivity. Steps will be taken aimed at restoring the balance between the various levels of government. Progress may be slow -- measured in inches and feet, not miles -- but we will progress.
"It is time to reawaken this industrial giant, to get government back within its means, and to lighten our punitive tax burden. And these will be our first priorities, and on these principles, there will be no compromise."
On Jan. 20, Barack Hussein Obama has the country's permission to plagiarize at will from Ronald Wilson Reagan. _________________________
Bill Steigerwald is the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review's associate editor. Call him at (412) 320-7983. E-mail him at: bsteigerwald@tribweb.com.
Who will be revealed as "Advisor A" and "Advisor B" on the Obama Team? Will the information bring down another democratic president?
Who Knew About Blago, and When Did They Know It? by Jack Thompson
United States Code, Title 18, Section 4, states:
“Misprision of a Felony: Whoever, having knowledge of the actual commission of a felony cognizable by a court of the United States, conceals and does not as soon as possible make known the same to some judge or other person in civil or military authority under the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.”
Yes, Virginia, it is a crime in this country to know of a violation of federal law and not report it to a judge or a prosecutor.
Do the feds ever prosecute this crime? Not often, but, yes they do. Just this year, Zach Scruggs, the son of prominent personal injury lawyer Richard Scruggs, pled guilty to misprision of a felony for his failure to report to authorities others in his law firm who were improperly trying to influence a judge.
We have just learned from the Chicago Tribune Rahm Emanuel did in fact have conversations with Gov. Blagojevich’s team about who should replace Obama in the United States Senate. All the clever parsing over the past several days of the President-elect’s team has raised suspicion, and now, with the news from the Tribune, the suspicion has been proven well-founded.
This is where misprision of a felony comes in. If Rahm Emanuel knew that Governor Blagojevich was trying to extort something for himself in exchange for the US Senate appointment only he could make, then Emanuel, under Title 18, Section 4 of the United States Criminal Code had a duty to run, not walk, to the Feds with this information. Maybe Emanuel did just that, but if he did not he could be charged for a failure to report this crime.
The Feds’ criminal complaint does in fact state, beginning at paragraph 90 on page 56, that a demand for a bribe from Team Blagojevich was conveyed to “Advisor A” on November 3, the day before the presidential election. One cannot read the complaint without concluding that “Advisor A” is an advisor to Barack Obama.
Further, federal criminal complaint paragraphs 96, 98, 99, 101, 102, 103, 105, 107, 110, 113, 114, and 115 all recount in disturbing detail the intercepted, recorded phone conversations between Team Blagojevich and Team Obama individuals (Advisor A and Advisor B) as to what Blagojevich thought he could get from Obama in exchange for certain Senate picks.
These numbered paragraphs are not idle ruminations or wonderings by Blagojevich. They are demands that the complaint states were communicated on the phone to “Advisor A” and “Advisor B.” Other “advisors” -- ones who are advising the Governor -- are described with a different label and clearly indicated to be Blagojevich “advisors.” “A” and “B” belong to Team Obama.
A Chicago Sun-Times reporter this week asked Emanuel, who was at his kids’ holiday event, whether he, Emanuel, was the Obama emissary (Advisor A or B) who heard radioactive “Hot Rod’s” demands as set forth in the criminal complaint. Emanuel refused to answer the question, pushing away the reporter’s tape recorder with his hand. The question is fair because paragraph 112 in the federal criminal complaint refers to communications between Blagojevich and a “President-elect advisor” about the “Fifth CD thing,” which the complaint construes to mean the Fifth Congressional District. Emanuel is the Congressman from the Fifth Congressional District.
Back in the waning days of the Nixon presidency, US Senator Howard Baker, ranking member on Senator Sam Ervin’s Watergate Committee, openly asked the question given him by Fred Thompson, the committee’s minority counsel, “What did the President know and when did he know it?”
The question now, for the man who claims there is an “Office of President-elect,” is this: “What did the President-elect and his advisors know about what Illinois’ Governor was doing, and when did they know it?” Obama says he is putting together a document to answer that question.
This is not a pleasant question to have on the table even before Inauguration Day, but there it is. It will be asked and asked again until a plausible answer is given. Washington political reporter Juan Williams this week said, “This Illinois scandal has used up Obama’s honeymoon even before he is sworn in.”
One reason that’s true is that Barack Obama sat in a church for 20 years and then claimed he did not know its senior pastor was spouting racism. Is there a pattern here? We don’t know yet, but there is one pattern which is an historical fact: The last two lawyers to serve as President, before Illinois lawyer Barack Obama, were Nixon and Clinton.
