Political Truth and Fact

Saturday, February 28, 2009

The day’s top political news:

The economy is spiraling down at an accelerating pace, threatening to undermine the Obama administration’s spending plans, which anticipate vigorous rates of growth in years to come.

A disconnect between the projections by the White House and the grim realities of everyday American life was enhanced on Friday, as the Commerce Department gave a harsher assessment for the last three months of 2008.

In place of an initial estimate that the economy contracted at an annualized rate of 3.8 percent — already abysmal — the government said that the pace of decline was actually 6.2 percent, making it the worst quarter since 1982.

This is more than a matter of semantics. As the government determines its spending plans, readying another infusion of cash for troubled banks while contemplating an additional bailout for the auto industry, the magnitude of those needs will hinge on the extent of the damage.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/28/business/economy/28recession.html

Obama is declaring war on investors, entrepreneurs, small businesses, large corporations, and private-equity and venture-capital funds.

That is the meaning of his anti-growth tax-hike proposals, which make absolutely no sense at all — either for this recession or from the standpoint of expanding our economy’s long-run potential to grow.

Raising the marginal tax rate on successful earners, capital, dividends, and all the private funds is a function of Obama’s left-wing social vision, and a repudiation of his economic-recovery statements.

Ditto for his sweeping government-planning-and-spending program, which will wind up raising federal outlays as a share of GDP to at least 30 percent, if not more, over the next 10 years.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/29434104

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is labeling President Barack Obama's $3.6 trillion budget plan a "higher-tax, weaker-economy, fewer-jobs" blueprint that should trigger the most crucial policy debate since 1980.

The Republican leader says he actually agrees with much of Obama's rhetoric, but that there's a "gap between the words and reality."

Gingrich said there are pieces of Obama's budget that are "doable," including projected savings from more closely watching for fraud in entitlement programs.

But the Georgian also said, "The problem with the overall budget is that it's a job-killing budget."

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20090227/D96JTKD80.html

Opinion:
Obama survives by offering “hope” – but it’s something on which he cannot deliver

Whether its his total lack of experience or training for the job of being president or not, Obama is painting himself into a corner.  A small corner at that.

Obama’s expansive promise to Americans who make less than $250,000 a year – “you will not pay an additional dime in taxes” is a promise he cannot keep and stands as a lie from the git go.

The false commitment provided Newt Gingrich fuel for a devastating attack on Obamas’ tax plan when Newt addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington.

Never one to refuse such an inviting target when such is provided by a political enemy, Newt proceeded to detail the items on which ALL Americans will pay additional taxes: gasoline, heating oil, electricity, and other such basic items of daily life.

Corporations who see their taxes increased by Obama’s desperation will pass the new taxes on to their customers.  That’s the way business is supposed to work.  After all, the sole reason for the existence of any corporation is the generation of profits.  That’s the Alpha and Omega of business – any business.

Therefore, when Obama raises (or refuses to decrease) taxes on corporations and other businesses, he is increasing taxes on those Americans who use what the corporations produce.

Is Obama too stupid to understand, or is he so oblivious to reality he simply gambols along lying about his programs, policies, and proposals?

In any case, Newt is certainly not the only highly respected voice that will be quite happy to point this out.  Glenn Beck – a conservative talk host being promoted mightily by the brass a Fox News – is a bit more energetic than Newt, but his message is the same – a message that is supported by reality – undeniable reality.

This is something out of which Obama cannot lie.

He is openly raising our taxes – it will cost us all and cost us dearly.  In return, the Obama scam of paying taxpayers will come in the form of about the cost of a noon lunch – and most people wont be doing handsprings.  His devout followers were certainly expecting a whole lot more.

But perhaps we should cut Obama some slack.  After all, he has no real experience or training to serve in the office to which he was elected.

Pardon me, but while we are on that subject, does anyone care to guess why Obama so desperately refuses to come clean on where he was born or what might be on the birth certificate he hides from public view?

Hmmm and he also admits he has no clue about what to do about the terrorists at Git Mo – despite the fact his first act as president was closing that facility – not as a result of reasoned, logical study or conclusions, but simply to satisfy the demands of the extreme left wing among his supporters.

It was crass politics and a very irresponsible act – but then so is his raising the taxes on us all.

Buddy

The Top Blogs of the Day

First an overview:

1.

http://www..politico.com/news/stories/0209/19303.html
John Bresnahan

Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), the longest serving Democratic senator, is criticizing President Obama’s appointment of White House “czars” to oversee federal policy, saying these executive positions amount to a power grab by the executive branch.

In a letter to Obama on Wednesday, Byrd complained about Obama’s decision to create White House offices on health reform, urban affairs policy, and energy and climate change. Byrd said such positions “can threaten the Constitutional system of checks and balances.

2.

http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=320542727367781
And Off We Go To Democracy European-Style

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

Not a great speech, but extremely consequential. If Barack Obama succeeds, his joint address to Congress will be seen as historic — indeed as the foundational document of Obamaism.
As it stands, it constitutes the boldest social democratic manifesto ever issued by a U.S. president.

3.

http://townhall.com/columnists/ThomasSowell/2009/02/25/not_one_of_us
 
"Not One of Us"
Thomas Sowell 
 
If Barack Obama has been the most remarkable phenomenon of the recent political scene, Sarah Palin must be second. The emotional responses to each-- especially by the media and the intelligentsia -- go beyond anything that can be explained by the usual political differences of opinion on issues of the day.

That liberals would be thrilled by another liberal is not surprising. But there are conservative Republicans who voted for Barack Obama, and other conservatives who may not have voted for him, but who are quick to see in various pragmatic moves of his since taking office an indication that he is not an extremist.

Anyone familiar with history knows that Hitler and Stalin were pragmatic. After years of denouncing each other, they signed the Nazi-Soviet pact under which they became allies for a couple of years before going to war against one another.

Pragmatism tells you nothing about extremism. But the conservative intellectuals who seize upon President Obama's pragmatism to give him the benefit of the doubt are obviously bending over backward for some reason.

Now for the complete articles:

1.

http://www..politico.com/news/stories/0209/19303.html

John Bresnahan

Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), the longest serving Democratic senator, is criticizing President Obama’s appointment of White House “czars” to oversee federal policy, saying these executive positions amount to a power grab by the executive branch.

In a letter to Obama on Wednesday, Byrd complained about Obama’s decision to create White House offices on health reform, urban affairs policy, and energy and climate change. Byrd said such positions “can threaten the Constitutional system of checks and balances. At the worst, White House staff have taken direction and control of programmatic areas that are the statutory responsibility of Senate-confirmed officials.”

While it's rare for Byrd to criticize a president in his own party, Byrd is a stern constitutional scholar who has always stood up for the legislative branch in its role in checking the power of the White House. Byrd no longer holds the powerful Appropriations chairmanship, so his criticism does not carry as much weight these days. Byrd repeatedly clashed with the Bush administration over executive power, and it appears that he's not limiting his criticism to Republican administrations/.

Byrd also wants Obama to limit claims of executive privilege while also ensuring that thes White House czars don’t have authority over Cabinet officers confirmed by the Senate.

“As presidential assistants and advisers, these White House staffers are not accountable for their actions to the Congress, to cabinet officials, and to virtually anyone but the president,” Byrd wrote. “They rarely testify before congressional committees, and often shield the information and decision-making process behind the assertion of executive privilege. In too many instances, White House staff have been allowed to inhibit openness and transparency, and reduce accountability.”

The West Virginia Democrat on Wednesday asked Obama to “consider the following: that assertions of executive privilege will be made only by the president, or with the president’s specific approval; that senior White House personnel will be limited from exercising authority over any person, any program, and any funding within the statutory responsibility of a Senate-confirmed department or agency head; that the President will be responsible for resolving any disagreement between a Senate-confirmed agency or department head and White House staff; and that the lines of authority and responsibility in the Administration will be transparent and open to the American public.”

Obama faces a decision as early as next week on whether to support a claim of executive privilege made by former President Bush in refusing to allow Karl Rove, the former deputy White House chief of staff, to be deposed by the House Judiciary Committee on the White House’s role in the 2006 firing of nine U.S. attorneys.

Bush claimed “absolute immunity” for top advisors in resisting such subpoenas, by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, filed a lawsuit over the issue. The case is on appeal, and the Obama administration is scheduled to file a motion next week laying out its stance on the issue

2.

http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=320542727367781

And Off We Go To Democracy European-Style

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

Not a great speech, but extremely consequential. If Barack Obama succeeds, his joint address to Congress will be seen as historic — indeed as the foundational document of Obamaism.

As it stands, it constitutes the boldest social democratic manifesto ever issued by a U.S. president.
The first part of the speech, justifying his economic stabilization efforts, was mere housekeeping. The economic crisis is to Obama a technocratic puzzle that needs to be solved because otherwise he loses all popular support.

Unlike most presidents, however, he doesn't covet popular support for its own sake. Some men become president to be someone, others to do something. This is what separates, say, a Ronald Reagan from a Bill Clinton. Obama, who once noted that Reagan altered the trajectory of America as Clinton had not, sees himself a Reagan.

Reagan came to office to do something: shrink government, lower taxes, rebuild American defenses. Obama made clear Tuesday night that he intends to be equally transformative. His three goals: universal health care, universal education and a new green energy economy highly funded and regulated by government.

(1) Obama wants to be to universal health care what Lyndon Johnson was to Medicare. Obama has publicly abandoned his once-stated preference for a single-payer system as in Canada and Britain. But that is for practical reasons. In America, you can't get there from here directly.
Instead, Obama will create the middle step that will lead ultimately and inevitably to single-payer. The way to do it is to establish a reformed system that retains a private health-insurance sector but offers a new government-run plan (based on benefits open to members of Congress) so relatively attractive that people voluntarily move out of the private sector, thereby starving it.
The ultimate result is a system of fully socialized medicine. This will likely not happen until long after Obama leaves office. But he will be rightly recognized as its father.

(2) Beyond cradle-to-grave health care, Obama wants cradle-to-cubicle education. He wants far more government grants, tax credits and other financial guarantees for college education — another way station to another universal federal entitlement.

He lauded the country for establishing free high school education during the Industrial Revolution; he wants to put us on the road to doing the same for college during the Information Age.

(3) Obama wants to be to green energy what John Kennedy was to the moon shot — its visionary and creator. It starts with the establishment of a government-guided, government-funded green energy sector into which the administration will pour billions of dollars from the stimulus package and billions more from budgets to come.

But just picking winners and losers is hardly sufficient for a president who sees himself as world-historical. Hence the carbon cap-and-trade system he proposed Tuesday night that will massively restructure American industry and create a highly regulated energy sector.

These revolutions in health care, education and energy are not just abstract hopes. They have already taken life in Obama's massive $787 billion stimulus package, a huge expansion of social spending constituting a down payment on Obama's plan for remaking the American social contract.

Obama sees the current economic crisis as an opportunity. He has said so openly. And now we know what opportunity he wants to seize.

Just as the Depression created the political and psychological conditions for Franklin Roosevelt's transformation of America from laissez-faireism to the beginnings of the welfare state, the current crisis gives Obama the political space to move the still (relatively) modest American welfare state toward European-style social democracy.

In the European Union, government spending has declined slightly, from 48% to 47% of GDP during the last 10 years. In the U.S., it has shot up from 34% to 40%.

Part of this explosive growth in U.S. government spending reflects the emergency private-sector interventions of a Republican administration. But the clear intent was to make the massive intrusion into the private sector temporary and to retreat as quickly as possible. Obama has radically different ambitions.

The spread between Europe and America in government-controlled GDP has already shrunk from 14% to 7%. Two terms of Obamaism and the difference will be zero.

Conservatives take a dim view of the regulation-bound, economically sclerotic, socially stagnant nanny state that is the European Union. Nonetheless, Obama is ascendant and has the personal mandate to take the country where he wishes. He has laid out boldly the Brussels-bound path he wants to take.
Let the debate begin.

© 2008 Washington Post Writers Group

3.

http://townhall.com/columnists/ThomasSowell/2009/02/25/not_one_of_us
 
"Not One of Us"
Thomas Sowell 
 
If Barack Obama has been the most remarkable phenomenon of the recent political scene, Sarah Palin must be second. The emotional responses to each-- especially by the media and the intelligentsia -- go beyond anything that can be explained by the usual political differences of opinion on issues of the day.

That liberals would be thrilled by another liberal is not surprising. But there are conservative Republicans who voted for Barack Obama, and other conservatives who may not have voted for him, but who are quick to see in various pragmatic moves of his since taking office an indication that he is not an extremist.

Anyone familiar with history knows that Hitler and Stalin were pragmatic. After years of denouncing each other, they signed the Nazi-Soviet pact under which they became allies for a couple of years before going to war against one another.

Pragmatism tells you nothing about extremism. But the conservative intellectuals who seize upon President Obama's pragmatism to give him the benefit of the doubt are obviously bending over backward for some reason.

With Governor Palin, it is just the opposite. The conservative intelligentsia who react against her have remarkably little to say that will stand up to scrutiny. People who actually dealt with her, before she became a national figure, have expressed how much they were impressed by her intelligence.

Governor Palin's "inexperience" is a talking point that might have some plausibility if it were not for the fact that Barack Obama has far less experience in actually making policies than Sarah Palin has. Joe Biden has had decades of experience in being both consistently wrong and consistently a source of asinine statements.

Governor Palin's candidacy for the vice presidency was what galvanized grass roots Republicans in a way that John McCain never did. But there was something about her that turned even some conservative intellectuals against her and provoked visceral anger and hatred from liberal intellectuals.
Perhaps the best way to try to understand these reactions is to recall what Eleanor Roosevelt said when she first saw Whittaker Chambers, who had accused Alger Hiss of being a spy for the Soviet Union. Upon seeing the slouching, overweight and disheveled Chambers, she said, "He's not one of us."

The trim, erect and impeccably dressed Alger Hiss, with his Ivy League and New Deal pedigree, clearly was "one of us." As it turned out, he was also a liar and a spy for the Soviet Union. Not only did a jury decide that at the time, the opening of the secret files of the Soviet Union in its last days added more evidence of his guilt.

The Hiss-Chambers confrontation of more than half a century ago produced the same kind of visceral polarization that Governor Sarah Palin provokes today.

Before the first trial of Alger Hiss began, reporters who gathered at the courthouse informally sounded each other out as to which of them they believed, before any evidence had been presented. Most believed that Hiss was telling the truth and that it was Chambers who was lying.

More important, those reporters who believed that Chambers was telling the truth were immediately ostracized. None of this could have been based on the evidence for either side, for that evidence had not yet been presented in court.

For decades after Hiss was convicted and sent to federal prison, much of the media and the intelligentsia defended him. To this day, there is an Alger Hiss chair at Bard College.

Why did it matter so much to so many people which of two previously little-known men was telling the truth? Because what was on trial was not one man but a whole vision of the world and a way of life.

Governor Sarah Palin is both a challenge and an affront to that vision and that way of life-- an overdue challenge, much as Chambers' challenge was overdue.

Whether Governor Palin runs for national office again is something that only time will tell. But the Republicans need some candidate who is neither one of the country club Republicans nor-- worse yet-- the sort of person who appeals to the intelligentsia.

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and author of Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy.
 

 

Friday, February 27, 2009

The top political news:

The US government, making its third attempt to keep Citigroup alive, will boost its stake in the nation's largest bank to as much as 36%, encourage private investors to shore up the bank's capital and radically reshape the board.

The Treasury agreed to convert up to $25 billion in government-held preferred shares in the bank to common equity—provided private investors contribute an identical sum—in the third major aid package for Citigroup since mid-October.

The move won't involve any new government money for now, however.

The news dragged down the overall market, along with a bigger-than-expected decline in fourth-quarter GDP.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/29420036

Whose side is Hillary Clinton really on in the conflict in the Middle East?

In a swift about face from her views as New York's senator, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is now hammering Israel over its treatment of Palestinians in Gaza.

As First Lady, Clinton raised eyebrows when she kissed Suha Arafat. Wife of the PLO terror leader.

On Thursday, as Secretary of State she had an about face in the form of angry messages demanding Israel speed up aid to Gaza. Jewish leaders are furious.

http://wcbstv.com/national/hillary.clinton.israel.2.945238.html

Acting legend Clint Eastwood , 79, apparently believes that political correctness has rendered modern society humourless, for he accuses younger generations of spending too much time trying to avoid being offensive.

“Political correctness” is typical of silly and ridiculous crusades by liberals on Capitol Hill and in academia.

Serious people should not take it seriously and normal America should vigorously reject t the idea.

We're all spending too much time and energy trying to be politically correct about everything," says Eastwood.

http://in.news.yahoo.com/139/20090227/906/ten-eastwood-thinks-political-correctnes.html

Opinion:
Obama – trapped by success

There is a dynamic at work in politics that I long ago dubbed “the looking glass effect”.  It holds that when things are going badly in politics, look closely and increase the analysis – it is likely an opportunity for winning vital points is somewhere in the data.  That premise also has a counterpart, of course.  That holds that when all is going very well, alarms should go off warning against a major calamity.

Obama and liberal Democrats are trapped in the looking glass effect.

While many liberal cheer leaders such as the embarrassing Nancy Pelosi (her ballet of scrambling to her feet repeatedly to applaud any and all remarks of Obama’s speech to Congress, was truly humiliating – or should be), those who have a more sober and viable grasp of the political reality know better.

As is pointed out in the top blog of the day: The Obama Steamroller: Is resistance futile?, Democrats can do pretty much anything they wish in government.  They can impose their positions, programs, and proposals with alacrity.  Republicans have no ability to viably oppose them.  All the GOP can do is “hide in the weeds” and wait for some opportunity to arise.

In general, the situation is not a positive one for normal America – those Obama says cling to their bibles and their guns and oppose illegal immigration.  They are surrounded and the Indians are getting closer.

Fortunately, there is a big time “however” in this circumstance.

Obama has a cadre of deeply committed supporters who expect much from him.  They took his campaign rhetoric at face value.  They voted for him (many more than once thanks to Obama’s ACORN conspiracy) and they are waiting for the benevolent largess they were promised.

They will be shocked when they see the government payment from recent legislation will hardly cover a restaurant meal.

They expect Obama’s culture war against productive elements of America to hand them money and benefits they heard Obama promise.  They took Obama seriously when he promised a “share the wealth” philosophy with “Joe the Plummer”.  Surely the economy will turn upward and rewards will shower Obama’s people.

Of course it wont happen.  Even if Obama’s efforts to right the economy are successful – and most real experts doubt that to be the case, it will take time and success will come in slow increments.  For most of those who are not conversant with the ying and yang of financial matters, there will be little to make their lot noticeably better.

Obama seems Hell-bent to socialize our healthcare system.  The result will be care that is rationed, care that is delivered over long periods of time, and care that lacks today’s quality.

In recent years, there has been a flood of physicians seeking other professions because the cost of insurance and other matters makes their lot all but hopeless.  That exodus has led to a flood of doctors from foreign nations becoming more and more visible.  Pakistan, India, and other alien societies and cultures are filling the healthcare slots once manned by Americans.   The result costs patients in terms of confidence – even when the level of care remains the same.  It just doesn’t FEEL right.  Confidence can be crucial in matters of health – these foreign doctors  have a steeper hill to climb in that regard – at least for many patients.

But that is another matter for later discussion.

The bottom line of today’s position is that Obama and Democrats cannot deliver what they promised.  Meanwhile, they can do much as they wish and impose their radical views on normal Americans.  This invites such outrageous actions as the so-called “Fairness Doctrine” which is a conspiracy designed to shut down conservative talk radio.

It may also provide for show trial assaults on the Bush administration.  Congressman John Conyers has been salivating over that prospect for years…he even embarrassed himself by holding make-believe version.  Conyers and other extremists – Maxine Waters comes to mind – will likely also make a pass at reparations payments to Black America to ameliorate the evils of slavery.

As these issues arise, the credibility of the Obama government will decline.  Capitol Hill’s credibility may not follow given the low standing it already has based on polling data.

What happens when a huge volume of Americans loses all confidence in Obama?

Perhaps the looking glass effect will take hold and we’ll see a grass roots arousal such as the one that killed the amnesty bill.  Despite frantic efforts by the US Senate, the White House, and the mainstream media – America said “NO” and did so with such volume and mass, the issue had to be shelved and dismissed.

That sort of uprising will likely be needed again and again as Obama and his radical Congress move forward.  Trapped by having promised what they cannot deliver – and facing the reality that even the small successes will not be understood by most Americans – they will see themselves trapped and failing.

That’s where real hope for America lies – as Republicans look for someone to lead them and a cause around which they can rally sufficient support to regain their footing and stop the madness.

Buddy

The day’s top blogs

First an overview:

1.

The Obama Steamroller: Is resistance futile?
Richard Baehr

The political reality at the moment is that whatever will be proposed by the Obama administration or Congress in the next two years, it will pass. This is the consequence for the GOP of losing elections and losing them big in both 2006 and 2008.  The Democratic majority in the House is 257-178. After the 2004 elections, the GOP held a 232-203 edge, so nearly a quarter of GOP held seats are gone.  
There is no power of filibuster for the minority in the House, and there won't be any key votes where 40 blue dog Democrats align with the Republicans to stop some piece of legislation from being passed.

2.

http://townhall.com/columnists/ThomasSowell/2009/02/25/not_one_of_us
 
"Not One of Us"
Thomas Sowell 
 
If Barack Obama has been the most remarkable phenomenon of the recent political scene, Sarah Palin must be second. The emotional responses to each-- especially by the media and the intelligentsia -- go beyond anything that can be explained by the usual political differences of opinion on issues of the day.

That liberals would be thrilled by another liberal is not surprising. But there are conservative Republicans who voted for Barack Obama, and other conservatives who may not have voted for him, but who are quick to see in various pragmatic moves of his since taking office an indication that he is not an extremist.

3.

http://townhall.com/columnists/JonahGoldberg/2009/02/27/the_politics_of_fear
 
The Politics of Fear
Jonah Goldberg 
 
This week, former Vice President Al Gore was forced to withdraw a slide from his PowerPoint presentation.

Admittedly, on the surface that sounds only marginally more exciting than the news that Dan Quayle had wheat toast instead of rye with breakfast this week. But hold on a minute.

The slide in question was part of Gore's peripatetic minstrel show of environmental doom, made famous in his Oscar-winning horror-documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." After a montage of images of people suffering from famines, floods, fires and other biblical plagues across the globe, the slide purported to show data demonstrating that global warming "is creating weather-related disasters that are completely unprecedented."

The problem:

the source of the data -- the Belgium-based Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters -- explicitly warned against using the data the way Gore did, because there's no way to attribute all of these disasters to climate change. Caught fudging the facts, again, the former vice president had no choice but to drop the graph.

Now the complete articles:

1.

The Obama Steamroller: Is resistance futile?
Richard Baehr

The political reality at the moment is that whatever will be proposed by the Obama administration or Congress in the next two years, it will pass. This is the consequence for the GOP of losing elections and losing them big in both 2006 and 2008.  The Democratic majority in the House is 257-178. After the 2004 elections, the GOP held a 232-203 edge, so nearly a quarter of GOP held seats are gone. 

There is no power of filibuster for the minority in the House, and there won't be any key votes where 40 blue dog Democrats align with the Republicans to stop some piece of legislation from being passed. 

In the Senate, the Coleman Franken race will likely wind up with Franken being seated, giving the Democrats a 59-41 Senate majority, one seat from the 60 seat filibuster proof majority.  After the 2004 elections, the GOP held a 55-45 edge in the Senate, so just over a quarter of the GOP seats are now gone.

The Coleman Franken result is not certain, but Coleman's odds of prevailing are long. In the first critical weeks of the recount he was out-lawyered and out-hustled by the Franken team, which seemed to know better than the Coleman team where they could find additional votes, and insure they were counted. With 59 Senate seats the Democrats will have clear sailing on all votes by turning just one Republican on a filibuster vote.

With Arlen Spector facing re-election in an increasingly Democratic leaning state in 2010, the Democrats have their most likely vote. Given union influence in the Keystone state, will Spector stand with other Republicans and oppose card check? If Spector does not fall in line with the Obama steamroller, then Obama can pick off one of Maine's two Republican Senators. He won the votes of both Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, as well as Spector for the stimulus bill. 

The Republicans have been unlucky, particularly in Senate races recently, but part of the damage was self-inflicted. Would a shift of campaign resources in 2006 have saved the seats of George Allen and Conrad Burns, both of whom lost very narrowly? Might a better use of resources saved Coleman and Ted Stevens last year? 

Were the GOP at 44 or 45 in the Senate, they would have a real shot at sustaining a filibuster, and slowing the Obama team's determined effort to greatly expand the role of government. That effort amounts to nothing less than a sustained attack on the free enterprise system in the country, penalizing its winners, and discouraging entrepreneurship. Is it at all surprising that not a single corporate executive found a home among the upper levels of the Obama White House or Cabinet? 

Obama stated several times during the long campaign that even if some of his policies did not expand the pie, that they were needed for fairness. In essence, this is an administration committed to leveling, that trusts that only government can accomplish this.

The Obama team is relatively honest about the size of the ballooning federal deficit this year and next, due both to a shrinking economy (reduced revenues, and higher social service expenditures), and the new stimulus package and other rescue efforts (TARP 1, TARP II, TARP III?).  It is dishonest, however, about where the deficit will likely be after that. If Democrats remain in control of the White House and retain big majorities in the Congress, few or none of the new programs established by the Stimulus bill will be allowed to expire. The budget numbers assume they will all expire. The $800 billion stimulus cost  over ten years, becomes more than $3 trillion in ten years, if the new spending becomes a permanent part of the federal spending baseline. This year, total federal spending will rise to around $4 trillion, over 25% of the GDP, for the first time since World War 2.

