Political Truth and Fact

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Political Truth and Fact.Com

Neither Fair nor balanced, but totally truthful

Opinion:Democrat governance: “the people be damned”There they go again” to paraphrase Ronald Reagan.  Democrats are at it again, working to impose government action against “the will of the governed”.  Once upon a time, such arrogant displays of despotic acts, would not have become believable.

Today, government by edict is a rule of the day for the Obama Administration and its dominating Democrat majorities in both houses.  Liberals are becoming more desperate to cram their radical theories, ideas, and proposals down the throats of normal Americans who don’t share the liberal obsessions of today’s Democrats.

The latest outrage comes in another incredible memo within an arm of Homeland Security.  An earlier memo cited as potential terrorists, those Americans who disagree politically with Obama – especially if those Americans are also veterans.

The latest memo “lists tools it says the administration has to "reduce the threat of removal" for many illegal immigrants who have run afoul of immigration authorities”.

In plain speaking, discovery of the memo reveals another scheme from liberal Democrats, to thwart public opinion and impose government actions a majority of Americans oppose.  Anyone recall when “democracy” itself was aborted as a principle of government?

Discovery of the memo coincides with actions by Obama’s Justice Department’s assault on Arizona’s new immigration law – a law supported by over 70% of Arizonans.  Key elements of the Arizona law were slapped down by a federal judge appointed by the Clinton Administration.

Pro-illegal alien demonstrators tried to vent their hatred in cities across the country – in Phoenix, at least 32 demonstrators were arrested.  It is reported other activists who support alien illegals tried to create videos of law enforcement officers targeting Hispanics.

The law, of course, is aimed at illegal aliens, and “Hispanics” are not cited as its target.  Serious concern about the flood of illegals focuses on growing numbers with roots in the Middle East and Asia.  Such aliens are paying as much as $50,000 to be smuggled across the US border.  Since such aliens are clearly not seeking menial jobs, their actual motivation is a question bearing on national security.

Who is putting up such large sums of money?  What do they expect in return?

Still, Liberal Democrats shrug at such questions and push for amnesty despite what ordinary Americans want.  Government crafting policy in direct conflict with the will of the  people raises more serious questions.

The Democrat memo proposing back dooring amnesty, would grant citizenship for people who consciously chose to disobey American law.  The dictionary says that’s “criminal”.

Buddy

Top Political News:   

Obama Agents Conspiring: Amnesty for Illegals without having Congress Vote

With Congress gridlocked on an immigration bill, the Obama administration is considering using a back door to stop deporting many illegal immigrants - what a draft government memo said could be "a non-legislative version of amnesty."

The memo, addressed to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Alejandro Mayorkas and written by four agency staffers, lists tools it says the administration has to "reduce the threat of removal" for many illegal immigrants who have run afoul of immigration authorities.

The memo suggests that in-depth discussions have occurred on how to keep many illegal immigrants in the country, which would be at least a temporary alternative to the proposals Democrats in Congress have made to legalize illegal immigrants.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jul/29/memo-outlines-backdoor-amnesty-plan-for-obama/

Speaker defends troubled majority

Three months before what certainly will be brutal House elections, Speaker Nancy Pelosi is again vowing to defend “every grain of sand” of what she’s built in Congress and predicting this August will prove kinder to Democrats than a year ago.

The massive health care overhaul is hidden by a phony label: a “patients’ bill of rights;”  Radical Wall Street reform is claimed to be “consumer protection.”

Playing defense will also be a big change for Pelosi and other liberals. The 2006 and 2008 campaigns, which built Pelosi’s power, were assaults on an established Republican order in Congress and the White House. Now in a punishing economic environment, the roles are reversed. If Democrats are to survive, aides predict the tough-minded Pelosi will face a painful chore: performing the triage needed when money runs low and old friends and allies must be cut loose to save those who have a better chance of winning. Ruthless politics on display as Democrats face having failed to govern with “the will of the people”.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0710/40446.html#ixzz0vBOg
   
GOP Succeeds in Turning back Liberal Legislative Assault in the Senate

Three months before his election, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is finding his tactics on energy refom questioned by liberals as GOP operatives strategize how to defeat him this fall.

Campaign season is in full swing on Capitol Hill, playing a major role in stalling many high-profile bills. Republicans handed Reid his second legislative defeat of the week Thursday when they blocked what had been considered a bipartisan small-business bill.

Lawmakers negotiated into the evening to keep the measure moving, but there was no deal as of press time. The GOP voted as a bloc Tuesday to kill the Disclose Act, a priority of liberal activists. That measure would have required corporations and unions to report on their political activity, a proposal that had long enjoyed bipartisan support until this year.

The aura of campaign-trail politics was underscored by the presence of senior White House political adviser David Axelrod and Democratic consultant Paul Begala at a lunch with Senate Democrats on Thursday. In this charged atmosphere, Reid has had to juggle bills ranging from food safety to child nutrition to the Supreme Court nomination of Elena Kagan.  

http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/111797-as-campaign-gathers-pace-senate-bills-sink

Thursday's Web

Political Truth and Fact.Com

Neither fair nor balanced, but absolutely factual

Opinion:
Democrats face days of internal division and decline.

While Obama’s far left supporters cheer the ruling by a Clinton-Appointed Federal Judge, striking down key provisions of Arizona’s immigration legislation, Democrat candidates facing opposition in November are not nearly as gleeful.

These Democrats see their positions substantially weakened by the increased intensity on illegal immigration. The ruling was politically useful to Obama’s re-election efforts in 2012, but not helpful at all to Democrats in 2010.

There are growing rifts among team Democrat. The vote for funding for the war, was passed, but not without providing additional indications of the Democrat quandary.  As even POLITICO (recently revealed as part of a far left conspiracy)  notes:

“The Afghanistan war vote revealed more than just a mild strain of discontent among Democrats over the war. It laid bare a more serious — and growing — split between the White House and liberals who make up Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s core constituency in the House.

(More than a hundred liberal House Democrats parted company with Pelosi and voted against supporting US troops in combat.)

“Those divisions increasingly have left the most politically vulnerable House Democrats caught between something of a rock and a hard place as they seek their own survival in November. On issues such as the economy, the health reform “public option,” the “cap and trade” energy bill — and even party messaging — House Democrats say they increasingly are on their own politically and convey a sense that they — and their party — are floundering.”

(Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0710/40384.html#ixzz0v5CAnVr1)

Little more than three months out, vulnerable Democrats are left with no doubt that team Obama won’t blink at serving its own ends no matter how much additional vulnerability it imposes on others. 

Of course, for many Democrats, having Obama come to their area to campaign in their behalf is not an option.  Obama’s crashing popularity makes him a distinct negative.

No wonder.  Extremism issuing from the Obama White House gets worse and worse.  Among the “just ins” is a report (elsewhere on this web site0, noting Obama Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, is pushing for 10 or 12 hour school days on a schedule that obviously conspires to make students Virtual wards of the state.

Duncan’s radical plan raises memories of the state domination of young people so prevalent in dictatorships of history

(A link to the full article can be found in the “Top Political News” section of today’s  www.PoliticalTruthandFact.com web site.)

These are not good times for Democrats politically, but they have toiled long and hard in the vineyards of political extremism to get to their position.  They have brought it all on themselves. 

Despite Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s pledge to preside over a Congress devoid of corruption, the reverse has been what Democrats have provided the nation for the past 18 months or so.

Today, veteran Democrat Charles Rangel, long an eager beaver in imposing higher and higher taxes on everyone else, takes a major hit for failure to pay his own.  Rangel’s plight may well be a harbinger of what lies ahead for many Democrats – not just in November, but far into the future.

It couldn’t happen to a more deserving group.

Buddy

Today’s top political news:

Pro-Illegal immigration Ruling Is New Hot-Button Issue in Current Campaigns. 

A Clinton-appointed federal judge struck down major portions of Arizona’s law designed to deal with the illegal immigration crisis.  It is a given the arguments will reach the Supreme Court, but that will take many months.  Meanwhile, the Obama administration fails to stem the immigration threat.

Republicans quickly denounced both the ruling and the Obama Justice Department for challenging the law in the first place. Some said the ruling would further energize voters who are angry about what they see as federal overreach on health care and other issues.

Some Democrats call the ruling an “unhelpful distraction” from campaigns they have been building around jobs, economic themes and border enforcement. Pat Waak, chairwoman of the Colorado Democratic Party, said candidates can't win in the fall if they aren't talking about jobs and the economy.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704895004575395703643810936.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEFTTopStories

Obama Administrationi’s Education secretary calls for 12-hour school days, demands longer school years

Education Secretary Arne Duncan contends,  “schools should be open 12, 13, 14 hours a day, seven days a week, 11-12 months of the year,” Duncan said. “This is not just more of the same. There would be a whole variety of after-school programs. Obviously academics would be at the heart of that. But you top it off with dancing, art, drama, music, yearbook, robotics, activities for older siblings and parents, ESL classes.”

Duncan says the American school calendar is antiquated and must be modified so that American students can compete at the highest levels internationally.

Many Americans see such schemes as a conspiracy by liberals to take over the raising of children – putting them in environments totally dominated by government and expose them to propaganda from such extremist groups as the NEA union.  Duncan’s proposals fail to reflect the collapse of quality of content in public schools.

http://dailycaller.com/2010/07/28/education-secretary-calls-for-12-hour-school-days-longer-school-years/

Obama Spokesman hints  Cap and Trade measures may yet be added to Senate bill

The threat continues. According to the White House, Climate measures could be added in conference to an energy bill the Senate will take up this week.

The measure in the Senate drops the language from the House dealing with climate change and carbon emissions. By dropping those controversial measures, Democrats hope they can pass a bill through the Senate before lawmakers leave for the August recess.

“We could do it in September,” Gibbs says.  Consider the potential impact of $8 a gallon gasoline.

Gibbs suggests climate measures could be added to Senate bill

Top Blogs:

1.

Cry Racism! and Let Slip the Dogs of Politics

A Commentary by Tony Blankley

In the last fortnight:

1) The NAACP called the tea party racists; 2) Andrew Breitbart called the NAACP racist; 3) Shirley Sherrod called Republican opponents of Obamacare racists; 4) Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack called Shirley Sherrod racist; 5) many in mainstream media called

Andrew Breitbart racist; 6) Howard Dean called Fox racist; and, 7) it was revealed that liberal journalist Spencer Ackerman proposed calling Fred Barnes and Karl Rove racist.

Thus, through a confluence of bizarrely unlikely events, the vicious act of falsely accusing people of racism became a laughing stock. It went

from being a career killer to a punch line; from villainy to vaudeville; from knife in the back to pie in the face.

It started at about noon Monday when Andrew Breitbart publishes on his website an edited video of Shirley Sherrod (giving a speech to an NAACP audience this spring), which he describes, in part thusly: "Sherrod describes how she racially discriminates against a white farmer. She describes how she is torn over how much she will choose to help him. And, she admits that she doesn't do everything she can for him, because he is white. Eventually, her basic humanity informs that this white man is poor and needs help. But she decides that he should get help from "one of his own kind".

"She refers him to a white lawyer. Sherrod's racist tale is received by the NAACP audience with nodding approval and murmurs of recognition and agreement."

The week before, the NAACP, without evidence, had attacked the tea parties for alleged racism in its rank and file. This is part of a running

smear now about a year old, by prominent Democrats such as Speaker Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and legions of Democratic Party support groups that the Tea Party (now identified with by about a third of the country) is racist, Nazi, un-American, etc.

Breitbart strikes back, with evidence (in the form of the video of the audience reaction to the moment in Sherrod speech before she talks of

racial reconciliation) demonstrating anti-white racism in a NAACP audience. The story of the week is thus launched.

Notice, by the way, that he alerts the viewer that "Eventually, her basic humanity informs that this white man is poor and needs help." It's in

the video and it is in the text of Breitbart's original post on the topic. But the mainstream media selectively edits out this exonerating fact in

virtually every story about Breitbart. So the subsequent charges against Breitbart by the mainstream media that his editing was misleading was itself misleading and wrong.

In a seemingly unrelated story just after midnight Tuesday morning (July 20) Tucker Carlson's Daily Caller reported on leaked emails from the

liberal media cabal Journolist in which, when the Rev, Wright issue first emerged during the 2008 campaign, one of the participating liberal

journalists, Spencer Ackerman, proposed defending Obama by using a racial smear tactic:

"If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they've put upon us.

Instead, take one of them-Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares-and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction."

At last, we have the smoking gun that proves to the American public that at least some liberal reporters are quite prepared to make false

charges of racism to advance their liberal political agenda-and to conspire with other like-minded character assassin journalists in the so doing.

So far, there are just two web site stories. But then the White House panics, and turns a couple of, until then, minor web stories into one

of the worst political weeks for any White House since Nixon's many sad examples of terrible political weeks in 1974.

According to Mrs. Sherrod, she is forced to resign her post immediately at Department of Agriculture under pressure from the White House

which was afraid that Glenn Beck was about to report the story of her NAACP speech. (In the Obama version of FDR "The only thing we have to fear is the Glenn Beck Show itself-- -nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. "

The compliant NAACP then itself apologizes. The next day, more of Mrs. Sherrod's speech becomes available, where she describes how she over comes that first instinct of racial bigotry three decades ago and helps out the white farmer. The white farmer's wife then goes on CNN and says what a nice and helpful lady Mrs. Sherrod is.

The White House panics again and instructs the Sec. of Agriculture to apologize and offer her job back to her. The NAACP then withdraws its

apology and says it was "snookered" by Breitbart (even though it was their event with a room full of their members available to the NAACP last week.)

Then some more of her speech-after the reconciliation of the races section-is made available and includes the following sentences: " I haven't

seen such a mean-spirited people as I've seen lately over this issue of health care. (Murmurs of agreement.) Some of the racism we thought was buried -- (someone in the audience says, "It surfaced!") Didn't it surface? Now, we endured eight years of the Bushes and we didn't do the stuff these Republicans are doing because you have a black president. (Applause) " (Text courtesy of National Review).

In other words, she is accusing up to 70 million Americans (registered Republican voters) of opposing Obamacare because the President

is black-rather than because we disagree with the policy-as we did with Hillarycare in 1994. That is a broad-brush bigoted attitude by Mrs. Sherrod against all of us who opposed the president's healthcare policy. She implicitly accuses all 70 million of us of being racist.

Then Mrs. Sherrod goes on CNN with Anderson Cooper and says she thinks that Andrew Breitbart wants America to return to slavery for the

blacks. And that is the last mainstream television seems to want to present of Mrs. Sherrod live and unedited. After dominating the news for the week, the eloquent Mrs. Sherrod is not invited to a single Sunday show.

And so did the rank cynicism of overplaying the race card turn that dreaded knave into a joker.

Tony Blankley is executive vice president of Edelman public relations in Washington.

COPYRIGHT 2010 CREATORS.COM <http://CREATORS.COM> 

2.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/07/carbon_cronyism_why_capandtrad.html

Carbon Cronyism: Why Cap-and-Trade Is Not Dead Yet

 Brian Sussman

This past weekend, while addressing the Netroots convention in Las Vegas, Senator Harry Reid gave the gathering of lefties a promise regarding U.S. health care. "We're going to have a public option," Reid said. "It's just a question of when."

The same thing can be said of a cap-and-trade energy bill: The Democrats are determined to get cap-and-trade. It's just a question of when. There's too much money to be made for Democrat cronies to let this opportunity pass.

Nancy Pelosi pushed the original 1,200-page cap-and-trade bill though the House of Representatives a year ago. I have written extensively about the innards of the legislation both in my book, Climategate, and in the pages of the American Thinker. Given the mood of the people, it's unlikely that a similar monster of a bill could pass the Senate this session. However a scaled down version with some so-called compromises just might.