Both were disbarred and one of them was impeached for not telling the truth. ________________
Mr. Thompson is a writer and former lawyer in Miami who was Janet Reno's Republican opponent in 1988 for State Attorney. He secured the first broadcast decency fines ever levied by the FCC (1989) and represented Oliver North at the 1992 Time Warner shareholders meeting, persuading TW to pull rapper Ice-T's "Cop Killer" from store shelves worldwide. He can be reached at amendmentone@comcast.net.
Chicago Politics Find A Home In The White House by Michael Reagan
At the moment it seems clear that Barack Obama has had no direct involvement in the growing scandal involving Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, but nothing can remove the stench of Chicago politics that engulfs Obama thanks to his appointments of the Chicago Three.
Let it be said at the outset -- the only way Barack Obama can separate himself from any hint of the sordid corruption that is the earmark of Chicago's Daley machine is to send the Chicago Three back to the political sewer from which they have emerged.
Obama has chosen three long-time associates, David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel and Valerie Jarrett, to fill key posts in his administration. All are products of the scandal-ridden Richard Daley machine that dominates the city's politics, and by virtue of that fact alone they are unfit to serve in top White House posts.
This is not a matter of guilt by association. If you're a member of an organized crime family -- even if you've never killed anybody -- you're still part of an organization that routinely commits murder and you share in the guilt.
The same thing is true if you're closely associated with a notoriously corrupt political machine such as Chicago's Daley machine -- you are more than merely tainted by the corruption, you share in it.
Rahm Emanuel, Obama's choice to be White House chief of staff, signed on with Mayor Daley as long ago as 1987, when Daley was running for mayor.
According to news accounts, Emanuel served as a fundraiser for Daley, aggressively convincing donors to give money to Daley's campaign. After Emanuel served in the Clinton White House, Daley welcomed him back to Chicago with open arms, endorsing him in 2002 to fill the congressional seat left vacant when Rod Blagojevich ran for governor.
Daley pulled out all stops to help Emanuel win. And he wound up in the U.S. Congress thanks to the mayor. He is a product of the corrupt Daley regime and as such is clearly unfit to be White House chief of staff.
Before he went to work for Obama, David Axelrod spent years working for the Daley Machine.
In 2005, he proved his loyalty to the machine when U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald was investigating corruption in Illinois. Axelrod attacked him for daring to criminalize the sleazy style of politics in Chicago. In an op-ed piece Axelrod insisted that trading political favors -- including jobs, known as "pay for play" these days -- is an essential part of the process that makes government work.
Axelrod has been the liaison between the Daley Machine and Barack Obama. Giving him a key White House post cannot cleanse him of his association with the endemic corruption of the Daley Machine, which he has long and faithfully served. Send him back to their welcoming arms.
There is no question of Valerie Jarrett's association with the Daley Machine. She once served as Richard Daley's chief of staff and has been described as a key cog in the Daley Machine. That fact alone disqualifies her from serving in the post of advisor to the president of the United States. Moreover, she has been under a cloud of suspicion for her roles in a couple of sordid scandals involving public housing in Chicago.
Said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton: "Like Barack Obama, Valerie Jarrett is a product of the corrupt Chicago political machine. And it is no stretch to say that she was a slumlord.
"We have real concerns about Jarrett's ethics. Washington already has plenty of corruption. We don't need to import more of it from Chicago," Fitton added.
According to Robert Grant, special agent in charge of the FBI's Chicago office: "If it [Illinois] isn't the most corrupt state in the United States, it's certainly one hell of a competitor."
America can do without any hint of the Illinois corruption the Chicago Three represent. __________________
Mr. Reagan is a syndicated radio talk-show host, author of "Twice Adopted" (Broadman & Holman Publishers) and "The City on a Hill,"and the son of former President Ronald Reagan.
Blago’s Bitter Fruit By Jacob Laksin
Filling Barack Obama’s vacated Senate seat was supposed to be a dully procedural affair. Under Illinois law, Democratic Governor Rod “Blago” Blagojevich was to name the president-elect’s successor. That would have been the end of the matter. But a routine transfer of power this week became a showcase of its spectacular abuse, with Blagojevich’s Tuesday arrest following revelations that he had used his office to enrich himself and his allies; to strong-arm his critics; and, in a final act, to offer up Obama’s Senate seat to the highest bidder.