Obama succeeded in getting elected, in large part by talking down the economy during the campaign (and hence the need for change). Until the financial market meltdown in September, the damage to the economy was limited mostly to a sector of the housing market.  Obama was able to get the stimulus bill passed by talking the economy down some more; catastrophe was the supposed alternative to Nancy Pelosi's vision for required federal spending. Is it any wonder that now consumers are holding onto their money and de-leveraging, creating falling levels of activity in most sectors of the economy?  And of course, this will require stimulus II later in the year.

Each day seems to bring new federal spending initiatives or plans for higher taxes on corporations and the well off.   $660 billion has been announced for new spending on health care, half "financed" with new taxes  (only a down-payment for what is really needed, according to the Obama team!), and cap and trade (higher taxes) for carbon emissions will come later in the year.

Addressing the economic slowdown is a bit of a smokescreen for what is really going on, I think. Yes, the "best and brightest" in the Obama team are trying to stabilize the banking system and get credit flowing. 
 
But the Obama team understands the political power they now have. And they won't waste it. So they will steamroller their way to victory on every left wing agenda item that is in their playbook -- from national health care, to global warming to card check.

If Obama wanted to stabilize the economy, create new jobs, and preserve others, his plans for health care and energy might be deferred, as well as some of  the pro-union legislation and executive orders.
 
For many of these initiatives will prove to be job killers, and counter some of the positive impact that may come from the stimulus package .. The stimulus package will not save or create 3.5 or 4 million jobs, and most of the jobs that are saved will be public sector jobs, an area of the economy with virtually full employment. The jobs created will likely be union jobs, which means higher wages and higher costs for both companies and government. In the private sector, this will mean fewer employees over time.

Above all, the Obama team wants to satisfy all the constituency groups that helped elect Democrats -- unions (SEIU), trial lawyers, unions (NEA), environmental groups, unions (AFSCME), ACORN, racial and ethnic minorities, and did I mention unions?  The enemies of the left -- drug companies, insurance companies, high earning corporate and banking employees, coal companies, oil companies, those with incomes over $250,000 (or maybe a bit less than that), entrepreneurs, doctors, companies with profitable foreign operations -- all will feel the pain, in large part through higher taxes, estimated at a trillion (so far).

Obama means to create a permanent Democratic majority, and he is well on his way to doing it. One of the problems of being in the minority in Congress, especially a small and weak minority, is that it is not much fun. This is why there are usually more retirements among the party in the minority. Open seats are the easiest to be turned, and so GOP retirements helped solidify Democratic gains in 2008, and may do so again in 2010.

In the Senate, where the Democrats are close to a filibuster proof majority today, Republicans are offering more bounties with open seats in 2010 in  Florida, Ohio, Missouri, New Hampshire, Kansas, and maybe Texas. Throw in a few vulnerable incumbents in Kentucky, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, and it is not hard to see the Democrats expanding their majority in 2010, rather than seeing a GOP bounce-back , as usually occurs after two straight poundings and an off year election with a new party in control of the White House.

The GOP may do better in the House, but is unlikely to get anywhere near winning back control of that body in 2010. In the House, the power of the majority, especially if there is strong party discipline, is near total, even with small majorities.  The GOP's best shot may be to win control of some Governor's races, and state legislative bodies in 2010, since unhappiness with the economy may hurt the incumbent party in power at this level. This can help the GOP with redistricting for Congress after the 2010 census, assuming Rahm Emanuel surprises us, and decides to play fair. 

And then there is Obama. The President is a gifted  politician and an even better candidate. And he will remain in candidate mode for all of the next four years. It is what he does best. So he will appear in swing states for announcements and speeches, as he has done already in Colorado, Virginia, Ohio, Florida, Indiana and Arizona.  Expect to see him in North Carolina, Nevada, New Mexico, Iowa, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, New Hampshire and Minnesota too. I do not expect to see him in New York or California much, except to raise money. The wealthy who deliriously write checks for Obama and the Democrats remind me of the character played by Kevin Bacon in the movie Animal House. As he is being paddled on the behind on his fraternity's pledge initiation night, he keeps shouting out: "Thank you sir, may I have another?"

Americans may grow weary of all the new programs, spending and elevated deficits. And most Americans do not hate the wealthy, even with all the populist bashing of bankers and corporate executives now going on. Obama's team has no problem per se with wealthy folks of course -- they like and depend on Hollywood liberals, K street lobbyists, trial lawyers, and union executives.  Obama's team will counter any criticism of its burgeoning deficit by saying:  "We inherited the problem, we inherited the problem". 

Over time, the refrain may wear thin, but no one should assume this is or will be a fair fight in terms of the power of the messaging, and the messengers.  By 2012, the GDP will likely be growing again, and Obama will take credit for the magnificent turnaround.  Obama will be a strong favorite for re-election, given his personal likeability and a campaign war chest that will almost certainly be bigger than the $800 million he spent in 2008.  

America may also not be recognizable by then, and even less so by 2016, with a greatly expanded public sector share of the economy -- maybe 30% on the federal level and close to 50% with states and localities added in. The federal bureaucracy will have been inoculated into every facet of the economy. There will be much higher tax rates on success (whether it be earned or investment income) and with this, the number of  risk-takers and entrepreneurs will drop rapidly.

Obama will have succeeded in turning the US into a more European like economy, with much slower growth prospects, crushing deficits, and increased entitlement spending as far as the eye can see (and neither more nor less manmade global warming, regardless of what the Congress and Obama do in this area). And of course, there will be the need for ever higher tax rates on the diminishing share of the population who pay income taxes, and for ever larger amounts of debt to be financed mostly by foreigners. 

Europe will have arrived.  Or would it better to say of the increasingly foreign owned, debt laden nation, "Don't cry for me, Argentina"?

Richard Baehr is chief political correspondent for American Thinker.

2.

http://townhall.com/columnists/ThomasSowell/2009/02/25/not_one_of_us
 
"Not One of Us"
Thomas Sowell 
 
If Barack Obama has been the most remarkable phenomenon of the recent political scene, Sarah Palin must be second. The emotional responses to each-- especially by the media and the intelligentsia -- go beyond anything that can be explained by the usual political differences of opinion on issues of the day.

That liberals would be thrilled by another liberal is not surprising. But there are conservative Republicans who voted for Barack Obama, and other conservatives who may not have voted for him, but who are quick to see in various pragmatic moves of his since taking office an indication that he is not an extremist.

Anyone familiar with history knows that Hitler and Stalin were pragmatic. After years of denouncing each other, they signed the Nazi-Soviet pact under which they became allies for a couple of years before going to war against one another.

Pragmatism tells you nothing about extremism. But the conservative intellectuals who seize upon President Obama's pragmatism to give him the benefit of the doubt are obviously bending over backward for some reason.

With Governor Palin, it is just the opposite. The conservative intelligentsia who react against her have remarkably little to say that will stand up to scrutiny. People who actually dealt with her, before she became a national figure, have expressed how much they were impressed by her intelligence.

Governor Palin's "inexperience" is a talking point that might have some plausibility if it were not for the fact that Barack Obama has far less experience in actually making policies than Sarah Palin has. Joe Biden has had decades of experience in being both consistently wrong and consistently a source of asinine statements.

Governor Palin's candidacy for the vice presidency was what galvanized grass roots Republicans in a way that John McCain never did. But there was something about her that turned even some conservative intellectuals against her and provoked visceral anger and hatred from liberal intellectuals.
Perhaps the best way to try to understand these reactions is to recall what Eleanor Roosevelt said when she first saw Whittaker Chambers, who had accused Alger Hiss of being a spy for the Soviet Union. Upon seeing the slouching, overweight and disheveled Chambers, she said, "He's not one of us."

The trim, erect and impeccably dressed Alger Hiss, with his Ivy League and New Deal pedigree, clearly was "one of us." As it turned out, he was also a liar and a spy for the Soviet Union. Not only did a jury decide that at the time, the opening of the secret files of the Soviet Union in its last days added more evidence of his guilt.

The Hiss-Chambers confrontation of more than half a century ago produced the same kind of visceral polarization that Governor Sarah Palin provokes today.

Before the first trial of Alger Hiss began, reporters who gathered at the courthouse informally sounded each other out as to which of them they believed, before any evidence had been presented. Most believed that Hiss was telling the truth and that it was Chambers who was lying.

More important, those reporters who believed that Chambers was telling the truth were immediately ostracized. None of this could have been based on the evidence for either side, for that evidence had not yet been presented in court.

For decades after Hiss was convicted and sent to federal prison, much of the media and the intelligentsia defended him. To this day, there is an Alger Hiss chair at Bard College.
Why did it matter so much to so many people which of two previously little-known men was telling the truth? Because what was on trial was not one man but a whole vision of the world and a way of life.

Governor Sarah Palin is both a challenge and an affront to that vision and that way of life-- an overdue challenge, much as Chambers' challenge was overdue.

Whether Governor Palin runs for national office again is something that only time will tell. But the Republicans need some candidate who is neither one of the country club Republicans nor-- worse yet-- the sort of person who appeals to the intelligentsia.

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and author of Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy. 

3.

http://townhall.com/columnists/JonahGoldberg/2009/02/27/the_politics_of_fear
 
The Politics of Fear
Jonah Goldberg 
 
This week, former Vice President Al Gore was forced to withdraw a slide from his PowerPoint presentation.

Admittedly, on the surface that sounds only marginally more exciting than the news that Dan Quayle had wheat toast instead of rye with breakfast this week. But hold on a minute.

The slide in question was part of Gore's peripatetic minstrel show of environmental doom, made famous in his Oscar-winning horror-documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." After a montage of images of people suffering from famines, floods, fires and other biblical plagues across the globe, the slide purported to show data demonstrating that global warming "is creating weather-related disasters that are completely unprecedented."

The problem: the source of the data -- the Belgium-based Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters -- explicitly warned against using the data the way Gore did, because there's no way to attribute all of these disasters to climate change. Caught fudging the facts, again, the former vice president had no choice but to drop the graph.

It's a small thing, in and of itself, but it illustrates something much bigger.

Democrats take understandable pride in FDR's famous declaration, made during the Great Depression, that "all we have to fear is fear itself." More recently Democrats, led by none other than Al Gore, have been fixated on the evils of the "politics of fear" -- politics, allegedly, only Republicans are guilty of practicing.

Ever since the Iraq War turned decidedly unpopular, Gore has been demonizing George W. Bush and the GOP as fearmongers. "He betrayed this country!" Gore fumed of President Bush, in a famous splenetic diatribe at a 2004 Democratic Party event in Tennessee. "He played on our fears!" Gore went on to rail against the "politics of fear" going all the way back to Nixon. In 2008, when Gore endorsed Barack Obama in part because the Illinois senator represented a break with the "politics of fear."
What's hilarious about this is that Gore is, without question, the most successful fearmonger in America, if not the whole world.

He is constantly spinning climate change in the most horrifying terms possible. He asserts global warming as the author of nearly every calamity, inflating threats in order to bully people into agreeing with him. There's no time to argue, do what I say or we're all doomed, is the central message of Al Gore's environmental shtick. And it works for him. It's made him both hugely wealthy and popular in the circles he cares about and it has advanced his agenda farther than fair-minded persuasion would.

Of course, in the process he's fueled paranoia among an entire generation of young people who think we're seconds from an environmental Armageddon.

Gore also seems to have taught Barack Obama a thing or two. President Obama, whose whole campaign was about hope over fear, has been scaring the dickens out of people lately. He has certainly terrified the stock market. He's warned of "catastrophe" and economic "disaster" from which we may never recover.

What's particularly odious about Obama's scare tactics is that he's using them for the mother of all bait-and-switches. He justifiably scares people about the magnitude of the financial crisis, but uses that fear not to sell them on a solution to the crisis but to trick them into signing up for a new Great Society. It's like convincing someone he's got cancer and then telling him that's why he needs to buy a new car.

But beyond the hypocrisy and the undemocratic nature of using panic to cram through policies you couldn't get through debate and persuasion, what I find fascinating is the psychological projection.
Liberals have been using fear to demonize their opponents for generations. FDR did it all the time.

Harry Truman claimed his 1948 opponent, Thomas Dewey, was the front man for a fascist cabal. LBJ tried to link Barry Goldwater with the Klan and the (fictionally right-wing) forces who assassinated Kennedy. Bill Clinton was a master of conjuring fears about angry white men and other hobgoblins. Al Gore campaigned in 2000 by decrying every idea he didn't like as a "risky scheme."

Liberal activists groups stir up panics over food, children, power lines, polar bears and a thousand other things every day.

I've long been convinced that one of the chief sources of rage in politics is when the enemy steals your shtick. Republicans loathed Bill Clinton in part because he ran on issues like crime and fixing welfare.

One major ingredient of Bush hatred was that he campaigned on issues like education and gushed about compassion. I'm not saying that Republicans don't practice the politics of fear. But I do sometimes wonder if Democrats get so upset about it because they think they're the only ones allowed to do that.

Copyright © 2009 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.

 

Thursday, February 26, 2009

 The day's top political news:

 

President Barack Obama will forecast the biggest

U.S.

deficit since World War Two in a budget that urges a costly overhaul of the healthcare system and would spend billions to arrest the economy's freefall.

 

A $1.75 trillion deficit for the 2009 fiscal year is projected in Obama's first budget.

That is equal to 12.3 percent of

U.S.

gross domestic product -- the largest share since 1945 when the country ran a shortfall of 21.5 percent of GDP.

The soaring deficit figure sent U.S. Treasury bond prices lower and yields up to three week highs on Thursday.

http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idUSN2644850320090226?sp=true

 

Attorney General Eric Holder issues the threat: the Obama administration will seek to reinstate the assault weapons ban that expired in 2004 during the Bush administration.

 

President Obama indicated during the campaign, there are changes that he will try to impose regarding Second Amendment rights --  among them would be to reinstitute the ban on the sale of assault weapons..

 

Holder claims putting the ban back in place would not only be a positive move by the

United States

, it would help cut down on the flow of guns going across the border into

Mexico

..

 

"I think that will have a positive impact in

Mexico

, at a minimum." Holder said at a news conference on the arrest of more than 700 people in a drug enforcement crackdown on Mexican drug cartels operating in the

U.S.

 

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=6960824&page=1

 

Obama has laid out the most ambitious and expensive domestic agenda since LBJ, and now all he has to do is figure out how to pay for it.

 

On Tuesday, he left the impression that we need merely end "tax breaks for the wealthiest 2% of Americans," and he promised that households earning less than $250,000 won't see their taxes increased by "one single dime."

 

Even the most basic inspection of the IRS income tax statistics shows that raising taxes on the salaries, dividends and capital gains of those making more than $250,000 can't possibly raise enough revenue to fund Obama's new spending ambitions.

 

Mr. Obama is of course counting on an economic recovery. And he's also assuming along with the new liberal economic consensus that taxes don't matter to growth or job creation. The truth, though, is that they do.

 

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123561551065378405.html?mod=djemEditorialPage

 

Opinion:

News interest declines as the eyes of most Americans glass over

 

This morning  we are told GM had a disastrous quarter  and will need billions in federal tax dollars, then get word AIG will also need another multi-billion dollar bail out.

 

There’s no doubt a lot more bad financial news out there, but who can sort through the dispatches and evaluate just how bad things are.  For most Americans, we are up the financial creek without a paddle and it’s getting worse by the day.  Don’t bother us with details, just find a way to stop the bleeding.

 

Meanwhile, Obama assures us all that if we make less than a quarter million dollars, our taxes will not increase by one dime.  How reassuring.

 

Obama’s declaration is insightful.  He is betting so few Americans earn more than his magic figure, that his hand wont be called on his conspiracy against the productive elements of our society.  Not many jobs are created by those making less than a quarter million, and those in that victimized group who do generate jobs, generate only a dribble.

 

The Obama solution reveals an ignorance of economic reality.  It also gives us another bit of insight regarding liberal thinking and their lack of economic understanding.  They are so caught up in the “punish the rich” insanity, they cannot grasp the reality.

 

Democrat class warfare is a model for financial collapse.  The Middle Class doesn’t create that many jobs and creating jobs is the path to recovery.

 

When I was in college, federal tax rates reached confiscatory proportions.  I believe that income above about $90,000 a year, hit a point in which the taxpayer only got to keep about a nickel.  95% tax rates. Confiscatory.  Irresponsible.

 

I had an uncle for whom I was working  my freshman year in college.  About July, he hit that magic number ($90,000 represented a lot more in those days than is the case today).  He did what was reasonable to do – he shut down his office and headed south to spend the rest of the summer and all the fall in

Florida

.  Why work?  There is no incentive in working hard if the government is going to confiscate it.

 

That brings us to Obama’s schemes and scams today.  He is dedicated to taxing high income, achieving Americans.  He will attack faceless lobbyists and special interests as being his enemies.

 

The truth is, those sorts of people, lobbyists and special interests are his administration, they are his government, they are his “team”.  After all, several have already been idenfied as tax cheats – including his own Secretary of Treasury.

 

Watch Obama’s three card monte scam wear on.  His budget is shot through with ear marks and payoffs for his political allies.

 

He is counting on confusion on the part of the American people.  He is counting on American eyes continuing to glass over as bad financial news arrives.  He is dependant on grass root desperation that gives him support and power through which he can impose his continuing march toward socialism and against American prosperity.

 

So far he is succeeding.  Poll numbers give him high rates of approval from the American people.  Don’t believe it.  What is measured had zero to do with the viability of Obama’s plan.  What is being measured is the desperate hope by normal Americans who have no clue about the financial details that Obama’s promises and proposals wont be as empty and flawed as those of us who are following the reality know it to be.

 

Obama may have painted himself into a corner – hopefully he’ll have trapped himself before he has trapped our country.

 

Buddy

 

The top blogs:

 

First an over view:

 

1.

 

Transparency lost: White House demands DOD budget secrecy 

I've lost count of the number of tall tales (a lesser man would call them "lies") candidate Obama told during his multi-year campaign for the presidency. Now the Department of Defense budget will be opaque to taxpayers, presumably just another step towards "transparency" and "openness" in the enlightened Obama administration. Defense News reports:

2.

 

 http://www.businessandmedia.org/commentary/2009/20090225102010.aspx

 

It's Our Tea Party, Politicians Can Cry if They Want to
Santelli rant touches a nerve with White House, media.

 

Dan Gainor
The Boone Pickens Free Market Fellow
Business & Media Institute

 

Only in

America

does the term “tea party” sound ominous. In much of the world, it’s a high-falootin,’ civilized gathering. In the

U.S.

, it has meant tax rebellion ever since a few

Boston

patriots decided they liked their tea mixed with salt water instead of sugar.

 

Last week CNBC’s Rick Santelli made national news when he called for a “

Chicago

tea party” in a populist rant so powerful that the White House had to scramble to respond.

 

Rick Santilli - on CNBC   

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEZB4taSEoA

 

3.

 

http://www.businessandmedia.org/articles/2009/20090225151845.aspx

 

Nationalization: It's Not Just for Communists Anymore
It used to be synonymous with authoritarian regimes, now politicians threaten it and media call it a 'necessary evil.'

 

Jeff Poor
Business & Media Institute

In

America

, “nationalization” used to be a dirty word. But that was prior to this era of government intervention to save industries and institutions deemed “too big to fail.” Now, state involvement in – and even ownership of – certain sectors of the national economy is called a “necessary evil.”

 

The markets may not see it as necessary, but they’ve made no bones about it being evil. The mere mention of nationalized banks by a prominent senator sent the Dow Jones into a tail spin.  

 

Now for the complete articles:

 

1.

 

Transparency lost: White House demands DOD budget secrecy 

I've lost count of the number of tall tales (a lesser man would call them "lies") candidate Obama told during his multi-year campaign for the presidency. Now the Department of Defense budget will be opaque to taxpayers, presumably just another step towards "transparency" and "openness" in the enlightened Obama administration. Defense News reports:

The Obama administration has directed defense officials to sign a pledge stating they will not share 2010 budget data with individuals outside the federal government... In an undated non-disclosure agreement obtained by Defense News, the administration tells defense officials that "strict confidentiality" must be practiced to ensure a "successful" and "proper" 2010 defense budget process.

and Office of Management and Budget have agreed on a fiscal 2010 defense budget top line figure of $537 billion. That level is nearly $50 billion lower than the $585 billion defense plan created during the final months of the Bush administration...

The pledge covers any data about the 2010 budget, including: "planning, programming and budgeting system documents and databases, and any other information" that concerns the administration's internal discussions about "the nature and amounts of the president's budget for fiscal year 2010, and any supplemental budget request during the current fiscal year..."

I don't know about you, but I've about reached my four-year quota of hope and change.

2.

 

http://www.businessandmedia.org/commentary/2009/20090225102010.aspx

 

It's Our Tea Party, Politicians Can Cry if They Want to
Santelli rant touches a nerve with White House, media.

 

Dan Gainor
The Boone Pickens Free Market Fellow
Business & Media Institute

 

Only in

America

does the term “tea party” sound ominous. In much of the world, it’s a high-falootin,’ civilized gathering. In the

U.S.

, it has meant tax rebellion ever since a few

Boston

patriots decided they liked their tea mixed with salt water instead of sugar.

 

Last week CNBC’s Rick Santelli made national news when he called for a “

Chicago

tea party” in a populist rant so powerful that the White House had to scramble to respond.

 

Rick Santilli - on CNBC   

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEZB4taSEoA

 

With more than 2 million views, his anger and frustration have poured across the internet. Liberals who only recently celebrated the new era of progressive politics suddenly feared the discontented masses. Naturally, the rest of the media wanted nothing more than to blame the messenger for what MSNBC’s Chris Matthews called the “Ebenezer Scrooge-Rick Santelli position” against the housing bailout.

 

You might say Obama’s media fans were tea-ed off, and they weren’t alone.

 

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs wasn’t genteel in response. “Mr. Santelli has argued, I think quite wrongly, that this plan won't help everyone,” Gibbs said. So now the Obama plan won’t just “drive down mortgage rates for millions of Americans,” as Gibbs told the press. It’s so perfect that it will help everyone. That’s exactly what Gibbs was saying.

 

Of course, he’s wrong. It won’t help you if you have to pay for it. And according to some in the press corps, Obama is already picking out politically correct targets for hefty tax hikes to pay for the multi-trillion-dollar welfare state he is building. The Feb. 22 Washington Post declared Obama’s budget will be funded “primarily by raising taxes on businesses and the wealthy.”

 

Raising taxes in the middle of a tough recession? No wonder many are clamoring for a spot of tea while the Obama folks are in a spot of trouble.

 

But the bobbing and weaving press secretary still maintains that everyone will benefit from the plan. Perhaps Gibbs tied one of those signature pinks ties too tight around his neck that day. The blood certainly seemed to rush to his head in his micro-rant against Santelli as he offered to buy the CNBC reporter a cup of coffee – “decaf” – to take one last smack at his opponent.

 

Maybe Gibbs needs to try drinking the decaf instead of the Kool-Aid himself. Then he wouldn’t get so angry at a bit of well-deserved criticism. Unlike Gibbs, Santelli works with the traders and hears their complaints every day. If he’s angry, it’s because they’re angry.

 

It’s because millions of us are angry. That anger is more than the Obama camp is ready for. Anger at Wall Street fits their agenda. Anger over the president’s plan earns a hasty rebuke from Gibbs or Obama.

 

And of course the media is distressed at Obama getting an early tea time.

 

Matthews’ partner-in-slime Keith Olbermann rated Santelli, who works for the same parent company, as one of his “worst people.” MSNBC’s Mighty Mouth said Santelli was out of touch and complained bitterly that “businesspeople in this country right now are viewed like actors were after Booth shot

Lincoln

.”

 

The Obama Network wasn’t alone in its support for the president. Bloomberg’s executive editor for Washington Albert R. Hunt called Santelli’s comments “so sophomoric,” while the

Baltimore

Sun’s David Zurawik complained about on-air correspondents who “behave like clowns and would-be demagogues.”

 

Where were these paragons of journalistic virtue when the bulk of the news media showered Obama with love during the campaign? I guess it’s OK to gush over The One, just don’t question Him.

 

It was a predictable script and Gibbs seemed warmed by the support. So, for the second time in a month, the prickly White House lashed out at opponents. Last time it was talk radio star Rush Limbaugh. This time, a lowly CNBC financial reporter. Gibbs was so annoyed with Santelli that he referenced him six separate times by name during the press conference.

 

This is the MO for the Obama team when backed into a corner ever so slightly. They kicked reporters off the plane during the campaign after some media outlets actually backed Sen. John McCain instead.

 

Instead of a swift kick, Gibbs warned that it was up to “people who rant on cable television to be responsible and understand what it is they're talking about.”

 

It’s apparently not “responsible” to challenge the president, but OK when Obama talks down the economy calling this the “most profound economic emergency since the Great Depression.” What the White House and the media really mean is they want opponents to shut up because they fear an angry

America

will blame Obama for his obvious failures handling the economy.

 

When all is said and done, maybe the Obama administration will discover populism isn’t its cup of tea after all.

 

Dan Gainor

is The Boone Pickens Fellow and Vice President of the Media Research Center’s Business & Media Institute. His column appears each week on The Fox Forum and he can be seen each Thursday from 9-10:30 on Foxnews.com’s “Strategy Room.”

 

3.