The compromises will be creative and designed to lure enough Republicans and voter-sensitive Democrats to the dark side. One such deal might include allowing more domestic drilling for oil and natural gas, or perhaps the expansion/construction of oil refineries. Any giveaways to the oil industry would be a lucrative trade-off, especially since these entities will be financially reamed by cap-and-trade.

Once deals are cut, it will be like a Three-Card Monte street hustle. Whatever the Senate passes will be craftily conjoined with the gargantuan House bill in committee, and then sent back to the two chambers for a final vote. Before you know it, the new legislation will wind up on the desk of the man who wants to transform America.

And even if it's only the proverbial "nose of the camel" that's allowed under the tent, some form of cap-and-trade will be in the bill.

Recall that cap-and-trade works like this: Members of President Obama's team will look at every industry sector in America and determine how much carbon dioxide individual businesses and companies are allowed to emit -- that's the cap. If an entity surpasses its defined annual cap, it must purchase carbon credits from a government-approved exchange. If that same business were to see its carbon emissions remain below the imposed cap, it would gain credits.

At the end of each year, the government will auction off new permits to carbon producers. Businesses with leftover credits from the prior year will be able to hold them for a specified period of time, and then, depending on demand, sell them later for a greater profit. Long sales, short sales, speculation, and loaning credits for cash -- it will all be possible with cap-and-trade. Even derivatives trading is allowed. Well-placed investment bankers and brokers are eyeing cap-and-trade as their biggest opportunity since the internet bubble -- and big-government liberals are excited, too. With each transaction on the exchange, the brokers will get a commission, investors will get an easy "vig" (as they arrogantly say behind the scenes in the investment world), and the feds will take an even easier skim. According to the Congressional Budget Office, by 2015, the federal government will be hauling in at least $104 billion a year from cap-and-trade. Investors are anticipating even more.

The officially recognized carbon exchange will likely be awarded to a privately held company called the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX). As mysterious as the inner workings of the Federal Reserve, CCX was created as the first voluntary cap-and-trade system established in the U.S.

And as conspiratorial as it may sound, Barack Obama has been in on this for many years. In fact, before Obama was ever elected to public office, he was recruited to the board of the radical, non-profit Joyce Foundation, where he served from 1994 to 2001. Joyce gave over $1 million in two separate grants that were instrumental in developing and launching the privately owned Chicago Climate Exchange.

When the foundation made its first grant to the Climate Exchange, Joyce's president was Paula DiPerna. DiPerna left the organization in 2001 to become a founding executive vice president of CCX. In 2009, Ed Barnes of Fox News interviewed DiPerna and asked about Obama's role in the grants. She replied that as a director, Obama "read the proposal and voted on the grant."

And some of America's biggest moneymakers are lined up and ready to drink the milk of this Chicago-based cash cow.

As I expose in my book, Climategate, foremost on the list are Al Gore and his former Goldman Sachs business buddies, including past Goldman CEO Hank Paulson (Treasury Secretary under George W. Bush) and Philip Murphy (once Chair of the Democratic Finance Committee). Together with Gore, these chums founded Generation Investment Management (GIM) in London. GIM is a hedge fund that specializes in "green investments" and is worth over $1 billion. GIM is said to have a 20-percent stake in Europe's official carbon trading exchange, the European Climate Exchange (ECX), as well as a significant stake in the Chicago Exchange.

Goldman Sachs also owns ten percent of CCX. Indeed, in 2009, Goldman's website boasted:

Goldman Sachs is active in the markets for carbon emissions. ... Additionally, we have created new financial products to help our clients manage the risks posed by climate change. In September 2006, we made a minority equity investment in Climate Exchange PLC, which owns several European and US trading platforms that facilitate trading in environmental financial instruments: the European Climate Exchange (ECX), [and] the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX).

Another player set to cash in on carbon is Silicon Valley's most prestigious venture capital firm, Kleiner-Perkins (KP). And guess who's a partner at KP: Al Gore. And guess who has an investment in the Chicago Climate Exchange: KP.

Together, these well-connected characters stand to make billions of dollars off cap-and-trade.

But now an additional element of cronyism has surfaced: Former Clinton and Obama advisor -- and former Fannie Mae CEO -- Franklin Raines has positioned the government-sponsored mortgage giant Fannie Mae to make big bucks in the carbon trading marketplace by selling carbon credits straight off the backs of the American homeowner.

Raines is listed as one of several "co-inventors" for U.S. patent numbers 6904336 and 7133750, both of which are titled "System and Method for Residential Emissions Trading." The patents give Fannie Mae the exclusive rights for identifying and measuring energy savings in homes that can then be packaged and sold as credits on the carbon exchange. The patents speak of "replacing older appliances with more energy-efficient appliances; upgrading domestic hot-water heating systems; upgrading heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems; modifying lighting; [and] fuel switching and renovating the entire home" and speak of "installing insulating insulation in attics and exterior walls; installing more efficient windows; and reducing infiltration."

The patents allow Fannie to establish an energy baseline on a home (likely through the installation of the new Smart Meters, which calculate and record energy usage on a minute-by-minute basis) and by "onsite" inspectors conducting "visual inspection."

Readers of American Thinker know these onsite inspectors are what I call "the green goon squad."

Buried in the House version of cap-and-trade are federally mandated energy-efficient building regulations, which supersede all local and state codes. These new building codes will be enforced by a federal green goon squad, funded in part by revenues from energy taxes, as well as by an annual $25 million from the Department of Energy "to provide necessary enforcement of a national energy efficiency building code[.]"

Each time a home is built, remodeled, or preparing to be sold, a G-man wearing a federal badge and armed with a clipboard will show up at your house to make sure you have proper insulation, efficient windows, and Energy Star appliances, and are in compliance with the components necessary to adapt to the coming Smart Grid. The costs associated with the upgrades will either be partially offset with a tax credit or rolled into the new loan, or both. However, it's pretty clear that at least some of the money generated from the sale of the home's carbon credits will be awarded to Fannie Mae. 

Once your house is up to code, you will receive a certificate -- or label -- of compliance. Without the certificate, your home essentially will be blacklisted.

Section 204 of the House bill states that the goal of this certification, or "Energy Performance Labeling Program," is to see ninety percent of the homes in America labeled within five years. The EPA will get $50 million each year to enforce the labeling program. The Secretary of the Department of Energy will get an additional $20M each year to help the EPA.

One way to get rich in America is to have a patent on a popular product, and the patents on this green scheme will rake in the cash. Usually, a business patent royalty is one percent. Multiply that times the 100 million homes in the U.S. (and who knows how many carbon credits will be attached to each house, or what the credits will be worth?) and you have a handful of people who will can go on a five-star tropical vacation for the rest of their lives.  Specifically, those associates are:

• The aforementioned Clinton and Obama crony, Franklin Raines.
• Scott Lesmes, former Fannie Mae Deputy General Counsel.
• Robert Sahadi, former Fannie Mae Vice President who now runs GreenSpace Investment Financial Services.
• Kenneth Berlin, an environmental attorney who has worked for Fannie Mae, and also a Barack Obama fundraiser.
• Michelle Desiderio, she developed an associated scheme for Fannie Mae called the Energy Efficient Mortgage. Desiderio is now director of the National Green Building Certification program, which will likely train the green goon squad.
• Elizabeth Arner Cavey, wife of Democratic apparatchik Brian Cavey of the Stanton Park Group, which received $200,000 last year to lobby on climate change legislation.
• Jane Bartels, widow of Carlton Bartels -- who some refer to as inventor of carbon credit trading.

Interestingly, Smart Meters have already been installed on millions of homes in America. These devices will make Raines-patented methodologies easier to carry out. The meters were mandated via the Federal Energy Act of 2005 and will eventually be connected to the coming Smart Grid that was announced in the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007. Funding for the grid came through the "stimulus" bill in 2009. Construction will ensue if the pending energy legislation becomes law.

The kicker is, the two Fannie Mae patents were approved just months before the 2005 Energy Act was signed into law.

Coincidence? No.

We've got to prevent cap-and-trade from passing -- in any form.

Brian Sussman is an award-winning meteorologist who hosts a popular morning radio talk show on KSFO in San Francisco. His highly acclaimed book, Climategate: a veteran meteorologist exposes the global warming scam, is published by WND Books.

3.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/07/barack_obama_adult_child_of_an.html

Barack Obama, Adult Child of an Alcoholic

M. Catharine Evans

Shirley Sherrod's hair trigger firing is merely the latest in a long line of dysfunctional responses by the President that may indicate that he's out of control. How many incidents does it take to make a pattern? How many times does the President have to show his propensity for paranoia, projection, and blaming others before his team arranges for an intervention?

In 12-step recovery programs, Obama would be called an ACoA, an adult child of an alcoholic. His father, Barack Obama, Sr. was the typical garden-variety chronic alcoholic. But according to a 2008 article in the Boston Globe, as Barack Sr.'s disease progressed, he became a very dangerous man.

He began to drink more heavily and had a series of alcohol-related accidents, one of which resulted in the death of another driver. Shortly before his death a colleague from the Harvard Institute for International Development working at the ministry in Nairobi saw Obama, Sr. "staggering'" through the hallways. He asked another employee:

"I asked someone next to me, 'What is the matter with that guy?' " said Gray..."He said, 'He is always very intoxicated and unable to do his job.' It was very sad."

According to former U.S Rep. Neil Abercrombie who knew Obama, Sr., he was "self-involved and egotistical" with "big unrealistic dreams."

Obama met his father only one time after he was an infant. When Obama was ten years old, and his father visited for a month, little Barry "'began to count the days until my father would leave and things would return to normal." Barack Obama's father died at the age of forty-two while driving under the influence.

Obama's exposure to the destructive effects of alcoholism continued when he accompanied his grandfather on visits to the home of the hard-drinking communist, Frank Davis. Later, in high school and beyond, Obama himself had trouble with drinking and drugs. These days though, the President's behavior during the campaign-that-never-ends offers textbook proof of his being an ACoA.

In a July 23 interview with Good Morning America, correspondent Elisabeth Leamy asked the president about the Sherrod mess. Obama replied:

He [Tom Vilsack] jumped the gun partly because we now live in a media culture where something goes up on Youtube or a blog and everybody scrambles.

A typical response for an ACoA is to blame others. Obama calls everybody else out, but he's the one that "scrambled."  His inability to admit his character defects except when the din becomes so loud that he needs to shut people up is classic.  He waited six weeks after the Deepwater Horizon oil explosion to answer critics' charges that he wasn't doing anything. Obama stated:

I take responsibility. It is my job to make sure that everything is done to shut this thing down.

His words drip with the narcissism of adult children of alcoholics. Having been abandoned by both parents, Obama sees himself alone in the world. He doesn't have to consult the experts; in his grandiose way of thinking, he's the expert on everything.

The ACoAs, with their deep mistrust of people, have no loyalty to anyone. They are master manipulators. They live by the mantra, "what's in it for me?"

Dr. Tian Dayton, wrote a great piece in the Huffington Post in September of 2009, nine months after Obama took office. She analyzed some of the major mechanisms ACoA's use to survive in a hostile world inhabited by Sean Hannitys, Glenn Becks and Fox News.

Hyper Vigilance/Anxiety...ACoAs tend to scan the  environment and relationships for signs of potential danger...or insults and ruptures. We constantly try to read the faces of those around us so that we can protect ourselves from perceived danger...we may perceive danger when little exists.

Hyper Reactivity/Easily Triggered...we may respond to stressful situations blowing conflicts that could be managed calmly out of proportion.

Emotional Constriction...those that have experienced relationship trauma have a restricted range of feelings.

Obama said this last year in a CNBC interview:

I've got one television station that's entirely devoted to attacking my administration. That's a pretty big megaphone. You'd be hard pressed if you watched the entire day to find a positive story about me on that front.

By Dr. Dayton's analysis, Obama probably does watch Fox News all day.

When asked a question at a town meeting in Indiana about his cabinet appointments not paying their own taxes, Obama told the woman:

I'm one of those that think you need to have a beer with Sean Hannity.

The President's reference to Hannity on an unrelated topic offers stark proof of hyper vigilance and fear of the media in general.

His hyper reaction to his friend Professor Henry Gates' arrest in Cambridge last year saying that the "police acted stupidly" cost him dearly. His beer summit apology to Officer Crowley mirrored his phone call to Sherrod this past week. Like the alcoholic who needs to get out of hot water with his wife or boss, "I'm sorry" works wonders until the next blunder.

And last, but hardly least, was the president's strange, emotionally constricted reaction to the terrorist massacre at Ft. Hood. Even an NBC local affiliate in Chicago had a hard time understanding Obama's detached, bizarre behavior when learning of the deaths of innocent military men and women. The title of their story, "Obama's Frightening Insensitivity Following Shooting," reveals:

...instead of a somber [sic] chief executive offering reassuring words and expressions of sympathy and compassion viewers saw a wildly disconnected and inappropriately light President making introductory remarks...the president thanked various staffers and offered a "shout-out" to "Dr. Joe Medicine Crow.

If we follow Dr. Dayton's guidelines, Obama's frightening behavior falls within the clinical definition of an ACoA. As long as ACoAs don't actively work on changing their behavior patterns, they will add more names to their list of casualties. Sherrod came out of the debacle unscathed, but other victims caught in the dysfunction of an ACoA president may not fare as well.

Wednesday's Web

Political Truth and Fact.Com

Neither fair nor balanced, but absolutely factual

Opinion:
The Empire Strikes Back

It is said 4% never get the word.  That explains the ridiculous material from Washington Post pundit E. J. Dionne a day or so back.  Dionne blames the entire race-tinged flare up regarding a Georgia Obama appointee to the US Department of Agriculture on Fox News.

In a column incredibly headlined “Enough right-wing propaganda”,

Dionne expresses fear at “the overwhelming power and control of conservatives” over the nation’s media.  What a stupig position.  Real Americans would pray the claim were true.

Perhaps his being embedded within the bowels of the Washington Post – a newspaper that has been left wing corrupted for decades, distorts his view.  More likely, Dionne is just another liberal trying to lie out of facts he cannot honestly refute..

Dionne ignores the fact that most all daily newspapers (including his own) and all over-the-air Television network news operations are totally corrupted by the left – and have been for decades.  Anyone who denies that fact is either a fool, a liar – or both.

Dionne’s premise is not only absurd, it’s outrageous, insulting the intelligence of its readers.  An example:

“The mainstream media and the Obama administration must stop cowering before a right wing that has persistently forced its propaganda to be accepted as news by convincing traditional journalists that "fairness" requires treating extremist rants as "one side of the story." And there can be no more shilly-shallying about the fact that racial backlash politics is becoming an important component of the campaign against President Obama and against progressives in this year's election.”

Hmm.  Dionne misses the unveiling of emails this week, that reveals a conscious conspiracy of liberal “journalists”.  The material shows these liberal reporters, pundits, and editors plotting political strategy in which accusing opponents as being racist, is a central point. The liberal collusion also admits promoting attacks on Sarah Palin’s campaign for Vice President, using her disabled child as the target.

A primary tactic of these scheming liberals (promoted in the emails) suggests accusing conservatives of being racists might shield Obama from his connection with the obscene, anti American, racist ranting of his spiritual advisor, Jeremiah Wright. Calling any handy conservative a racist would, say the plotters, change the subject from Jeremiah Wright’s bigotry.

Dionne not only avoids honest consideration of the exposure of his liberal colleagues as plotting, partisan, politically driven propagandists, but tries to make the case the nation’s media process is dominated by conservatives.

“Were it were so”.