If the charges so graphically detailed in the FBI’s 76-page criminal complaint are accurate, Gov. Blagojevich presided over one of the largest corruption scandals in recent Illinois history. In a state where three former governors have been sent to prison in the past 35 years, and in which Blagojevich’s Republican predecessor, George Ryan, is serving out a six-and-a-half year prison term for fraud and racketeering, that is no mean achievement. But then, Blagojevich’s schemes to auction off Obama’s former office – and to secure in the process well-paid appointments for himself and his wife – are nothing if not audacious.
Blagojevich’s bid to cash in on Obama’s Senate seat has drawn the most media attention, and it’s easy to see why. FBI taps reveal him to be a perfect caricature of the corruption-steeped Chicago machine politician. In one excerpt cited in the FBI’s complaint, Blagojevich sensationally boasts of the Senate seat: “I’ve got this thing and it’s f-cking golden, and…I’m just not giving it up for f-ckin’ nothing.”
Indeed, Blagojevich demanded a high price. Although there is no evidence that Obama had knowledge of any such deal, Blagojevich apparently contemplated everything from an appointment Secretary of Health and Human Services or an ambassadorship in the Obama administration to a high-paying post with a union-connected non-profit called Change to Win, as suitable rewards for finding an appointment favorable to the president-elect. One advisor recommended that the governor set his sights on energy secretary, since that is the “one that makes the most money.” Absent adequate compensation, Blagojevich was more than ready to name himself Obama’s successor. “If I don’t get what I want,” he is recorded as saying, “and I’m not satisfied with it, then I’ll just take the Senate seat myself.”
It speaks to the abject ethical bankruptcy of his administration that the Senate seat was only the latest object of Blagojevich’s “pay-to-play” schemes. Earlier this year, for instance, Blagojevich and his chief of staff, John Harris, tried to bribe the Chicago Tribune to fire deputy editorial page editor John McCormick, a critic of the governor, as well as other editorial employees deemed hostile. In exchange for purging these “biased and unfair” journalists, Blagojevich promised to make it easier for the money-losing paper’s parent company, Tribune Co., to get financial assistance from the Illinois Finance Authority (IFA), a state agency. If the Tribune Co. wanted IFA financing, Blagojevich explained with typical tact, “our recommendation is fire all those f-cking people, get ‘em the f-ck out of there and get us some editorial support.” Blagojevich’s wife Patricia was also keen on the idea, urging the paper to “just fire” unfriendly editorialists.
It wasn’t just big companies that Blagojevich squeezed for a gain. This October, Blagojevich allegedly threatened to withhold $8 million in funds for pediatric care to Chicago’s Children Memorial Hospital, unless he got $50,000 in campaign contributions from a hospital executive. Perhaps the only wonder is that the FBI found no evidence of the governor leaning on a local orphanage.
While the scale of the governor’s corruption is startling, more incredible still is the brazen unconcern with which he went about his crooked business. Not only did Blagojevich understand perfectly well that he was breaking the law, but he specifically devoted his efforts to preparing for the legal consequences that he seemed to consider inevitable. At one point, the FBI complaint notes, Blagojevich discussed plans to move money out of his political campaign fund to avoid having it frozen in the event of an indictment. Yet another precautionary tactic was to transfer the money to Blagojevich’s defense attorney, on the understanding that the attorney would return the money if it wasn’t needed.
Such methodical conspiring is all the more astonishing when one considers that the governor, as he was well aware, had been under investigation since at least 2005. Even after last spring’s trial of his top political fundraiser, real estate developer Antoin “Tony” Rezko, brought heightened scrutiny of influence peddling in the Blagojevich administration, the governor remained unfazed. As recently as this Monday, Blagojevich told reporters that he was not in the least concerned about reports of a corruption investigation, declaring, “I don’t believe there’s any cloud that hangs over me.”
The irony – and it is admittedly a small one, considering the state’s scandal-plagued history – is that Blagojevich was first elected in 2002 by promising ethics reform and pledging to end “business is as usual” in Illinois state politics. Instead, his dramatic downfall merely adds to the state’s reputation for corruption. A 2004 survey, for instance, judged Illinois the fifth most corrupt state in the country. It trailed only the likes of Louisiana, home of recently ousted Democratic Rep. William Jefferson, indicted for pocketing $500,000 in bribes, and Alaska, whose Republican senior Senator Ted Stevens was convicted on seven counts of corruption this October. The Blagojevich affair suggests that the state still belongs in that undistinguished company.