 

It is for Communists, it's the legalistic way they impose communism on those who resist! They reserve military force for those who continue to oppose them.   Harry Becker

 

http://www.businessandmedia.org/articles/2009/20090225151845.aspx

 

Nationalization: It's Not Just for Communists Anymore
It used to be synonymous with authoritarian regimes, now politicians threaten it and media call it a 'necessary evil.'

 

By Jeff Poor
Business & Media Institute
2/25/2009 3:25:05 PM

 

In

America

, “nationalization” used to be a dirty word. But that was prior to this era of government intervention to save industries and institutions deemed “too big to fail.” Now, state involvement in – and even ownership of – certain sectors of the national economy is called a “necessary evil.”

 

The markets may not see it as necessary, but they’ve made no bones about it being evil. The mere mention of nationalized banks by a prominent senator sent the Dow Jones into a tail spin.  

 

With good reason, too. Vladimir Lenin wrote an entire book about it with “On Worker’s Control and the Nationalization of Industry.”  Mao Zedong of

China

nationalized all land and equally distributed it to landowners and peasants when he came into power in the 1940s. More recently, Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez had no qualms with nationalization, evident from his seizing of several private sector industries as he has ascended to power.

 

Not very good company. But although many in the media haven’t recognized it, some of the talk of nationalization in the present-day

United States

sounds eerily familiar. As CNBC’s Jim Cramer pointed out on MSNBC’s Feb. 2 “Morning Joe,” its sounding a lot like Lenin.

 

“It’s the time for nationalization, and I’ll say this,” Cramer said. “Either the new economic policy Lenin, or it’s the initial storm-the-winter palace Lenin. I’m not quite sure yet. It’s a mid-’20s situation. It could go either way.”

 

Although a recent Rasmussen Poll showed 75 percent of Americans oppose nationalization, and despite all the negative publicity the term has been associated with over the past 70 years, some in the media don’t seem to understand its history and consequences.

 

Bank Nationalization: Seeds Sewn By Politicians

 

With fears that the American banking system is teetering on the verge of collapse, and banking giants Citigroup (NYSE:C) and Bank of America (NYSE:BAC) are struggling, political figures in

Washington

,

D.C.

, have been pushing to nationalize these big banks, but not without some serious reaction by the private sector.

 

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., often considered as the most influential member of the Senate regarding the oversight of the banking industry, created a market turmoil when reports surfaced that he suggested in a Bloomberg Television interview that nationalization might be the only option for the government to save the banking system.

 

“I don’t welcome that at all, but I could see how it [nationalization] is possible it may happen,” Dodd said on the Feb. 20 “Political Capital with Al Hunt.” “I’m concerned that we may end up having to do that, at least for a short time.”

 

Reports of Dodd’s remarks sent the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) reeling more than 200 points (nearly 3 percent), until White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs squelched those rumors later in the trading day.

 

“This administration continues to strongly believe that a privately held banking system is the correct way to go, ensuring that they are regulated sufficiently by this government,” Gibbs said at the Feb. 20 White House press gaggle. “[I] think I was very clear about the system that this country has and will continue to have.”

 

That caused the Dow to rebound, even briefly reaching positive territory before finishing down 100 points.

 

And the notion of nationalization isn’t something propagated by just Democratic politicians. South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham also suggested it was a possibility on ABC’s Feb. 15 “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”

 

“This idea of nationalizing banks is not comfortable,” Graham said. “But I think we’ve got so many toxic assets spread throughout the banking and financial community, throughout the world, that we’re going to have to do something that no one ever envisioned a year ago, no one likes. To me, banking and housing are the root cause of this problem. I’m very much afraid any program to salvage the banks is going to require the government ... I would not take off the idea of nationalizing the banks.”

 

On Feb. 17, the next trading day after Graham’s comments and the same day an article in The Washington Post by Matthew Richardson and Nouriel Roubini called for nationalization, the Dow fell 297 points. .after

 

And the prospect of bank nationalization was reflected in comments from Jeff Macke, founder and president of Macke Asset Management and a co-host of CNBC’s “Fast Money.”

 

“That’s just the kind of thing that makes your head hurt and what you do is you grab your wallet and back slowly towards the exit of the stock market,” Macke said, on CNBC’s Feb. 23 “Power Lunch.”

 

The financial markets don’t react lightly to talk of nationalization.

 

However, the opposite holds true when nationalization is ruled out, as Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke did in remarks to the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee on Feb. 24.Bernanke was asked whether the stress tests will lead regulators to move in to take outright control of some banks under powers used to deal with failing institutions.

 

“No, I don’t think so,” Bernanke said to the committee.

 

According to the Feb. 24 Financial Times, Bernanke stated he did not believe that outright nationalization made sense. “I do not see any reason to destroy the franchise value or to create the huge legal uncertainties of trying to formally nationalize a bank when it just is not necessary.”

 

At the end of the trading day, the markets had responded positively. The Dow advanced 236 points.

 

Media Anchors: What is this ‘Nationalization’ You Speak Of?

 

Although it has been shown that the financial markets have adverse reactions to federal government hints of possible nationalization of the banking system, members of the media have been less concerned over the implications.

 

In a Feb. 24 interview with FDIC Chairwoman Shelia Bair, CBS “The Early Show” co-host Maggie Rodriguez didn’t invoke names of Chavez or Castro when she brought up the possibility of nationalization, but instead referred to it as the “n-word” or a “necessary evil.”

 

“I can’t think of a better morning to have you here, because all the talk is about the bank and if you look at the cover of The Washington Post, there it is, the n-word, 'nationalization,' which you have said you would be surprised if we get to that point,” Rodriguez said. “But isn’t it maybe going to be a necessary evil?”

 

In an interview following a Feb. 23 segment about bank nationalization with correspondent Betsy Stark, ABC “World News” anchor Charles Gibson wasn’t sure about nationalization being such a bad thing.

 

“I’m curious why nationalization is considered such a dirty word,” Gibson said. “The Obama administration has been at pains to say we’re not going to nationalize the banks. But a lot of economists, and you heard some there, say this actually could be a positive step if the banks were – a couple of banks were taken over for a couple of years.”

 

Stark had to explain to Gibson why this was not such a great thing for the government to do.

 

“If banks are taken over by the government, then private investors could see the value of their shares either severely diluted or wiped out altogether,” Stark said. “But the other thing is philosophical. Wall Street is the bastion of free market capitalism. And nationalization, even if it's meant to save the banks, is something that happens in socialist countries. It's not supposed to happen in the

United States

.”

 

NBC “Today” weekend host Lester Holt showed similar naïveté about nationalization, not recognizing the ideology the practice is associated with. Following a segment about the banking woes on the Feb. 22 “Today,” Holt asked NBC correspondent Scott Cohn how nationalization rumors could possibly be so bad.

 

“We look at Bank of America, Citibank, as [CNBC correspondent Trish Regan] noted in that report, got hammered. This rumor of a nationalization of the banks – oh my, Wall Street goes nuts.” Holt said. “Why? First of all, what does nationalization mean? And why did Wall Street react so negatively to just the hint?”

 

It Sounded Like a Good Idea at the Time: Consequences of Bank Nationalization

 

Nationalization might not be so bad if the government could be relied upon to manage it back to health according to sound business principles. But to the government, politics is paramount.

 

Any sort of government involvement in the private sector, whether it is loans under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), or all-out government nationalization, will have strings attached, according to economist and Business & Media Institute adviser John Lott.

 

Lott, in a Feb. 23 op-ed for FoxNews.com, explained how the government might try to force nationalized banks into engaging in risky behavior they otherwise would avoid. He warned that the temptation to score political points by those in power could be tough for the banks to overcome.

 

“Over the last couple of decades the federal government used regulations to force banks to give mortgages to people the banks thought were too risky – people who couldn’t make down payments and may have only had income from welfare,” Lott wrote. “With the government owning the banks, banks may be asked to fund all sorts of politically desirable borrowers. The problem now is that with government ownership – instead of just regulations – the political pressure might be much harder to track.”

 

Lott also warned that the ebb and flow of the free market is interfered with when the nationalization occurs in the banking system. He concluded the federal government would have an advantage over the private sector, which would prevent the market from operating efficiently.

 

“Economists have also argued that government owned companies frequently charge less than the cost of their products – in other words, they engage in predatory pricing. In this case, nationalized banks backed by the federal government might charge lower interest rates than private banks, forcing the remaining private banks out of business,” Lott wrote. “The point isn’t that banks are bad investments. The problem is that nationalization will make banks into bad investments.”

 

 

 

 

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

The day’s top political news:

President Barack Obama promised a nation shuddering in economic crisis Tuesday night that he would lead it from a dire "day of reckoning" to a brighter future, summoning politicians and public alike to shoulder responsibility for hard choices and shared sacrifice.

"The time to take charge of our future is here," Obama declared, delivering his first address to a joint session of Congress.

Offering words of reassurance to an anxious nation, he declared, "Tonight I want every American to know this: We will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before."

Promises, promises, promises – the stock in trade of politicians

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20090225/D96IB6G00.html

Abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay has worsened sharply since President Barack Obama took office as prison guards "get their kicks in" before the camp is closed, according to a lawyer who represents detainees.

Claims by those who defend and support the claims of terrorists held in custody.

The Pentagon said on Monday that it had received renewed reports of prisoner abuse during a recent review of conditions at Guantanamo, but had concluded that all prisoners were being kept in accordance with the Geneva Conventions.

"According to my clients, there has been a ramping up in abuse since President Obama was inaugurated," said a British-American lawyer with Reprieve, a legal charity that represents 31 detainees at Guantanamo.

http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE51O3TB20090225?sp=true

President Barack Obama knows Americans are unhappy that the government could rescue people who bought mansions beyond their means. But his assurance Tuesday night that only the deserving will get help rang hollow.

Even officials in his administration, many supporters of the plan in Congress and the Federal Reserve chairman expect some of that money will go to people who used lousy judgment.

The president skipped over several complex economic circumstances in his speech to Congress.

He may have even started an international debate among trivia lovers and auto buffs over what country invented the car.

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20090225/D96IFSC80.html

Opinion:
Time for real facts and honest truth

Even as Obama admits to be conspiring to slash our ability to defend ourselves against radical Islamic terrorists, Democrat lies are allowed to persist.

Of course, Obama is aided and abetted in this mission by a mainstream media that has been totally corrupted by the left.  As I continually note: ‘honest journalism” has become an oxymoron.  It is internally conflicted.

Last night, Obama took the podium and read his telepromter while giving his patented Os-so-sincere stare and grimace.

Integrity and honesty are not in this guy – nor in his party.
Sadly, America faces a threat in which Democrats conspire to impose a one party system of government.

Let’s look at some of the actual facts:

<<The economic crisis Barack Obama "inherited"

Five years ago, Republicans proposed "the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry [in a decade]." (Source: New York Times)

Democrats on the House Financial Services Committee blocked efforts at fixing Fannie and Freddie. Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) said, "Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac... are not facing any kind of financial crisis,"

At least 18 times since 2001 Democrats blocked efforts at overhauling Fannie and Freddie even as accounting scandals and executive ripoffs became public.

Why? For starters, the top two recipients of Fannie and Freddie campaign donations were Democrat fatcats Chris Dodd ($165K) and Barack Obama ($126K) (Source: Open Secrets)

And Fannie Mae paid well. Clinton-era Democrats, serving as the CEO, CFO and Vice Chairman, paid themselves $200 million in only six years even while a $10 billion accounting scandal was exposed. (Source: Wall Street Journal)

And Democrats like Chris Dodd also got favorable loans under a "VIP program." Dodd alone saved over $75,000 on his mortgage payments. (Source: Conde Nast Portfolio)

So where are former Fannie Mae CEOs like Franklin Raines ($90 million in salary) and Jim Johnson ($21 million in salary in one year)? As you might expect, they've served as Barack Obama's key economic advisers. (Source: Washington Post)

With a track record like that, it should have been easy to predict the spectacular economic success of the Democratic Congress and the Obama administration.>>

Those are the real facts.  Read them.  Believe them.  Understand them.

Buddy

The day’s top blogs:

First an overview:

1.

http://townhall.com/columnists/TonyBlankley/2009/02/25/always_look_on_the_bright_side_of_life
 
Always Look on the Bright Side of Life
Tony Blankley 
 
I hate to admit it, but I miss Bill Clinton. At least that lecherous old charmer was more amusing than his successor as a Democratic president, our new mortician in chief, Barack "End of the World" Obama.

Although, our new president's spokesman did deliver the funniest line of this so-far-not-too-funny millennium. Last week, Robert Gibbs called the president -- who, in the previous couple of weeks, had talked about our economy being a catastrophe from which we might never recover -- "an eternal optimist."

I appreciate that presidential spokesmen are not always known for their candor. And putting a positive gloss on his boss's image is barely an infraction, given the howlers that often have come from that podium. But really, one prefers one's perfidy to be at least plausible. If our economy in a death spiral is Obama's upbeat version of events, one can only tremble at what he would sound like if he turned a little glum.

Perhaps it was with those comments in mind that our former president took the opportunity -- while purportedly complimenting his successor -- to advise President Obama that he ought to try to be a little more upbeat about the economy.

2.

Look for new lows in most markets today! Gold may try for higher but it is already @ near record highs & historic coins look sold out & beyond consideration!    HB
 
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123553912675568201.html

Obama Unbridled
The President has only begun to expand the government.
 
Anyone who thought the recession and financial market turmoil would moderate President Obama's policy ambitions discovered the opposite last night. Far from suggesting limits on Congress or federal spending, the new President made clear in his first State of the Union address that he believes in government power as the answer to our current difficulties, and he intends to use it.

We suspect many Americans will respond well to his clear determination, tied as it was to optimism about the future. Americans are looking for leadership, and last night Mr. Obama dropped his recent riff about looming "catastrophe" and pointed to a brighter day beyond today's trouble. Americans want Mr. Obama's policies to succeed because they rightly understand that all of us will pay a price if they fail. This helps to explain Mr. Obama's high poll ratings, despite struggling financial markets and the partisan divide over the stimulus bill. Americans won't easily or quickly concede that another President isn't making the grade.

The political divide is over means, not ends, and on that score Mr. Obama is slowly revealing himself as a President who meant what he said going back to the primaries. He believes in the power of the state to drive prosperity, to reform the financial system and health care, and even to transform the entire energy economy. Mr. Obama said at one point that he didn't believe in government for its own sake, but his policy emphasis showed otherwise.

3.

http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=320283863033633

Race Cowards? In Academia, Certainly

WALTER E. WILLIAMS

Attorney General Eric Holder said the U.S. is "a nation of cowards" when it comes to race relations. In one sense, he is absolutely right.

Many whites, from university administrators and professors, to schoolteachers, to employers and public officials, accept behavior from black people that they wouldn't begin to accept from whites.

For example, some of the nation's most elite universities, such as Vanderbilt, Stanford and the University of California, have yielded to black student demands for separate graduation ceremonies and separate "celebratory events."

Universities such as Stanford, Cornell, MIT and Cal Berkeley have, or have had, segregated dorms.

If white students demanded whites-only graduation ceremonies or whites-only dorms, administrators would have labeled their demands as intolerable racism. When black students demand the same thing, these administrators cowardly capitulate.

Calling these university administrators cowards is the most flattering characterization of their behavior. They might actually be stupid enough to believe nonsense taught by some of their sociology and psychology professors that blacks can't be racists because they don't have power. What about Holder's statement that America is "voluntarily segregated"? I say so what.

1.

http://townhall.com/columnists/TonyBlankley/2009/02/25/always_look_on_the_bright_side_of_life
 
Always Look on the Bright Side of Life
Tony Blankley 
 
I hate to admit it, but I miss Bill Clinton. At least that lecherous old charmer was more amusing than his successor as a Democratic president, our new mortician in chief, Barack "End of the World" Obama.

Although, our new president's spokesman did deliver the funniest line of this so-far-not-too-funny millennium. Last week, Robert Gibbs called the president -- who, in the previous couple of weeks, had talked about our economy being a catastrophe from which we might never recover -- "an eternal optimist."

I appreciate that presidential spokesmen are not always known for their candor. And putting a positive gloss on his boss's image is barely an infraction, given the howlers that often have come from that podium. But really, one prefers one's perfidy to be at least plausible. If our economy in a death spiral is Obama's upbeat version of events, one can only tremble at what he would sound like if he turned a little glum.

Perhaps it was with those comments in mind that our former president took the opportunity -- while purportedly complimenting his successor -- to advise President Obama that he ought to try to be a little more upbeat about the economy.

(One of the more enjoyable entertainments we can look forward to during the next four years will be watching Bill Clinton sneak in little disparaging statements about his successor every time he pretends to compliment him. Bill obviously is being driven nuts by Obama. After all, as I recall, Clinton once complained that he could have been a great president if only he had had a depression or major war to preside over. How envious he must be of Obama, who may be in the process of turning an economic downturn into a depression and a small war in Afghanistan into a major war in Pakistan. Well, Bill, great men make their own opportunities.)

Nonetheless, things do seem a mite nasty at the moment. And Bill Clinton's advice to be more cheerful reminded me of the closing song in Monty Python's "Life of Brian." Brian, a Christ-like figure in this comedy, had just been nailed to the cross by the Romans and was in the process of dying from his crucifixion, when he broke out in a cheerful little toe-tapping song, part of the lyrics going:

"Always look on the bright side of life.
Always look on the light side of life.
If life seems jolly rotten,
There's something you've forgotten,
And that's to laugh and smile and dance and sing.
When you're feeling in the dumps,
Don't be silly chumps.
Just purse your lips and whistle; that's the thing.
So always look on the bright side of death
Just before you draw your terminal breath."

It would be easier to be cheerful if Obama weren't telling us this week that he is going to put us trillions of dollars in debt this year by pouring money down various ratholes while saving money by leaving Iraq before victory can be secured, cutting other defense programs, taxing energy, taking a first cut at totally screwing health care (but first expanding health care entitlements, even though we are almost insolvent).

All this and more he is proposing in order to "get exploding deficits under control" and as an act of "fiscal responsibility." As independent analysts estimate that the universal coverage entitlement to which Obama aspires will cost $200 billion a year, I would argue that if he wants to stop "exploding deficits," perhaps he should begin by not lighting the fuse of large deficit bombs.

After going nuts borrowing money on which our children still will be paying interest in 2039 (the maturity date for a 30-year Treasury note issued this year), he offers "fiscal responsibility" by his claim to reduce the deficit he has just created by taxing the crap out of business and anyone left with a decently paying job. Yes, that's the ticket. Promise to raise taxes on any person and any business that still produces anything while promising to give yet more hundreds of billions to people who are already burdens on working Americans.

Some people claim that although Obama was born in 1961 -- and thus is technically a baby boomer -- he is really a post-boomer. Just as he is post-racial (while his attorney general calls Americans cowards for not blathering on about race).

But regretfully, he is the very embodiment of my boomer generation. We will go down in history as the generation that was given everything, took everything, and left nothing -- except debt, debt, debt.

Copyright © 2009 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.

2.

Look for new lows in most markets today! Gold may try for higher but it is already @ near record highs & historic coins look sold out & beyond consideration!    HB
 
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123553912675568201.html

Obama Unbridled
The President has only begun to expand the government.
 
Anyone who thought the recession and financial market turmoil would moderate President Obama's policy ambitions discovered the opposite last night. Far from suggesting limits on Congress or federal spending, the new President made clear in his first State of the Union address that he believes in government power as the answer to our current difficulties, and he intends to use it.

We suspect many Americans will respond well to his clear determination, tied as it was to optimism about the future. Americans are looking for leadership, and last night Mr. Obama dropped his recent riff about looming "catastrophe" and pointed to a brighter day beyond today's trouble. Americans want Mr. Obama's policies to succeed because they rightly understand that all of us will pay a price if they fail. This helps to explain Mr. Obama's high poll ratings, despite struggling financial markets and the partisan divide over the stimulus bill. Americans won't easily or quickly concede that another President isn't making the grade.

The political divide is over means, not ends, and on that score Mr. Obama is slowly revealing himself as a President who meant what he said going back to the primaries. He believes in the power of the state to drive prosperity, to reform the financial system and health care, and even to transform the entire energy economy. Mr. Obama said at one point that he didn't believe in government for its own sake, but his policy emphasis showed otherwise.

We were especially struck by his determination to pass a carbon "cap and trade" regime, despite the costs it would impose on the economy amid a recession. Only last year Midwest Democrats rebelled against those costs when the Senate debated cap and trade. But in the past week Mr. Obama's green advisers have declared that the Administration will soon formally declare that carbon must be regulated like any pollutant under the Clean Air Act.

This will unleash a flood of new regulatory controls across the economy, and perhaps Mr. Obama believes this imperative will drive Congress to act, almost as a kind of relief. But the economic uncertainty alone will further retard business risk-taking just when we need such daring for the economy to recover.

Likewise, even many Democrats have argued that the political system can't accommodate both a cap and trade debate and health care reform in the same year. Mr. Obama declared otherwise last night.

He urged Congress to pass a new universal health-care entitlement "this year," a request that was met with ecstatic applause among the Democrats who now run Congress. No one seriously believes that kind of commitment would cost anything less than $220 billion a year, which is real money even in today's Washington.

Mr. Obama suggested he could finance all of this with a combination of a budget scrubbing plus a tax increase on a mere 2% of American taxpayers. The President said his staff has already found $2 trillion in spending savings, and we look forward to those details.

As for those 2%, they are a lot poorer than they used to be and in any case there aren't enough of them to come close to paying for Mr. Obama's plans. Despite the President's protests, the American middle class will eventually be asked to pay far more than they do now.

Mr. Obama made a valiant attempt to explain the importance of unclogging the financial system, and that's no easy task considering the anger toward our financial elites across the country. But he also played to that anger himself when he declared that "This time, CEOs won't be able to use taxpayer money to pad their paychecks or buy fancy drapes or disappear on a private jet." This only encourages the phony, but still damaging, populism in Congress that will also slow the revival of animal spirits. 

Mr. Obama clearly believes the recession has created a political moment when Americans are frightened enough to be open to a new era of expanded government. The question is whether his vast ambitions will allow the private economy to grow enough even to begin to pay for it all.

3.

http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=320283863033633

Race Cowards? In Academia, Certainly

WALTER E. WILLIAMS

Attorney General Eric Holder said the U.S. is "a nation of cowards" when it comes to race relations. In one sense, he is absolutely right.

Many whites, from university administrators and professors, to schoolteachers, to employers and public officials, accept behavior from black people that they wouldn't begin to accept from whites.

For example, some of the nation's most elite universities, such as Vanderbilt, Stanford and the University of California, have yielded to black student demands for separate graduation ceremonies and separate "celebratory events."

Universities such as Stanford, Cornell, MIT and Cal Berkeley have, or have had, segregated dorms.

If white students demanded whites-only graduation ceremonies or whites-only dorms, administrators would have labeled their demands as intolerable racism. When black students demand the same thing, these administrators cowardly capitulate.

Calling these university administrators cowards is the most flattering characterization of their behavior. They might actually be stupid enough to believe nonsense taught by some of their sociology and psychology professors that blacks can't be racists because they don't have power. What about Holder's statement that America is "voluntarily segregated"? I say so what.

According to the census, in 2007 4.6% of married blacks had a white spouse; less than 1% of married whites were married to a black.

While blacks are 13% of the population, they are 80% of professional basketball players and 65% of pro football players. Mere casual observance of audiences at ice hockey games or opera performances would reveal gross voluntary segregation.

What would Holder propose the U.S. Justice Department do about these and other instances of voluntary segregation?

The attorney general's flawed thinking is widespread whereby people think that an activity that is not racially integrated is therefore segregated.

Blacks are about 60% of the Washington, D.C., population. At Reagan National Airport, which serves D.C., nowhere near 60% of the airport's water fountain users are black; I'd guess blacks are never more than 5% of users.

The population statistics of states such as South Dakota, Iowa, Maine, Montana and Vermont show that not even 1% of their populations are black. Does that mean Reagan National Airport water fountains and South Dakota, Iowa, Maine, Montana and Vermont are racially segregated?

If Holder does anything about "voluntary segregation" at the state level, I hope it's not court-ordered busing; I'm not wild about their winters.

Just because some activity is not racially integrated does not mean that it is racially segregated.

The bottom line is that the civil rights struggle is over and it is won. At one time black Americans didn't share the constitutional guarantees shared by whites; today we do. That does not mean that there are not major problems that confront a large segment of the black community, but they are not civil rights problems nor can they be solved through a "conversation on race."

Black illegitimacy stands at 70%, nearly 50% of black students drop out of high school and only 30% of black youngsters reside in two-parent families.

Even though they're just 13% of the population, blacks in 2005 committed over 52% of the nation's homicides and were 46% of the homicide victims. Ninety-four percent of black homicide victims had a black person as their murderer.

Much of that pathology is precipitated by family breakdown and is entirely new among blacks. In 1940, black illegitimacy was 19%; in 1950, only 18% of black households were female-headed compared with today's 70%. Both during slavery and as late as 1920, a teenage girl raising a child without a man present was rare among blacks.

If black people continue to accept the corrupt blame game agenda of liberal whites, black politicians and assorted hustlers, as opposed to accepting personal responsibility, the future for many black Americans will remain bleak.

Walter E. Williams holds a bachelor's degree in economics from California State University (1965) and a master's degree (1967) and doctorate (1972) in economics from the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1980 he joined the faculty of George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., and is currently the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics.

Copyright 2008 Creators Syndicate, Inc

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

The top political news:

House Democrats unveil a $410 billion spending bill to keep the government running through the end of the fiscal year, setting up the second political struggle over federal funds in less than a month with Republicans.