Maybe the far left cabal tapped Dionne to provide it cover.  Other inspirations for Dionne’s screed are less apparent, less rational, or non-existent.

In today’s journalistic environment, it’s seldom anything surprises concerned Americans.  A whole lot of head shaking greets every morning.

Along with a goodly bit of derisive chuckling and chortling.

Liberals have no pride, so there is no limit they observe in trying to selling ordinary Americans on absurd Liberal concepts.  Perhaps the far left has simply been caught up in its own echo chamber and has no logical understanding of real Americans, their wants, needs, or desires.

That’s why Democrats imposed radical healthcare on an unwilling people, and why they assail efforts to stop the cross-border invasion of illegal aliens whose real motivations are unknown.  70% of Americans support Arizona’s efforts in that regard.

Seeing an article seriously contending the racist turmoil caused by an Obama cabinet member’s cruelly demanding a political appointee resign  because of Fox News, is stunning.  Such an article’s attempting to make a case that Fox News played a major role in the fiasco, is absurd.  To assume E .J. Dionne penned such an article seriously, reflects the depths to which today’s journalism has plunged.  “Honest Journalism” has been an oxymoron for  decades.  Now “rational journalism” can be added to that same list.

Buddy

The Day’s Top Political News:

Democrat Charles Rangel Hopes To Reach  Deal on Ethics violation charges

Democratic Rep. Charles Rangel says he hopes to reach a settlement with House ethics investigators, while signs emerged that moderate Democrats will call for the veteran legislator's ouster if he doesn't strike a deal soon.

Since House ethics investigators announced last week that they had found evidence of ethics violations by the New York Democrat, Mr. Rangel has tried to sidestep even the most basic questions about his case.

Mr. Rangel is facing a range of allegations, and investigators that have set the stage for what in essence would be a public trial before a House committee, to begin as early as Thursday.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703977004575393193865397372.html?mod=WSJ_newsreel_us

Anti-Immigrant Group Calls for 'Safe Passage' of Illegals Out of U.S.

An anti-immigration group is calling on the Obama administration to ensure a smooth exit for illegal immigrants who want to leave the U.S. due to the weak economy and Arizona's strict new immigration law.

Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC) is urging U.S. citizens to pressure the White House and the Homeland Security Department to establish "safe departure" border checkpoints along the U.S. border for illegal immigrants so they can leave without fear of being detained or prosecuted for immigration crimes.

ALIPAC spokesmen say the safe passage would ensure that illegals "leave in an orderly fashion, instead of trying risky desert crossings, paying money to the cartels for passage south, or fleeing to other states."

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/07/27/anti-immigrant-group-calls-safe-passage-illegals/

Obama's base quits blaming Bush

The summer of the discontented voter steams onward and, unfortunately for President Obama, polls show voters are no longer blaming the bad times on the George W. Bush administration.

Add Hispanics to the growing list of Obama supporters disgruntled by aspects of the president’s performance, in what has become for the White House and Democrats a daily beat of gloomy polls.which show voters are no longer blaming the bad times on the George W. Bush administration

Support for Mr. Obama has eroded among whites, independents, men and now Hispanics, who were part of the coalition that powered him to the White House in 2008. Mr. Obama gets only lukewarm ratings on issues important to Hispanics in a Univision/AP poll released Tuesday, and, according to a separate Reuters-Ipsos survey, Americans overwhelmingly believe the president has failed to focus enough on job creation.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jul/27/obamas-base-quits-blaming-bush/

Top Blogs:

1.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/healthcare/health_care_law

Health Care Law

58% Favor Repeal of Health Care Bill, But 48% Say It’s Unlikely

Most voters continue to favor repeal of the national health care bill, but nearly half see repeal as unlikely. A plurality believes repeal would be good for the economy.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 58% of voters favor repeal, including 48% who Strongly Favor it. Thirty-seven percent (37%) are opposed to repeal, with 28% who are Strongly Opposed.

Support for repeal is up two points from a week ago but is consistent with findings recorded over the past several month. Weekly tracking surveys have found support for repeal has ranged from 52% to 63%.

Forty-four percent (44%) believe repeal of the health care bill would be good for the economy. Twenty-eight percent (28%) say repeal would hurt the economy. These views have not changed since earlier this month.

But just 39% think it even somewhat likely that the new law will actually be repealed. Forty-eight percent (48%) of voters see repeal as unlikely. Those figures include nine percent (9%) who say repeal is Very Likely and 10% say it’s Not At All Likely.

Democrats continue to be much more supportive of the health care bill and much more confident of its benefits than are Republicans and voters not affiliated with either party (Platinum Members  can see demographic crosstabs].

2.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jul/26/pruden-the-salesman-doesnt-know-the-territory/

PRUDEN: The salesman doesn't know the territory

Wesley Pruden
ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Barack Obama is taking his teleprompter on the road again, this time with Detroit as the first stop on a magical mystery tour to prove that he is, too, still the messiah. He's trying to persuade everybody that he really isn't who he really is.

He's beset by polling numbers that continue to fall. Everything he does makes it worse. He's fleeing Washington's chattering class, and he'll run into the crying class on the road. The president has yet to get his mind around the fact that most Americans have decided that he betrayed their trust, that their only hope for change begins in November.

There's a forlorn desperation about everything the president and the frightened Democrats do. The soggy blanket of partisan haze and smothering humidity in Washington is enough to drive anyone out of town, and even Detroit looks good. The November congressional elections are now only three months away, and the news from flyover country is that if there's going to be a turnaround in Democratic fortunes, time's a-wasting.

John Kerry, trying to cheer up his Senate colleagues in misery, is talking of a rescue of his global-warming scam in a lame-duck session after the elections. He insists that his cap-and-trade scheme, which Majority Leader Harry Reid stripped out of the legislation and tossed into the garbage can last week, "is not dead." He told Bloomberg Television's Al Hunt that hope nevertheless springs infernal. "If it is after the election, it may well be that some members are free and liberated and feeling they can take a risk to do something." Maybe dead senators can do what live ones can't.

The president's visits to the government's auto plants in Michigan, bought by Mr. Obama with the bailout money, preceded visits to New Jersey, where the celebration is supposed to be about the $787 billion dollar "stimulus." He's got a lot of 'splainin' to do: A new poll by Pew Research finds that only a third of Democratic voters think the stimulus kept unemployment numbers from getting worse, and only 45 percent of the Democrats think the grandly named American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, meant to rebuild the nation's infrastructure, has done much more than put up billboards proclaiming how great highways and bridges will be. Someday, not today.

Mr. Obama can't fix what's wrong with him with a recitation of what he's done for America — the health care reform, the stimulus, the Wall Street regulatory bill — because most Americans don't like what he's done to America and have taken his measure and decided that he just can't get it. Race has nothing to do with it. Americans, mostly white Americans, who have soured on the messiah of Hyde Park are nevertheless proud that the votes that elected a black man demonstrated that the nation has moved past bigotry in the ballot box. (If white folks were as evil as Mr. Obama's favorite Chicago preacher says they are, Jim Crow wouldn't be in the graveyard sleeping the sleep of the unjust.)

Mr. Obama has the intellectual's habit, formed by the intellectualoids at elite universities, of trying to parse sentiment by mathematic formula. Americans respond to love of country like they respond to love of home and hearth, with an instinct of heart and gut. Mr. Obama famously told a group of wealthy donors in San Francisco that when Americans "get bitter, they cling to guns or religion," and didn't understand why he enraged the masses. When he apologizes to the nation's enemies, he wins the applause of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, but jeers in Peoria. When he argues that "if we occasionally confess to having strayed from our values and our ideals, [we] strengthen our hand," he wins applause in the faculty lounges of Harvard and Yale, but confirms the verdict of Middle America that "he's not one of us."

Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, describes the president — emotionally distant, hostile to the cherished traditions of hard work and free enterprise, contemptuous of small-town America — as "reasoned, calm, looking like the adult in the room." We've come a long way to the time and place when we can elect a black president who, like the elites he represents, is indifferent to and contemptuous of the values Americans hold dearest. The president is an attractive, likable salesman, but he can tour from now until next Christmas and never move his merchandise. He never learned the drummer's first rule for success: "You gotta know the territory."

• Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

© Copyright 2010 The Washington Times, LLC.

3.

Nobody Can Fire Andrew Breitbart

Christopher Chantrill

As the mainstream media synchronized their watches over the Shirley Sherrod affair, the object of their little trench raid was clear. Demonize Andrew Breitbart for the unethical publication of a video featuring Ms. Sherrod uttering racist remarks at an NAACP awards dinner.

You could see the strategy. The MSM wanted to discredit and demonize Breitbart so that he could be fired or marginalized, just like Rush Limbaugh was fired from ESPN for the thoughtcrime of suggesting that the media wanted Donovan McNabb to succeed as the Philadelphia Eagles' quarterback because he was black.

But then I thought: Yeah, but who can fire Andrew Breitbart? 

When Rush Limbaugh wanted to buy the St. Louis Rams, the Ruling Elite trailed a few stories about his supposed racist remarks. They pressured the NFL, and the NFL could pressure the syndicate to remove Rush.

But Andrew Breitbart? Can anyone fire him?

For that matter, what about Rush? You can kick him off ESPN; you can kick him off the St. Louis Rams. You can even force Snapple drinks and the Florida oranges off his radio show. But "they" haven't been able to fire him from his position as host of the Rush Limbaugh Program. The reason is, I suspect, that Rush's show is owned by not a public corporation, but a private venture. Rush has to keep the confidence of only his partners and affiliates, not the executive committee of the Ruling Class as a whole.

No doubt the same is true of Andrew Breitbart.

Here we see the late-dynasty stupidity of the Ruling Elite. A Ruling Elite that was up to the job would have co-opted or destroyed Limbaugh and Breitbart long ago. 

Rush remarked on his radio show last week that he anticipated, when he moved to New York in 1988 and made talk radio into a national phenomenon, that he would get accepted into the social circles of the media elite. 

But the invitation never came. Sorry, old chap -- not Ruling Class solidarity, you see.

Even Rush's acceptance into the modest social circle of conservative media was a big deal for him. When Bill Buckley died, he spoke on his show about his first visit to Buckley's New York home. He had his driver drive around the block before he could summon up the courage to enter Buckley's lair.

This is the guy who fearlessly skewers liberals daily on the EIB Network's fun, frolic, and serious discussions of the issues.

I suspect that Andrew Breitbart is even less biddable than Rush.

There is a generational pattern here. In Generation One, we had Buckley, the Catholic rich man's son with a non-profit movement. In Generation Two, we had Rush, the local WASP judge's grandson and a for-profit enterprise. But Generation Three, with Drudge and Breitbart, is an outsider generation, a trouble-making insurgency. Drudge (born 1966) and Breitbart (born 1969) are both Jewish, and they take their place in a conservative movement that is increasingly combative and increasingly led by Jews.

In Generation One, conservatives fenced with the Ruling Class using foils, masks, jackets, and breeches. In Generation Two, conservatives roamed in the talk radio AM band hinterland around the Ruling Class's NPR-fortified cities. Now, in Generation Three, conservatives move through the internet as a fish swims in the sea.

In Generation One, conservatives wanted to be treated as part of the elite. So they were, grudgingly; Bill Buckley got his "Firing Line" show on PBS, and Milton Friedman got his "Free to Choose." Generation Two never got past the TV Nazis. No PBS shows for them. Rush's syndicated television show was confined to middle-of-the-night time slots. Generation Three is different. It aims to get respect with hard-knuckle action in the mean streets of the internet. That is what Andrew Breitbart is all about, as Kyle Wingfield recognizes:

Breitbart is clear about his desire to turn the tables on liberal media and activist groups. That's why he went after ACORN, and why it makes sense that he'd set his sights higher than an obscure bureaucrat.

Breitbart aimed to play the race card right back in the face of the racist NAACP. While the media was busy getting its knickers in a twist about out-of-context quotes, Breitbart had managed to make fools of both the NAACP and the Obama administration.

Or maybe it's just a coincidence that the Rasmussen Presidential Approval Index dipped to -20 over the weekend.

You can't hurt Andrew Breitbart by playing the "out-of-context" card, the one that leads into a demand to have the conservative racist fired. In the kind of ball that Breitbart plays, there is no appealing to the friendly umpire or the CEO who fears a call from the White House.

Breitbart is BigGovernment.com. He is BigJournalism.com, and BigHollywood.com, and BigPeace.com. He's not shilling for some Mr. Big, some right-wing George Soros. 

Guess what, liberals. He can't be fired.

Christopher Chantrill is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. See his roadtothemiddleclass.com and usgovernmentspending.com. At americanmanifesto.org he is blogging and writing An American Manifesto: Life After Liberalism.

 

Tuesday's Web

Political Truth and Fact.Com

Neither fair nor balanced, but absolutely factual

Opinion:
Liberal journalists make accusatioins of “racism” a political tactic

Expect charges of “racism” to be used as a political weapon by liberals -- especially when truth and fact desert their arguments.  That was revealed in liberal emails revealed this week. 

If there was any doubt before –  there should be none now – thoughts of honest news reporting, editing, and analysis from what passes as our “Mainstream Media” are gone.  Completely gone.

“The Caller” – Tucker Carlson’s blog – revealed a massive political conspiracy in which “journalists” huddled to develop venal tactics and strategies specifically designed to help Obama get elected President.  Their use of the tactic continues as has been seen in news reporting this past week.

The liberal conspirators applauded diverting attention from bothersome stories by calling a conservative = any conservative – a racist.  The far left schemers simply make the “racism” charge and let it simmer in a cauldron in which others would join in driving up the heat and making it impossible for the conservative victim to survive..

Victims of the conspiracy would find it impossible to prove their innocence.  Other “journalists” in the cabal would then pile on to add intensity and muffle any denial..  It’s a journalistic howling mob, chasing down a victim.

Such tactics could completely ruin their victims, no matter how innocent the victim.  This is at work in the on-going liberal scheme labeling all Black Americans who don’t toe the liberal line as “Uncle Toms”.

Justice Clarence Thomas is a long time victim of such liberal racism. 

Discussions in the past several days, have made racism a political issue not seen for decades.  Forget forgetting. 

Racial bigotry as an issue was certain to arise the moment Obama became a candidate for President.  It began as a Liberal Democrat assumption. Such liberals are intellectually unable to grasp the reality that most of the opposition to Obama is based not on his race, but on the extremism of his political philosophy.  Liberals remain convinced the Tea Party movement is race-based and fueled by the sort of hatred that invites violence.

Both assumptions are absurd and without foundation.  The violence experienced in town hall demonstrations last year came from union thugs from the SEIU, not from Tea Party participants.

However, an immutable law of politics holds “truth is what the people believe – it may have nothing to do with truth or fact”.  In short, in politics, “perception is reality”.

Given the venal political conspiracy liberal “journalists” are known to embrace, that political law looms as a dire threat.  Control the nature and thrust of political debate, and reality itself is controlled.

Such distortion is apparent in liberal reactions to the Tea Party Movement, and in evaluations of conservative positions in legislation and government itself.  When “honest journalism” becomes an oxymoron, civil debate and meaningful discussion becomes impossible.

This is particularly threatening when far left practitioners intend to use distortion and corruption of political discourse as a conscious weapon.

Given such threat, contemplate an aftermath of an Obama defeat. Cities might burn.

There is little encouragement from suggestions the discussion of racism  be avoided or muzzled.  Racism as an issue is pernicious.  Even if it is shut out of open debate, it festers in the background, and in small groups. It cannot be avoided.

Such reality is particularly alarming when a host of those who purport to report on news, provide honest analysis and opinion, and which can dominate the mainstream are revealed as participants in a political cabal and quite willing to make false claims and use bald faced lies against opponents..