Then there are the national implications. Fairly or not, Blagojevich has cast a taint on the incoming Obama administration. To be sure, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald has stressed that the federal case against Blagojevich makes no allegations of wrongdoing by Obama, while the governor himself was seemingly outraged with the administration’s refusal to buy him off. The FBI’s affidavit quotes him grumbling that “they’re not willing to give me anything except appreciation.” But there is still the pressing matter of what, if anything, Obama, who served as a top advisor to Blagojevich's 2002 gubernatorial campaign, knew of his corruption – a matter scarcely clarified by contradictory statements from Obama and his strategists about whether the president-elect had spoken to Blagojevich about the Senate vacancy.
It’s trite but true to say that Blagojevich is the kind of politician that makes people cynical about politics. His dismal 13 percent approval ratings prior to this week’s arrest are sufficient proof of that. But an appropriate antidote to such cynicism is the thought that Blagojevich, for all his leering contempt for the law, ultimately was not above it. As he gloried in playing kingmaker and profiteer, Blagojevich mused that a Senate seat “is a f-cking valuable thing, you just don’t give it away for nothing.” On this count, at least, the disgraced governor cannot be disappointed. He gave it away for everything. ____________________________________
Jacob Laksin is a senior editor for FrontPage Magazine. His e-mail is jlaksin [@] gmail.com.
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Dec. 9: U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald talks about the criminal complaint against Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich on corruption charges during a news conference in Chicago. (AP Photo)
Prosecutor: Blagojevich Engaged in 'Political Corruption Crime Spree'
Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and his chief of staff were arrested in Chicago Tuesday on two counts each of corruption charges relating to trying to sell President-elect Barack Obama's vacated Senate seat.
U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald on Tuesday accused Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich of participating in a "political corruption crime spree" that was a blatant effort to sell the state's U.S. Senate seat in the latest "pay-to-play" scheme in Illinois politics.
Fitzgerald described the alleged behavior by Blagojevich, who was arrested Tuesday morning along with his chief of staff, John Harris, as "appalling." He said his "cynical behavior" reached "a truly new low."
"He has been arrested in the middle of what we can only describe as a political corruption crime spree," Fitzgerald said in a news conference to announce the charges against the governor and his chief of staff. "This is a sad day for government. It's a very sad day for Illinois government. Governor Blagojevich has taken us to a truly new low."
The arrest is part of a three-year probe into the governor's administration. The criminal complaint by the FBI says each man was arrested on two charges of conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud and solicitation of bribery.
FBI Special Agent-in-Charge in Chicago Robert Grant said he was asked by reporters when he first started the investigation "whether or not Illinois is the most corrupt state in the United States."
"And I didn't answer that question, yes or no, and I can't answer that question today. I don't have 49 other states to compare it with. But I can tell you one thing: If it isn't the most corrupt state in the United States, its certainly one hell of a competitor," he said.
The series of allegations say that Blagojevich and Harris tried to sell President-elect Barack Obama's vacated Senate seat to the highest bidder. Fitzgerald quoted Blagojevich recorded during court-authorized wiretaps as saying, "It's a 'bleeping' valuable thing. You just don't give it away for nothing."
Fitzgerald said no allegations were being made that Obama was aware of any alleged scheming by Blagojevich.
The prosecutor added that the two men allegedly schemed with previously convicted defendants Antonin Rezko, Stuart Levine, Ali Ata and others to arrange financial benefits in exchange for appointments to state boards and commissions, state employment, state contracts and access to state funds.
The charges also allege that Blagojevich tried to influence the composition of The Chicago Tribune editorial board in exchange for state aid to the Tribune Company, which owns the newspaper.
Fitzgerald said Blagojevich was recorded in wiretaps as saying, "Fire all those 'bleeping' people, get them the bleep out of there and get us some support."
The prosecutor also cited another instance in which Blagojevich allegedly said he wanted to pull back $8 million in funding from the Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago because he did not receive a $50,000 personal contribution he had wanted from the hospital.
Blagojevich and Harris had their initial court appearance before U.S. Magistrate Judge Nan Nolan in Chicago on Tuesday. They were released on $4,500 signature bonds and must turnover their passports, any firearms and firearms ownership IDs.
The governor spoke little and was wearing the running clothes he had on when he was arrested at his home at 7 a.m. ET. Harris wore a suit and tie. Both men said they understood the crimes with which they were charged.
In an earlier statement Fitzgerald said, "Blagojevich put a for sale sign on the naming of a United States senator; involved himself personally in pay-to-play schemes with the urgency of a salesman meeting his annual sales target; and corruptly used his office in an effort to trample editorial voices of criticism."
Grant noted that Blagojevich was elected in 2002 after Illinois Gov. George Ryan retired in the face of looming federal corruption charges. Ryan was convicted and sentenced in 2006 to six and a half years in prison.