The measure includes thousands of earmarks, the pet projects favored by lawmakers but often criticized by the public in opinion polls. There was no official total of the bill's earmarks, which accounted for at least $3.8 billion.

The legislation, which includes an increase of roughly 8 percent over spending in the last fiscal year, is expected to clear the House later in the week.

Democrats defended the spending increases, saying they were needed to make up for cuts enacted in recent years or proposed a year ago by then-President George W. Bush in health, education, energy and other programs.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/House-Democrats-propose-410B-apf-14450221.html

Rupert Murdoch has issued an urgent internal communication warning his staff: "We are in the midst of a phase of history in which nations will be redefined and their futures fundamentally altered."

The dramatic call comes as markets continue their plunge and the future of the media becomes increasingly muddled.

"Many people will be under extreme pressure and many companies mortally wounded," Murdoch declares.

"Our competitors will be sorely tempted to take the easy beat, to reduce quality in the search for immediate dividends."

http://drudgereport.com/flashrm.htm

A U.S. soldier on active duty in Iraq has called President Obama an "impostor" in a statement in which he affirmed plans to join as plaintiff in a challenge to Obama's eligibility to be commander in chief.

The statement was publicized by California attorney Orly Taitz who, along with her Defend Our Freedom Foundation, is working on a series of legal cases seeking to uncover Obama's birth records and other documents that would reveal whether he meets the requirements of the U.S. Constitution.

"As an active-duty officer in the United States Army, I have grave concerns about the constitutional eligibility of Barack Hussein Obama to hold the office of president of the United States," wrote Scott Easterling in a "to-whom-it-may-concern" letter.

Obama "has absolutely refused to provide to the American public his original birth certificate, as well as other documents which may prove or disprove his eligibility," Easterling wrote. "In fact, he has fought every attempt made by concerned citizens in their effort to force him to do so."

http://wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=89837

Opinion:
Growing resentment of Obama – but to what end?

In recent days, there seems to be a growing resistance and resentment to what Obama’s team is trying to do.

The outburst on Wall Street the other day is interesting in this regard, given the mini-fire storm it seems to have created.

No wonder.  Wall Street  has not eagerly embraced Obama’s financial proposals – to say the very least.  The market continues to sag and there is no indication of just how low those figures may go.  (Yesterday, the market hit a twelve year low!)

Obama makes a serious speech to Congress tonight.  It is crucial for him and for the immediate future of his administration.  He must sell his plans, his proposals, and his positions through which he intends to save the economy.

Certainly his incredibly huge bill passed just the other day has failed to instill optimism or honest hope among masses of the American people.  The problem was underscored when Fox News and others noted Obama used the term “crisis” more than 25 times when he outlined his proposal for the housing bailout.  Being told we face a “crisis” with such rapidity hardly does much to instill any vestige of hope or optimism.

Thus does a growing tide of resentment roll across America.  Expect more.

Expect also for the mainstream media to do all it can to reverse the negative trend.   They may be the one force that can help Obama escape the trap he has built for himself.

But I doubt it.

Reversing public opinion is sort of like steering a boat – there is no immediate response and it takes momentum and time before the adjustment takes effect. 

How long does Obama have before the pessimism sets in so deeply it cannot be reversed?  This problem has doomed other politicians in years past.

But back to the growing “resistance” to Obama.

Can it have any actual impact or positive effect?

Not as long as it is disjointed and unorganized.  It needs a means through which a plan of action can be developed.  First, they need to define “winning”.  What precisely do they expect or want to achieve?  Political change?  New policies?  Chaos out of which a new shuffle of the deck could be achieved?

Without such an identified goal, the effort will fail.  It also needs effective spokesmen who can communicate a viable message – then it must develop a means of marshalling the resentment and focusing it on a point that will force the desired change.

We saw this happen when grassroot pressures slapped down the amnesty bill.  This same sort of resentment made George Bush ineffective in his final months in office.  There are proposals and targets around which public resentment and negative opinions can be recruited.

Some where, some how, some time there must be an effective move that can lead to the sort of result needed and desired. 

Buddy

The day’s top blogs:

First an overview:

 

1.

 

http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=320284148139252

Despair Sets In With America On A Fatal Arc
THOMAS SOWELL

An increasing number of recent letters and e-mails from readers strike a note, not only of unhappiness with the way things are going in our society, but a note of despair.

Those of us who are pessimists are only a step away from despair ourselves, so we may not be the ones to offer the best antidote to the view that America has seen its best days and is degenerating toward what may well be its worst. Yet what hope remains is no less precious nor any less worthy of being preserved.

First of all, the day-to-day life of most Americans in these times is nowhere near as dire as that of the band of cold, ragged and hungry men who gathered around George Washington in the winter at Valley Forge, to which they had been driven by defeat after defeat.

Only the most reckless gambler would have bet on them to win. Only an optimist would have expected them to survive.

2.

http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=320285002503138

Hope's Expiration
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

Economy: In confirming that he will let the Bush tax cuts expire, President Obama is discarding proven economic medicine. He is also bringing the discredited welfare state back to life, bigger than ever.
 
Obama's certainly is a new kind of presidency. Gone are the days when a president could look Congress and the American people in the eye and make a declaration like this: "We have worked to give the American people a smaller, less bureaucratic government in Washington. And we have to give the American people one that lives within its means. The era of big government is over."
But whoever said Barack Obama was Ronald Reagan? In fact, those were the words of one William Jefferson Clinton during his State of the Union address of 1996. 

At the time, Clinton was preparing for a re-election campaign that would rely heavily on reform of one of the most unpopular federal government programs ever devised: welfare.  He would claim in that re-election campaign that his first term as president proved him to be that rare thing: a Democrat with fiscal sanity.  And in November of that year, the voters would believe him.

3.

First ACORN arrest...

Arrest Made in Home Foreclosure Civil Disobedience Program
Joshua Rhett Miller

Police in Baltimore today made what is believed to be the first arrest in a civil disobedience program aimed at supporting homeowners who refuse to vacate their foreclosed homes.

An activist with ACORN — the Association of Community Organization for Reform Now — faces criminal charges after breaking into a home in southeast Baltimore on Thursday to protest the foreclosure crisis sweeping the country.

"This is our house now," ACORN member Louis Beverly reportedly said after cutting a lock with bolt cutters at the home.  Beverly will be charged with fourth-degree burglary, according to Anthony Guglielmi, a spokesman for the Baltimore Police. Attempts to reach his attorney, Justin Brown, were not immediately successful.

1.

http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=320284148139252

Despair Sets In With America On A Fatal Arc
THOMAS SOWELL

An increasing number of recent letters and e-mails from readers strike a note, not only of unhappiness with the way things are going in our society, but a note of despair.

Those of us who are pessimists are only a step away from despair ourselves, so we may not be the ones to offer the best antidote to the view that America has seen its best days and is degenerating toward what may well be its worst. Yet what hope remains is no less precious nor any less worthy of being preserved.

First of all, the day-to-day life of most Americans in these times is nowhere near as dire as that of the band of cold, ragged and hungry men who gathered around George Washington in the winter at Valley Forge, to which they had been driven by defeat after defeat.

Only the most reckless gambler would have bet on them to win. Only an optimist would have expected them to survive.

Against the background of those and other desperate times that this country has been through, we cannot whine today because the stocks in our pension plans have gone down or the inflated value that our houses had just a few years ago has now evaporated.

In another sense, however, looming ahead of us — and our children and their children — are dangers that can utterly destroy American society. Worse yet, there are moral corrosions within ourselves that weaken our ability to face the challenges ahead.

One of the many symptoms of this decay from within is that we are preoccupied with the pay of corporate executives while the leading terrorist-sponsoring nation on Earth is moving steadily toward creating nuclear bombs.

Does anyone imagine that we will care what anyone's paycheck is when we see an American city in radioactive ruins?

Yet the only serious obstacle to that happening is that the Israelis may disregard the lofty blather coming out of the White House and destroy Iran's nuclear facilities before the Iranian fanatics can destroy Israel.

If by some miracle we manage to avoid the fatal dangers of a nuclear Iran, there will no doubt be others, including a nuclear North Korea.

Although, in some sense, the United States of America is still the militarily strongest nation on earth, that means absolutely nothing if our enemies are willing to die and we are not.

It took only two nuclear bombs to get Japan to surrender — and the Japanese of that era were far tougher than most Americans today. Just one bomb — dropped on New York, Chicago or Los Angeles — might be enough to get us to surrender.

If we are still made of sterner stuff than it looks like, then it might take two or maybe even three or four nuclear bombs, but we will surrender.

It doesn't matter if we retaliate and kill millions of innocent Iranian civilians — at least it will not matter to the fanatics in charge of Iran or the fanatics in charge of the international terrorist organizations that Iran supplies.

Ultimately, it all comes down to who is willing to die and who is not.

How did we get to this point? It was no single thing.

The dumbing down of our education, the undermining of moral values with the fad of "nonjudgmental" affectations, the denigration of our nation through poisonous propaganda from the movies to the universities. The list goes on and on.

The trajectory of our course leads to a fate that would fully justify despair. The only saving grace is that even the trajectory of a bullet can be changed by the wind.

We have been saved by miraculous good fortune before in our history. The overwhelming military and naval expedition that Britain sent to New York to annihilate George Washington's army was totally immobilized by a vast impenetrable fog that allowed the Americans to escape. That is how they ended up in Valley Forge.

In the World War II naval battle of Midway, if things had not happened just the way they did, at just the time they did, the American naval force would not only have lost, but could have been wiped out by the far larger Japanese fleet.

Over the years, we have had our share of miraculous deliverances. But that our fate today depends on yet another miracle is what can turn pessimism to despair.

Currently Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute in Stanford, Calif. he received his master's in economics from Columbia University (1959) and a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago (1968). His dozen books, as well as numerous articles and essays, cover a wide range of topics, from classic economic theory to judicial activism, from civil rights to choosing the right college.
 
Copyright 2008 Creators Syndicate, Inc

2.

http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=320285002503138

Hope's Expiration
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

Economy: In confirming that he will let the Bush tax cuts expire, President Obama is discarding proven economic medicine. He is also bringing the discredited welfare state back to life, bigger than ever.
 
Obama's certainly is a new kind of presidency. Gone are the days when a president could look Congress and the American people in the eye and make a declaration like this: "We have worked to give the American people a smaller, less bureaucratic government in Washington. And we have to give the American people one that lives within its means. The era of big government is over."

But whoever said Barack Obama was Ronald Reagan? In fact, those were the words of one William Jefferson Clinton during his State of the Union address of 1996. 

At the time, Clinton was preparing for a re-election campaign that would rely heavily on reform of one of the most unpopular federal government programs ever devised: welfare.  He would claim in that re-election campaign that his first term as president proved him to be that rare thing: a Democrat with fiscal sanity.  And in November of that year, the voters would believe him.

Now we are faced with a new president whose mission seems to be to prove that Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton were both wrong. Reaganesque across-the-board tax cuts on income and investment, as this thinking goes, have only gotten us into an unprecedented global financial crisis (begging the question of how they did so much good for so long before finally making the sky fall).

Yet faced with this, the supposed risk of global depression, the federal government should go full steam astern, back to the wasteful, corrupt — and corrupting — practices that Democrat Bill Clinton got re-elected helping to end. 

Heritage Foundation senior domestic policy analyst Robert Rector recently noted that the stimulus "will overturn the fiscal foundation of welfare reform . . . . For the first time since 1996, the federal government would begin paying states bonuses to increase their welfare caseloads."

Rector added that the new welfare system Obama would establish "is actually worse than the old AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) program because it rewards the states more heavily to increase their caseloads." 

According to Rector, "Under the stimulus bills, the federal government will pay 80% of cost for each new family that a state enrolls in welfare . . . the original goal of helping families move to employment and self-sufficiency and off long-term dependence on government assistance has instead been replaced with the perverse incentive of adding more families to the welfare rolls."

Uncle Sam would actually pay the states many billions of dollars to increase their welfare caseloads. Rector sees welfare spending increases nearing $800 billion over a decade, with more than $1.3 trillion added to the national debt by the stimulus. 

Yet amidst all this, the president promises to cut the budget deficit in half by the end of his first term — a promise Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron, appearing on CNN, disparaged as "wildly optimistic," especially since the massive, ever-expanding Social Security and Medicare entitlement programs are left unaddressed.

An economic rescue entailing ratcheting up income taxes and ballooning the government runs counter to Reagan's, Clinton's and even John F. Kennedy's governing philosophy. Does President Obama really think his 65-bucks-a-month tax cut will make up for it all?

3.

First ACORN arrest...

Arrest Made in Home Foreclosure Civil Disobedience Program
Joshua Rhett Miller

Police in Baltimore today made what is believed to be the first arrest in a civil disobedience program aimed at supporting homeowners who refuse to vacate their foreclosed homes.

An activist with ACORN — the Association of Community Organization for Reform Now — faces criminal charges after breaking into a home in southeast Baltimore on Thursday to protest the foreclosure crisis sweeping the country.

"This is our house now," ACORN member Louis Beverly reportedly said after cutting a lock with bolt cutters at the home.

Beverly will be charged with fourth-degree burglary, according to Anthony Guglielmi, a spokesman for the Baltimore Police. Attempts to reach his attorney, Justin Brown, were not immediately successful.
Donna Hanks, who owned the home since 2001, lost it in September when she couldn't make her $1,995 mortgage payments. It was not immediately clear whether Hanks re-entered her home last week, but she was not expected to be arrested, Guglielmi said.

Other police departments contacted by FOXNews.com said arrests would be made if an individual is determined to be residing at a foreclosed home illegally.

"If they're trespassing and it's not their property, absolutely, there'd by an arrest," a police source in Boston said. "If they were told to leave the property and they didn't, they'd be charged with disorderly conduct."

Pittsburgh Police Spokeswoman Diane Richard said charges would be filed against any individual found living in a foreclosed home, whether that individual had previously lived at the residence or not.
"If someone is court-ordered to vacate and they do not, it would be trespassing at that point," Richard said. "What exactly would be charged depends on the intensity of the violation. It could go all the way up to burglary, which is a felony."

The flood of foreclosures across the country has already led some law enforcement officials to alter how they handle evictions.

In Wayne County, Michigan, Sheriff Warren Evans suspended all foreclosure sales on Feb. 2 until a federal plan to combat foreclosures can be implemented, spokesman John Roach said. In Butler County, Ohio, Sheriff Richard Jones has reportedly ordered deputies not to evict residents who have no other housing options during the winter months. And in Cook County, Illinois, where a record 4,487 foreclosures occurred last year, Sheriff Thomas Dart appointed an attorney to review all eviction orders in October in order to protect individuals who continued to pay rent after their buildings were seized by banks.

Joe Cox, a community organizer for ACORN in Baltimore, said Monday's arrest was not a surprise.
"We definitely expected some kind of a response," Cox said. "We understand people have to do their jobs and we hope that they understand that we're doing this to highlight the issue."

Cox said he expects homesteading — refusing to vacate a foreclosed property — will become common as blame for the foreclosure crisis increasingly shifts from homeowners to financial corporations.

"This program is saying, 'We are not going,'" Cox said last week. "People say we're breaking the law, but we don't see how putting a person back in an abandoned property is harming anyone."
ACORN launched its "Home Savers" campaign in New York earlier this month and plans to expand the program to at least 22 other cities and three counties nationwide in the coming weeks. Participants like Beverly say they will refuse to move out of foreclosed homes or reclaim properties altogether until a comprehensive federal housing plan takes affect.

Cox said ACORN's homesteading program has attracted homeowners at risk of losing their homes from all socioeconomic backgrounds, from low-income Baltimore city neighborhoods to the more affluent Washington-area suburbs.

"We very much like what President Obama is doing with his foreclosure plan, but there's going to be a lot of people still left out," Cox said. "What we've been calling for nationally is a foreclosure moratorium so people have time to get help from a HUD-certified agency and start negotiating with lenders to get the banks off [their] back."

Attempts to reach Beverly on Monday were unsuccessful. In a Feb. 13 press release announcing the organization's plan to fight foreclosures, Beverly called for "civil disobedience" as a last resort.
"We need foreclosures to stop right now," Beverly said. "We need a moratorium to allow time to try to get loans modified so they can stay in their homes. The banks don't really want your house — it becomes a liability for them. With restructuring of the loan, everyone wins."

At least 500 volunteers have reportedly agreed to work as "home defenders" to employ non-violent tactics to block authorities from evicting homeowners. Other cities targeted by the campaign include Denver, Boston, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Dallas, Cleveland, Minneapolis and Orlando, Fla.

Founded in 1970, ACORN is a community-based, grassroots organization that primarily focuses on — among other social issues — health care, affordable housing and voter registration programs. Its large-scale voter registration drives most recently came under scrutiny during the 2008 presidential race, during which ACORN reportedly gathered more than 1.3 million voter registration forms in 21 states. Approximately 400,000 forms were reportedly rejected for duplications, incomplete forms and fraudulent applications.

President Obama, who was endorsed by ACORN, served as a local counsel for the organization in a 1995 voting rights lawsuit.

Monday, February 23, 2009

The Day’s top Political News:

Citigroup Inc. is in talks with federal officials that could result in the U.S. government substantially expanding its ownership of the struggling bank, according to people familiar with the situation.

While the discussions could fall apart, the government could wind up holding as much as 40% of Citigroup's common stock. Bank executives hope the stake will be closer to 25%, these people said.

Any such move would give federal officials far greater influence over one of the world's largest financial institutions. Citigroup has proposed the plan to its regulators. The Obama administration hasn't indicated if it supports the plan, according to people with knowledge of the talks.

The talks reflect a growing fear that Citigroup and other big U.S. banks could be overwhelmed by losses amid the recession and housing crisis. Last week, Citigroup's share price fell below $2 to an 18-year low. Bank executives increasingly believe that the government needs to take a larger ownership stake in the institution to stop the slide.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123535148618845005.html

Vehicles owned by the Obama administration's auto team reflect one reason why Detroit's Big Three automakers are in trouble: The list includes few new American cars.

Among the eight members named Friday to the Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry and the 10 senior policy aides who will assist them in their work, two own American models. Add the Treasury Department's special adviser to the task force and the total jumps to three.

The Detroit News reviewed public records to discover what many of the task force and staff members drove, but information was not available on all of the officials, and records for some states were not complete.

The co-chairs of the task force -- Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and White House National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers -- both own foreign automobiles.

http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090223/AUTO01/902230327

The Obama administration, which says it doesn’t want to nationalize U.S. banks, may find itself taking a step in that direction if it converts the government’s preferred shares in Citigroup Inc. into common equity to help the firm withstand losses.

“Trust us?”  Surely they jest.

Citigroup and rival Bank of America Corp., beaten down in New York trading last week on U.S.-takeover speculation, are among more than 20 lenders that could wind up majority-owned by the government if such conversions took place.

Executives at New York-based Citigroup have discussed the change as a way to quell concerns about capital adequacy while heading off all-out nationalization, according to a person familiar with the matter

 http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=anGxzRYhVF_Y&refer=worldwide

Opinion:
Time to look more closely at Obama’s “stimulus” scam.

This bill is one Obama claims will generate jobs and stimulate the economy.  However, the closer we look, the more absurd that claim becomes.

Don’t take my word for it.  Judge for yourself:

An itemization from a friend:

<<$198 million School Lunch Room EQUIPMENT    Uhhhh ?

$9 billion For 'Broadband Technology Opportunities Program'

$650 million Digital Converter Box Program,  for coupons and converter box installation. Don't get me started on this one

$1.256 billion National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

$300 million Violence Against Women Prevention and Prosecution Programs',

$1.5 billion Dollars SCIENCE, AERONAUTICS, EXPLORATION, and CROSS AGENCY SUPPORT

$200 million Dollars for the costs of developing and implementing a nationwide Integrated Wireless network supporting Federal law enforcement

$25 million Dollars shall be available for tribal alcohol and substance abuse drug reduction assistance grants.  How is this job creation??

$390 million Dollars for the Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning Fund

$125 million Dollars for the District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority How is this job creation?? Now we have to clean up DC? 

$600 million Dollars for acquiring motor vehicles with higher fuel economy

$1.2 billion to the TSA for procurement and installation of checked baggage explosives detection systems and checkpoint explosives detection equipment

$200 million Dollars to the Leaking Underground Storage Tank Trust Fund Program

$650 million to the Forrest Service for hazardous fuels reduction and hazard mitigation activities in areas at high risk of catastrophic wildfire

$545 million Dollars for Indian Health Services How is this job creation??

$158 million for the operation of the National Park System   " is this like a hang out for criminals" ?

$40 million Dollars to the Bureau of Indian Affairs for Operation of Indian Programs

$1.2 billion Dollars for grants to the States for youth activities, including summer employment for youth

$2 billion Dollars for Payments to States for the Child Care and Development Block Grants

$1.368 billion Dollars for grants or loans for energy retrofit and green investments in assisted housing

$100 million Dollars for the Lead-Based Paint Hazard Control Grant Program

$79 billion Dollars for the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund

$200 million Dollars for direct loans and grants for distance learning and telemedicine services in rural areas

$4.5 billion for U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

$850 million for Amtrak Amtrak has been losing $$ for decades... why throw more $$ at it??

$87 million for a polar icebreaking ship

$1.7 billion for the National Park System How many Park benifits ?

$55 million for Historic Preservation Fund

$7.6 billion for "rural community advancement programs" Uh... is this like building roads?  Tourist attractions so more people go there?? More rodeos? 4F shows?

$150 million for agricultural-commodity purchases I don't understand this one at all

$150 million for "producers of livestock, honeybees, and farm-raised fish" why???

$50 million for habitat restoration and other water needs in the San Francisco Bay Area Who does someone owe in SF??

$198 million to compensate Filipino World War II veterans What does this have to do with job creation???? And what did they do again ?

$2 billion for renewable-energy research ($400 million for global-warming research) but we don't have global warming...just walk outside and feel how cold it is...

$2 billion for a "clean coal" power plant in Illinois  - Illinois? what a surprise  " hmm"

$6.2 billion for the Weatherization Assistance Program

$3.5 billion for energy-efficiency and conservation block grants

$3.4 billion for the State Energy Program

$200 million for state and local electric-transport projects

$300 million for energy-efficient-appliance rebate programs Huh?

$400 million for hybrid cars for state and local governments Let them drive their own cars... ok, if you're police maybe, but wouldn't a police car want to be 8 cylinders full of power?  Are any hybrid cars that beefy??

$1 billion for the manufacturing of advanced batteries  " Please "

$1.5 billion for green-technology loan guarantees

$8 billion for innovative-technology loan-guarantee program

$2.4 billion for carbon-capture demonstration projects Huh??

$4.5 billion for electricity grid

$79 billion for State Fiscal Stabilization Fund The states failed.... bailing them out will just encourage them to keep failing...

$89 billion for Medicaid Why?  isn't this welfare ? "

$30 billion for COBRA insurance extension Why?  If you really did save or create all those jobs, we wouldn't need Cobra?  And why should we pay 65% of these premiums??

$36 billion for expanded unemployment benefits same as above

$20 billion for food stamps To whom?  The unemployed?  So now we're giving them health insurance, more expanded unemployment benefits, and food stamps?  What is the incentive to go back to work??

$150 million for the Smithsonian Why?  As a thank you for letting the DNC put all those port-a-potties on their lawn and letting people use their toilet facilities during the inauguration?

$34 million to renovate the Department of Commerce headquarters So I guess you could argue that the "renovations, improvements, repairs, moves, new stuff" will create jobs?

$500 million for improvement projects for National Institutes of Health facilities see above

$44 million for repairs to Department of Agriculture headquarters see above

$350 million for Agriculture Department computers see above

$88 million to help move the Public Health Service into a new building see above

448 million for constructing a new Homeland Security Department headquarters see above

$450 million for NASA (carve-out for "climate-research missions") Let's put a space ship up there to watch the weather change?

$600 million for NOAA (carve-out for "climate modeling") whatever

$1 billion for the Census Bureau why?

$145 billion for "Making Work Pay" tax credits

$83 billion for the earned income credit

$50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts

$380 million in the Senate bill for the Women, Infants and Children program

$300 million for grants to combat violence against women How is this job creation??  Self-defense class instructors?  Mace manufacturers?

$2 billion for federal child-care block grants Oh... someone has to take care of all those children ...you know, the kids of all those new federal government workers...

$6 billion for university building projects More construction jobs?

$15 billion for boosting Pell Grant college scholarships  " don't know the guy "

$4 billion for job-training programs, including $1.2 billion for "youths" up to the age of 24  Now we have a new definition of youth?

$1 billion for community-development block grants

$4.2 billion for "neighborhood stabilization activities"     Huh ?

$200 million for direct loans and grants for distance learning

$954 million shall be used as an additional amount to carry out the immunization program

$545 million shall be used as an additional amount to carry out chronic disease, health promotion, and genomics programs

$60 million shall be used as an additional amount to carry out environmental health programs

$50 million shall be used as an additional amount to carry out injury prevention and control programs

$40 million shall be used as an additional amount for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health to carry out research activities within the National Occupational Research Agenda

$40 million shall be used as an additional amount for the National Center for Health Statistics>>

I leave the evaluation, analysis, and conclusion to you.  Understand that NO member of either House read this bill before voting for it.

Buddy
 
The day’s top blogs:

1.

The Democrat Show Trials
J.R. Dunn

In the past few weeks a number of influential Democrats have expressed an interest in legal prosecution of members of the Bush administration. Nancy Pelosi in particular has a lot of things she'd like to get to the bottom of, and has been seen wringing her hands and whispering,  "I want to see the truth come forth." Patrick Leahy is pushing it this week.