Given today’s politics, a conspiracy using  “racism” indiscriminately as a political weapon is as terrifying as deficits or the national debt. 

All Americans – liberal and conservative – should be aware of the danger.  They should recognize accusation of “racism” may well be specious and may stem from liberal futility rather than from truth.  Liberals have serious challenges in defending their positions.  What is known from the “Jornolist” fiasco is that a liberal with his back to the wall in debate, can be expected to shout “racist” as their last line of defense.

America must be made aware of this threat and reject such accusations while rejecting those who make the claim.  Shouting “racist” should become a symbol of empty debate, and political desperation.  A cause without substance.  A user without honor or ethics.

If that awareness fails, the outlook for political debate is awful to contemplate. 

By all means, spread the word. Dull this rhetorical spear, and muffle this despicable ploy.

Buddy

The day’s top political news:

WikiLeaks disclosures unlikely to change course of Afghanistan war

In the first 24 hours after the unauthorized release of more than 91,000 secret documents about the war in Afghanistan, White House and Pentagon officials diminish the significance of the leak by arguing that there were few, if any, revelations in the documents..

Officials express alarm that the anti-American group WikiLeaks.org has posted such a large amount of classified material that could compromise the safety of U.S. forces and their Afghan allies.

Both Republicans and Democrats in Congress call for Defense Secretary Robert Gates to open an investigation into the matter. Pakistani officials angrily dismissed as malicious rumors the leaked intelligence reports suggesting that their spy service was collaborating with the Taliban.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/26/AR2010072605657.html?hpid=topnews

Pro-life groups claim Obama’s health scheme funds Abortions

Advocates on both sides of the abortion issue are raising money and mobilizing volunteers for a showdown in November.

The question being debated: Will the reform of the health care system create a loophole that allows taxpayer money to fund abortions? The White House says it won’t; abortion opponents say it will.

An independent expenditure group – Catholics United –  has created its own campaign, dubbed Set the Record Straight, which is aimed at disputing “myths” about the health care reform bill — including the assertion that abortion services will be covered, said Chris Korzen, the group’s executive director.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0710/40244.html#ixzz0ut5POoJU

Among House Democrats in Rust Belt, a sense of abandonment over Pelosi's “energy” bill

13 months after voting for the Democrat “Cap and Trade” scam, dozens of House Democrats along the Rust Belt are not at all happy with the way things have turned out. The White House and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) had assured reluctant members that the Senate would take up the Cap and Trademeasure. Although Senate passage wasn't a sure thing, House Democrats hoped to go back home to voters with a great story to tell -- about reducing dependence on foreign oil, slowing climate change and creating jobs.

That didn't happen. Senate leaders, sensing political danger, repeatedly put off energy legislation, and the White House didn't lean on them very hard to make it a priority. In the aftermath of the gulf oil spill, the Senate is set to take up a stripped-down bill next week, but the controversial carbon-emissions cap is conspicuously missing.

This has left some House Democrats feeling badly served by their leaders. Although lawmakers are reluctant to say so publicly, their aides and campaign advisers privately complain that the speaker and the president left Democrats exposed on an unpopular issue that has little hope of being signed into law.  Good thing.  Consider gasoline prices of $8 a gallon.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/26/AR2010072605656.html?hpid=topnews

Top Blogs:

1.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/07/obama_and_the_fake_tag.html

Obama and the Fake Tag

Kevin Jackson

The election of Obama reminds me of years ago, when I bought a fake Tag Heuer watch while visiting Manhattan. Normally I walk right by street vendors, but this watch caught my eye. It was sleek and clean, and some described it as gorgeous. Only true Tag aficionados could tell that the watch was a fake. 

The thing that impressed me about my fake Tag was that it had the "weight" of a real Tag. It didn't feel like the lightweight replicas I had seen in Mexico, China, and Africa. And the best part? My fake Tag cost me $7!

My fake Tag was made of a high-gloss "white gold" electroplate -- okay, stainless steel -- with a sea-blue oyster shell face. It had a curved glass bezel, not plastic. The contrast between the high-gloss steel and the face gave my fake Tag a regal appearance.

My fake Tag had all the real Tag markings on the back, though I certainly wasn't given papers to authenticate my fake Tag. However, if I had asked, the salesperson might have produced them.

I wore the watch everywhere and received numerous compliments, and I was so confident about my fake Tag that occasionally, I would allow questioners to inspect it firsthand. I was proud of my fake Tag. People would see my fake Tag and say things like, "I didn't know Tag made anything except diving watches. That is an exquisite Tag! Where did you get it?" 

"Oh this thing..." I would deflect to keep from outright lying.

"Diving!" I thought. I didn't dare get my fake Tag near anything moist, for that would mean certain death. In rainstorms, I took off my fake Tag, placing it in the driest available pocket. If I were in a high humidity climate, I kept fake Tag near a de-moisturizer packet, again in my pocket. I treated fake Tag better than I did my real Tag, which was a true Tag diving watch.

One day a few months after acquiring my fake Tag, I found it lying on my nightstand, lifeless. 

"Not for long," I panicked aloud.

I rerouted a few errands that day so I could visit a watch repair kiosk at the mall, hoping to have them breathe life back into fake Tag. I had gotten accustomed to the look of fake Tag on my wrist. Without it, I felt naked.

I approached my fake Tag's potential life-giver with mixed emotions. Would fake Tag be good enough to fool a watch expert? Would the sales clerk unknowingly compliment me as others had on my fake Tag? Or would he "out" me as a pretentious sellout for having purchased what I knew was not the real thing?

I laid my fake Tag on the countertop, and the young salesperson said, "Wow, nice Tag! You're gonna want a Tag battery for this."

I said, "Well how much is a Tag battery?"

The salesman said, "Twenty-four dollars. But you wouldn't want to skimp on a Tag by getting a Chinese battery, or you could ruin the inner workings."

Now I had a dilemma.

"Just out of curiosity, how much is the Chinese battery for a Tag?" I inquired.

The salesperson said, "Three dollars. But again, you could ruin a Tag if you...because Chinese batteries are...blah blah blah."

I didn't even hear the rest of his education on fine watches and cheap batteries. Circling through my mind was the fact that I had a $7 watch that I wanted people to believe was a $2,500 watch and the idea of putting a battery in it that was costing me more three times more than the cost of fake watch!

Liberal America in electing Obama bought a fake Tag. And the batteries have run down in less than a year. Obama may still look good, but he's draining his political juice.

The Liberals feel trapped, because they simply can't admit that they have bought a fake Tag, and maintenance of their fake costs more than the fake himself!

As for that battery salesman, I suspect he knew my Tag was a fake. Why not take advantage of somebody who was a poser? I was ripe for the picking.

The moral to the story: Don't settle for the fake, as it will cost you three times more in the end.

That's my rant!

Kevin Jackson is author of The BIG Black Lie and The Black Sphere blog. He is a regular on Fox News programs such as Glenn Beck, O'Reilly, and others.

2.

Wanted: Grown-up governance

Adults need to reassert control on Election Day

Robert Knight

At some point, the grown-ups are going to have to take over. We're being governed by a gang of perpetual adolescents from the most liberal enclaves in America.

Recent brain research has shown that adolescents do dumb things because they haven't developed the part of the mind that governs risk aversion. This is why we don't let them drink or manage our stock portfolios.

Like adolescents, the Washington gang is spending trillions for a good time today, oblivious to long-term damage. Like teens, they see money as an inexhaustible parental resource (or in this case, taxpayer resource).

Instead of taking on the tough decisions befitting a self-governing people, they yearn to surrender American sovereignty to the United Nations and international legal elites. Then they can say, "It's not our fault."

Like adolescents, this group pushes the envelope, hoping to shock grown-ups while undermining the moral order and the principles of self-government. President Obama and his cronies pander to every odd faction with a gripe. The tie-dyed White House is aided and abetted by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who hails from - where else? - San Francisco. Mrs. Pelosi's district hosts the Folsom Street Fair, an annual sadism festival that breaks every public decency law under the sun. She sends participants a nice welcoming note.

Last week, San Francisco's animal welfare board was slated to vote on criminalizing the sale of cats, dogs and hamsters. It put off the vote only because scores of enraged "animal companion" owners showed up at the normally sparsely attended meeting. The measure will resurface as soon as a bureaucrat finds a way to blame gerbils for global warming.

The city, which has thrown the Boy Scouts out of public facilities, has issued tips on how to bake "safe" marijuana-laced goodies. It's not clear how this will contribute to the general welfare, except to create more voters with the functioning brains of 11-year-olds who keep getting hungry. This should make it easier to recruit for one of the political parties.

Back in Washington, the left's flagship paper, The Washington Post, showed its adolescent chops by plugging the Capital Fringe Festival on the front page of its Weekend section on July 9. Among the offerings: "Pushing Boundaries" (of course); "Secret Obscenities"; and "Illegal Sex Acts: Live on Stage!" Inside, the Post featured a large photo of a young man in a dress applying makeup to another young man in a dress for the "Miss Teen Jesus Pageant."

Post writer Amy Orndorff rhapsodized: "So many choices, so little time! We know, it can seem overwhelming, but isn't that part of the fun?" Remember, this is the paper of record in the nation's capital.

In the name of love and peace, our nation's adolescent leaders are ignoring the constitutional mandate to secure our border. Instead, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.'s Justice Department is suing Arizona for acting like a state run by grown-ups and enforcing federal immigration law. At the same time, Justice is blessing "sanctuary cities" that explicitly vow to ignore the law. Right on, dudes! Mr. Holder also dropped charges against members of the New Black Panther Party who were videotaped intimidating Philadelphia voters in 2008. Wow, look at those cool fatigues and baton!

Many of these power-wielding adolescents in government and the media apparently are unfamiliar with our Constitution. This is by design. When Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan was dean of Harvard's Law School, constitutional law was dropped from the list of mandatory courses, while international law was added. It's in keeping with columnist and author Joe Sobran's wry observation that "the Constitution poses no threat to our form of government."

In "Lord of the Flies," Nobel Prize-winning novelist William Golding vividly depicts kids without adult supervision. The British youngsters, stranded on an island, form factions that combine high-minded ideals with brutish methods of compliance. It gets outright bloody before a shipload of grown-ups restores order.

Perhaps this November, a ship full of grown-ups will save what's left of our God-fearing republic. Unlike adolescents, however, we will have to make it happen. We can't hand it off to hapless, indulgent parents.

Robert Knight is senior writer and correspondent for Coral Ridge Ministries, a senior fellow for the American Civil Rights Union and the author of "Radical Rulers: The White House Elites Who Are Pushing America Toward Socialism" (Radicalrulers.com, 2010).

3.

Go for Growth

An agenda for Republicans.
MATTHEW CONTINETTI

If Republicans were James Bond villains, this would be the moment in the movie when they chuckle and say deviously, “Everything is going according to plan.” The president’s approval rating continues to fall. Last week Gallup found that Congress is the least popular institution in the land. The GOP maintains a slight lead in the congressional generic ballot, a metric in which the Republicans typically underperform. What was recently unthinkable—that the GOP could take one or both houses of Congress this November—is a real possibility.

If only Republicans knew what to do when (and if) they return to power.

True, there are some conservatives and Republicans who believe an agenda isn’t necessary. Let the Democrats fall under their own weight, they say. Then we can clean up the mess. Alternative policies, in their view, would only give liberals and Democrats something to demagogue in the campaign. Better to remain cautious. Better to wait until the storm is over.

They’re wrong. Not only is such a strategy timid, it is also a false reading of the last two years in American politics. After all, the Democrats are a case study in the perils of victory by default. It was not a strong alternative agenda that netted the Democrats 55 House seats and 16 Senate seats between 2006 and 2008. The party made those gains by vigorously opposing an unpopular war, an unpopular president, a corrupt Republican majority, and an economy in recession. The Democrats won by being the other guy. (A little luck, in the form of razor-thin Senate victories in Montana and Virginia in 2006 and Minnesota in 2008, and Arlen Specter’s defection in 2009, helped too.) Nor did Obama run on bailouts, a trillion-dollar stimulus, and a health insurance mandate. He ran on an airy promise to bring the country together and govern differently from George W. Bush.

Look where that has brought him and his party. A lack of new ideas and victory through opposition may have provided the Democrats with tactical victories. But every day those victories look more and more Pyrrhic—indeed, they may have opened the door for Republican strategic victory in 2010 and 2012 and beyond. Yes, the Democratic majority emerged. But it isn’t durable. Liberalism is exhausted.

Liberals and Democrats write all this off, of course. The reason President Obama is unpopular, they argue, isn’t that his agenda is too liberal for public consumption. It’s that the economy continues to be in the doldrums. That’s true as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go very far.

Obama’s agenda has hurt him. It is hard to think of an era in which the political majority pushed so many unpopular initiatives in such a short span of time. From the stimulus to the mandate to cap and trade to flirting with a trial for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in civilian court to suing Arizona for enforcing federal immigration law, it’s almost as if this administration enjoys being on the wrong side of public opinion. Can liberals honestly believe that these policies would be more popular if America were at full employment?

The reason the economy hurts Obama is that his agenda has not produced a recovery. At best, the legislation he has signed into law has delayed the financial reckoning. At worst, it has actively hindered recovery by increasing the regulatory and tax burdens on business and crowding out private investment. And so a principled and cheerful opposition to the Obama-Pelosi-Reid legislation, and a promise to overturn that legislation’s worst elements, is the beginning of a Republican agenda. But just the beginning.

Luckily, the GOP still has some idea men in its ranks. The Republican Study Committee (RSC), led by Representative Tom Price of Georgia, has designed an alternative budget resolution. And Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin has designed a long-term Roadmap for America’s Future. Both plans limit government and encourage growth. Ryan’s plan is especially audacious, as it overhauls the welfare state in a market-oriented, conservative direction. The really remarkable thing, however, is that these are the only two Republican visions of the future at this time of political and economic ferment. Why aren’t there more?

An enterprising conservative would build on the RSC and Ryan plans with an explicitly pro-growth agenda. He (or she!) would do this with the understanding that only robust, broad-based, and prolonged economic growth will produce jobs, reduce the debt burden, and increase social cohesion. He (or she) would be aware of a recent study by the Kauffman Foundation that found that net job growth in the United States comes from firms less than one year old. This enterprising conservative’s growth agenda, therefore, would make it a point to reduce hindrances to entrepreneurship and small business.

Meaning? An extension of current tax rates on income, dividends, and capital gains until the economy is booming and Congress is ready to undertake large-scale, pro-family, pro-investment tax reform. A payroll tax cut. A promise to take the Federal Register to the paper shredder, reducing the number of regulations that aspiring businessmen face when they start new ventures. A plan to withdraw from GM and Fannie and Freddie and end corporate welfare. A commitment to advance free trade by passing stalled agreements with South Korea and Colombia and championing new agreements with India and Africa.

The benefits associated with this agenda would not only be economic. The public would know where conservatives and Republicans stand. They would know what to expect in the years to come. And they would be able to hold the GOP accountable. The alternative is for Republicans to stand pat, benefit in the short term from Obama’s unpopularity in 2010—and reap the whirlwind in 2012.

—Matthew Continetti

 

Monday's Web

Political Truth and Fact.Com

Neither fair nor balanced, but absolutely factual

Opinion:
Forces of the far left just cannot stand watching news sources they don’t control prosper with popularity among more and more Americans

The success of Fox News can be measured by the extremism of the attacks from liberals.  The left has corrupted and dominated what is referred to as “Mainstream Media”, for decades, yet it goes ballistic at seeing honest news from sources they don’t dominate and control.