Grant said he had hoped that Ryan's conviction "would send a clear single to elected officials in Illinois that business-as-usual will no longer be tolerated, that selling your office for personal gain is a -- is a practice of the past. It's obvious by this complaint and by today's charges that this current governor did not get that message."
Fitzgerald said federal authorities obtained permission to wiretap the governor secretly a month and a half ago, and the recordings yielded a variety of details on Blagojevich's alleged wheeling and dealing.
He said the 76-page FBI affidavit alleges that Blagojevich was taped conspiring to sell or trade Obama's vacated U.S. Senate seat for financial and other personal benefits for himself and his wife, including an annual salary of $250,000-$300,000 at a nonprofit foundation or an organization affiliated with labor unions.
The prosecutor alleged that Blagojevich is heard on tape demanding a corporate board seat for his wife worth as much as $150,000 a year; promises of campaign funds, including cash up front; and the post of secretary of health and human services or an ambassadorship for himself in the Obama administration.
Informed Monday of the wiretap, Blagojevich told reporters that his discussions were "always lawful" and said taping him was akin to Watergate and President Nixon.
"I should say if anybody wants to tape my conversations, go right ahead, feel free to do it," he said.
The Chicago Tribune was first to report the arrests. The Tribune was named in the affidavit because tapes allegedly recorded Blagojevich directing Harris to inform the newspaper's owners and advisers that "state financial assistance would be withheld unless members of the Chicago Tribune's editorial board were fired, primarily because Blagojevich viewed them as driving discussion of his possible impeachment."
The Tribune Company, which declared bankruptcy on Monday, owns The Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Cubs, and had explored the possibility of obtaining assistance from the Illinois Finance Authority as part of the effort to sell the Cubs and finance the sale of Wrigley Field.
Conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. Solicitation of bribery carries a maximum of 10 years in prison. Both carry a maximum fine of $250,000.
Grant said when he called to inform Blagojevich he was under arrest Tuesday morning, the Illinois governor was "very cooperative."
In a statement released Tuesday, Illinois Republican Party Chairman Andy McKenna called for Blagojevich to resign.
"For the good of the state, and in the interest of the taxpayers, the Illinois Republican Party calls on Governor Blagojevich to resign his office effective immediately," McKenna said. "If Governor Blagojevich does not resign his position, we urge the General Assembly to move swiftly with impeachment proceedings."
Illinois Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin said the state Legislature should call a special election to fill Obama's seat rather than allow Blagojevich to appoint his successor.
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Illinois Governor Arrested on Corruption Charges
Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and his chief of staff were arrested in Chicago Tuesday on two counts each of corruption charges relating to trying to sell President-elect Barack Obama's vacated Senate seat.
Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and his chief of staff John Harris were arrested Tuesday morning in Chicago on two counts each of federal corruption charges stemming from allegations Blagojevich was trying to sell President-elect Barack Obama's vacated Senate seat to the highest bidder.
The arrest is part of a three-year probe of "pay-to-play politics" in the governor's administration. The criminal complaint by the FBI says each man was arrested on two charges of conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud and solicitation of bribery.
The charges also relate to allegations that Blagojevich and Harris schemed with previously convicted defendants and Obama associates Antoin Rezko, Stuart Levine, Ali Ata and others to arrange financial benefits in exchange for appointments to state boards and commissions, state employment, state contracts and access to state funds.
Blagojevich and Harris will have an initial appearance in U.S. District Court Tuesday.
A statement by U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald and FBI Special Agent-in-Charge Robert Grant said Blagojevich and Harris "allegedly conspired to sell U.S. Senate appointment, engaged in pay-to-play schemes and threatened to withhold state assistance to Tribune Company for Wrigley Field to induce purge of newspaper editorial writers."
"The breadth of corruption laid out in these charges is staggering," Fitzgerald said in a statement.
"Blagojevich put a for sale sign on the naming of a United States Senator; involved himself personally in pay-to-play schemes with the urgency of a salesman meeting his annual sales target; and corruptly used his office in an effort to trample editorial voices of criticism," he added.
Grant noted that Blagojevich was elected in 2002 after Illinois Gov. George Ryan retired in the face of federal corruption charges. He was convicted and sentenced in 2006 to six and a half years in prison.
"Many, including myself, thought that the recent conviction of a former governor would usher in a new era of honesty and reform in Illinois politics. Clearly, the charges announced today reveal that the office of the Governor has become nothing more than a vehicle for self-enrichment, unrestricted by party affiliation and taking Illinois politics to a new low," Grant said.