John Conyers is also intent on playing Torquemada, going so far as to have the Judiciary Committee -- which he chairs -- release a 500-page "report" detailing the crimes of the Bush presidency. (This is a hobby of long standing for Conyers -- readers will recall that a few years ago he held some sort of "inquest" concerning Bush crimes in the basement of the House Office Building, borrowing tables and tablecloths from the dining room for the purpose.) During last fall's campaign Joe Biden also expressed enthusiasm for the idea, though little has been heard from him on the topic since he was fitted with a muzzle. Several UN representatives.

2.Do Democrats Have a Corruption Problem?
Susan Davis reports on politics.

Congressional Democrats swept into power in 2006 after a steady drumbeat of attacks against Republicans for allowing a systemic “culture of corruption” to define their majority.

It wasn’t a new charge, but it took a perfect storm of GOP scandals that year — lobbyist Jack Abramoff, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas, former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham of California, and Florida Rep. Mark Foley of Florida — for it to register with the electorate.

Now, with solid Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate, Republicans are echoing the same attacks of corruption among Democrats—and they may have a point.

3.

Rahm Emanuel – another Obama tax cheat
 
There could be tax troubles on the horizon for White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who reportedly has lived rent-free in Washington for five years but hasn't paid taxes on the imputed income, according to reports.

He's the latest in a growing list of President Obama's nominees to have been involved in tax issues.

WND columnist Phyllis Schlafly writes that several of "Obama's major nominees are mired in political embarrassment. Three withdrew their names from consideration, one sneaked through confirmation because senators were still intoxicated with the Obama honeymoon, and Obama plans to use a waiver so the Senate will approve the fifth."

"Funny thing," she continued, "Americans don't seem to like it when government officials evade the taxes the rest of us pay, especially when they evade more taxes than most Americans' entire tax bill. Apparently, that doesn't seem to bother Obama."

3.

Now the full articles:

1.

The Democrat Show Trials
J.R. Dunn

In the past few weeks a number of influential Democrats have expressed an interest in legal prosecution of members of the Bush administration. Nancy Pelosi in particular has a lot of things she'd like to get to the bottom of, and has been seen wringing her hands and whispering,  "I want to see the truth come forth." Patrick Leahy is pushing it this week.

John Conyers is also intent on playing Torquemada, going so far as to have the Judiciary Committee -- which he chairs -- release a 500-page "report" detailing the crimes of the Bush presidency. (This is a hobby of long standing for Conyers -- readers will recall that a few years ago he held some sort of "inquest" concerning Bush crimes in the basement of the House Office Building, borrowing tables and tablecloths from the dining room for the purpose.) During last fall's campaign Joe Biden also expressed enthusiasm for the idea, though little has been heard from him on the topic since he was fitted with a muzzle. Several UN representatives.

One Democratic official has expressed hesitation, the popular writer Barack Obama, currently serving in an office known as the "presidency". But how much influence he possesses still remains very much to be seen.

There's no point in asking for details concerning who will be prosecuted and for what crimes. That's not how these things work. (Karl Rove, for one, is convinced that he's on the list, which led to some good-natured ribbing from the Fox news team. I can't quite understand the skepticism -- after all, he's been a target before.) What's being discussed has little legal basis but lies more in the realm of theater. As readers of Orwell, Kafka, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn will clearly recognize, what's being proposed here is a series of show trials.

I think it's an excellent idea.

Show trials are nothing new to the Democratic Party, although it's true that they're one element of Democratic governance that, like Democratic support for segregation and the fascist source of much liberal doctrine, has been allowed to slip down the memory hole.

Examples of such trials occurred during both world wars. During WW I, a number of specious prosecutions were made for "sedition". (Reading H.L Mencken's record of the period makes it clear that "sedition" often meant "having ancestors who came from Germany".) The most notable of these involved Socialist party leader Eugene Debs. Like a number of people, Debs opposed entry into the war and was not shy about saying so. That towering liberal Woodrow Wilson saw to it that Debs was tried, found guilty, and given the maximum sentence. He began doing his time in 1919, a year after the war ended.

It's likely that Wilson was out for revenge over Debs' run against him in the 1912 election, when he did extremely well for a Socialist, gaining nearly a million votes, and in the process embarrassing Wilson from his left. (The 1912 election was a particularly bizarre episode with three major parties involved, including Teddy Roosevelt's Bull Moose party. It can be assumed that amidst all the uproar, a number of voters simply threw up their hands and decided to toss their vote to the lefty.) After Wilson left office, Debs was pardoned by the Republican tyrant Warren G. Harding, who invited him the White House. Debs died a short time later.

The Dems attempted a similar trick during WW II. As Richard Gid Powers tells it in his excellent history of American anticommunism, Not Without Honor, in 1944 the Roosevelt administration saw fit to prosecute a number of figures who had opposed American entry into the war, an odd mixture of Bundists and America Firsters along with pacifists and conscientious objectors. Curiously, no communists, the group most adamantly against the war during the 1939 - 41 period, were included. While it's unknown who instigated the prosecution, circumstantial evidence points to Harry Hopkins, with his fervent admiration for Josef Stalin and his methods.

Most of the "crimes" had taken place before the war, but all such evidence was disallowed, leaving the government with no alternative but to give speeches and harangue the witnesses. This was so effectively carried out as to reduce the entire courtroom - including defendants on the stand - to uncontrollable laughter. The judge repeatedly asked the prosecution if they had any actual evidence or testimony to present, and at last shut down the proceedings and dismissed all charges.

While the Democrats may have switched to the antiwar side this time, the intended message is the same in all cases: don't antagonize the Donkeys. The "criminalization of policy differences" as George H.W. Bush called it, is nothing new to the Democratic party.

So why is it an excellent idea? Because from the Democratic point of view, it's a loser.

The Debs prosecution marked the beginning of the end for Wilson. The same messianic fervor that had led him to persecute Debs dictated his actions in the postwar period, when his alienation of the Allies, along with his own countrymen, assured the collapse of all chances of lasting peace. Shortly afterward, he suffered the stroke that effectively turned him into an invalid and led to that strange interval where the country was being run by his wife Edith (who did a better job than Wilson himself had done in the previous two years).

The 1944 antiwar prosecutions marked the high point of the FDR era, with Roosevelt reaching for an unprecedented fourth term, victory in Europe and the Pacific in sight, and the country united as never before. Within months after the trial closed, Roosevelt was dead, followed in short order by Hopkins. The pragmatic Harry Truman had little use for any New Deal loose cannons, who soon found themselves seeking employment outside the government.

Clearly, show trials in an American democracy are a "whom the gods would destroy" matter. It's been awhile since the gods destroyed any Democrats. I for one would rather enjoy witnessing such a spectacle.

The apparent model for Pelosi and Conyers' effort is the Scooter Libby trial, the one successful Democratic action against the Bush administration. What's being overlooked is that fact that the actual targets were Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and beyond them W himself. Libby was a kind of consolation prize, and one bagged only through blatant dishonesty by the prosecution, not to mention Colin Powell and Richard Armitage. Another major factor was weariness with the Iraq war coupled with a media-created uneasiness over the War on Terror. It's unlikely that all these elements will fall in place so perfectly a second time, which doesn't mean that the Dems won't try it.

It shouldn't be hard for the tables to be turned by a canny opposition. A number of tactics suggest themselves. It would provide a good opportunity to subpoena various Dems (including Madam Secretary Hillary) to learn exactly why they voted alongside the Republican criminals. The Dems could be forced to disgorge considerable amounts of confidential paper dealing with party matters. If they choose to dredge up bogus accusations of torture, it would prove entertaining to establish that the original Master of the Dungeon was one George Tenet, a Democratic appointee.

Such proceedings would likely prove embarrassing to Obama, who appears to be coming around to the recognition that his "out in 16 months" plan for Iraq is a nonstarter. It would also serve to put GOP "moderates" on notice as to the wisdom of "nonpartisanship", and act as a good solid  lesson to the Republicans as a whole as to the wisdom of winning elections.

And in the end, it would likely be thrown out of court in any case.

Several liberal commentators seem to recognize that the show trial scenario is flawed and are instead calling for a "blue-ribbon commission" where the left would be able to control the narrative and allow the Democrats to play demagogue at no risk. (One of them termed it a "truth and reconciliation commission", of the type convened in former dictatorships such as Chile and Argentina. This adequately reveals the kind of mentality we're dealing with.) This is already one large step down from the trial proposal, suggesting that the Dems can be made to back off even further. But if not, they can still be embarrassed.

Last week the Republicans extracted... not a "promise"; I suppose you could call it an "indication", from Eric Holder, nominee for attorney general, that he does not intend to carry out such trials. This may well nip the scheme in the bud. But if not, the GOP should not view it as a threat, but as a superb opportunity to make the Dems squeal. The party has shown unexpected backbone regarding Obama's  "simulus" program. That trend needs to be cultivated. However the Democrats choose to play it -- trials, commissions, whatever -- the GOP needs to make a point of punishing them for overreaching. Do it today, and they'll hesitate to try it again anytime soon.

J.R. Dunn is consulting editor of American Thinker.

2.

Do Democrats Have a Corruption Problem?
Susan Davis reports on politics.

Congressional Democrats swept into power in 2006 after a steady drumbeat of attacks against Republicans for allowing a systemic “culture of corruption” to define their majority.

It wasn’t a new charge, but it took a perfect storm of GOP scandals that year — lobbyist Jack Abramoff, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas, former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham of California, and Florida Rep. Mark Foley of Florida — for it to register with the electorate.

Now, with solid Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate, Republicans are echoing the same attacks of corruption among Democrats—and they may have a point.

Consider the following:

–Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich: Is an explanation necessary? The former governor was impeached and thrown out of office for allegedly trying to sell President Barack Obama’s Senate seat for personal gain, among other corruption charges. The expletive-laden criminal complaint against him made for intrigue—and comedy—as he quickly became a target for Saturday Night Live and late-night talk shows. Blagojevich’s rambling defense before the Illinois senate and bizarre string of media appearances on “The View” and “The Late Show with David Letterman” proved that Illinois politics can not only be corrupt but also just plain weird.

–New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson: Before tax problems tinged Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner or derailed Tom Daschle as health and human services secretary, Richardson was the first mini-scandal to hit the nascent—and still very popular—Obama administration. Tapped to serve as commerce secretary, Richardson withdrew his name because of an ongoing pay-to-play federal investigation in his home state. Richardson has not been charged with any wrongdoing, but the Associated Press reported over the weekend that a grand jury subpoenaed records from his office dating back to 2002.

–Mayors Gone Wild! From sea to shining sea, Democratic mayors have gotten nabbed in scandals recently from the inappropriate to the illegal. In Portland, newly elected Mayor Sam Adams is caught up in a sex scandal. In Hartford, Conn., Mayor Eddie Perez has been charged with bribery related to work done on his home. In Detroit, former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was recently released after serving three months in jail on obstruction of justice charges. In Baltimore, Mayor Sheila Dixon was indicted last month on charges of accepting illegal gifts.

–New York Rep. Charles Rangel: Congressional Republicans have focused the brunt of their corruption attacks on Rangel, the chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee after the New Yorker was hit by a series of stories ranging from his New York apartment dealings to his failure to pay certain taxes (a recurring theme for Democrats lately). Rangel has offered a spirited defense and refused any calls from his political opponents to relinquish his gavel while the House ethics committee—at his encouragement—sorts through his dealings. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has stood by his side, and Democrats voted down a GOP resolution on Tuesday to force Rangel to step down temporarily from the chairmanship. When Pelosi was minority leader, she also used resolutions to force House votes on ethics issues—almost all of which failed on party line votes.

–The Appropriators: Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania has also been a top target for Republican attacks of corruption. The veteran lawmaker and appropriator has been the subject of several media reports questioning how he delivers federal money to benefit his district. But recent news reports suggest federal authorities could be interested in Murtha. Two Pennsylvania firms with close ties to the lawmaker were raided last month by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and our colleague Susan Schmidt reported Tuesday that another Virginia-based firm with ties to Murtha was raided late last year. The New York Times reported today that federal authorities are looking into a lobbyist who funneled contributions to Murtha and fellow appropriators Rep. Jim Moran of Virginia and Peter Visclosky of Illinois. None of the lawmakers have been accused of any wrongdoing, but it’s highly unlikely the recent raids are the last we’ve heard of this story.

To be sure, Republicans still haven’t shaken their own corruption tag. Alaska GOP Rep. Don Young is under FBI investigation in a broad corruption probe that took down Alaska GOP Sen. Ted Stevens. And the Jack Abramoff probe carries on to this day.

But Republicans don’t run Washington anymore.

At a recent breakfast with reporters hosted by the Christian Science Monitor, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (who knows a bit about scandals) suggested that Democrats would soon feel the heat for corruption issues percolating across the country. He argued that Blagojevich was “simply the tip of an iceberg of systemic corruption across this country that is breathtaking.”

Heading in to 2010, House Democrats in particular have a precarious path ahead. Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chris Van Hollen warned his colleagues last week at their annual retreat that history is not on their side. Since Abraham Lincoln, only two presidents have not lost seats in the midterm election cycle, with an average loss of 30 seats.

The Washington Post’s Fix reported today that Senate Republicans are eyeing Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd’s traditionally safe seat in Connecticut after a Quinnipiac poll showed just one in 10 Connecticut voters said he definitely deserved re-election after Dodd was caught up last year — you guessed it—in a scandal over whether he received preferable treatment from mortage lender Countrywide.

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=89242

© 2009 WorldNetDaily

3.

Rahm Emanuel – another Obama tax cheat

Tax troubles for president's chief of staff
Emanuel's rent-free Washington residence draws questioning

There could be tax troubles on the horizon for White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who reportedly has lived rent-free in Washington for five years but hasn't paid taxes on the imputed income, according to reports.

He's the latest in a growing list of President Obama's nominees to have been involved in tax issues.

WND columnist Phyllis Schlafly writes that several of "Obama's major nominees are mired in political embarrassment. Three withdrew their names from consideration, one sneaked through confirmation because senators were still intoxicated with the Obama honeymoon, and Obama plans to use a waiver so the Senate will approve the fifth."

"Funny thing," she continued, "Americans don't seem to like it when government officials evade the taxes the rest of us pay, especially when they evade more taxes than most Americans' entire tax bill. Apparently, that doesn't seem to bother Obama."

According to the New York Post, the nondisclosure of free rent in a home owned by Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., apparently isn't all that's being questioned about Emanuel's arrangements.

Another issue is "the work Emanuel tossed the way of DeLauro's husband, Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg."

The Post said while Emanuel was living in the rent-free arrangement, he also served as the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which gave Greenberg several polling contracts, paying him $239,000 in 2006 and $317,000 in 2008.

The report said Emanuel has explained the living arrangements as "hospitality" between colleagues, and that's why it never appeared on his financial-disclosure forms.

But the Post suggested that over five years, the rent could have been worth more than $100,000.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was confirmed despite not paying taxes on time, Health and Human Services nominee Tom Daschle withdrew his name over unpaid taxes and proposed Chief Performance officer Nancy Killifer withdrew over similar problems.

Schlafly noted Daschle's tax problems involved $146,000 that went unpaid. But larger than the money was the response to such misbehaviors.

"Even after it became publicly known that Daschle had failed to pay all his income taxes, Obama defiantly declared that he was 'absolutely' standing by Daschle," she wrote.

After Daschle took his own name out of the running, Obama admitted he made a "mistake" in the selection. But he didn't admit a similar misjudgment over Geithner, who paid about $35,000 past due after being nominated to the post.

In Killifer's case, she reportedly failed to pay required employment taxes on her household employee.

Also, while the issue didn't involve taxes, Obama's first pick for secretary of commerce – New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson – proved an embarrassment because of his involvement in an alleged pay-to-play scheme.

The Washington Post and New York Daily News suggested that at a minimum, the gift rules for members of the U.S. House may not have been met by Emanuel's extended use of free housing.

And according to reports in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Democrat Al Franken, whose challenge to incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman remains unresolved, also had tax issues during his campaign.

Franken's campaign manager, Andy Barr, said the candidate's accountant worked with California officials during the campaign to sort out whether he paid taxes on earnings in the state between 2003 and 2007.

Franken previously left unpaid workers' compensation and disability premiums in New York.

 
 

 

Sunday, February 22, 2009

The day’s top political news:

Obama's First Budget Seeks To Trim Deficit

The plan would cut war spending, increase taxes on the wealthy, who knows what else?

President Obama is putting the finishing touches on an ambitious first budget that seeks to cut the federal deficit in half over the next four years, primarily by raising taxes on businesses and the wealthy and by slashing spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, administration officials said.

Such potentially rash plans raise serious questions about the Obama administration and questions regarding our national defense and efforts in the global war on terror.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/21/AR2009022100911_pf.html

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton wants China to continue investing in the United States because the two countries' financial futures are closely tied together.

"I certainly do think that the Chinese government and central bank are making a smart decision by continuing to invest in Treasury bonds," she said during an interview Sunday with the popular talk show "One on One.""It's a safe investment. The United States has a well-deserved financial reputation."

To boost the economy, the U.S has to incur more debt, she said, shortly before departing for Washington. "It would not be in China's interest if we were unable to get our economy moving."

Yang responded that China wants to see its foreign exchange reserves - the world's largest at $1.95 trillion - invested safely and to continue working with the United States.

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20090222/D96GHOP80.html

The Obama administration, siding with former President George W. Bush, is trying to kill a lawsuit that seeks to recover what could be millions of missing White House e-mails.

Two advocacy groups suing the Executive Office of the President say that large amounts of White House e-mail documenting Bush's eight years in office may still be missing, and that the government must undertake an extensive recovery effort.

They expressed disappointment that Obama's Justice Department is continuing the Bush administration's bid to get the lawsuits dismissed.

Recently, the Bush White House said it had located 14 million e-mails that were misplaced and that the White House had restored hundreds of thousands of other e-mails from computer backup tapes.

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20090221/D96G5E9G0.html

Opinion:
Liberal threats to the First Amendment, and freedom of speech generally

Obama has done what he can to dismiss fears liberals will impose a return to :”The Fairness Doctrine” process of decades past – a past in which totally different components and circumstances described our media.

There is no more crucial element to democratic intercourse (REAL Democratic intercourse) than a free exchange of ideas.  Debate is central to the process.

Unfortunately for liberals, they don’t fare well when forced to deal with fact and truth.  They are perpetual losers – especially in matters in which logic and rational thought are concerned.   Frisco provides us with a continual parade of proof of such matters.

There is no better test of this concept than the result of the free market-generated, response to talk radio.  No one is dictating particular view points, what IS dictating choices is the size of audiences conservative talk radio attracts, versus those attracted to liberal talk radio.

Liberal talk radio loses big time – it is not remotely competitive.  ALL liberal talk show efforts have been dismal failures in their inability to attract large numbers of listeners.  Only PBS liberal talk radio survives, and it survives only by ripping off unwilling American taxpayers to grab the dollars necessary.

This nettles liberals, so they are conspiring to effectively shut down talk radio, and thusly shut down honest debate.  They want to saddle radio stations that carry real talk radio, with imposed baggage in the form of liberal talk radio.  A devious plot, but one that has been uncovered and is under stronger and stronger microscopes.

Stay alert.  We will keep you informed.

Buddy

(Here is one article on the subject:)

<<http://www.nypost.com/php/pfriendly/print.php?url=http://www.nypost.com/seven/02142009/postopinion/editorials/the_shut_up_doctrine_155064.htm
 

THE 'SHUT UP' DOCTRINE 
 

With the mega-pork, er, stimulus bill done, Democrats will now turn to regulating political speech they don't like.

That is, they're revving up to resurrect the so-called Fairness Doctrine.

Created in 1949, the doctrine required broadcast radio and TV outlets (then relatively few in number) to present balanced viewpoints on issues. The FCC repealed it in 1987, noting the dramatically expanded media landscape of the intervening four decades allowed sufficient competition of ideas.

Then a funny thing happened: Commercial, conservative-themed talk radio flourished.

Liberal talk? Not so much.

Left-wing perches like National Public Radio and Pacifica use tax dollars to buy their soapbox in the marketplace of ideas, while commercial operations like Air America can't buy listeners.

This presents Democrats with an opportunity.

Successful commercial talk stations forced to "balance" their programming would have to run hours of left-wing talkers who, lacking listeners, would bring in fewer ads - creating big holes in station revenues and producing a serious disincentive to carry talk of any sort.

Which would suit folks like former President Bill Clinton just fine:

"Well, you either ought to have the Fairness Doctrine or we ought to have more balance on the other side," said Hillary's husband earlier this week.

Well, given that Rush Limbaugh feasted off the Monica Lewinsky scandal for years, Clinton can be forgiven his views. But he could not possibly be more wrong.

Sure, there's something delicious about the prospect of NPR being forced to give over a few hours a day to the likes of Michael Savage and Ann Coulter (as if the Democrats would ever bring themselves to go that far.)

But, in a world with hundreds of cable stations and satellite radio - plus an Internet featuring its own radio and streaming video, blogs and uncounted political Web sites of all persuasions - the idea that government should (or even could) enforce balance is laughable on its face.

The left's problem is not with the media - it's with their message.

Moreover, one political document might find Fairness Doctrine-imposed "balance" really offensive:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

That should be the last word.

Doubtless it won't be.>>

 
The day’s top blogs:

First a brief overview:

1.

Catholics can't buy a Fairness Doctrine
Larrey Anderson

Most know that NBC rejected a TV add produced by CatholicVote.org for the Super Bowl.  CNN has also rejected the spot. Seems like Catholics can’t even buy a piece of the “Fairness Doctrine.”

(The advertisement shows the development of a baby in his mother’s womb. The spot simply celebrates the process and the decisions that led to the birth of the first African-American president. See the short add here .)

According to Brian Burch at CatholicVote.org, this is how CNN explained its decision not to run the add:

2.

Obama to Unveil an Ambitious Budget Plan

President Obama is putting the finishing touches on an ambitious first budget that seeks to cut the federal deficit in half over the next four years, primarily by raising taxes on business and the wealthy and by slashing spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, administration officials said.

In addition to tackling a deficit swollen by the $787 billion stimulus package and other efforts to ease the nation's economic crisis, the budget blueprint will press aggressively for progress on the domestic agenda Obama outlined during the presidential campaign. This would include key changes to environmental policies and a major expansion of health coverage that Obama hopes to enact later this year.

3.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123491436689503909.html

Synchronized Boom, Synchronized Bust
Bad U.S. monetary policy had global consequences.
MARC FABER

(NOTE: Politicians are evil, but basically dumb ... we can't change that... So? Whaddaya gonna do? They have been screwing up the economy since they 1st got here in 1913, nearly 100 years ago... Kill the Fed! Let states do whatever they individually think the Fed does nicely.  When a state screws things up badly enough business moves out, eventually The People fix it.     Harry Becker  )

The world has gone from the greatest synchronized global economic boom in history to the first synchronized global bust since the Great Depression. How we got here is not a cautionary tale of free markets gone wild. Rather, it's the story of what can happen when governments ignore market signals and central bankers believe in endless booms.

Following the March 2000 Nasdaq bust, the Federal Reserve began to slash the fed-funds rate from 6.5% in January 2001 to 1.75% by year-end and then to 1% in 2003. (This despite the fact that officially the U.S. economy had begun to recover in November 2001). Almost three years into the economic expansion, the Fed began to increase the fed-funds rate in baby steps beginning June 2004 from 1% to 5.25% in August 2006.

But because interest rates during this time continuously lagged behind nominal GDP growth as well as cost of living increases, the Fed never truly implemented tight monetary policies. Indeed, total credit increased in the U.S. from an annual growth rate of 7% in the June 2004 quarter to over 16% in early 2007. It grew five-times faster than nominal GDP between 2001 and 2007.

The complete mispricing of money, combined with a cornucopia of financial innovations, led to the housing boom and allowed buyers to purchase homes with no down payments and homeowners to refinance their existing mortgages. A consumption boom followed, which was not accompanied by equal industrial production and capital spending increases. Consequently the U.S. trade and current-account deficit expanded -- the latter from 2% of GDP in 1998 to 7% in 2006, thus feeding the world with approximately $800 billion in excess liquidity that year.

Now the full articles:

1.

This is Fairness?
 
Catholics can't buy a Fairness Doctrine
Larrey Anderson

Most know that NBC rejected a TV add produced by CatholicVote.org for the Super Bowl.  CNN has also rejected the spot. Seems like Catholics can’t even buy a piece of the “Fairness Doctrine.”

(The advertisement shows the development of a baby in his mother’s womb. The spot simply celebrates the process and the decisions that led to the birth of the first African-American president. See the short add here .)

According to Brian Burch at CatholicVote.org, this is how CNN explained its decision not to run the add:
Thank you for your patience.  We have decided to pass on this creative. CNN doesn't accept advocacy ads that portray personal decisions in a manner that suggests a position in favor of the advocacy message, without having permission of the persons involved.

Watch the CatholicVote.org advertisement -- and then try to make some sense (any sense) out of that string of non-sequiturs.

CNN has run pro-abortion “creatives” in the past. The network defended its decision to run the pro-choice adds thus:
CNN accepts advocacy advertising from responsible groups from across the political spectrum who wish to express their views and their opinions about issues of public importance.

Logical analysis of this defense tells us that CNN thinks: (a) Catholics are not a responsible group, (b) abortion is not a matter of public importance, or (c) both.

Forget the “Fairness Doctrine.” Catholicvote.org can’t even buy time from the mainstream media to express its opinion.

Hat tip: My wife

— Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a recipient of the 2007 National Humanities Medal.

2.