Conservative pundit Neal Boortz, quotes a liberal talking about Fox News Channel boss Rupert Murdoch:

"Murdoch is a Nazi; Murdoch is a Nazi! And everyone that works for him is a potential murderer! Do you not -- do you not get that? Why does anybody in this administration pay any attention whatsoever to anything these people say? They shouldn't be listened to; they should be dragged into the street and pummeled! And I'd be very happy to be the first person to do it."

Such out-of-control ranting is widespread among the left.  More evidence of this came yesterday from former National Democrat Chairman and former Presidential candidate, Howard Dean.

Appearing opposite Newt Gingrich on “Fox News Sunday”, Dean plunged headlong into a discussion of the racial dustup over the firing of a political appointee in the Department of Agriculture.  Dean again proved himself an utter idiot.  He also displayed the virulent racism running throughout today’s Democrat party.

Ranted Dean: “I think Fox News did something that was absolutely racist.” Progarm host, Chris Wallace, quickly corrected Dean. pointing out Sherrod’s name had never even been mentioned on Fox News Channel until after she was fired.

As the Fox Website reports: “Dean then broadened his argument by addressing the current state of race in America, saying ‘There’s been this ongoing theme about black racism in America... But I think continuing to cater to this theme of minority racism and stressing comments like this, some of which are taken out of context, does not help the country knit itself together.” Dean failed to make a viable point, of course.

Liberals such as Dean are unable to grasp that opposition to Obama is not based on race. It is pposition to far left, socialist, Democrat proposals.  Democrats lack necessary intellectual capabilities.

On White House handling of the Sherrod case, Gingrich calls it: “one more example of the Obama administration's continuing incompetence.”  He also commented on White House panic that the Sherrod story would be revealed on Glenn Beck’s program (it wasn’t). How might the Obama Administration deal with real threats in the world such as Iran, when it is so terrified of a TV show?  Dean offered no alibi

(Read more: http://fns.blogs.foxnews.com/2010/07/25/newt-dean-jackson-comment-on-sherrod/#ixzz0unaHHULm)

Dean and other liberals continually offer a strategy: When their backs are to the wall and facts betray them, Liberals will yell “racist”.  This was revealed in secret emails within a cabal of several hundred Mainstream Media "journalists". Far leftists will divert any and all assaults by claiming any conservative they face as being racist. 

These are despicable tactics, of course.  No decent American would endorse such a sleazy course of action – but polling also shows most Americans don’t support liberal positions.  Liberal positioins on radical health care, the Cap and Trade tax scam, and the unwrranted ssault on the Arizona immigration law.

Come to think of it, given issues the left is forced to defend, they have no option other than slandering opponents.  Liberals are not man enough to face such issues honestly, and facts betray their positions, claims, and arguments. Take Obama’s radical health care take over – they drew it up in secret, behind closed doors, then they strong armed it and imposed it against the will of the governed.  The same with opposing Arizona’s law – forget the 70% of Arizonans and a similar amount of all Americans – just plunge ahead and if anyone disagrees, label them as a racist.

If liberals want to disagree or try debating the facts, the door to this website is always open.

Buddy

The Day’s Top Political News:

White House decries release of Afghan war documents – an Anti- American act that endangers US troops in combat

National Security Advisor James Jones says the disclosure could endanger lives and U.S. security. The N.Y. Times, which received early access, says the documents point to Pakistan-Taliban collusion.

The anti-American website WikiLeaks, which posted the documents late Sunday, provided them ahead of time to such far left sources as the New York Times, the Guardian newspaper in London and the German magazine Der Spiegel which asked the White House for comment.

According to the New York Times, the documents, which it received several weeks ago, refer to previously unreported incidents of Afghan civilian deaths in the NATO military operations.  The Times has a record of such irresponsible actions as releasing these documents.

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-fg-pakistan-papers-20100726,0,5560351.story

Health Law Augurs Transfer of Funds From Old to Young – Refuting denials of Obamacare supporters

The new, radical Obamacare scheme is designed to cover the uninsured -- a a decades-long goal of Democrats. But it also represents a change in how the government spreads its social safety net underneath Americans. Already, it's creating tensions that are a harbinger of debates to come. 

The health overhaul diverges by tapping a program for the elderly to help provide insurance to 32 million Americans of younger generations. Nearly half the funding for the law is supposed to come from paying lower fees to hospitals, insurers and other health-care providers that participate in Medicare, the federal insurance program for Americans age 65 and older,

Say “Hello” to the death panels Obama and his cohorts denied being included in their far left plans for Healthcare.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703340904575285002595068326.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsSecond

GOP hopefuls raise support, fewer funds

Money can't buy Democrat assurance, of course. In some key races that may decide control of Capitol Hill this fall, it's coming down to a battle of Democratic money versus Republican momentum.

Some top Democrat incumbents have run up big money advantages over their GOP opponents, but polls suggest that may not be enough to save them in November.

Republicans note the Democratic money edge isn't surprising — incumbents typically have a clear fundraising edge, and Democrats now control the White House and both houses of Congress — and won't be decisive in the fall.  Momentum among voters is with Republican candidates and the GOP has had a banner year in being able to recruit candidates.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jul/25/gop-hopefuls-raise-support-not-funds/

Top Blogs:

1.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/07/the_party_of_despair.html

The Party of Despair

Carol Peracchio

California Congressman Fortney "Pete" Stark was caught on tape in June insulting a constituent at a town hall meeting. When the voter identified himself as a member of the Minutemen, Representative Stark asked him, "Who are you gonna kill today?" The taped exchange has gone viral.

I watched Mr. Stark with fascination and a bit of nausea, incredulous that he's been representing his district since 1979. Reading his words is disturbing, but watching the video is astonishing. A few minutes into it, I discovered that I know Pete Stark. In fact, every single one of us knows Pete Stark.

Congressman Stark is a living, breathing, textbook example of a crotchety, sour old coot. He's the codger in bed 301B who snarls at the nurse for not answering his call bell in thirty seconds. He's the crabby customer who yells at the cashier, certain he didn't get the senior discount on one item. He's the quintessential cranky old guy down the street, yelling at the neighborhood kids: "Get off my lawn!"

What is most surprising about Pete Stark is not that he's 79, or that he's been a congressman for decades, or even that he's aged so disgracefully. The surprising thing is that in today's Democratic Party, he is so typical. After reading the bios of today's liberal Democrats, it's hard to distinguish Washington, D.C. from Jurassic Park. For example, here are a few facts about some of our leading Democrat dinosaurs:

Nancy Pelosi: 70 years old, in Congress for 23 years.

Harry Reid: 71 years old, in Congress for 27 years.

Charles Rangel: 80 years old, in Congress for 39 years.

Barney Frank: 70 years old, in Congress for 28 years.

Barbara Boxer: 70 years old, in Congress for 28 years.

Steny Hoyer: 71 years old, in Congress for 29 years.

So what? you may ask. Many people in their 70s and 80s lead productive lives. My question is not why so many in the Democratic Party in Washington are elderly. Experience counts. What puzzles me is the almost universal cantankerousness among them. For example, a few weeks ago, Democrat Congressman Bob Etheridge, 69, who has represented his North Carolina district for 14 years, was caught on camera actually assaulting a student who merely asked him if he supported President Obama's agenda. 

Representative Barney Frank, 70, has been fêted for decades in the mainstream media for his acerbic wit. When confronted by constituents at a health care town hall meeting last summer, however, he snapped, attacked, and snarkily told one lady, "Trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table." Quite the sparkling wit, isn't he?

And let's not forget Senator Barbara Boxer, 70, berating a brigadier general for calling her "Ma'am" instead of "Senator." It wouldn't have been out of place if she had added, "You young whippersnapper!"

As I pondered the personalities of these elder statesmen in the Democratic Party, I tried to figure out what lies at the root of such behavior. It couldn't be merely a matter of old age. Consider Ronald Reagan. I couldn't think of an incident where President Reagan at the same age was rude and insulting to an average voter.

I decided to dust off my psychiatric nursing training and review Erik Erikson's Stages of Development. Erikson was a psychoanalyst whose theory was that every person must pass through a series of eight interrelated stages over the entire life cycle. These stages are characterized by a conflict or crisis between two opposing emotional forces. For example, Erikson's first stage (Birth to 12 to 18 Months) is known as "Trust vs. Mistrust."

All of the Democrats I've referenced fall into Erick Erikson's final stage: Late Adult, Age 55 or 65 to Death. The crisis is Integrity vs. Despair. In this stage, we look back over our lives and review our achievements and contributions to future generations. This is also the time when we inevitably face our own mortality. To explain further:

Integrity means feeling at peace with oneself and the world. No regrets or recriminations. The linking between the stages is perhaps clearer here than anywhere: people are more likely to look back on their lives positively and happily if they have left the world a better place than they found it - in whatever way, to whatever extent. There lies Integrity and acceptance.

Despair and/or 'Disgust' (i.e., rejective denial, or 'sour grapes' feeling towards what life might have been) represent the opposite disposition: feelings of wasted opportunities, regrets, wishing to be able to turn back the clock and have a second chance.

What is it about being a liberal that seems to lead inexorably to despair in old age in the 21st century? I have been wracking my brain trying to come up with a liberal in academia or media or politics who can be described as a "Happy Warrior." Compare George H.W. Bush to Jimmy Carter. Two former presidents who perfectly illustrate Integrity vs. Despair.

The old cliché goes: Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it. Liberals have achieved their greatest ambition: power. They have passed comprehensive health care reform and massive stimulus bills. The media obediently cheer their every move. And yet it is obvious that they are leaving the world in a much, much worse condition than what they were given. Their grandchildren will never pay off the debt. We are farther from racial unity, not closer. All their education dreams have been implemented, and our children are dumber. And on and on.

Erikson's stages are unrelenting. Every one of us must pass through them. Suddenly, it makes perfect sense why our elderly Democrat politicians are so nasty. They have had the opportunity to implement everything they've devoted their entire lives to, and it's been a spectacular failure.

Erikson's final stage also explains another mystery: Why do so many politicians refuse to retire? If one reviews one's life and sees only wasted opportunities and failed programs, how could retirement be an option? So we are faced with the tragic picture of politicians like Arlen Specter refusing to leave the stage. Just one more term, just one more.

And as liberal politicians face the mess that is their agenda, they have an even greater problem. If they wish to stay in public life, to have that coveted second chance, they need the support of their constituents. Suddenly, it makes perfect sense why Pete Stark lashes out at the previously docile average voters who are now rejecting him. Without them, he's out, finished, alone with his regrets. No wonder he and his fellow senior citizen liberal comrades are so cranky.

I'm submitting a new motto for 2010:

Today's Democrats: The Party of Despair. From "Happy Days are Here Again" to "Get off my lawn!"

Carol Peracchio is a registered nurse.

2.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/07/journolist_and_malice.html

Journolist and Malice

Mark J. Fitzgibbons

Sunshine appears to be causing uncertainty and fear among members of the now-defunct Journolist cabal. Some of the emails demonstrate certain liberal journalists willing and eager to employ malice as part and parcel of their professional duties.

The fact that such open malice of at least a few of the four hundred "professionals" on Journolist did not result in their expulsion from this professional Listserv, and indeed seemed tolerated at the time by its members and now by its defenders, would seem to indicate a more widespread problem. The dog doesn't bark when it's comfortable with the visitor.

Jonathan Strong of The Daily Caller broke the news about left-wing journalists conspiring on Journolist to kill the stories during the 2008 election about Barack Obama's relationship with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Strong writes,

In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama's relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama's conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, "Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares -- and call them racists."

Ackerman skipped the intermediary suggestion of even asking loaded questions of Obama's conservative critics and proceeded directly to proposing false accusations against figures -- "who cares" -- on the right.

Strong reports that others on Journolist objected to the strategy proposed by Ackerman -- not because what Ackerman suggested involved malice, but because strategically it did not aid their cause:

Kevin Drum, then of Washington Monthly, also disagreed with Ackerman's strategy. "I think it's worth keeping in mind that Obama is trying (or says he's trying) to run a campaign that avoids precisely the kind of thing Spencer is talking about, and turning this into a gutter brawl would probably hurt the Obama brand pretty strongly. After all, why vote for him if it turns out he's not going change the way politics works?"
 
Fred Barnes wrote a measured, thoughtful response to the report. Barnes' style isn't provocative or satirical, as Rush Limbaugh's or Ann Coulter's can be. All three, however, face the malice of the left because they advocate for less government.

The malice exhibited in the e-mails is about more than journalistic ethics, and it may have legal consequences, with the immediate potential to cause jitters in the bars of Georgetown and Manhattan.

Malice becomes very, very significant in the case of public figures like Limbaugh, Barnes, and Rove ever since The New York Times v. Sullivan decision. Such public figures have a very difficult time winning damages for libel because of the "malice" evidentiary hurdle announced in Sullivan. As Mark Tapscott of the Washington Examiner explains,

Rove is certainly a public figure and a strong case could be made that Barnes is as well. Thus, any temptation to sue they might experience would be tempered by the Sullivan standard - unless conscious, actual malice by the defendant can be proven, forget it.

On the other hand, it's not difficult to envision an enterprising attorney finding an arguable case that specific examples culled from among the voluminous comments exchanged among JournoList participants clearly indicate high levels of what sure looks an awful lot like actual malice towards all sorts of prominent people on the Right.

This might help explain a curious passage in JournoList honcho Ezra Klein's explanation ... of his response to Tucker Carlson's request to be allowed to join the list serv:

"Adding someone to the list meant giving them access to the entirety of the archives. That didn't bother me very much. Sure, you could comb through tens of thousands of e-mails and pull intemperate moments and inartful wording out of context to embarrass people, but so long as you weren't there with an eye towards malice, you'd recognize it for what it was: A wonkish, fun, political yelling match." (Emphasis added.)

As The Daily Caller continues to expose vile exchanges on Journolist, we read about the hateful fantasy of one NPR producer involving Rush Limbaugh having a heart attack, and "serious" discussions that the government should shut down Fox News.

Why are any of these people still employed by news agencies instead of flipping tofu burgers?

Malice is not designed to get to the truth. Quite the opposite: Malice is designed to harm without regard to the truth. Malicious libel against public figures is not a protected press freedom. On the other hand, satirical or provocative speech, writings, or graphics, which can be biting, are designed to elucidate certain truths or positions in an attention-grabbing way.

Writing at The Daily Caller, Ben Smith observes:

The election of Barack Obama, America's first black president, was supposed to be a sign of our national maturity ... a chance to transform the charged, stilted "national conversation" about race into a smarter and more authentic dialogue, led by a president who was also one of the nation's subtlest thinkers and writers on the topic.

Instead, the conversation just got dumber.

Smith errs. It's not dumb conversation that's the problem. Malicious accusations of racism against conservatives are an old left-wing tactic. They are an intentional distraction from genuine conversations about small-government principles. Charges of racism being leveled at "who cares" damages and discredits the real issues of racism that should be addressed. Both debates are harmed by malice from the left.

The NAACP recently passed its controversial yet unreleased resolution that the Tea Party should condemn what it describes as racist elements within the Tea Party. Some news agencies agree. The Kansas City Star even proclaimed, "NAACP's criticism is valid: Tea party needs to condemn its racist fringe elements."

While the NAACP, The Kansas City Star, and others on this bandwagon may not have demonstrated malice, it is clearer now that they are pushing an agenda that has nothing to do with racism. Journolist, the "unofficial Obama campaign," proves that irresponsible, false charges of racism are accepted on the left as a political tactic.

Tea Partiers, being mostly new to political activism, may not be accustomed to dealing with leftist institutions. However, in my opinion, the Tea Party should avoid being distracted from its purposes by these attempts from the left. The left would like nothing more than to draw attention away from constitutional, small-government, fiscally responsible policies that the Tea Party advocates.