Federal authorities were permitted by a judge to record the governor secretly before the November election after raising concerns that a replacement for Obama would be tainted.
Fitzgerald's office said the 76-page FBI affidavit alleges that Blagojevich was taped conspiring to sell or trade Obama's vacated U.S. Senate seat for financial and other personal benefits for himself and his wife, including an annual salary of $250,000-$300,000 at a nonprofit foundation or an organization affiliated with labor unions.
They also allege Blagojevich is heard on tape demanding a corporate board seat for his wife worth as much as $150,000 a year; promises of campaign funds, including cash up front; and a Cabinet post or ambassadorship for himself.
The Chicago Tribune was first to report the arrests. Informed Monday of the wiretap, Blagojevich told reporters that his discussions were "always lawful" and he defended a close confidant, John Wyma, who turned on him. Wyma as "an honest person who's conducted himself in an honest way," Blagojevich said.
"I should say if anybody wants to tape my conversations, go right ahead, feel free to do it," he said.
However, the Tribune was also named in the affidavit because tapes allegedly play Blagojevich directing Harris to inform the newspaper's owners and advisers that "state financial assistance would be withheld unless members of the Chicago Tribune's editorial board were fired, primarily because Blagojevich viewed them as driving discussion of his possible impeachment."
The Tribune Company, which declared bankruptcy on Monday, owns the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Cubs, and had explored the possibility of obtaining assistance from the Illinois Finance Authority as part of the effort to sell the Cubs and finance the sale of Wrigley Field.
Conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. Solicitation of bribery carries a maximum of 10 years in prison. Both carry a maximum fine of $250,000.
The Holy Land Verdict: A Setback for the Stealth Jihad By Robert Spencer
A federal jury in Dallas on Monday dealt the Stealth Jihad initiative in the United States a crushing defeat: it found five former officials of an Islamic charity, the Holy Land Foundation (HLF), guilty of funneling at least $12 million of the charity’s funds to the jihad terror group Hamas. The notorious “Muslim civil rights” group, the Council on American Islamic Relations, is involved as well, since Ghassan Elashi, a founding director of CAIR as well as founder of the group’s Texas chapter, was among those found guilty; Elashi and his co-defendants face prison sentences of up to twenty years for providing support to terrorists.
HLF was once the largest Islamic charity in the United States. According to the Investigative Project, “prosecutors say HLF was part of a Palestine Committee – a conglomerate of U.S. based Muslim organizations and individuals committed to helping Hamas financially and politically. HLF was its fundraising arm, a designation formalized by Hamas deputy political director Mousa Abu Marzook in 1994.” After September 11, CAIR carried a link to HLF on its website, under the heading, “Donate to the NY/DC Emergency Relief Fund.” It seems likely that some people gave money to this thinking they were helping the injured and bereaved in New York and Washington, when they were actually giving money to Hamas. This weblink earned CAIR the designation of “unindicted co-conspirator” in the HLF case – which designation the group has tried unsuccessfully to have the Justice Department remove.
Andrew McCarthy, who prosecuted the blind Islamic cleric Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, told The Investigative Project: “This is one of the most significant victories the Justice Department has won in the war on terror. Financing is the life-blood of jihadist organizations like Hamas. With the assistance of willing co-conspirators, they conceal their activities and use the Muslim obligation of charitable giving to mask support that is actually channeled to their murderous agenda. Today’s verdicts say, loudly and clearly, that Americans aren’t fooled and won’t tolerate it. As a former federal prosecutor, I am especially proud of the assistant U.S. attorneys who persevered through some real travails in securing justice for the American people.”
Another unsavory link between the HLF and the global jihad came to light during the first trial of the charity, which ended in a mistrial last year. Found among the HLF’s documents was the Muslim Brotherhood memorandum about its “grand jihad in eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within” first came to light. It seems clear now that the HLF itself was one of the chief engines of this stealthy effort, enjoying a sterling reputation as a charitable organization while actually acting as a virtual fundraising engine for Hamas.
One chief operating procedure of this stealth jihad effort is constantly to portray oneself as being unjustly victimized by a racist and bigoted Justice Department. (Al-Qaeda manuals, similarly, advise imprisoned members to claim that they have been tortured whenever and wherever they may find themselves in an infidel prison.) The HLF’s allies began with this immediately as the verdicts were announced: a child of one of the defendants, unidentified in news reports, cried out in the courtroom, “My dad is not a criminal! He’s a human!” The tactic of portraying these jihadists as martyrs a la Alger Hiss was furthered also by William Moffitt, an attorney who represented the admitted Palestinian Islamic Jihad operative Sami Al-Arian. “I suspect,” Moffitt opined, “that they will be viewed much the same way that Mandela was viewed by the black South African population – as freedom fighters who have dedicated their lives to the liberation of Palestine.” The HLF trial was, he said, one of many “show trials,” the purpose of which was “to further, in the minds of the public, the so-called ‘war on terrorism.’ There are legitimate terrorist organizations out there. But we’ve tried to make every group that doesn’t agree with us like al-Qaeda.”