Obama to Unveil an Ambitious Budget Plan
Lori Montgomery and Ceci Connolly
Washington Post Staff Writers

President Obama is putting the finishing touches on an ambitious first budget that seeks to cut the federal deficit in half over the next four years, primarily by raising taxes on business and the wealthy and by slashing spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, administration officials said.

In addition to tackling a deficit swollen by the $787 billion stimulus package and other efforts to ease the nation's economic crisis, the budget blueprint will press aggressively for progress on the domestic agenda Obama outlined during the presidential campaign. This would include key changes to environmental policies and a major expansion of health coverage that Obama hopes to enact later this year.

A summary of Obama's budget request for the fiscal year that begins in October will be delivered to Congress on Thursday, with the complete, multi-hundred-page document to follow in April. But Obama plans to unveil his goals for scaling back record deficits and rebuilding the nation's costly and inefficient health care system Monday, when he addresses more than 100 lawmakers and budget experts at a White House summit on restoring "fiscal responsibility" to Washington.

In his weekly radio and Internet address today, Obama expressed determination to "get exploding deficits under control" and described his budget request as "sober in its assessments, honest in its accounting, and lays out in detail my strategy for investing in what we need, cutting what we don't, and restoring fiscal discipline."

Reducing the deficit, he said, is critical to the nation's future: "We can't generate sustained growth without getting our deficits under control."

Obama faces the long-term challenge of retirement and health programs that threaten to bankrupt the government years down the road, as well as the more immediate problem of deficits bloated by spending on the economy and financial-system bailouts. His budget proposal takes aim at the short-term problem, administration officials said, but also would begin to address the nation's chronic budget imbalance by squeezing savings from the federal health programs for the elderly and the poor.

Even before Congress approved the stimulus package earlier this month, this year's deficit was projected by Congressional budget analysts to approach $1.2 trillion, or 8.3 percent of the overall economy, the highest since World War II. With the stimulus and other expenses, some analysts say the annual gap between federal spending and income could approach $2 trillion when the fiscal year ends in September.

Obama proposes to dramatically reduce those numbers by the end of his first term, cutting the deficit he inherited in half, said administration officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because the budget has yet to be released. His budget plan would keep the deficit hovering near $1 trillion in 2010 and 2011, but shows it dropping to $533 billion in 2013 -- still high in dollar terms, but a more manageable 3 percent of the overall economy.

To get there, Obama proposes to cut spending and raise taxes. The savings would come primarily from "winding down the war" in Iraq, a senior administration official said. The budget assumes that the nation will continue to spend money on "overseas military contingency operations" throughout Obama's presidency, the official said, but that number is significantly lower than the nearly $190 billion the nation budgeted for Iraq and Afghanistan last year.

Obama also seeks to increase tax collections, primarily by making good on his promise to eliminate the temporary tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 for wealthy taxpayers, whom Obama defined during the campaign as those earning more than $250,000 a year. Those tax breaks would be permitted to expire on schedule for the 2011 tax year, when the top tax rate would rise from 35 percent to more than 39 percent.

Obama also proposes to maintain the tax on estates worth more than $3.5 million, instead of letting it expire next year. And he proposes "a fairly aggressive effort on tax enforcement" that would target tax havens and corporate loopholes, among other provisions, the official said.

Overall, tax collections under the plan would rise from about 16 percent of the economy this year to 19 percent in 2013, while federal spending would drop from about 26 percent of the economy, another post-war high, to 22 percent.

Republicans, who are already painting Obama as a profligate spender, are laying plans to attack him on taxes as well. Even some non-partisan observers question the wisdom of announcing a plan to raise taxes in the midst of a recession. But senior White House adviser David Axelrod said in an interview that the tax proposals reflect the ideas that won the election last fall.

"This is consistent with what the president talked about throughout the campaign," and "restores some balance to the tax code in a way that protects the middle class," Axelrod said. "Most Americans will come out very well here."

The budget also puts in place the building blocks of what administration officials say will be a broad restructuring of the U.S. health system, an effort aimed at covering some of the 46 million Americans who lack insurance while controlling costs and improving quality. Many lawmakers said they had expected a health care overhaul to be pushed off while Obama deals with the economic crisis, but administration officials stressed they intend to forge ahead with comprehensive reform.

"The budget will kick off or facilitate a focus on getting health care done this year," the senior official said, adding that the White House is planning a summit on health care. The event has been delayed by former senator Tom Daschle's decision to withdraw from consideration as health secretary because of tax problems, a move that left Obama without key member of his health team.

Administration officials and outside experts say the most likely path to revamping the health system is to begin with Medicare, the federal program for retirees and people with disabilities, and Medicaid, which serves the poor. Together, the two programs cover about 100 million people at a cost of $561 billion in 2007. Making policy changes in those programs -- such as rewarding physicians who computerize their medical records or paying doctors for results rather than procedures--could improve care while generating long-term savings, expert say. It also could prod private insurers to follow suit.
Obama's budget request would create "running room for health reform," the official said, by reducing spending on some health programs so the administration would have money to devote to initiatives to expand coverage. The biggest target is bonus payments to insurance companies that run managed-care programs under Medicare, known as Medicare Advantage.

The Bush-era program has attracted nearly a quarter of Medicare beneficiaries to private health insurance plans that generally cover a package of services such as doctor visits, prescription drugs and eyeglasses. But the government pays the plans between 13 and 17 percent more than it pays for traditional fee-for-service coverage, according to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, which advises Congress on Medicare financing issues. Democrats have long complained about the cost, and eliminating the extra payments would save about $35 billion over the next five years.

Administration officials also are debating whether to permit people as young as 55 to purchase coverage through Medicare. That age group is particularly vulnerable in today's weakened economy, as many have lost jobs or seen insurance premiums rise rapidly. The cost would depend on whether recipients were offered a discount or required to pay the full price of coverage.

Staff writer Shailagh Murray contributed to this report.

3.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123491436689503909.html

Synchronized Boom, Synchronized Bust
Bad U.S. monetary policy had global consequences.
 
MARC FABER

(NOTE: Politicians are evil, but basically dumb ... we can't change that... So? Whaddaya gonna do? They have been screwing up the economy since they 1st got here in 1913, nearly 100 years ago... Kill the Fed! Let states do whatever they individually think the Fed does nicely.  When a state screws things up badly enough business moves out, eventually The People fix it.     Harry Becker  )

The world has gone from the greatest synchronized global economic boom in history to the first synchronized global bust since the Great Depression. How we got here is not a cautionary tale of free markets gone wild. Rather, it's the story of what can happen when governments ignore market signals and central bankers believe in endless booms.

Following the March 2000 Nasdaq bust, the Federal Reserve began to slash the fed-funds rate from 6.5% in January 2001 to 1.75% by year-end and then to 1% in 2003. (This despite the fact that officially the U.S. economy had begun to recover in November 2001). Almost three years into the economic expansion, the Fed began to increase the fed-funds rate in baby steps beginning June 2004 from 1% to 5.25% in August 2006.

But because interest rates during this time continuously lagged behind nominal GDP growth as well as cost of living increases, the Fed never truly implemented tight monetary policies. Indeed, total credit increased in the U.S. from an annual growth rate of 7% in the June 2004 quarter to over 16% in early 2007. It grew five-times faster than nominal GDP between 2001 and 2007.

The complete mispricing of money, combined with a cornucopia of financial innovations, led to the housing boom and allowed buyers to purchase homes with no down payments and homeowners to refinance their existing mortgages. A consumption boom followed, which was not accompanied by equal industrial production and capital spending increases. Consequently the U.S. trade and current-account deficit expanded -- the latter from 2% of GDP in 1998 to 7% in 2006, thus feeding the world with approximately $800 billion in excess liquidity that year.

When American consumption began to boom on the back of the housing bubble, the explosion of imports into the U.S. were largely provided by China and other Asian countries. Rising exports from China led to that country's strong domestic industrial production, income and consumption gains, as well as very high capital spending as capacities needed to be expanded in order to meet the export demand. An economic boom in China drove the demand for oil and other commodities up. Rapidly accumulating wealth allowed the resource producers in the Middle East, Latin America and elsewhere to go on a shopping binge for luxury goods and capital goods from Europe and Japan.

As a consequence of this expansionary cycle, the world experienced between 2001 and 2007 the greatest synchronized economic boom in the history of capitalism. Past booms -- of the 19th century under colonial economies, or after World War II when 40% of the world's population remained under communism, socialism, or was otherwise isolated -- were not nearly as global as this one.

Another unique feature of this synchronized boom was that nearly all asset prices skyrocketed around the world -- real estate, equities, commodities, art, even bonds. Meanwhile, the Fed continued to claim that it was impossible to identify any asset bubbles.

The cracks first appeared in the U.S. in 2006, when home prices became unaffordable and began to decline. The overleveraged housing sector brought about the first failures in the subprime market.
Sadly, the entire U.S. financial system, for which the Fed is largely responsible, turned out to be terribly overleveraged and badly in need of capital infusions. Investors grew apprehensive and risk averse, while financial institutions tightened lending standards. In other words, while the Fed cut the fed-funds rate to zero after September 2007, it had no impact -- except temporarily on oil, which soared between September 2007 and July 2008 from $75 per barrel to $150 (another Fed induced bubble) -- because the private sector tightened monetary conditions.

In 2008, a collapse in all asset prices led to lower U.S. consumption, which caused plunging exports, lower industrial production, and less capital spending in China. This led to a collapse in commodity prices and in the demand for luxury goods and capital goods from Europe and Japan. The virtuous up-cycle turned into a vicious down-cycle with an intensity not witnessed since before World War II.
Sadly, government policy responses -- not only in the U.S. -- are plainly wrong. It is not that the free market failed.

The mistake was constant interventions in the free market by the Fed and the U.S. Treasury that addressed symptoms and postponed problems instead of solving them.

The bad policy started with the bailout of Mexico following the Tequila crisis in 1994. This prolonged the Asian bubble of the 1990s, because investors became convinced there was no risk in growing current-account deficits and continued to finance Asia's emerging economies until the bubble burst with the start of the Asian crisis in 1997-98.

Then came the ill-advised bailout of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998, which encouraged the financial sector to leverage up even more. This was followed by the ultra-expansionary monetary polices following the Nasdaq bubble in 2000, which led to rapid and unsustainable credit growth.

So what now? Unfortunately, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner were, as Fed officials, among the chief architects of easy money and are therefore largely responsible for the credit bubble that got us here. Worse, their commitment to meddling in markets has only intensified with the adoption of near-zero interest rates and massive bank bailouts.

The best policy response would be to do nothing and let the free market correct the excesses brought about by unforgivable policy errors. Further interventions through ill-conceived bailouts and bulging fiscal deficits are bound to prolong the agony and lead to another slump -- possibly an inflationary depression with dire social consequences.

Mr. Faber is managing director of Marc Faber Ltd. and editor of "The Gloom, Boom & Doom Report."
 
 
.

 
.

Saturday, February 21, 2009

The day’s top political news:

Renowned investor and left wing conspirator, George Soros is saying the world financial system has effectively disintegrated, adding that there is yet no prospect of a near-term resolution to the crisis.

He said the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September marked a turning point in the functioning of the market system.

"We witnessed the collapse of the financial system," Soros said at a Columbia University dinner. "It was placed on life support, and it's still on life support. There's no sign that we are anywhere near a bottom."

It would seem his plot against capitalism has been a successful one.

http://www.reuters.com/article/businessNews/idUSTRE51K0A920090221?feedType=RSS&feedName=businessNews&rpc=23&sp=true

The United States will press China on human rights but this will not keep them from working together on the financial crisis, climate change and North Korea, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says.

The United States has long accused China of human rights abuses, has pressed Beijing to grant greater autonomy to Tibet and has sold arms to Taiwan, which Beijing views as a renegade province.

Making her first trip abroad as secretary of state, Clinton said three of her top priorities in Beijing will be addressing the global economic crisis, climate change and security challenges such as the North Korean nuclear weapons program.

"Now, that doesn't mean that questions of Taiwan, Tibet, human rights, the whole range of challenges that we often engage on with the Chinese, are not part of the agenda," Clinton told reporters in Seoul before flying to Beijing. "But we pretty much know what they are going to say.

(Excuding sincerity continues to totally elude Hillary)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090221/wl_nm/us_china_clinton_2

The deepening economic recession hasn't stopped members of Congress from throwing lavish events to raise campaign money for the 2010 election.

"Everyone is tightening their belts, but lawmakers are doing what they have always done: holding fundraisers in exotic locales," said Nancy Watzman, who tracks political fundraising events for the watchdog group Sunlight Foundation. "This is the kind of thing that's out of reach to most people, and it's pretty much hidden from the public."

Aides to the lawmakers said the events are driven by the need to raise growing amounts of campaign money. House and Senate candidates raised nearly $1.4 billion to fund campaigns in 2008, up from roughly $1 billion eight years earlier, according to the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics.

"Almost every member of Congress is fundraising all the time," said Julie DeWoody, the finance director of Perlmutter's campaign. "It's the reality of running for office and how expensive campaigns are."

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2009-02-19-fundraising_N.htm

Opinion:
I’m advised I am incorrect in my analysis about Obama and his schemes, scams, and plotting

The spoor seems obvious to me.  Item after item, act after act, fiasco after fiasco all suggest Obama and company are working hard to deceive the American people and are working hard to do things such as force passage of the incredible Obama “stimulus” plan.  After all, they forced passage of the final version before any Congressman, Senator, or staff member could read, understand, or comprehend exactly what is included in this huge act.

(Presuming you agree any bill throwing a trilling dollars at a problem without details or assigned responsibility is something absurd.)

I was explaining my theories on potential Obama conspirators to a friend whose political judgment I value and who is positioned to have an inside view of things as they transpire in today’s Washington.

He contends I am according the Obama people far too much ability.  He says they are totally asea and have no clue about how to get about the job of setting up a new administration.

None.  Nada.  Zip.

As a result, says my friend, the Obama people are pin balling from bumper to bumper, lighting a lot of lights and setting off bells of alarm all over the playing service.  All this not because of some dire master plan (although the ultimate damage done to this country may be just as bad) but because of total incompetence.

Does this make it better/

I’m not sure.  But there is a small measure of relief I think.  Those who blunder along without a plan, scheme or conspiracy may damage us as much at the end of the day, but its not as likely.

Our job, on the other hand, is developing a plan to confront and shunt aside this damage.  How can we constrain the extremism and impede the momentum of this evil beast that threatens to change the basic fiber of America itself?

I’m not at all sure I  have an answer yet, but at least I think I’m better prepared to know where to look, and where I might most likely find a solution.

Stay tuned.

Buddy

The day’s top blogs:

First an overview:

1.

Obama didn't OK Palestinian migration to U.S.
Reports wrongly claim president allowing Gazans to flood America
Aaron Klein
© 2009 WorldNetDaily 

Contrary to some news media reports, President Obama did not authorize Palestinian "refugees" to migrate to the U.S. as part of emergency assistance following Israel's 22-day war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

On Jan. 30, Obama signed an order issuing an emergency contribution of $20.3 million for "urgent relief efforts" in Gaza. He approved the aid, which was to come from the U.S. Emergency Refugee and Migration Assistance Fund, one day after the U.N. launched a flash appeal for $613 million to help Palestinians in the Hamas-controlled territory rebuild infrastructure following Israeli antiterrorism air raids.

Several media outlets wrongly reported Obama had approved the emergency migration of Gazans to the U.S.

Canada Free Press, for example, released an article titled, "Obama opening floodgates by inviting Hamas to 'migrate' to the U.S.A.?"

Also, the New Media Journal featured a piece by author Paul L. Williams with the screaming headline, "Pres. Obama invites Hamas terrorists to America."

An e-mail containing an article titled, "Obama Decrees: Massive Immigration of Hamas Refugees from Gaza To U.S." has been circulating with the byline of CNN's Lou Dobbs. However, WND has learned Dobbs did not pen any such piece. The article was simply posted on the reporter's website forum and later falsely attributed to him.

WND received a number of e-mail requests from readers asking the news organization to investigate the stories.

Michael Hammer, a spokesperson for the National Security Council, confirmed to WND Obama did not authorize the migration of any Palestinians to the U.S. A State Department spokesman provided the same comment.

Officials from both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority told WND they are not aware of any plans to bring Gazans to the U.S.

2.

Obama's Revenge
Joan Swirsky 

Once upon a time, a white teenager from Kansas got pregnant by her black Kenyan boyfriend, Barack Obama Sr., or was it her husband? Whatever. (I say whatever because we've never seen either marriage or divorce certificates). Some say the couple was in Kenya visiting relatives when the birth of their son, Barack Obama Jr., occurred. No matter. (I say no matter because we've never seen an authentic birth certificate). By the time the baby was two years old his father abandoned him for his other wife and child in Kenya.

I wonder how toddler Barry felt when his father left him, and never reappeared until a single time when the boy was 10. Bewildered? Sad? Lonely? Angry? What do two-year-olds do with those feelings?

It didn't take long for Barry's mother to meet and marry an Indonesian native named Lolo Soetoro. They moved to Indonesia, where her child became Barry Soetoro, took on Indonesian citizenship, and was presumably schooled in public, Christian, and Muslim schools. (I say presumably because we've never seen those school records). But when Barry was 10 years old, his mother sent him back to the U.S. to be raised by her parents, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham, although she kept her baby daughter Maya Soetoro with her.

I wonder how the by-now fully-sentient young Barry felt when his mother sent him packing. Sad? Jealous of the baby who remained behind with mommy? Confused and dizzy by the disparate cultures – languages, customs, foods, sights, sounds, schooling – he had experienced? Resentful? What did Barry do with those feelings?

3.

http://mises.org/story/3344

The Left in Power
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

The theme of my book, The Left, the Right, and the State, is that both sides of the political aisle represent a grave threat to liberty — though each of a different sort. It is like two people tugging at a turkey's wishbone: the turkey is liberty, and you are the bone.

We've lived through eight years of the threat from the Right. It was all about nationalism, militarism, war, torture, state secrets, attacks on privacy, the use of tax funds to subsidize "conservative values," the outsourcing of government in a fascistic business-government partnership, the banning of products and services that government doesn't like, the regimentation of educational life, government impositions in the name of security, and so on.

With the end of the Bush years, many of these threats have receded, if only slightly. Consider the problem of nationalism, for example. The neoconservatives who ran the country during the last two Bush terms exploited this dangerous impulse for all it was worth.

If you were not for their wars, you were against America, and hence deserving of jail without trial. The whole ideological apparatus of the Bush years was profoundly anti-intellectual, and while the neocons shouted down anyone who compared their administration to the Third Reich or Mussolini, the ideological comparison was actually quite apt: right-wing government control stems from the same motives of exalting security, discipline, and chauvinism above liberty.

In two short months, however, that ethos has subsided, and it has been replaced by a threat from the Left. It is tragic that Obama should be president at all. If we had a position called "national well-wisher," "national greeter," or "national symbol of accomplishment," he would be perfect for the job. He is elegant, graceful, and articulate, and he inspires people in an unusual way. As chief policymaker, however, he has revealed himself as nothing more than a two-bit socialist.

Now for the full articles:

1.

FROM WND'S JERUSALEM BUREAU
Obama didn't OK Palestinian migration to U.S.
Reports wrongly claim president allowing Gazans to flood America
Aaron Klein
© 2009 WorldNetDaily 

 TEL AVIV, Israel – Contrary to some news media reports, President Obama did not authorize Palestinian "refugees" to migrate to the U.S. as part of emergency assistance following Israel's 22-day war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

On Jan. 30, Obama signed an order issuing an emergency contribution of $20.3 million for "urgent relief efforts" in Gaza. He approved the aid, which was to come from the U.S. Emergency Refugee and Migration Assistance Fund, one day after the U.N. launched a flash appeal for $613 million to help Palestinians in the Hamas-controlled territory rebuild infrastructure following Israeli antiterrorism air raids.

Several media outlets wrongly reported Obama had approved the emergency migration of Gazans to the U.S.

Canada Free Press, for example, released an article titled, "Obama opening floodgates by inviting Hamas to 'migrate' to the U.S.A.?"

Also, the New Media Journal featured a piece by author Paul L. Williams with the screaming headline, "Pres. Obama invites Hamas terrorists to America."

An e-mail containing an article titled, "Obama Decrees: Massive Immigration of Hamas Refugees from Gaza To U.S." has been circulating with the byline of CNN's Lou Dobbs. However, WND has learned Dobbs did not pen any such piece. The article was simply posted on the reporter's website forum and later falsely attributed to him.

WND received a number of e-mail requests from readers asking the news organization to investigate the stories.

Michael Hammer, a spokesperson for the National Security Council, confirmed to WND Obama did not authorize the migration of any Palestinians to the U.S. A State Department spokesman provided the same comment.

Officials from both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority told WND they are not aware of any plans to bring Gazans to the U.S.

Perhaps the text of Obama's executive order left the matter open for interpretation.
The order stated the money was to be used for the "purpose of meeting unexpected and urgent refugee and migration needs."

It continued, however, by stipulating the funds were to be used for "distributing emergency food assistance, providing medical assistance and temporary shelter, creating temporary employment, and restoring access to electricity and potable water."

The authorization includes $13.5 million for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, $6 million to the International Committee of the Red Cross and $800,000 to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

While some civilians were killed and wounded during Israel's operation in Gaza, Israeli forces focused on Hamas' terrorist and government infrastructure. Hamas tactics, however, likely increased civilian casualties.

Gazans detail being used as human shields

More tales are emerging of the ways Hamas utilized civilians during Israel's campaign, including accounts from Gaza residents who accuse Hamas of using them as human shields.
In one case, after engaging with terrorists holed up inside a civilian apartment complex, the Israel Defense Forces seized an Arabic-language note left behind, addressed to one of the apartment's occupants.

"Greetings, honored residents of this house," reads the note, obtained by WND. "We, your brothers, holy war fighters used this house and some of the things in it. Our apologies."

Earlier this month, the Sydney Morning Herald interviewed Muhammad Shriteh, a Gaza-based ambulance driver, who complained Hamas would "lure the ambulances into the heart of a battle to transport fighters to safety."

He told the paper his ambulance company "coordinate[d] with the Israelis before we picked up patients … so they would not shoot at us."

Shriteh recounted one instance when he was called to an emergency in the Jabaliya camp in the northern Gaza Strip only to find Hamas terrorists waiting inside a civilian apartment complex, hiding from Israeli fire.

"They were very scared, and very nervous," he said. "They dropped their weapons and ordered me to get them out, to put them in the ambulance and take them away."

Shriteh stated he refused to help because, he believed, if the IDF saw him transporting Hamas gunmen, he would not be able to pick up any more wounded people. He recounted one of the Hamas operatives putting a gun to his head, but he still refused and then they allowed him to leave.
He said at one point Hamas attempted to hijack the ambulances at one of the main hospitals in Gaza City.

"You hear when they are coming. People ring to tell you," Shriteh said. "So we had to get in all the ambulances and make the illusion of an emergency and only come back when they had gone."
Also, in a piece entitled "Parsing Gains of the Gaza War," the New York Times quoted a source it said was close to Hamas, describing how the group "fired rockets in between the houses and covered the alleys with sheets so they could set the rockets up in five minutes without the planes seeing them. The moment they fired, they escaped."

The Italian daily Corriere della Sera similarly published an article translated into English by Israel's Center for Special Studies quoting Gaza residents accusing Hamas of shooting from their homes and then preventing the residents from fleeing when Israel returned fire.

WND broke the story that Hamas took out dozens of apartments from within civilian complexes where it currently bases its new government infrastructure: including Hamas' interior ministry, court system, ministry of transportation, education, police, health services and scores of other official institutions.
Hamas sources claimed the group had no choice but to open their offices within civilian apartment complexes, since their previous government buildings were mostly bombed by Israel.

Also, IDF Brig. Gen. Eyal Eisenberg, who fought in Gaza, charged Hamas sent civilians, including women and children, to transfer weapons to gunmen engaged in battles with Israeli forces, and he accused Hamas of booby-trapping many of the civilians' homes. He labeled Hamas' alleged use of civilians as "monstrous" and "inhumane."

Similar reports were provided to WND during previous Israeli battles with Hamas. During one battle focusing largely on the Hamas infrastructure in the city of Jabaliya, about one mile into the Gaza Strip, an Israeli commander said Hamas drew Israeli forces into populated civilian areas, shooting at Jewish fighters from occupied civilian homes while women and children were inside.

In another case, Israel's Haaretz daily quoted an Israeli commander describing how Hamas sent a 10-year-old boy into the battlefield in full view of the Israeli military to remove a gun from a felled terrorist and then pass the weapon to another terrorist. The commander at the scene said he ordered his troops to halt their fire as the Israeli military watched.

Another commander speaking to WND said Hamas snipers used the windows of a Jabaliya house that was clearly occupied by women and children to shoot at his unit.

"The aim is to draw us into killing civilians to bring about international pressure to end our operation," the commander said.

The international community and much of the world media constantly berated Israel for purportedly killing more than 1,250 Palestinians during the conflict.

Aaron Klein, WorldNetDaily's Jerusalem bureau chief, is known for his regular interviews with Mideast terror leaders and his popular segments on America's top radio programs. His newly released book is "Schmoozing with Terrorists: From Hollywood to the Holy Land, Jihadists Reveal their Global Plans – to a Jew!"

2.