Maybe the left-wing journalists at Journolist could learn from the Coffee Party to encourage deliberation guided by reason. Oops, too late. It seems reasoned deliberation isn't as popular on the left as the strategy of smears.

3.

http://spectator.org/archives/2010/07/19/perverse-democrats

Perverse Democrats

The Prowler

WASTING NO TIME

Donald Berwick -- the Obama Administration's recess-appointed head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) -- and his staff aren't wasting a lot of time getting settled into their offices.  Already, Berwick, according to career employees at CMS, has begun looking at what resources are at his disposal to launch a wide-scale media and public relations offensive in support of Obamacare and his views on government-funded health care. CMS is the agency charged with administering Medicare and working with state governments to administer Medicaid, and the Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). The agency also has a role in setting and overseeing quality standards in nursing homes.

Berwick is also said to have asked his senior staff to look for ways to utilize some of the foundations and entities he has had relationships with while working at Harvard and his own think tank, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), and those organizations read like a who's who from the George Soros Dustbin of Leftist Agitators.

Tops of among them is the Open Society Institute (OSI), itself a Soros-funded organization, which, through several different channels, has funneled money to Berwick's IHI think tank at Harvard. Scholars at IHI were involved, for example in the Soros-funded "Project on Death in America," which seeded hundreds of thousands of dollars across the country for studies into end of life issues. The OSI has also funneled similar amounts to organizations involved in drug-policy circles.

Through OSI's contacts, Berwick staff is discussing ways to use leftist propagandist and Corporation for Public Broadcasting gadfly Bill Moyers (the man who famously spent his days as a President Lyndon Johnson aide trashing the reputation of Martin Luther King to the media) to highlight the efforts of the Obama Administration's health care "reform" plan.  They are also seeking ways to utilize relationships with charitable organizations that have had ties with Soros's operation, including the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which has made the issue of "working families" a point of its research. There is also the  Nathan Cummings Foundation, a leftist foundation with a definite pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel tilt, which spends millions in the "social justice" arena.

"Open Society was the hub that allowed Donald [Berwick] to meet up with foundations and individuals that helped him raise millions for Institute for Healthcare," says a foundation board member with ties to OSI. "You didn't start something at Harvard and not reach out to Soros, and Donald certainly worked that network hard, in part because he's one of them."

Just as important to Berwick's team as bringing the old group back together again, is the getting a renewal and increase in the CMS budget on the five-year $300 million fund that has been paying four giant public relations firms, Ketchum, Ogilvy, Porter Novelli, and Weber Shandwick, for image and "outreach" efforts for the agency.

According to CMS sources, Berwick's team has been talking to those four agencies, as well as one other global communications firm with strong ties to the Obama Administration -- believed to be the Brunswick Group -- about PR projects they could undertake under new contracts put in place after the 2011 expiration of the current multi-hundred million budget. "We're going to need strong PR as more and more of the health care reform plan comes on line and citizens have more questions about the role CMS may play in their lives," says a CMS career staffer. "I wouldn't be surprised if we're looking at PR budgets upwards of $500 million, if not more."

DEMOCRAT SEX OFFENDER

Most people haven't heard of Jeffrey Epstein, a billionaire sex-offender, with close ties to former President Bill Clinton, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, and members of the Obama Administration. But after July 21, folks may be hearing more from him. That's when his year-long probation -- after he pleaded guilty to state charges arising from sexually charged massages and sex in exchange for money with under-age females -- comes to an end.

Back in 2007 and 2008 when the Epstein-sex-abuse scandal broke, Democrats who at one time couldn't move fast enough to get close to him, were running scared. Clinton, who famously traveled with Epstein to Africa, and Epstein friend, Obama economic adviser and former Harvard president Lawrence Summers, who sought tens of millions from Epstein for the university, would not comment on the relationship. Bill Richardson and then-New York Governor Eliot Spitzer returned political donations.  

But Epstein, who, according to Palm Beach, Fla., newspaper reports, has settled more than two-dozen lawsuits and claims against him by underage females, and who will remain a registered sex offender for the rest of his life, is said to have been able to hold on to billions of his vast fortune, and continues to maintain homes in Palm Beach, Manhattan, New Mexico and an island in the U.S. Virgin Islands. And that has Democrat party fundraisers willing to overlook his criminal and sordid past if he's game to start underwriting efforts for the Democrat party agenda.

"We are a forgiving people," says one Democrat National Committee fundraiser. "Look, Eliot Spitzer is going to have his own national TV show on CNN -- why can't someone like Epstein be allowed to support political and philanthropic endeavors he cares about?"

To that end, according to Democrat insiders, former close associates to Epstein, like Clinton and Richardson, who is leaving office after the 2010 election cycle, have been approached by party officials about how to best engage Epstein's largesse without directly tying him to the Democrat party. It is not known whether Clinton or Richardson has been in contact with Epstein in the past two years.

"There are any number of ways for us to do that," says the DNC fundraiser. "If there is a foundation, he can give the money through the foundation to entities like The Tides, which will use his money confidentially to fund our causes. He can give dollars to groups like the Center for American Progress, where his name won't be made public. He's paid his debt to society, and we can't afford to have him stuck on the sidelines."
 

Sunday's Web

Political Truth and Fact.Com

Neither fair nor balanced, but absolutely factual

Opinion:
Obama is close to his lowest point in polling as Hillary supporters consider charges the 2008 nomination was stolen

According to polling by the Rasmussen Report, Obama has strong approval from only a quarter of the nation’s voting population, while 45% of American voters strongly disapprove.  Rasmussen says this is just one point below the highest level of disapproval yet measured for Obama.

These figures are dire for Democrats.  While Obama’s name won’t be on the ballots in November, every Democrat in the House is facing voters as are a third of the Democrats in the Senate. Control of all Congress is at stake. Obama’s popularity, or lack thereof, will be reflected to some extent in the outcome of all races. 

Of course many Republicans will make Obama a whipping boy.  Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi – technically seeking re-election – is very unpopular too. Pelosi’s poll figures are in single digits, even lower than the 11% for Congress itself

Obama’s low poll figures are likely to continue their decline, unless something strange happens.  It will take a major event of some sort to increase the president’s popularity.  Given the  approach of the usual summer recess, not much is likely to happen legislatively as Congress rushes for the exits.

The Opposition figure of 45% is significant, of course.  These are voters who say they “Strongly” disapprove of the job Obama is doing.  His total negative figures show he currently has more than 50% in opposition.

Such low figures have Hillary Clinton’s closest political plotters huddling in secret, and examining potential openings.  Hints of such internal unrest among Democrats are already showing.

A documentary film, “We Will Not Be Silenced”. Details charges Obama campaign workers helped steal the nominaton.

The film is directed by lifelong Democrat Gigi Gaston.  It accuses the Democratic National Committee of "depriving American voters of their choice of Hillary Clinton as Democratic nominee" in the 2008 presidential election.

As reported in an interview on "Fox & Friends" today, Gaston said she went to Texas during the 2008 primary between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, hoping to prove that allegations of voter fraud were wrong.

Gaston says she has since “compiled dozens of interviews with campaign workers and volunteers from across the country who say they witnessed voter intimidation tactics, falsified documents and other irregularities perpetrated by the Obama campaign.”

The accusations follow a major scandal involving Obama supporters from the New Black Panther Party threatening GOP voters in Philadelphia.  The tactics, real and claimed, are similar.

In one documentary interview, civil rights activist Helene Latimer recounts seeing an elderly woman being intimidated at the polls. "As she approached the entrance way to go into the building, one of the young men said to her, 'If you're not voting for Obama, go home because you're not voting here today.'"

As Obama’s popularity wanes even more, such scandals and accusation will be manipulated by some in a plan to replace Obama on the Democrat Presidential ballot in 2012.

Buddy

The Day's Top Political News:

A New Harry Reid Threat: "We're Going To Have a Public Option"

Speaking at a Las Vegas convention of far left activists, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says there will eventually be a public option.  The “Public Option”, so-called entry legislation that would usher in Canadian-style socialized medicine.

Socialized Medicine, by definition would mean health care of substantially less quality.  Reid’s comments were seeking to console liberal activists who were disappointed by the final version of the national health care law.

Reid's general comments reflected the same overall message to “progressives” that President Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi delivered to the group earlier. It essentially boils down to: claming Democrats have  done a lot of stuff, but still have a lot of unfinished business.  It was an appeal for votes in the mid-term elections from left wing voters.   Substantial majorities of voters opposed the radical Democrat health scheme and the opposition has increased.

http://spectator.org/blog/2010/07/24/reid-to-netroots-were-going-to

Unofficial reports claim Mexican drug thugs are occupying two ranches near Laredo, Texas

Confirmation has been elusive, but rumors abound that Mexican thugs have captured two American ranches near Laredo, Texas.  The Thungs are said to be members of the “Zetas” strong-arm supporters of Mexican drug lords. Americans at the ranches are said to have been released unharmed

Reports cannot be confirmed officially, but one web site claimed it has received confirmation from three sources within Laredo law enforcement agencies.
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News outlets say they cannot get official confirmation of the cross-border operation, and some are claiming a news blackout has been imposed.  Those reports suggest news of such a raid could have a negative impact on Federal efforts to shoot down an Arizona immigration law.

http://www.diggersrealm.com/mt/archives/003440.html.

100 Days before mid-term elections and Obama is sounding “Charge” to his followers

In a fundraising letter to members of his Organizing for America, Obama freely admits having set his goal on achieving “fundamental changes” to America itself.

Obama tells OFA members: “You and I did not build this movement to win one election. We did not come together to pass one single piece of legislation. We are fighting for nothing less than a new foundation for our country.”

Obama claims his “foundation” was built on his “stimulus” scheme. And on his radical healthcare – both of which are opposed by substantial majorities of normal Americans.  The direction of the Obama crusade to date has been far left.

Top Blogs:

1.

Changing the Conversation

Daniel Greenfield

The entire Breitbart-Sherrod-NAACP-Tea Party mess is a lesson in how the left tries to sabotage and undermine conversations that don't suit it. It's a real time event version of what the Daily Caller chronicles in the Jornolist archives show about the media strategizing against Palin.

The Democrats used their NAACP organization to try and brand the Tea Party as racist, thereby changing the conversation from criticisms of the Obama Administration, to an attack on the Tea Party itself, in order to delegitimize it, and discourage people from participating it. Breitbart's Sherrod attack was the equivalent of the "plate glass window" strategy that Jornolist members proposed to use by protecting Jeremiah Wright, by going on the offense against a Republican figure. The entire Sherrod soap opera served as a warning about the political uses of racism, and it changed the conversation from whether the Tea Party is racist, to whether the NAACP is racist. Breitbart understands this. Many of his critics at some conservative blogs don't.

These are ugly tactics, but they may be the only kind that work in an environment dominated by ruthless far left agendas in both the media and the political sphere.

Similarly the Daily Caller's Jornolist archives have made the invisible wizards behind the media coverage into the subjects, which is something they don't want to be, unless it's the occasional flattering profile. The Jornolist archives going public undermines the wall of silence surrounding the media club.

In the 2008 election, the media left kept changing the conversation over and over again. It won in part by being able to do that enough times, that the real issues were never heard. But now the left is having trouble doing it. They've tried to launch attacks on the opposition. They've tried glamor and photo ops. But it's still the economy, stupid. And they have found no real way to change the topic for very long.

So now it's come down to bare knuckles. And Breitbart has demonstrated that with a limited budget, and no official political backing, he can still change the conversation. And seriously impact what is going. Which is more than many of his conservative critics have been able to do.

And until they can do that, it might be time to get out of Breitbart's way.

Moving on, remember when George W. Bush was being blasted by liberals for saying, "You're either with us, or you're against us." Bush was talking about the terrorists. But liberals have revived the term for a domestic purge from the party.

He said he supports primaries as needed to keep the party's moral compass. "We have to do our vetting process. You're either with us, or you're against us in the progressive movement in America," he said.

So "You're with us or against us" is wrong when applied to terrorists, but right when applied to conservative Democrats.

And that highlights the differences between Republicans who wanted to use strong tactics to protect all Americans from terrorists, vs Democrats who want to use harsh tactics to win their ideological wars in order to repress all Americans.

2.

Reality Check: Democrats Still Think Their Job-Killing Agenda Is Working?

Republicans and the American People Know Better
Washington, DC – Recently, President Obama and Congressional Democrats have consumed a lot of oxygen making the ridiculous claim that their job-killing agenda has actually been good for American families and businesses. Republicans and the American people know better.
 
• Republicans and the American people want to reinvigorate the economy with policies that respect the free enterprise system. But with nearly 15 million Americans still out of work, the Democrats response is to mount a PR campaign touting their failed stimulus boondoggle. We, meanwhile, have actual solutions to get the economy moving.
 
• Republicans and the American people know that Democrats recklessly chose not to write a budget this year, have no plan to prevent trillion dollar deficits from bankrupting future generations, and love to hide behind a so-called “pay-as-you-go” law that doesn’t actually make them pay as they go. We, on the other hand, have a concrete solution to balance the budget.
 
• Republicans and the American people want to protect our economy by ending bailouts, ending too-big-to-fail, and making financial regulation smarter, more nimble, and more effective. The Democrats’ so-called “reform” of the financial sector accomplishes none of this. We, as usual, have a real solution for financial reform that actually tackles the root causes of the crisis.
 
• Republicans and the American people support health care reforms that empower patients without breaking the backs of small businesses. But Democrats rammed through an unpopular bill that raises taxes and other costs on employers in every sector of the economy. We, of course, have a patient-centered solution that doesn’t destroy jobs.
 
Out-of-touch Democrats need a reality check. We’re guessing the American people will give them one in just a few months.

3.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/07/why_the_revolution_will_prevai.html

Why the Revolution Will Prevail and Why It Will Last

Bruce Walker

If Republicans gain the chance, for the first time in history, to pass laws without Democrat support -- because of a potential filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, a working majority in the House, and the presidency -- what will prevent RINOs from gumming up the works? How can a brief two- or four-year period make permanent revolutionary reforms? Don't we need, instead, to amend the Constitution -- repeal the 16th Amendment and the 17th Amendment, for example?

These are all serious and fair questions, but these questions present no real obstacles. Consider RINOs. Will they stop a revolution? No. RINOs are not ideologues (at all). Rather, they fancy themselves "pragmatists." What RINOs really want is popularity, power, and prestige. However, popularity in the eyes of the leftist establishment is increasingly meaningless. Newspapers, news magazines, and network news are withering on the vine. Hollywood's left-wing lecturing films draw no audiences. Besides, as McCain found out during 2008, the fawning leftist media does not like or trust RINOs at all. 

If Republicans led by conservatives run Congress and the White House, then RINOs can have a bit of power and a smidgen of prestige, but only if they are willing to support conservatives in the critical area of parliamentary procedure. That is all conservatives need. Let Susan Collins, for example, vote against a bill which provides revolutionary devolution of power over education away from Washington and education bureaucrats and directly to parents and to students. She can support Republicans in invoking cloture on the bill, saying, "I am not sure that I can support this bill, but I at least think that the Senate should vote on it." She supports cloture but votes against our bill on the floor -- and we win. We can also let RINOs get some of their small pet projects passed, which could happen only if the conservative majority in the caucus wished it so. RINOs have been hypocrites to us: They will just as quickly be hypocrites to an impotent but angry left.

The reforms passed in the period of true power must not be half-measures, and they must not require future fine-tuning. Instead, the reforms must be utterly transformative. As one example, granting parents a voucher to allow them to educate their child through public, private, charter, or home schooling and, critically, removing all subject matter jurisdiction from all federal courts on the constitutionality of this act, would gut the public education empire -- and it would be immensely popular with both students and parents. Private industry would compete aggressively for these vouchers, creating a permanent vested interest by millions of Americans in keeping this reform in place.