Is the problem with Hamas really just that it “doesn’t agree with us”? When Hamas has for years gloried in the murders of innocent Israeli civilians? The answers are clear; but to obfuscate what is straightforward is a hallmark of the Stealth Jihad. That effort – the effort to soften American resistance to Islamic jihad activity and to insinuate Islamic law piece by piece into the United States – has been dealt a blow in the Holy Land Foundation verdict, but although it is down, it is by no means out. _______________________
Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of seven books, eight monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including the New York Times Bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His next book, Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs, is coming this November from Regnery Publishing.
Smearing Sarah By Jacob Laksin
It is an inescapable rule of politics that defeat breeds recrimination, and the bitter aftermath of the 2008 election is no exception. Hardly had Barack Obama swept to a resounding victory on November 4th, than anonymous insiders in the McCain campaign began feeding political reporters a too-convenient-by-half theory to explain the electoral rout. In brief, it was all Sarah Palin’s fault.
Most sensational in this vein is the claim that Palin’s supposed intellectual deficiencies were one of the downfalls of the campaign. Thus, in the past few weeks alone, McCain aides have accused Palin of being so politically clueless that she could not name the participating nations in the North American free-trade agreement and so geographically unlettered that she did not know that Africa is a continent and not a country. Even Palin’s family has become an object of internecine derision, charmlessly described by one disgruntled McCain advisor as “Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast.”
Palin’s putative ignorance is but one of the flaws that allegedly undid the McCain campaign. If the mudslingers are to be believed, Palin used her ascendance to the Republican ticket as cynical self-promotion. In the days leading up the election, whispering from McCain aides gave rise to the notion that Palin had “gone rogue” and was seeking the limelight at the expense of John McCain, a narrative that was repeated without scepticism by a press eager to see the worst in the popular Alaska governor. In countless news stories, McCain aides were quoted calling Palin a “diva” out for herself, an ideologue “who takes no advice from anyone,” even a crazed “whack job.” As if this were insufficiently damning, one unnamed McCain aide lamented that Palin “does not have any relationships of trust with any of us.” Given the daily barrage of defamatory leaks against her, this complaint was all too credible.
But the rest was dubious at best. For the record, Palin has said that her comments about NATO and Africa were quoted out of context. The Africa charge turns out to be a hoax. In any case, it’s hard to see why Palin's gaffes merit the significance that has been attached to them. On a campaign stop in Oregon this summer, Barack Obama famously claimed to have visited “fifty seven states” and insisted that he still had “one left to go.” Joseph Biden, a one-man compendium of political faux pas, offered this history of the Great Depression in September: “When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the princes of greed. He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.’” It was an interesting account, all the more so given that Herbert Hoover was president during the Great Depression and televisions were not made available to the mass public until the late 1930s. That the indisputably bright Obama won the election handily suggests that such gaffes are not a reliable indicator of intelligence – let a lone a convincing explanation of why McCain lost.
It is likewise difficult to lend credence to claims that Palin went “rogue.” This charge seems largely based on Palin’s telling a reporter that she disagreed with McCain strategists’ decision to suspend the campaign in Michigan in the first week of October. It may well be that the strategists were right on the merits. McCain ultimately lost the state by 16 percentage points and some 800,000 votes. But if a determination to keep fighting for votes in the face of adversity is now to be considered a sign of a vice presidential candidate’s unfitness, it has to be asked why the running mate exists in the first place.
If McCain aides’ disdain for Palin has garnered such popular notice, the reason seems to have less to do with the substance of their animus than with the fact that it flatters the prejudices of the Palin’s critics on the Democratic Left and anti-populist Right. For her services to the McCain campaign, Palin has been mocked as an intellectual lightweight and faux-populist, tarred as a religious fanatic and a secessionist, dismissed as a McCarthyite demagogue and declared nothing less than the enemy of reason. In the New York Times, David Brooks wrote that she “represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party,” a charge echoed in the Economist, which accused her of “bringing out the worst in her party.” A marginal but much-noticed chorus of “Obamacons,” including most prominently Christopher Buckley, son of the late William F. Buckley, publically turned against McCain for no other reason than a felt dislike for his vice presidential pick.