Obama's Revenge
Joan Swirsky 

Once upon a time, a white teenager from Kansas got pregnant by her black Kenyan boyfriend, Barack Obama Sr., or was it her husband? Whatever. (I say whatever because we've never seen either marriage or divorce certificates). Some say the couple was in Kenya visiting relatives when the birth of their son, Barack Obama Jr., occurred. No matter. (I say no matter because we've never seen an authentic birth certificate). By the time the baby was two years old his father abandoned him for his other wife and child in Kenya.

I wonder how toddler Barry felt when his father left him, and never reappeared until a single time when the boy was 10. Bewildered? Sad? Lonely? Angry? What do two-year-olds do with those feelings?

It didn't take long for Barry's mother to meet and marry an Indonesian native named Lolo Soetoro. They moved to Indonesia, where her child became Barry Soetoro, took on Indonesian citizenship, and was presumably schooled in public, Christian, and Muslim schools. (I say presumably because we've never seen those school records). But when Barry was 10 years old, his mother sent him back to the U.S. to be raised by her parents, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham, although she kept her baby daughter Maya Soetoro with her.

I wonder how the by-now fully-sentient young Barry felt when his mother sent him packing. Sad? Jealous of the baby who remained behind with mommy? Confused and dizzy by the disparate cultures – languages, customs, foods, sights, sounds, schooling – he had experienced? Resentful? What did Barry do with those feelings?

By the time he was 10, the boy had been abandoned three times – by his father, stepfather, and mother. And although he was raised by his white grandparents in Hawaii – where "people of color" were not his color – he found out soon enough that his mixed-race background rendered him, in effect, an outsider. Did that make him feel self-conscious, indignant, victimized?

But he wasn't altogether an outsider. In Hawaii, young Barry met Frank Marshall Davis, his first and perhaps most influential mentor. The infamous Marshall, a Communist activist (and self-confessed pedophile) taught Barry – was it Obama, Soetero, Dunham? – that white people were the devil incarnate and that blacks were the most "victimized" people on earth.

Yet the abandoned and rejected child was lucky. His white-devil grandparents gave him a comfortable life in Hawaii, and an education that apparently qualified him to attend several prestigious schools – Occidental College in CA, Columbia Univ. in NY City, and Harvard Law School in Cambridge, MA.(I say apparently qualified because we've never seen any of his college transcripts).

BARRY MORPHS INTO BARACK

After his undergraduate days at Columbia, Obama chose not to go to graduate school, but instead held various jobs in the Big Apple and then moved to Chicago to become a community organizer. Although he had been exposed to American exceptionalism through his life in the United States and his privileged education, it is clear that his experiences in impoverished Kenya and totalitarian Indonesia, as well as his exposure to Marshall and the other radicals he had met during his years in New York – among them the unrepentant domestic terrorists William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn of Weather Underground infamy – made the deepest and most lasting impressions.

Their messages of American imperialism and its white-devil culture clearly resonated in the thrice-abandoned boy. In his young-adult and adult years, free to choose his friends and pursuits, he opted exclusively for far-left socialists and Marxists, and activities aimed at relieving the suffering of people he perceived to be as victimized as apparently he felt he had been. He understood their feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, and impotent rage, as well as the pain of fatherlessness. After all, his Harvard-educated father consciously chose to leave him. And his mother gave him away. Was that depressing to Barry? Infuriating?

When given the opportunity to join one of dozens of churches in Chicago, Barry – who had morphed into Barack – opted for the Trinity United Church of Christ, which was led by the fire-breathing Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose decades-long anti-American and anti-Semitic rants apparently resonated in Obama's rejected and abandoned heart and soul. (I say apparently resonated because in over 20 years of regular attendance, Obama said he heard nothing inflammatory or anti-American, and we've never seen the videotapes of any sermon, although each one was unfailingly recorded).

"God damn America," Wright raged. "The chickens have come home to roost," he "preached" to his whooping and hollering congregation after 9/11. Obama heard nothing.

But it wasn't only Wright who Obama was attracted to in Chicago. He was also drawn to another hate-spewing radical, Rev. Louis Farrakhan, as well as to the raving Father Michael Phleger, the radical Islamist Khalid Rashidi, his friends and neighbors the Ayers, and to equally-close friends "Tony" and Rita Rezko – Tony being the notorious "fixer" and now-convicted-and-imprisoned felon for fraud, bribery, and money laundering. What did the seemingly mild-mannered Obama find so irresistible in these angry and/or crooked people and others like them? Was it the same thing that a shy man finds in his attraction to a flamboyant girlfriend – and alter-ego, a person who expresses what he really feels but is unable to give voice to? 

In these relationships and in community organizing – which offers inner-city mostly-black residents job training, tutoring, and methods to organize tenants'-rights groups and voter-registration drives, etc. – the twenty-something Obama apparently found his calling, and also a renewed and burning ambition.

WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE

While his community-organizing job paid a paltry $12,000 or so per year, Obama somehow managed to pay his way through one of the priciest graduate schools in the world, Harvard Law School. (I say somehow managed because we have no record of his tuition payments). Even more amazing, he became the first black president of the Harvard Law Review without ever producing a written paper – or at least a paper that the public has ever read.

There is a good deal of evidence that Obama's acceptance at Harvard Law – and his tuition – were facilitated by friends who had a vested interest in the community organizer. Among them was Percy Sutton, a former Manhattan borough president and ardent leftist, who was also Malcolm X's lawyer. In an interview last year, the octogenarian Sutton stated: "I was introduced to [Obama] by a friend. The friend's name was Dr. Khalid al-Mansour, and the introduction took place about 20 years ago." Sutton described al-Mansour as "the principle adviser to one of the world's richest men" and suggested that al-Mansour was raising money for Obama. Knowing that Sutton had friends at Harvard, al-Mansour asked him if he would write a letter to Harvard recommending Obama, which Sutton did most agreeably. This took place about 1988 when 27-year-old Obama was applying to Harvard Law.

Journalist Jack Cashill has credibly speculated that Obama's two memoirs were actually written by his pal Bill Ayers, who was and is a University of Illinois at Chicago English professor, having escaped life in prison on a technicality. Two years [after he was admitted to law school], Cashill writes, "while still a law student, Obama improbably received an advance to write a memoir that would be called `Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance,' which was published in 1995." His second memoir, published in 2006, was "The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream." (I suspect Cashill said "improbably received an advance" because, as stated earlier, Obama had not produced even one paper or distinguished himself in any way to have inspired a major publishing company to approach him).

Al this begs the question: Who writes two memoirs about himself before the age of 45? My own speculation is that it could be no one but a narcissist.  As most people know in this age of pop psychology, the psychiatric disorder of narcissism derives from the Greek myth in which Narcissus, a handsome young man, became obsessed with himself and fell in love with his own image as he gazed into a pool of water. A lot of people have some degree of narcissism, which is characterized by grandiosity, an unquenchable need for admiration, unhealthy self-absorption, dependence on the affirmation of others, and also a lack of empathy, which is hidden by both personal charm and the kind of earnest language that pretends to "feel your pain."

Or he could be a malignant narcissist., which psychiatrist Dr. Otto Kernberg, a legendary leader in thought disorders, compares to a narcissist on steroids. This variety involves paranoid traits (think of Obama's thin-skinned, quasi-hysterical reactions to Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin), and ego-syntonic aggression, which means the person is perfectly in-sync with people who have the courage he lacks to lash out.

But consider the source! Obama's father was a self-aggrandizing narcissist who thought nothing of throwing his son away to fulfill his own ambitions and his mother also threw him away for the same reason. Talk about DNA, which Obama perfectly exhibited when, during his campaign, he unflinchingly dispensed with both his white grandmother and his black "mentor" Rev. Wright for his personal ambition.

GROOMING THE PERFECT MARXIST CANDIDATE
This leads me to only one conclusion, which I wrote about in a former article: "Obama: The Trojan Horse." My theory is that President Obama's narcissistic charm, even temperament, skill with words (teleprompter included), hunger to please, radical agenda, and subterranean rage at the "unfair" American system have been brilliantly exploited by powerful leftist radicals and Marxists in the United States, who for decades have plotted America's path to socialism. He is their pawn, totally dispensable but handy while the "aura" lasts.

These "handlers" saw in Obama the ideal blank slate on which to actualize their agenda, and they made sure the slate remained blank by concealing (or destroying) any evidence of his past, including his birth certificate, Selective Service record, visa(s), school transcripts, and other vital documents. All of which is costing his moneyed backers – including America-loathing billionaire George Soros – multimillions in lawyers' fees to fight the proliferating lawsuits that seek the truth about this stealth president.

In fact, former ambassador Alan Keyes, one of the many plaintiffs seeking proof of Obama's American citizenship, has reported that Obama's lawyers have now filed a motion "to quash our effort to obtain the relevant documents…[which] confirms Obama's ruthless determination to destroy anyone who continues to seek the information the Constitution requires. Obama thus signals his intent to bring financial ruin on those who won't accept his cover-up of the circumstances of his birth is a tactical escalation. It confirms the common sense suspicion that he won't act forthrightly in this matter because he has something to hide."

It is clear that Obama and his fellow radicals are restive. In the less-than four weeks of his presidency, the new president has taken volumes from the Marxian handbook, which dictates that the stupid masses be blitzed with an overload of information, hollow press conferences, appointments, dismantling of formerly effective national-security programs, et al., in order to set the stage for a massive, Soviet-style takeover of our government, including a civilian national security force that Obama has said should be "just as powerful, strong and well-funded as the U.S. military." Echoes of Nazi Germany in 1938, anyone?

According to writer Kyle-Anne Shrive, in Obama's ascendance:

"We have yet to see a more perfect collision of Murphy's Law with the Peter Principle. In only three weeks' time, [he] has signaled to every terrorist on the planet that we are a sorry, groveling, ashamed nation ready to come to the diplomatic confessional. He is closing Gitmo within one year, has suspended trials there, and dismissed the charges against the U.S.S. Cole plotter. [He] has just put our money where his mouth is and is using $20.3 million to bring in Palestinian refugees from Gaza…[he] had the gall to pronounce the so-called economic stimulus bill absolutely free of `earmarks' and `make-do work'…but according to the Congressional Budget Office [this bill] will do worse to our overall economy than no government action whatsoever."

And Obama has done all this with the predictable double-speak that characterizes malevolent intention, i.e., touting transparency while concealing everything, speaking of integrity while appointing crooks and incompetents riddled with conflicts-of-interest, supporting energy independence while killing off-shore and domestic oil-drilling and nuclear power, and feigning optimism while he speaks of impending "catastrophe" in order to push through a pork-laden, trillion-dollar-plus Stimulus plan that rewards the corrupt voter-fraud organization Acorn with billions and unions with discriminatory union-only labor agreements, paves the way for socialized medicine, and threatens to take away the most cherished rights of We The People.

As blogger Eric Gurr has said: "We still talk about the health care crisis, the environmental crisis, the oil crisis, the banking crisis. Let me tell you my friends you are about to learn the meaning of the only crisis that matters, the survival crisis." 

You can be sure that the sad-lonely-angry two-year-old, the jealous-confused-resentful 10-year-old, the self-conscious- cheated-victimized adolescent, and the man who found solace in and identified with his hate-America mentors is now determined to redeem all of his demons.

Unfortunately, he is acting out his rage on free-market capitalism, a free press, property and gun rights, a limited constitutional government, protection of the unborn, and everything else that is good and great about our country.

This is Obama's revenge!

http://mises.org/story/3344

The Left in Power
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

The theme of my book, The Left, the Right, and the State, is that both sides of the political aisle represent a grave threat to liberty — though each of a different sort. It is like two people tugging at a turkey's wishbone: the turkey is liberty, and you are the bone.

We've lived through eight years of the threat from the Right. It was all about nationalism, militarism, war, torture, state secrets, attacks on privacy, the use of tax funds to subsidize "conservative values," the outsourcing of government in a fascistic business-government partnership, the banning of products and services that government doesn't like, the regimentation of educational life, government impositions in the name of security, and so on.

With the end of the Bush years, many of these threats have receded, if only slightly. Consider the problem of nationalism, for example. The neoconservatives who ran the country during the last two Bush terms exploited this dangerous impulse for all it was worth.

If you were not for their wars, you were against America, and hence deserving of jail without trial. The whole ideological apparatus of the Bush years was profoundly anti-intellectual, and while the neocons shouted down anyone who compared their administration to the Third Reich or Mussolini, the ideological comparison was actually quite apt: right-wing government control stems from the same motives of exalting security, discipline, and chauvinism above liberty.

In two short months, however, that ethos has subsided, and it has been replaced by a threat from the Left. It is tragic that Obama should be president at all. If we had a position called "national well-wisher," "national greeter," or "national symbol of accomplishment," he would be perfect for the job. He is elegant, graceful, and articulate, and he inspires people in an unusual way. As chief policymaker, however, he has revealed himself as nothing more than a two-bit socialist.

After all the ghastly statism of the Bush years, you might think that the Left would back off from using power to achieve its aims. Instead, they have learned nothing. The Left has been lying in wait for its chance. As the Obama people entered the White House, it was as if they found a closet labeled "failed ideas of the past." They opened it and the contents spilled everywhere. They started grabbing things and putting them in the regulatory books and in legislation.

What an amazing pile of junky, worn-out, bogus policy ideas! Equal pay for equal work. Infrastructure spending. More money to the public schools. Socialized medicine. Rock-bottom interest rates. Welfare! Every wish granted by government. Down with business. Down with business failures. Curbs on fat-cat pay. Down with Wall Street. Turn on the money spigots. Expropriate the expropriators. Subsidies for every lifestyle that flies in the face of bourgeois prejudice.

Thus are we again reminded of what a profound threat the Left represents to liberty. It's been more than a decade now since we've seen this at work, and probably longer really. Clinton was a pain, but he was smart enough not to take his reigning ideological framework too seriously. He actually showed some deference to reality from time to time.

The Obamaites are different. They are woefully ignorant of economics. They seem to actually believe all that socialist claptrap that has provided an excuse for innumerable foreign dictators: the idea that government is the source of wealth and can make anything happen with the push of a button.

They see no limits to the possibility that government can make society perfect, righting every perceived social injustice, and bringing prosperity to all via stealing from the haves and giving it to the have-nots. Is there inequality? Mandate equality. Is there deprivation? Provide! Recession? Spend hundreds of billions!

What we have here is not just a profound love of the state; it is a profound confidence in the capacity of the unlimited state to create heaven on earth. How does this square with the idea of human liberty, of social cooperation, and of the rights of all? Herein lies the great mystery of leftism. The Left seems oblivious to the relationship between their chosen means and their ends. It's not that they hate liberty as such; it is that they believe that it must always take a backseat to other social priorities, like equality. In the end, they have a tendency to build the total state and find themselves taken aback when the whole of society ends up in a cage.

Those Obamaites! So compassionate, loving, universally minded, progressive — except that their ideological cousins managed to starve and destroy whole civilizations. Loyalty to their creed means death, because their ideology is the pathway to the gulag — and for one simple reason: their preferred means of social change is the state. The state is always and everywhere a threat to liberty, and liberty is the basic building block of prosperity and civilization.

Despite the slogans about progress, the upshot of the Obama administration is as deeply reactionary as anything that Bush conjured up. Despite all the hype and hope, what Obama offers is nothing new. It amounts to the robber state and the regimentation of society, a plan that will kill off prosperity and the conditions that allow for it.

The Republicans are right to fight this tendency at every turn, for it represents a radical attack on all things truly American. Worse still, by playing with the printing presses, the policy tendency here is also deeply dangerous. It could destroy the dollar internationally and domestically, igniting a hyperinflation that no one will be able to control once it gets going. One only wishes that the Republicans had been so principled when their president was in charge!

The Obama administration says that we have to give the stimulus time to work. No need. The stimulus will not work. If we manage to pull ourselves out of this slump, it will be despite and not because of this stimulus package.
 
When putting together my book, I wondered which threat was actually more dangerous for us, the Right or the Left. I'm still not sure, for national socialism and international socialism are in close competition. I ended up focusing on both. It's a hard truth for Americans to face that neither team in Washington is going to guard what we love the most. That is something we are going to have to face.
 
Liberty is for the citizens to guard themselves.

 

Friday, February 20, 2009

Today’s top political news:

“See the USA with the IRS riding with you!

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood wants to tax motorists based on how many miles they drive rather than how much gasoline they burn.

The scheme angeres drivers in states where it has been proposed.

Gasoline taxes that for nearly half a century have paid for the federal share of highway and bridge construction can no longer be counted on to raise enough money to keep the nation's transportation system moving, LaHood said in an interview with The Associated Press.

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-lahood-vehicle-mileage-tax,0,6754105,print.story

Republican Sen. Jim DeMint, S.C., wants Senate Democrats to go on the record one way or another on the issue.
 
DeMint, chairman of the Senate Steering Committee will offer the Broadcaster Freedom Act as an amendment to the D.C. Voting Rights bill next week.

The Broadcaster Freedom Act was introduced by Republican lawmakers last month and prevents the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from reinstating the Fairness Doctrine.

In 1985, the FCC determined that the Fairness Doctrine was no longer necessary due to the emergence of a “multiplicity of voices in the marketplace.” The FCC was also of the view that the Fairness Doctrine may have violated the First Amendment

http://www.businessandmedia.org/articles/2009/20090219171331.aspx

Analysis: Democrats self-destructing over demonstrated lack ethics

The Obama administration and the new Congress are quickly handing over to Republicans the very "culture of corruption" issue that Democrats used so effectively against the GOP before coming to power.

Senate Democrats accepted Freshman Sen. Roland Burris, D-Ill because they claim they believed what he told them: He was clean. Burris now admits he tried to raise money for Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who authorities say sought to sell President Barack Obama's former Senate seat.

"The story seems to be changing day by day," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., admitted Wednesday.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5j44ku9zUM9IEdkkoWbIYStDVE6SwD96EH4JO0

Opinion:
Citizen Alert!!!  Listen carefully to anything Obama says, be leery of anything he claims, and don’t believe anything he promised.  Obama has no credibility among those who pay attention.  None at all.

Take his claim that unless his “stimulus” scheme was enacted into law by close of Friday, the American financial institution would collapse and throw this country into the biggest chaos and ruin in history.

Obama shoe horned the vote – not because his warning was honest – but because he needed to force lawmakers to pass his “stimulus” bill before they could bother themselves with reading what was included.

Keep this in mind:  Obama manipulated a voted on the biggest spending bill in history – a trillion dollars just for openers – and did so while conspiring to keep the details hidden from those who voted on it.

NOT A SINGLE CONGRESSMAN, SENATOR, or STAFFEE read that bill before it was passed.  It was designed, crafted, and created by extreme left wing radicals whose qualifications are unknown and whose actual motives should be viewed with great skepticism.

They cannot be trusted and the track record proves it.

After all, Obama has been unwilling and (apparently) unable, to even prove he was born on US soil as required by the Constitution.  Not to worry, they continue to lie out of that fact – despite the actions of Obama himself and those around him clearly suggest he cannot prove his standing – and his media control has focused on efforts to label those who raise legitimate questions as odd balls.

Fine.  Put up, Mr President, or shut up and admit the truth.  Presenting an honest copy of such a basic document should prove no real challenge – the rest of us can do it with ease - - why cant you?

Such rampant dishonesty runs through this administration, from the tax cheats he has appointed which include his own Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, (who laid a huge egg early this week by being unable and incompetent to explain how our money will be spent) through other appointees who are also proven tax cheats.

Of course we have the many clouds over Obama Attorney General – Eric Holden – who is widely celebrated as the first African American Attorney General.  It’s fine to see racial barriers recede – but when it comes to appointing people to high posts, it should be considered the non-sequitur it is. What should count, is an ability to do the job.

Holden has a very shaky background – one offensive to many intelligent Americans – such as his involvement in suspect Clinton pardons, and in Clinton’s incredible release of convicted terrorists.  (Of course, Obama is now outdoing even Clinton in a rush to close Git Mo and failure to prosecute current terrorists.)

(I cannot avoid noting Obama’s top cabinet appointment was Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State – after all, that’s an apex of nerve and in-your-face insult to normal America! – How soon will we see her back on the combat trail, dodging snipers in Bosnia and elsewhere – how can a proven liar successfully deal in diplomacy?)

A day or so ago, Obama was back on the stump (his handlers conspire to keep him moving and out of the office) proposing another scam – this one seeming a mild amount –  $75 billion – claiming to solve the housing crisis (crisis being a word he used more than 25 times in his photo op announcing this latest scheme)

Wall Street has provided a measurement of Obama’s current credibility as it searches out new depths to which it can plunge.  Gold hits new highs – in and around $1,000 an ounce.

No need for me to work hard citing why Obama cannot and should not be believed and why intelligent America should take each and everything he says with a huge grain of salt.  Obama and his cabal of Chicago Democrat Machine thugs does a far better job of this than I.

Buddy

Today’s top Blogs:

First an overview:

1.

The Audacity of Irony

“Hope and change” meet reality. The ironies bring us back to the unlamented days of Jimmy Carter.

Victor Davis Hanson

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?

2.

U.S. President Barack Obama on Feb. 18 announced his mortgage restructuring plan, part of an effort to regenerate activity in the housing sector and put a floor under home prices. Overall, the plan works from the basis of the Bush administration plan of late 2008, but takes the Bush plan a step further in terms of requirements for lenders and the amount of federal monies to be made available.

The core idea is to assist those who — whether from subprime mortgages, variable-rate mortgages, job loss or other changes in their financial position beyond their control — cannot make their mortgage payments. The program will benefit only those who own only a single home, who have not made any particularly poor financial decisions in obtaining that home, and who do not have more than 20 percent equity in their property (those with 20 percent equity or greater can already apply for refinancing without the Obama plan). Specific guidelines as to who qualifies are set to be released in two weeks.

3.

Michelle Malkin: ACORN and Obama: Together Again

Fresh off the trillion-dollar porkulus bill signing in Denver, President Obama immediately launched into his next New Raw Deal expansion: a massive mortgage entitlement program forcing lenders to refinance at an initial cost of $50 billion to $100 billion. That's in addition to the bipartisan-supported $50 billion in the "stimulus" bill to bail out homeowners underwater on their mortgages and the $2 billion in "neighborhood stabilization" funds to alleviate the foreclosure crisis.

In tandem with the White House Bad Borrowers Bailout, Obama's old friends at the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) are launching a new campaign of their own: the "Home Savers" campaign. What a coinky-dinky, huh?

Now the complete blogs:

1.

 The Audacity of Irony

“Hope and change” meet reality. The ironies bring us back to the unlamented days of Jimmy Carter.

Victor Davis Hanson

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-sh! redder h ad 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 wer e 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 missi les, a bomb in Iran, the restarting of Dr. Khan’s nuclear franchise and its appendages in Libya and Syria, and a theocrat! ic nucle ar 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 P! elosi, w ho 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.

2.

U.S.: The Obama Mortgage Plan
Stratfor Today »

 
U.S. President Barack Obama on Feb. 18 announced his mortgage restructuring plan, part of an effort to regenerate activity in the housing sector and put a floor under home prices. Overall, the plan works from the basis of the Bush administration plan of late 2008, but takes the Bush plan a step further in terms of requirements for lenders and the amount of federal monies to be made available.

The core idea is to assist those who — whether from subprime mortgages, variable-rate mortgages, job loss or other changes in their financial position beyond their control — cannot make their mortgage payments. The program will benefit only those who own only a single home, who have not made any particularly poor financial decisions in obtaining that home, and who do not have more than 20 percent equity in their property (those with 20 percent equity or greater can already apply for refinancing without the Obama plan). Specific guidelines as to who qualifies are set to be released in two weeks.
The first step of the plan involves Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, aka “the twins.” These two institutions purchase mortgages, then package them for sale to interested investors. In essence, they serve as a conduit for those who would like to invest in the housing sector but for whatever reason do not want to get involved with any specific property. Roughly 40 percent of the monies that provide for mortgage loans enter the market in this manner.

The twins are currently held in conservatorship by the Treasury Department, meaning the Obama administration can change its policies by fiat without congressional approval. Under the first phase of the Obama plan, any mortgage held by the twins that meets the criteria immediately qualifies for refinancing regardless of the level of equity the homeowner holds.

The second step is not so automatic. In short, it involves pressuring private institutions to implement identical refinancings for the mortgages they hold. The government will be injecting some money — at present an unknown amount — to make this more palatable. Finally, the government will purchase some US$200 billion of the mortgage-backed securities that Freddie and Fannie package to help push mortgage rates down.

There is very little in this plan that is different from the Bush plan announced in December 2008. The Bush bailout involved extending the teaser rates for those subprime borrowers who — as in the Obama plan — always had made a good faith effort to make their mortgage payments. In essence, this is a form of refinancing. The primary difference between the two is that the Bush program was voluntary for the banks, while the Obama program is not.

Stratfor noted last December about the Bush mortgage bailout plan: “the plan potentially damages the integrity of the U.S. housing industry. The U.S. mortgage market is the largest pool of money in the world, not just because Americans are affluent, but also because of the sanctity of both property rights and contracts. … This bailout appears to tinker with the latter. If this proves to be just a one-off, little harm will be done. But if this sets a precedent that other presidents follow, then financial institutions will be forced to add a layer of political risk insurance to future mortgages. That would raise the cost of loans for everyone and retard economic growth on a national scale.”

Remember, these words were written about the Bush plan — which simply encouraged mortgage renegotiation — rather than the Obama plan, which makes such plans contingent upon any federal assistance. Under Bush, mortgage renegotiation was a potential concern; under Obama, it is a reality.
And in fact, our concerns run even deeper than that. In September 2008, the Bush administration launched a $700 billion program for regenerating the banking sector called the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP). As part of that program, the Bush administration forced all of the country’s largest banks to take federal money. This aimed to force-feed liquidity into the system and prevent a financial meltdown, but the money did not come for free. In exchange, the government received veto rights over bank decisions. The Bush administration never used this veto to Stratfor’s knowledge, instead simply using the power’s existence to influence bank policy. Wells Fargo — the American bank in the most stable financial position at the time — did not wish to take the funding because of this provision, but was forced to anyway by then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. Paulson argued that if every one of the major banks participated, there would be no stigma placed upon other banks that chose to seek assistance.