Wouldn't Democrats just repeal this reform when they had power? No, because the only times that Democrats have had the power to repeal or to pass laws were in those tiny windows of unchecked power -- FDR, LBJ, post-Watergate Carter, and Obama until Scott Brown. It requires very little muscle to stop new federal laws. Control of either House of Congress is enough; control of the White House and only 34% of either house is enough; control of 41% of the Senate is enough. It is incredibly difficult to pass a federal law, which includes repeal of an earlier federal law, against even a weak minority.

Shouldn't we amend the Constitution instead? Repeal the Income Tax Amendment. Provide that state legislatures once again choose senators. Change the Constitution so that our liberty will never be in jeopardy again. These are good ideas, but amending the Constitution is politically impossible for truly revolutionary reforms. Amendment requires not simply a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress, but ratification by three-quarters of the state legislatures. A foe of the proposed amendment who controls 13 of the 99 state legislative chambers can block confirmation of a proposed amendment.

But there is another problem with just amending our way to freedom.  Even then, any new constitutional amendment simply becomes putty in the hands of jurists like future Justice Elena Kagan. The 14th Amendment provides for equal protection of the laws, which the Supreme Court has interpreted as unequal protection of the laws. The Constitution, as it is, already protects our liberty. The left, though, just ignores the Constitution. 

We can pass a dozen or so revolutionary reforms, though, in a hundred days, if we have the three elements of a filibuster-proof Senate, a working House majority, and a president -- and a clear, uncompromising agenda. Because the left feasts on the rotting tissue of the secular nanny-state, one purpose of these reforms must be to starve these carrion birds. Allowing vouchers for education, for example, would improve education, but it would also drain the life out of the political giant of leftist establishment education. That reform -- and others would operate in much the same way -- would not only make America work better, but it would inflict a mortal wound upon the existing power structure that the left has built over the last eighty years.  

What must be done is this: (1) Conservatives must agree on the precise language of the dozen or so reforms which will be passed, and that language must not change; (2) these must be appealing to most Americans, as the Contract With America was in 1994; (3) the reforms must each create genuine, revolutionary change which will continue until -- in the unlikely event -- the left ever has gargantuan political power again; (4) we must put aside, for now, our justified anger at RINOs or any other group of prettified, phony pomposities whose help may be needed, as revolutions are won by shrewdly using potential, even dubious, allies; and (5) we must grab the coming, brief, historic chance.

Bruce Walker is the author of two books: Sinisterism: Secular Religion of the Lie and The Swastika against the Cross: The Nazi War on Christianity.

 

Saturday's Web

Political Truth and Fact.Com

Neither fair nor balanced, but absolutely factual

Opinion:
Watching Alan Colmes squirm and struggle to defend the far left corruption of today/’s media and undisguised support of liberal politics

Liberal political pundit, Alan Colmes,  tried to argue with felloe Fox News Anchor, Megyn Kelly and he had his head handed him – to be fair, Colmes was trapped trying to defend a position that has no ethical defense.

He attempted was in denial of the far left corruption of the mainstream media, and denied its conscious scheming to support liberal Democrats at the expense of conservatives.  No intelligent person would attempt to defend the professional integrity of a vast majority of today’s “journalism”.

Colmes was taking a swipe and Sharron Angel, the GOP candidate facing Democrat Senate Leader, Harry Reid.  Angel held a news conference this week, but (wisely) departed without taking questions.  That led Colmes into his first trap.  He spewed a tirade of disgust in which he claimed Angel was obligated to take questions from reporters.

Sorry, Alan, either you are taking a strictly Democrat swing at a candidate you don’t support, or you are rather stupid about campaigns.

When a candidate faces a predictably negative (probably quite unfair) onslaught from hostile reporters, the candidate has no obligation to put himself or herself in peril. Sorry, Alan, that’s not the way things have to work.  As Butch Cassidy noted, there are no rules in a knife fight.

Republican candidates are almost always in a knife fight when they face reporters from the Mainstream Media.

Among reporters covering the Nevada Senate race, there is a host who are bitterly partisan, and who conspire to develop attack themes and strategies that are specifically intended to trip up or trap the candidate into saying or doing something that can be used to hurt the GOP campaign.

That is why there is more paid political television commercials these days. Buying TV time and using it to put forth the campaign’s themes, positions, and promises, is vital.  It’s the only way most Republican candidates can get an honest shot at making a point, or expressing view on issues without facing twisting and distortion by liberal media operatives..

This perception – an obvious political fact – sent Colmes into a tirade in which he claimed a candidate for the Senate MUST “meet the press” (pun intended).  Colmes is wrong.  A candidate controls the campaign and accepts and declines invitations and opportunities to speak, based on strategy.

A candidate who avoids the media takes a risk, but the risk is a legitimate political option.

The rule is, “work from strength toward weakness”.  Savvy campaign managers thus work and plan to get candidates before friendly audiences then move toward voters likely to be undecided.  In campaigns managed by real professionals, candidates may never face hostile audiences.
 
Colmes disagrees – he recoiled in horror (presumed to be mock horror) at the suggestion by Megyn Kelly that a high degree of corruption and conspired political partisanship exists in today’s media.

Proof of that conspiracy came this week from the blog of Tucker Carlson (The Daily Caller), revealing emails circulated within several hundred reporters, pundits, and academicians.  The emails admitted strategizing about how attacks on Sarah Palin’s handicapped child might be used without generating sympathy.  The tactic was to claim her campaigning for Vice President – with such a child at home – proved her “family values” issue was hypocritical.

That the tactic adopted by members of the liberal group was sleazy and despicable, goes without saying.  Colmes was quite clumsy in trying to argue out of being forced to defend the indefensible.

The group called Journolist, even promoted a strategy for defending Obama from his close association with his pastor of 20 years, the racist, anti-American bigot, Jeremiah Wright.

The “Journolists” determined the best line of attack was to ignore Wright, and accuse any conservative it could name, with being a racist. Forget truth or fact, just scream “racist”. Of course, it’s quite difficult for anyone to prove themselves to NOT be racist.  This is especially true, if the several hundred writers in that conspiracy all join in the accusation as the Journolist conspiracy demanded.

Colmes, stung by facts, struggled to fight back, contending those on the list had a right to an opinion.  Of course, Colmes knew the defense was  specious.  Perhaps Colmes lacks the professional knowledge or experience to grasp Kelly’s point.

Everyone does have such a right, but those who report news without labeling such products as “opinions” are dishonest.  Such people have made the term “honest journalism” an oxymoron.  They have disgraced a once honorable  profession and defiled the concept.

Colmes challenged Kelly to name a reporter on the list who is guilty of the corruption.  The challenge was absurd and signaled Colme’s utter desperation.

Identifying those in the media reflecting the conspiracy’s corruption is simple.  90% of all American daily news papers are left wing corrupted, and all over-the-air television network news operations are similarly corrupt.  They often distort and sometimes even lie.  CNN and MSNBC are especially  corrupted, but their audiences are waning thus their importance is limited.

Colmes was flustered, befuddled, and defeated.  He was a far left adherent with his back to the wall and totally whipped.  The defeat was clear and uncontestable.

It is a wonder he didn’t accuse Kelly of being a racist.  Must have slipped his mind.

Buddy
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The Day’s top political news:

CNN Host Calls for Crackdown on 'Bloggers' in Wake of Sherrod Incident: 'Something’s Going to Have to be Done Legally'

Anchors Kyra Phillips and John Roberts discussed the "mixed blessing of the internet," and agreed that there should be a crackdown on anonymous bloggers who disparage others on the internet.Roberts said. "Imagine what would have happened if we hadn't taken a look at what happened with Shirley Sherrod and plumbed the depths further and found out that what had been posted on the internet was not in fact reflective of what she said." The anchors suggested there is a need to have “a gatekeeper” to police Internet content.

An absurd idea, of course, and CNN is among the most flagrant originators of false information including one documentary slandering American troops by claiming they had used poison gas, or, perhaps postings from their Baghdad bureau and its cozy arrangement with Saddam – “a discouraging word never was heard”.

(NOTE: Of course, integrity could be maintained by the mainstream media – busted this week for conspiring to employ despicable tactics to support far left candidates such as Obama.  The hundreds of participants in that media plot make the term “honest journalism” an ozymoron. Since the Internet provides a counter viewpoint, CNN and other liberal extremists, just cant stand it.)

Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/alana-goodman/2010/07/23/cnn-host-calls-crackdown-bloggers-wake-sherrod-incident-something-s-g#ixzz0ubc6JHLL

White House predicts record $1.47 trillion deficit

New estimates from the White House now predicts the budget deficit will reach $1.47 trillion this year – a new record.. The government is borrowing 41 cents of every dollar it spends.

The new estimates paint a grim unemployment picture as the economy experiences a relatively jobless recovery. The unemployment rate, presently averaging 9.5 percent, would average 9 percent next year under the new estimates.

The Office of Management and Budget report has ominous news for President Barack Obama should he seek re-election in 2012 — a still-high unemployment rate of 8.1 percent. That would be well above normal, which is closer to a rate of 5.5 percent to 6 percent. Private economists don't think the unemployment rate will drop to those levels until well into this decade.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100723/ap_on_bi_ge/us_budget_deficit_2

Far left Democrat, Charles Rangel Pleads for Time in the case involving his tax evasion case

In his first news conference since learning his fellow lawmakers would put up him on trial for ethics violations, Representative Charles B. Rangel urged his constituents and the press to be patient, saying he would not address the specifics of the charges against him until the proceedings begin next week.

But Mr. Rangel, who snapped at reporters in Washington on Thursday, appeared determined to strike a softer tone at Friday’s appearance, even offering a public apology to one reporter, Luke Russert, whose question on Thursday — about whether the charges would cost the congressman his job — Mr. Rangel dismissed as “dumb.”

Probe of Rangel has dragged on for many months.  Rangel is always eager to raise taxes, but evidence suggests he does all he can to avoid paying his own.  He headed the tax writing Committee of Congress until the heat got too much even for Democrats and he was forced to step down during prosecution efforts.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/23/rangel-speaks-and-asks-for-time/?hp

Top Blogs:

1.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/07/a_war_amongst_ourselves.html

President Haters

J.R. Dunn
 
 "I'll make those ******s glad to mutate."
  -- Franklin D. Roosevelt in Roosevelt after Inauguration by William Burroughs

William Burroughs will never be an icon of the conservative movement. A proud junkie, an aggressive homosexual, a leader of both the Beat movement and the Counterculture, a man who shot his wife by "accident" while playing a party game, Burroughs was if anything the polar opposite of the conservative ideal.

But there was one element of Burroughs' thought not altogether alien to conservatives: his opinion of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Relatively late in his career, Burroughs published a short piece titled Roosevelt after Inauguration, which featured FDR swaggering around Washington (this is fiction, remember) wearing a purple toga and accompanied by a gang of killer baboons whom he sends after his enemies. The story climaxes with the massacre of the Supreme Court by the baboons, whereupon FDR gazes contemplatively across the Potomac at the country now lying at his feet and utters the line quoted above.

What inspired Burroughs to embark on this exercise in nastiness remains unclear. He himself claimed that he was promised a high position in the St. Louis sewer department only to be denied it by New Deal do-gooders, but this may be only part of the legend. Whatever the case, Roosevelt after Inauguration remains one of the purest expressions of political hatred ever put into writing. If every foul attack made over the years against Nixon, Reagan, Gingrich, Bush, Cheney, and Palin were rolled into one, the result would not match a single paragraph. Roosevelt after Inauguration is a masterpiece of political scurrility.

Which brings us to Barack Obama.

Two weeks ago, the White House informed the state of Oklahoma that it could expect no federal aid to help deal with the damage caused by recent flooding. There was no explanation, no expression of sympathy, no offer of alternatives.

Last week, it was revealed that NASA's new mission will be centered on making Muslims "feel good" about their scientific achievements of roughly a millennium in the past. This comes right on the heels of the cancellation of the Constellation program, which employed tens of thousands and promised to put the U.S. back into space in a big way.

At roughly the same time, J. Christian Adams, a former Department of Justice attorney, revealed that the voter harassment case against the New Black Panthers had been dropped for purely racist reasons, and that the word had come down to "never bring another lawsuit against a black or other national minority, no matter what they do."

While this doesn't match killer baboons, it'll do until Obama gets his pack trained.

Consider these actions. If anyone during the 2008 had implied, or even speculated, that Obama was capable of anything of the sort, he'd have been dismissed as a demagogue, a hater, even a lunatic. But today, after his abandonment of the state of Tennessee (also wracked by flooding), his betrayal of the Georgians, his pulling the rug out from under the Poles and Czechs, his dragging and cold response to the Gulf blowout, his insults to the UK, the GOP, the Supreme Court, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Dalai Lama, it scarcely raises a shrug. That's Obama. That's how he acts -- with arrogance, superciliousness, and indifference. We can search the entire roster of American presidents, and we will not find a match. This is not the behavior of an elected chief executive; it's the conduct of a divine right monarch, and a pretty inadequate one as well.

Conduct of this sort inevitably produces a reaction -- contempt from equals, and hatred from victims. Obama has created a lot of victims in eighteen months of power, and that reaction has been growing. In plain fact, Obama is on his way to becoming the most hated president of the modern epoch. More so than Roosevelt, more so than Nixon, more so than Bush -- keep in mind that W. was truly hated only by the hard left. With steady and unrelenting pressure over a period of six years, the left did succeed in planting doubts and discomfort in the country as a whole. But never extending to actual hatred.

Obama is different. In part because of the way he was so relentlessly hyped during his ascension to office, and the way he played along with it, toying with the public's expectations and transparently enjoying his status as demigod. But he is no longer the godling of legend, the Illinois messiah here to lead us to a left-wing Eden. He is merely a community organizer in over his head. The blowback triggered by disappointments of such depth can be ferocious. FDR was never foolish enough to make promises on this level (listen to his 1933 inaugural speech), and it served him well over three full terms. Obama was, and now he must pay the piper.

Obama is hated for a good reason -- for causing unnecessary suffering to no purpose. A president must cause grief and pain; in this fallen world, he has no choice. He must and he will make decisions that hurt people. Hard decisions, decisions that kill. This is one of the reasons that presidents age so swiftly. The classic case here is Lincoln. No president caused more bloodshed and sorrow than Lincoln. No president suffered more for it, as much as it was done in a good and transcendent cause. The result is apparent in his photographs, the somber but healthy figure about to take office transformed into the wraith of 1865, with his haunted eyes and skin stretched parchment-tight across the bones of his face.

But the suffering generated by the reign of Obama is unnecessary and uncalled for, as any short examination will reveal:

The economy - Obama has made the same errors as FDR in his first term, without FDR's charm and earnestness to make up for it. Without even grasping that they were errors, for that matter. Of course, giving most of the stimulus money to the same financial industry that kicked off the crash was a brilliant ploy. We have to admit that worked.

The Border - A state under siege attempts to reimpose order through accepted legal means and Obama's response is to unleash Eric Holder, the only person in the country (possibly even the galaxy) more arrogant than he. This is going to haunt him.
  
Health care - Even now, the chicks are coming home. The system is starting to go, four years before anything will be ready to replace it. A former colleague of mine was told this week that her doctor will no longer accept Medicare. She lives in New York City, not friendly to Medicare patients in the best of times. She is understandably distraught. That story is being repeated across country in thousands -- perhaps hundreds of thousands -- of cases. And what is O's Plan B? You tell me.

The Gulf - during the worst ecological disaster of the era, as all levels of his administration repeatedly fumbled the ball, Obama golfed, partied, listened to Paulie Beatle, and went on vacation no less than three times. Let them eat cake!