No mystery surrounds the Left’s hatred of Palin. She energized a Republican Party that was at best halfhearted about its presidential nominee, attracting thousands to her rallies (a late October rally in Missouri brought out at least 13,000 Palin supporters, numbers rivaled only by Barack Obama himself) and almost single-handedly nullifying Obama’s expected poll bounce following the Democratic National Convention. It bears remembering that the one and only time that McCain pulled even with Obama in the race was after Palin’s addition to the ticket. One wouldn’t expect Democrats to admire these achievements. Less clear is why the McCain’s campaign operatives should find them so blameworthy.
Unless, of course, the idea is to deflect blame from their own missteps, of which there were many. In a politically unfavorable year for Republicans, McCain’s occasional policy incoherence – in one presidential debate, he unveiled new spending programs within minutes of promising a spending freeze – and his erratic behavior amid the recent financial crisis, when he needlessly suspended his campaign, only complicated the unlikely task of a McCain victory. Indeed, absent the grassroots enthusiasm generated by Sarah Palin, McCain’s margin of defeat may well have been larger than seven points that it was.
The truly strange aspect of the anti-Palin blowback from inside the McCain campaign is not that it has emerged – one wouldn’t expect the architects of an ineptly run campaign to do anything so drastic as accept responsibility – but that it has gone on as long as it has. Whatever the flaws of John McCain the presidential candidate, John McCain the man has never been one to evade responsibility. He could prove it again by standing up for a woman who did far more to make his campaign competitive than the aggrieved strategists now determined to blame her for its failure.
Jacob Laksin is a senior editor for FrontPage Magazine. His e-mail is jlaksin [@] gmail.com.
The Treatment of Bush Has Been a Disgrace By JEFFREY SCOTT SHAPIRO
Earlier this year, 12,000 people in San Francisco signed a petition in support of a proposition on a local ballot to rename an Oceanside sewage plant after George W. Bush. The proposition is only one example of the classless disrespect many Americans have shown the president.
According to recent Gallup polls, the president's average approval rating is below 30% -- down from his 90% approval in the wake of 9/11. Mr. Bush has endured relentless attacks from the left while facing abandonment from the right.
This is the price Mr. Bush is paying for trying to work with both Democrats and Republicans. During his 2004 victory speech, the president reached out to voters who supported his opponent, John Kerry, and said, "Today, I want to speak to every person who voted for my opponent. To make this nation stronger and better, I will need your support, and I will work to earn it. I will do all I can do to deserve your trust."
Those bipartisan efforts have been met with crushing resistance from both political parties.
The president's original Supreme Court choice of Harriet Miers alarmed Republicans, while his final nomination of Samuel Alito angered Democrats. His solutions to reform the immigration system alienated traditional conservatives, while his refusal to retreat in Iraq has enraged liberals who have unrealistic expectations about the challenges we face there.
It seems that no matter what Mr. Bush does, he is blamed for everything. He remains despised by the left while continuously disappointing the right.
Yet it should seem obvious that many of our country's current problems either existed long before Mr. Bush ever came to office, or are beyond his control. Perhaps if Americans stopped being so divisive, and congressional leaders came together to work with the president on some of these problems, he would actually have had a fighting chance of solving them.
Like the president said in his 2004 victory speech, "We have one country, one Constitution and one future that binds us. And when we come together and work together, there is no limit to the greatness of America."
To be sure, Mr. Bush is not completely alone. His low approval ratings put him in the good company of former Democratic President Harry S. Truman, whose own approval rating sank to 22% shortly before he left office. Despite Mr. Truman's low numbers, a 2005 Wall Street Journal poll found that he was ranked the seventh most popular president in history.
Just as Americans have gained perspective on how challenging Truman's presidency was in the wake of World War II, our country will recognize the hardship President Bush faced these past eight years -- and how extraordinary it was that he accomplished what he did in the wake of the September 11 attacks.
The treatment President Bush has received from this country is nothing less than a disgrace. The attacks launched against him have been cruel and slanderous, proving to the world what little character and resolve we have. The president is not to blame for all these problems. He never lost faith in America or her people, and has tried his hardest to continue leading our nation during a very difficult time.
Our failure to stand by the one person who continued to stand by us has not gone unnoticed by our enemies. It has shown to the world how disloyal we can be when our president needed loyalty -- a shameful display of arrogance and weakness that will haunt this nation long after Mr. Bush has left the White House. ______________
Mr. Shapiro is an investigative reporter and lawyer who previously interned with John F. Kerry's legal team during the presidential election in 2004.