But that veto authority remained in the government’s hands in the transition from Bush to Obama. Whereas the Bush administration used this power to persuade banks to participate, Obama made it very clear in his speech Feb. 18 that banks who benefit from TARP assistance will be required to adopt the Obama refinancing plan.

We noted several months ago that the Bush administration’s anti-crisis programs were concentrating an unprecedented amount of financial power in government hands. Under the Obama administration, that power is now being brought to bear.

The Bush-inspired Obama plan may well alleviate — perhaps even solve — the current problems in the housing sector by preventing foreclosures and buoying a badly battered housing market. But there is one final angle to this issue that must be considered.

The plan will require firms to rewrite their mortgage loans, in many cases against their wills, and in some cases for sound firms that did not want federal assistance in the first place. This cannot help but make investors — already nervous about the general economic situation — a bit more leery about extending credit in general, and to the housing market specifically. Should that credit dry up, the cost of borrowing money for a mortgage will go up, not down.

3.

Michelle Malkin: ACORN and Obama: Together Again

Fresh off the trillion-dollar porkulus bill signing in Denver, President Obama immediately launched into his next New Raw Deal expansion: a massive mortgage entitlement program forcing lenders to refinance at an initial cost of $50 billion to $100 billion.

Fresh off the trillion-dollar porkulus bill signing in Denver, President Obama immediately launched into his next New Raw Deal expansion: a massive mortgage entitlement program forcing lenders to refinance at an initial cost of $50 billion to $100 billion. That's in addition to the bipartisan-supported $50 billion in the "stimulus" bill to bail out homeowners underwater on their mortgages and the $2 billion in "neighborhood stabilization" funds to alleviate the foreclosure crisis.

In tandem with the White House Bad Borrowers Bailout, Obama's old friends at the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) are launching a new campaign of their own: the "Home Savers" campaign. What a coinky-dinky, huh? As with most of the bully tactics of the radical left-wing group, it ain't gonna be pretty. They are the shock troops on the streets doing the dirty work while the Community Organizer-in-Chief keeps his delicate hands clean.

Trumpets ACORN: "On Feb. 19, ACORN members will launch a new tactic in fighting foreclosures: civil disobedience. Participants in the ACORN Home Savers campaign nationwide will simply refuse to move out of foreclosed homes, or in some cases, will move back in. ACORN homesteaders intend to squat in their homes until a comprehensive, federal solution for people facing foreclosure is put in place."

ACORN's foot soldiers, funded with your tax dollars, will scream, pound their fists, chain themselves to buildings, padlock the doors and engage in illegal behavior until they get what they want. It's a recipe for anarchy. Threatens Baltimore ACORN's Louis Beverly, who calls himself a "Foreclosure Fighter":

"After you've used all your legal options, your last resort is civil disobedience. We're talking about families who have been in their homes 20 or 30 years. People who are assets in the community, who look out for the elderly, who have community associations, and these are the people being kicked out of the community."

We can all sympathize with good folks who can't pay their bills. But as I've said repeatedly in my criticism of the mortgage entitlement mentality embraced by both parties in Washington, home ownership is not a civil right -- and neither is home retention. Artificially propping up the housing market will only result in more of the same costly borrow-spend-panic-repeat cycles that got us into this mess in the first place. Failing corporations need to fail. So do failing home borrowers. This is borrowing from frugal renter Peter to pay profligate Paul's home loan.

Now that's the kind of theft that should be the subject of civil disobedience.

Instead, ACORN offices, funded with your tax dollars, are training teams of "Home Savers" -- described as "people ready and willing to mobilize on short notice to defend the homesteaders against attempts to evict them." Ready, willing and able to mobilize on short notice because they are either unemployed or employed full time as ACORN shakedown artists.

Guess who's encouraging them to defy the law. Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, who told them: "Stay in your homes. If the American people, anybody out there is being foreclosed, don't leave." The housing bullies will be assisted by left-wing propaganda documentarians at the Brave New Foundation, headed up by Hollywood lib Robert Greenwald, who will disseminate sob stories to crank up pressure while Obama pushes his housing entitlement plan.

ACORN is targeting the following cities: Tucson, Ariz.; Oakland, Calif.; Los Angeles, Calif.; Contra Costa County, Calif.; Orlando, Fla.; Baltimore, Md.; New York, N.Y.; Houston, Texas; San Mateo County, Calif.; Denver, Colo.; Bridgeport, Conn.; Wilmington, Del.; Broward County, Fla.; Boston, Mass.; Flint, Mich.; Detroit, Mich.; Minneapolis, Minn.; Raleigh, N.C.; Durham, N.C.; Albany, N.Y.; Cincinnati, Ohio; Cleveland, Ohio; Pittsburgh, Pa.; and Dallas, Texas.

ACORN has waited three decades for this moment in the sun. And as Obama promised ACORN members at a forum in December 2007, "We're going to be calling all of you in to help us shape the agenda. We're gonna be having meetings all across the country … so that you have input into the agenda." The moment is nigh. Prepare for lawlessness.

Thursday, February 19, 2009

The day’s top political news:

Inflation at the wholesale level surged unexpectedly in January, reflecting sharply higher prices for gasoline and other energy products.

The Labor Department said Thursday that wholesale prices increased by 0.8 percent last month, the biggest gain since last July and well above the 0.2 percent increase that economists had expected.

The acceleration was led by a 3.7 percent surge in energy prices with gasoline prices jumping by 15 percent, the biggest gain in 14 months.

Even outside the volatile food and energy sectors, wholesale prices showed a bigger-than-expected increase, rising by 0.4 percent. Economists had expected a slight 0.1 percent rise in so-called core inflation.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Wholesale-inflation-takes-apf-14410311.html

A handful of Republican governors is considering turning down some money from the federal stimulus package.

Opponents say the move puts conservative ideology ahead of the needs of constituents struggling with record foreclosures and soaring unemployment.

Though none has outright rejected the money available for education, health care and infrastructure, the governors of Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alaska, South Carolina and Idaho have all questioned whether the $787 billion bill signed into law this week will even help the economy.

"My concern is there's going to be commitments attached to it that are a mile long," said Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who considered rejecting some of the money but decided Wednesday to accept it. "We need the freedom to pick and choose. And we need the freedom to say 'No thanks."'

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/02/19/politics/main4812194.shtml

President Obama claims he opposes any move to bring back the so-called Fairness Doctrine, a spokesman told FOXNews.com Wednesday.

The statement is the first definitive stance the administration has taken since an aide told an industry publication last summer that Obama opposes the doctrine -- a long-abolished policy that would require broadcasters to provide opposing viewpoints on controversial issues.

"As the president stated during the campaign, he does not believe the Fairness Doctrine should be reinstated," White House spokesman Ben LaBolt told FOXNews.com.

That was after both senior adviser David Axelrod and White House press secretary Robert Gibbs left open the door on whether Obama would support reinstating the doctrine.  Can we all say “hmmmmmm?”

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/first100days/2009/02/18/white-house-opposes-fairness-doctrine/

Opinion:
Democrats and Obama hiding the probable lying of Roland Burris?  Now we know why.

Few are shocked to learn new Senate Democrat Roland Burris probably lied when he denied having discussed dollars with Governor Blagojevich.  Seems it’s a matter of what “is” is once again.

Obama’s Democrat cabal – the Chicago Machine - -has known the facts about Burris for several days – going back to before his crucial vote that helped pass Obama’s “stimulus” scam.

Obama HAD to get that vote and desperately needed passage before the week end.  The desperation so often invoked by Obama – as we learn more – was a desperation aimed directly and solely at passage before Congress let out for about 10 days of recess.

After all, trains, planes and automobiles were all set to begin taking our representatives to the wide corners of the world and give them their ten day break.

In the case of Speaker Nancy Pelosi., it allowed her to receive a big time spanking from the Pope for her promotion of abortion on demand.

The desperation and frenzy displayed by Obama had nothing to do with the nation’s financial situation – turns out it was all political and all contrived.  The real “crisis” was allowing Congressmen, Senators, and their staffers an honest opportunity to examine, consider, and parse Obama’s stimulus scam, and determine if his trillion dollar act was what was claimed, was a good thing, and that it doesn’t contain pitfalls and unintended consequences.

NOT A SINGLE CONGRESSMAN, SENATOR, OR AN STAFFER read that huge bill before voting on it.

That’s beyond “outrageous” – it’s certainly beyond “irresponsible” – it may well be proven criminally so.

This brings us back to the Democrat hiding Roland Burris’s problem with truth and fact.

They could have moved against him by this time last week.  They had an obligation to do so.  They chose to give him cover until they had his vote and a solid 60 positive vote on Obama’s “Stimulus” scam.  They had to have his vote in order to make it impossible for Republicans to read, consider and understand the bill Obama was passing -- without due process or honest deliberation.

It was a bill powered by cheating.  We must hold our breaths regarding what it may actually provide.

NOW Democrats are rushing around trying to lie out of the trap they have built for themselves on Burris.  America should hold them fully responsible – but the mainstream is a part of that conspiracy and will give Democrats the same amount of cover Democrats gave Burris.

Thus is the state of our America today.

Buddy

The day’s top bolgs:

First a quick overview:

1.

http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=319849378407659

THOMAS SOWELL 

From television specials to newspaper editorials, the media are pushing the idea that current economic problems were caused by the market and that only the government can rescue us.

What was lacking in the housing market, they say, was government regulation of the market's "greed." That makes great moral melodrama, but it turns the facts upside down. It was precisely government intervention that turned a thriving industry into a basket case.

An economist specializing in financial markets gave a glimpse of the history of housing markets when he said: "Lending money to American homebuyers had been one of the least risky and most profitable businesses a bank could engage in for nearly a century."

That was what the market was like before the government intervened. Like many government interventions, it began small and later grew.

2.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123500260310017735.html

Is the Administration Winging It?
Obama's reputation for competence is at risk
KARL ROVE

Team Obama demonstrated remarkable discipline during the presidential campaign. From raising an unprecedented amount of money to milking every advantage from the Internet to grabbing lots of delegates from inexpensive caucus states, they left nothing to chance.

And now the administration has scored a major legislative victory in an extraordinarily short period of time. Less than 700 hours after taking the oath of office, President Barack Obama signed the largest spending bill in American history.

Nevertheless, this fast start can't overcome a growing sense the administration is winging it on issues large and small.

3.

http://townhall.com/columnists/RossMackenzie/2009/02/19/the_high_cost_of_the_stimulus

The High Cost of the “Stimulus”
Ross Mackenzie 
 
On precisely the day Barack Obama signed into law the most gargantuan economic measure in the nation's peacetime history (White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel termed it "the most major, sweeping, comprehensive legislation as it relates to economic activity ever") -- at almost precisely the moment of his pen-strokes -- the stock market's hope balloon went "bang!"

The Dow fell to its bear-market low. In a cascade of awful economic news, the market had struggled to hold on. But the signs weren't good.

It fell on the day of the inauguration of a man who had campaigned as the embodiment of an idea called hope.

It fell on the day his tax-challenged treasury secretary rolled out his salvational plan.
Then, at the signing, it fell again.
Now for the full articles:

1.

http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=319849378407659

THOMAS SOWELL 

From television specials to newspaper editorials, the media are pushing the idea that current economic problems were caused by the market and that only the government can rescue us.

What was lacking in the housing market, they say, was government regulation of the market's "greed." That makes great moral melodrama, but it turns the facts upside down. It was precisely government intervention that turned a thriving industry into a basket case.

An economist specializing in financial markets gave a glimpse of the history of housing markets when he said: "Lending money to American homebuyers had been one of the least risky and most profitable businesses a bank could engage in for nearly a century."

That was what the market was like before the government intervened. Like many government interventions, it began small and later grew.

The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 directed federal regulatory agencies to "encourage" banks and other lending institutions "to help meet the credit needs of the local communities in which they are chartered consistent with the safe and sound operation of such institutions."

That sounds pretty innocent and, in fact, it had little effect for more than a decade. However, its premise was that bureaucrats and politicians know where loans should go, better than people who are in the business of making loans.

The real potential of that premise became apparent in the 1990s, when the Department of Housing and Urban Development imposed a requirement that mortgage lenders demonstrate with hard data that they were meeting their responsibilities under the Community Reinvestment Act.

What HUD wanted were numbers showing that mortgage loans were being made to low-income and moderate-income people on a scale that HUD expected, even if this required "innovative or flexible" mortgage eligibility standards.

In other words, quotas were imposed — and if some people didn't meet the standards, then the standards needed to be changed.

Both HUD and the Department of Justice began bringing lawsuits against mortgage bankers when a higher percentage of minority applicants than white applicants were turned down for mortgage loans.

A substantial majority of both black and white mortgage loan applicants had their loans approved, but a statistical difference was enough to get a bank sued.

It should also be noted that the same statistical sources from which data on blacks and whites were obtained usually contained data on Asian-Americans as well. But those data on Asian-Americans were almost never mentioned.

Whites were turned down for mortgage loans more often than Asian-Americans. But saying that would undermine the reasoning on which the whole moral melodrama and political crusades were based.

Lawsuits were only part of the pressures put on lenders by government officials. Banks and other lenders are overseen by regulatory agencies and must go to those agencies for approval of many business decisions that other businesses make without needing anyone else's approval.

Government regulators refused to approve such decisions when a lender was under investigation for not producing satisfactory statistics on loans to low-income people or minorities.

Under growing pressures from both the Clinton administration and later the George W. Bush administration, banks began to lower their lending standards.

Mortgage loans with no down payment, no income verification and other "creative" financial arrangements abounded. Although this was done under pressures begun in the name of the poor and minorities, people who were neither could also get these mortgage loans.

With mortgage loans widely available to people with questionable prospects of being able to keep up the payments, it was an open invitation to financial disaster.

Those who warned of the dangers had their warnings dismissed. Now, apparently, we need more politicians intervening in more industries, if you believe the politicians and the media.

Copyright 2008 Creators Syndicate, Inc

2.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123500260310017735.html

Is the Administration Winging It?
Obama's reputation for competence is at risk
KARL ROVE

Team Obama demonstrated remarkable discipline during the presidential campaign. From raising an unprecedented amount of money to milking every advantage from the Internet to grabbing lots of delegates from inexpensive caucus states, they left nothing to chance.

And now the administration has scored a major legislative victory in an extraordinarily short period of time. Less than 700 hours after taking the oath of office, President Barack Obama signed the largest spending bill in American history.

Nevertheless, this fast start can't overcome a growing sense the administration is winging it on issues large and small.

Take the vetting of cabinet nominees. Mr. Obama's aides ignored a federal investigation of New Mexico's Gov. Bill Richardson that started last August for a possible pay-for-play scandal. Mr. Richardson had to withdraw after being named to become secretary of commerce.

The administration treated as inconsequential the failure of its choices for Treasury secretary and White House performance officer, as well as its labor secretary-designate's spouse, to pay taxes. It failed to uncover Tom Daschle's problems with more than $102,943 in previously unpaid taxes, penalties and interest -- and once it did, aides assumed Mr. Daschle would be given a pass.

Team Obama promised Gen. Anthony Zinni he'd be ambassador to Iraq, then cut him loose without explanation. After the Bill Richardson fiasco, it romanced Republican Sen. Judd Gregg for commerce secretary -- then ignored his advice on the stimulus and wouldn't trust him with running the department, moving supervision of the Census into the White House. Mr. Gregg withdrew himself from consideration.

Then there is the stimulus itself. Mr. Obama's economic team met with congressional leaders in December to green light a bill costing up to $850 billion. But they described less than $200 billion of what they wanted in the envelope. In return for outsourcing the bill's drafting to Congress, the administration took on two responsibilities: running polls to advise Hill Democrats on how to sharpen their marketing, and putting the president on the road to sell a bill others wrote.

Team Obama was winging it when it declared the stimulus would "save or create" 2.5 million, then three million, then 3.7 million, and then four million new jobs. These were arbitrary and erratic numbers, and they knew there's no way to count "saved" jobs. Americans, being commonsensical, will focus on Mr. Obama's promise to "create" jobs. It's highly unlikely that more than 180,000 jobs will be created each month by the end of next year. The precise, state-by-state job numbers the administration used to sell the stimulus are likely to come back to haunt them as well.

Bipartisanship? The administration failed even to respond to GOP offers to endorse an Obama campaign proposal to suspend capital gains taxes for new small businesses.

Inexplicably, the president, in a prime-time press conference, raised expectations for Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's bank rescue plan, which turned out the next day to be no plan at all. The markets craved details; they got none. When markets cratered, spokesmen didn't acknowledge the administration's poor planning, but blamed the markets.

Team Obama was also winging it on enhanced interrogation of terrorists. First it nullified all the Bush administration's legal authorities before considering what rules it should have in place. When the CIA briefed White House officials on the results obtained from these techniques, the administration backtracked and organized a four-month study of what rules were appropriate.

Something similar happened with the promise to close Guantanamo Bay within a year: The administration has no idea what it will do with the violent terrorists detained there. And on ethics, Mr. Obama proclaimed an end to lobbyist influence in government -- even as he was nominating lobbyists for major posts and filling White House ranks with former lobbyists.  [ Tough to even think about criminal trials, they aren't there as lawbreakers, few if any are US Citizens or have ever been in the US to have an opportunty to violate our laws!  HB ] Team Obama has been living off its campaign reputation for planning and execution. That reputation is now frayed, and all the bumbling and unforced errors will have an impact. Such things don't go unnoticed on Capitol Hill or in foreign capitals.

The president, a bright and skilled politician, has plenty of time to recover. The danger is that what we have seen is not an aberration, but the early indications of his governing style. Barack Obama won the job he craved, now he must demonstrate that he and his team are up to its requirements. The signs are worrisome. The world is a dangerous place. The days of winging it need to end.

Mr. Rove is the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.

3.

http://townhall.com/columnists/RossMackenzie/2009/02/19/the_high_cost_of_the_stimulus

The High Cost of the “Stimulus”
Ross Mackenzie 
 
On precisely the day Barack Obama signed into law the most gargantuan economic measure in the nation's peacetime history (White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel termed it "the most major, sweeping, comprehensive legislation as it relates to economic activity ever") -- at almost precisely the moment of his pen-strokes -- the stock market's hope balloon went "bang!"

The Dow fell to its bear-market low. In a cascade of awful economic news, the market had struggled to hold on. But the signs weren't good.

It fell on the day of the inauguration of a man who had campaigned as the embodiment of an idea called hope.

It fell on the day his tax-challenged treasury secretary rolled out his salvational plan.
Then, at the signing, it fell again.

Said The Wall Street Journal Wednesday, with gold pushing toward its all-time high (up 9 percent this year, with the Dow down 14 percent): "The rising gold price says investors are starting to freak out over governments' response to the credit crunch."

The market is testifying to the difficulty of keeping hope alive. And to borrow the understatement Apollo XIII astronaut Jim Lovell gave the language, "Houston, we have a problem."

Again on the day of the signing, these things also happened:

-- Chrysler and General Motors begged for $21 billion in additional taxpayer dollars to keep from going toes-up.

-- Word came that Lloyds of London may follow G.M., et al., down bankruptcy's road.

-- China, the holder of $900 billion in U.S. Treasury bills alone, bought in big time to one of the world's premier gold-mining companies.

-- Roland Burris -- the joke now occupying Obama's seat in the joke called the Senate -- insisted in the face of calls for his resignation that he did not misspeak to investigators about his communications with Illinois' (former) joke of a governor.

-- Hugo Chavez won a referendum effectively crowning him tin-pot dictator for life in Venezuela, one of our major sources of imported oil.

-- Pakistan conceded the inevitable and sanctioned Sharia law in the country's jihadist-held Swat Valley.

-- Kansas halted taxpayer refunds because it is out of cash, and California continued giving refunds in the form of IOUs.

-- After a very public display of drunken incoherence at a meeting of the world's leading economies, Japan's finance minister resigned.

-- It was revealed that following passage of the 600-page stimulus bill, wherein Congress restricted private-sector executive pay, Congress acquiesced to its own annual pay raise. Shameless members of Congress from both parties then prepped for junkets to exotic locales here and abroad to -- you know - fact-find and confer.

And that's just a partial listing. Houston, we have a problem that is huge, vast and broadly economic but not exclusively so. These days, we hear hardly a word about terror and what the administration just ended called The Long War.

For an economy in freefall or meltdown or whatever, Obama our secular savior -- in concert with the Democratic congressional elite -- has advanced a stimulus package larger than any single element of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. In doing so, they evidently are following the advice of 'progressive' Princeton economist (and New York Times columnist) Paul Krugman, who believes FDR's policies didn't end the Great Depression but extended it until the onset of World War II because FDR didn't spend enough.

Obama shares FDR's impulse that throwing federal money at a depression is the way to tame it. Yet spending rarely works.

Tax-cutting usually does -- as Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Reagan (three times), and Bush II demonstrated. Obama does not share their belief in the virtue of cutting taxes to strengthen the economy. Nor does he share, notably, Reagan's abiding optimism. Talking grimly about imminent catastrophe, Obama sounds more like Dr. Doom.

The problem we have is this.

Americans in the past 12 months have lost $13 trillion in the stock and housing markets. Their debt burden includes $2.6 trillion owed on vehicles and credit cards and $10 trillion owed on home mortgages. Most of these good people have no confidence in the economy.

Most have done nothing wrong except to buy into the federally promoted debt culture for things they couldn't afford and didn't need -- a culture wherein the federal government now proposes to bail them out with money it doesn't have either.

The government can manufacture such money only through devices that will inflate the dollar -- thus diminishing its value down the road, along with the value of dollar-denominated nest-eggs.
In the first month of his administration, Barack Obama has exhausted nearly all his bipartisan goodwill largely on social programs long coveted by heavy-breathing leftists -- programs that will cut few substantive taxes and create few durable jobs.

Perhaps he has taken a leaf from the notebook of Stuart Chase -- a New Dealer who wrote upon his return from a trip to the Soviet Union: "Why should Russia have all the fun remaking a world?" Yet the fun and havoc of change come at high costs in broken lives and broken balloons of hope.
Oh, and we've hardly mentioned (or heard Obama mention) islamofascist terror -- and its relentless, insidious, ambitions on the West.

Ross Mackenzie lives with his wife and Labrador retriever in the woods west of Richmond, Virginia. They have two grown sons, both Naval officers.
 
 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123500825144618641.html

 The Auto Dead Zone
Only bankruptcy can force Detroit to change

The cover page of Chrysler's restructuring plan, submitted along with GM's late Tuesday, tells you all you really need to know about these 100-page-plus tomes. Replete with pictures of World War II Army Jeeps, dead men in starched collars -- and the now-obligatory "hybrid" logo and plug-in car -- the first page declares that Chrysler "is the Quintessential American Auto Company."

None of that has anything to do with whether it has a viable business model or cost structure now. Consider: Chrysler's plan, which runs to 177 pages, cuts 100,000 cars out of its 2.5 million-car capacity. And this for a company that currently sells one million cars a year. It is, in other words, a political document more than a financial plan.

Meanwhile, the companies' "downside" scenarios from late last year have become this year's reality, with auto sales running at an annual pace of 9.8 million for the entire industry in January. GM insists that its plan will allow it to be profitable on an "adjusted" cash-flow basis "at industry sales rates of 12.5-13.0 million units."

This assumes GM can maintain its market share when sales eventually pick back up, even though it has been bleeding share for the better part of three decades. While every auto maker has suffered from the 40% or so decline in sales, GM and Chrysler have been among the worst affected, with Chrysler's unit sales falling 55% year-over-year in January and GM's dropping by 49%.

At the same time, GM's funding needs are growing even faster than its market share is shrinking. Its latest plan foresees a total of $30 billion in government loans before it reaches its projected break-even point -- this for a company that, by its own reckoning, has a "net present value" in the range of $5 billion to $14 billion and market capitalization of only $1.25 billion. That $30 billion request doesn't include the possibility of pension-fund contributions over the next few years. It also assumes that additional aid will be forthcoming from European governments where the company has plants -- a possibility those governments view with dread.

GM posits this $30 billion against what it says would be a $100 billion tab for bankruptcy financing, a figure calculated to frighten the Obama Administration into doubling down on the $13.4 billion already lent to GM in December. Predictably, however, the latest plans defer most of the hardest decisions about labor costs and retiree benefits. The United Auto Workers are right to look askance at retiree benefit contributions made in company stock at a time when it isn't clear that the stock is worth much anyway. Likewise for bondholders, who are being asked to agree to a debt-for-equity swap to cut GM's debt load by two-thirds.

The Obama Administration, meanwhile, has junked the idea of a car czar, perhaps because there's no one willing to live that political nightmare. That alone should tell the Administration something.
As long as this remains a political workout instead of a financial one, GM, Chrysler and the UAW will continue to postpone the hard choices. Only bankruptcy, painful as it may be, offers the tools and legal authority needed to force all stakeholders to change the habits that brought the companies to this ebb.
The shrinking of GM and Chrysler are inevitable; the only questions are how long it takes and how much it will cost. President Obama will help himself, taxpayers and the economy if he forces the hard decisions as soon as possible, well before the next election and while he can still blame the last Administration.

Bankruptcy increasingly looks like the least painful choice.

 
 
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