In direct consequence of these actions and countless others, Obama has become a hated man. That hatred will only grow.

What would the prudent man do? He'd put away his purple robes, give up his grand schemes, cease the bullying and arrogance, and simply try to get through the next two years without civil disorder or other forms of ugliness. But Obama is not a prudent man. Nor are the members of his personal baboon pack -- Emmanuel, Axelrod and the rest.

So to avoid a state of permanent crisis, it will be necessary to dismantle the Obama presidency while it still exists. The new Congress will put a halt to much of the programs already in motion, and must also move to assure that the levers of power are moved out of Obama's reach. The Supreme Court will step in regarding a number of questionable decisions and programs. The sheer pressure of democratic checks and balances, so blithely ignored by Obama up until now, will begin to squeeze like a vise.

His own cronies, with no honor among them, will peel off as the downward spiral becomes evident. They will move to save themselves -- cut their deals, make their testimony, cop their pleas. We will learn a lot we don't now know about why certain decisions were made. The collapse will accelerate.

Thanks to the Gulf blowout, we know that Obama's crisis mode is to retreat. And retreat he will, until he can retreat no further. Eventually he will become a ghost in his own White House, querulous and isolated, afraid to go out among his own people. In the end, he may well become the first president forced to live in foreign exile. And this is the best he can expect. 

It will not be an easy period. The Iranians, the Chinese, and the Jihadis will take what advantage they can. All the figures Obama has so assiduously courted, everyone he bowed to, will simply stand aside. Contempt felt for a ruler extends as a matter of course to his country, and we cannot avoid that. Regaining international respect will take time, and it will not happen under this regime.

But it's far from hopeless. Those of us who lived through Watergate are aware that this country prevails even when the leadership is derelict. America is resilient, Americans at their best amid crises. America's "decline" is situational, not permanent. We can look forward to a period of renewal when it's all over and we've cleared away the Styrofoam columns. A lot of illusions will be dead, a lot of worthless ideas exposed. Those who hold them will be have to come to terms with the fact that no, Americans will never be glad to "mutate".

And who will be Obama's Burroughs? Who will be the one to define him for all time with a few well-chosen, vicious words? We may have to wait -- it took Burroughs himself nearly forty years. But we can be sure of one thing -- a lot of people will be trying. I'd give it a shot myself, but you know... I'm not sure I'm enough of a hater.

J.R. Dunn is consulting editor of American Thinker and editor of the forthcoming Military Thinker.

2.

http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=181865

Obama adviser: U.S. 'ideal place for renewal of Islam'

Religion aide closely linked to imam seeking to build Ground Zero mosque

Aaron Klein
© 2010 WorldNetDaily

Eboo Patel

A religion adviser to President Obama has close ties to the imam who wants to build a 13-story Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero. The two have been documented together discussing America as "the ideal place for a renewal of Islam," WND has learned.

In February, Obama named a Chicago Muslim, Eboo Patel, to his Advisory Council on Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Patel is the founder and executive director of Chicago-based Interfaith Youth Core, which says it promotes pluralism by teaming people of different faiths on service projects.

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the controversial Muslim leader behind the plan to build the Islamic center and mosque two blocks from Ground Zero, wrote the afterword to Patel's 2006 book, "Building the Interfaith Youth Movement: Beyond Dialogue to Action."

Patel is listed as one of 15 "Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow" on the website for the American Society for the Advancement of Muslims, or ASAM, which is led by Rauf.

In Patel's 2007 book, "Saving Each Other, Saving Ourselves," he recounts discussing with Rauf the future of Islam in the U.S.

Rauf "understood the vision immediately and suggested that I visit him and his wife, Daisy Khan, at their home the following evening," Patel recalled.

Khan founded the ASAM with her husband and has aided him in his plans for the mosque near Ground Zero.

"The living room of their apartment on the Upper West Side was set up like a mosque, with prayer rugs stretched from wall to wall," wrote Patel in his book.

Continued Patel: "I arrived at dusk, prayed the maghrib prayer with Daisy and Imam Feisal and then talked with them about how America, with its unique combination of religious devotion and religious diversity, was the ideal place for a renewal of Islam."

"In the twentieth century, Catholicism and Judaism underwent profound transformations in America," Rauf observed. "I think, this century, in America, Islam will do the same."

Patel boasts of a "critical mass" of Muslims in the U.S.

"Islam is a religion that has always been revitalized by its migration," he wrote. "America is a nation that has been constantly rejuvenated by immigrants. There is now a critical mass of Muslims in America."

Patel last March wrote a Huffington Post piece referring to Obama's former "green jobs" czar Van Jones as a "faith hero."

"In my last post on Van, I called him an American patriot," wrote Patel. "That is high praise in my book. But watching Van's speech at the NAACP, I have another title for him, one that I reserve for the true giants of history. Van Jones is a faith hero."

Jones resigned in September after it was exposed he founded a communist revolutionary organization and signed a statement that accused the Bush administration of possible involvement in the 9/11 attacks. Jones also called for "resistance" against the U.S.

Jones previously stated his advocacy for green jobs was part of a broader movement to destroy the U.S. capitalist system.

WND reported that one day after the 9/11 attacks, Jones led a vigil that expressed solidarity with Arab and Muslim Americans as well as what he called the victims of "U.S. imperialism" around the world.

Rauf, meanwhile, has caused a stir with his proposed $100 million, 13-story Islamic cultural center and mosque near the corner of Park Place and West Broadway.

Rauf sparked controversy earlier this month when he refused during a live radio interview to condemn violent jihad groups as terrorists. Rauf repeatedly refused on the air to affirm the U.S. designation of Hamas as a terrorist organization or call the Muslim Brotherhood extremists.

The Brotherhood openly seeks to spread Islam around the world, while Hamas is committed to Israel's destruction and is responsible for scores of suicide bombings, shootings and rocket attacks aimed at Jewish civilian population centers.

During the interview, Rauf was also asked who he believes was responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks.

"There's no doubt," stated Rauf. "The general perception all over the world was it was created by people who were sympathetic to Osama bin Laden. Whether they were part of the killer group or not, these are details that need to be left to the law-enforcement experts."

Rauf has been on record several times blaming U.S. policies for the Sept. 11 attacks. He has been quoted refusing to admit Muslims carried out the attacks.

Referring to the Sept. 11 attacks, Rauf told CNN, "U.S. policies were an accessory to the crime that happened. We (the U.S.) have been an accessory to a lot of innocent lives dying in the world. Osama bin Laden was made in the USA."

Madeline Brooks, a reporter who attended a sermon this year by Rauf, quoted the Islamic leader as stating "some people say it was Muslims who attacked on 9/11."

Rauf's 2004 book had two different titles, one in English and the second in Arabic. In the U.S., his book was called "What's right with America is what's right with Islam."

The same book, published in Arabic, bore the name "The Call From the WTC Rubble: Islamic Da'wah From the Heart of America Post-9/11."

With research by Brenda J. Elliott

3.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/07/the_coming_nullification_noncr.html

The Coming Nullification Non-Crisis

D.L. Adams

The radical, and so far ineffectual but significantly costly, programs and policies of the current resident of the White House suggest that a new "Nullification Crisis" will soon be upon us -- not on account of sectional or partisan motives, and this time for the entire nation.

This new Nullification "Crisis" will be measured by how much damage now being caused can be reversed. Our first true Nullification Crisis occurred in 1832 over tariffs and was resolved by political compromises and threats of force against South Carolina by then-President Andrew Jackson.

The 1832 controversy culminated in South Carolina's "Ordnance of Nullification," which nullified specific federal tariffs in that state. Over time, this crisis would set the stage for secession and the American Civil War. It should not be surprising to later analysts that South Carolina was the first state to secede.

It is significant that the state around which Nullification swirled in 1832 was also the first state to declare its independence from the Federal Union in 1860. The rejection of federal authority by South Carolina in 1832 was the dangerous precedent for later comprehensive nullification, which was the 1860 "Ordnance of Secession."

The coming nullification "crisis" will be very different. It will be a national rejection of societal self-destruction. This coming "crisis" will be no crisis at all, but rather a restatement of our national identity and a re-appreciation of our foundational concepts as laid out in our Constitution and Bill of Rights.

"Post-historical" is a popular concept on the American political left. It is the belief that history can be "reset" and that we can escape from historical precedent and context. The fall of Soviet Communism in 1989 validated this concept for many so-called "intellectuals," who have yet to repudiate it. They will eventually have no option -- because it is not true.

The next presidential election should be about nothing short of nullification: review, re-assessment, and repeal (when necessary) of almost every foreign policy and domestic initiative of the current administration. The opposition candidate should propose during the upcoming campaign, and follow through during his/her term(s) in office, that all laws passed during this administration be reviewed for constitutionality and practical/fiscal feasibility and overturned/nullified/repealed through a rapid repeal process via Congress.

This reversal would also involve foreign policy initiatives including the negative posture toward our traditional allies, specifically Israel, and our new genuflection toward Islamic states, their ideology, and their self-aggrandizing purposes.

Our two current costly wars must be rapidly reexamined by the new leadership in light of the constitutions of both Iraq and Afghanistan, which proclaim that both are Islamic states under Islamic law. Islamic law is fundamentally and diametrically opposed to our concepts of freedom, justice, and tolerance. If and when we declare "victory" in either or both wars, what can success look like when both states are founded upon Islamic Sharia? "Victory" would then be failure; this inverted situation should be entirely unacceptable and a terrible scandal for every American.

Our national unemployment rate continues to hover at 10% almost a year after trillions were spent on economic "stimulus."

The so-called "health care bill" represents a restructuring of health care insurance and access over which few are sanguine; the fact that few lawmakers claim to have read the thousands of pages in the bill prior to casting their "in favor" votes should cause great alarm. The so-called "health care bill" must be reviewed and repealed in its entirety if necessary, and the process of health care reform must be restarted to reach a rational and equitable and affordable conclusion.

Our immigration and border laws must be enforced. States that enforce these laws on their own, like Arizona, to secure their borders must be applauded and supported for doing the critically important work that the federal authority is mandated to do -- but is not doing.

The failure of the federal government to secure the Arizona border in particular, especially during time of war, is a potentially disastrous situation and is certainly a constitutional crisis, though few apparently now see it as such.

The tepid response by our political leadership to the greatest ecological disaster in American history in the Gulf of Mexico with vacations, golf outings, and other fun activities while Americans in the region lose their livelihoods and the environment is destroyed is indicative of a fundamental disconnect between leadership and the people. Self-indulgent, distracted leaders undermine our democracy.

The election of 2012 will be the next Nullification "Crisis"; a redemptive non-crisis created out of real crises.

We should have effective health care and better availability; we should have rational foreign policy; we should have economic recovery and growth; we should and must have justice and opportunity for Americans and for our friends; we must have secure borders and enforced immigration laws. These things we must and can have within a constitutional framework.

The opposition candidate in our next presidential election should reestablish our national connection with our Constitution and Bill of Rights. The new "nullification movement" should be a renewal of respect for the Constitution and its importance in American life and government. We are obligated by our history and are responsible to future generations, as well as to people today, to firmly uphold our foundational concepts and the guarantees of liberty which they promise.

The opposition candidate who is a nullifier, a "repealer," and a constitutionalist will touch a deep chord in the hearts of all rational Americans and will win the election. There is a deep connection between the American people and their Constitution not now apparently understood by the majority of our leadership.

The new Nullification Non-Crisis will not be a crisis at all -- it will likely be a celebration of our Constitution and foundational documents, and the ideas of freedom, justice, and opportunity for all that they represent.

DL Adams is an analyst and historian. Mr. Adams is Contributing Editor at New English Review and Family Security Matters. His work has appeared in American Thinker and The Washington Times.

.

Friday's Web

Political Truth and Fact.Com

Neither fair nor balanced, but absolutely factual

Opinion:
Democrats refuse to give up their radical schemes such as Public Option health care and the Cap and Trade scam that could mean $8 a gallon gasoline

Liberal Democrats replicate the demon robots of the “Terminator” movies – rising from the dead again and again – except Democrat threats of horror are real.  Far too real.

Even as normal Americans begin breathing sighs of relief at news the radical Cap and Trade bill is being shelved by Democrat Senate Leader Harry Reid, a warning comes from those noting that, in the wake of November’s election, Democrats will still hold dominating majorities in both Houses of Congress and can thus shove through truly bad and ruinous legislation until the new Congress arrives in mid to late January.

One of the sagest of political pundits, Charles Krauthammer, notes Obama has squandered his political capital on his radical health care take over, and on the bogus “stimulus” scam.  Thus, liberal politicians are left with only one legislative option: brute force.

Expect such a move to arise post November. Republicans will have only one strategy for protecting America from the renewed liberal surge of extremism: delay, delay, delay.

A substantial majority of Americans oppose the radical health care bill shoved through the House by Nancy Pelosi – after having been drafted behind closed doors in total secrecy by Harry Reid.  It’s a truly bad bill, but the inclusion of the infamous “Public Option”, so adored by the far left, was avoided.

The Public Options, so called, were a devious scheme by liberals to revise American health care by condemning it into a single payer, socialized, system such as has sent thousands of Canadians heading south in desperate attempts to find decent health care.

Socialized medicine, by definition, will always be health care of an inferior quality.

Now comes word of a new far left strategy – an unorthodox proposal from the shadows of last year's debate.  Again, there are threats of a "public option."

As the Denver Post reports, “The idea of creating a government health-insurance program was roundly rejected last year, but the 128 House Democrats pushing to reconsider the idea are now advancing the argument that it would help hold down federal spending.

“Their bill, which faces long odds, would allow Americans who do not get insurance at work to choose a government plan for their health coverage starting in 2014.”

As if sufficient doubt and suspicion does not already exist regarding the scheme, check its sponsors:Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey – a radical Democrat from California – and her Fellow far left California Democrat, Pete Stark, who starred in youtube videos a few days back as he stupidly insulted tea party members.  Stark showed he had nothing but disdain for ordinary Americans.

The Post reports Stark, Woolsey and their allies are using a new analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. It projects the public option could save the federal government $68 billion between 2014 and 2020, according to Democrats.

So far, the scheme has not garnered much credibility or wide support, but, as with the Terminator and other movie monsters, it can always find a way of returning.

As Rasmussen research proves, a majority of Americans support repeal of the Democrat Health scheme.  Such repeal should be a high priority should Republicans win back control of the House and Senate.

Buddy

The day’s top political news:

Rangel trial looms after secret talks break down

An unexpected announcement that the House ethics committee would begin a trial on ethics charges leveled against Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.) comes after a secret, months-long effort to settle the case fell apart, according to several sources close to the situation.

The negotiations were designed to avoid the extraordinary spectacle of a trial by his peers for Rangel, but they broke down when the parties in the discussions – Republicans and Democrats on the ethics committee, and Rangel himself – couldn’t reach an agreement.

Due the sensitive nature of the discussions, no one involved in the talks wanted to openly discuss them, but the conditions for a settlement included a public apology by Rangel for his ethical transgressions in exchange for lesser sanctions against the Harlem Democrat and an end to the case. Republican aides say Rangel faces the possibility of a formal reprimand by the House or possibly even a censure motion, although Democrats said it was premature to discuss what punishment will be recommended by the ethics committee.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0710/40136.html#ixzz0uVcTBAbu

Geithner: Taxes on Wealthiest to Rise

The Obama administration will allow tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans to expire on schedule, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Thursday, setting up a clash with Republicans and a small but vocal group of Democrats who want to delay the looming tax increases.

Mr. Geithner said the White House would allow taxes on top earners to increase in 2011 as part of an effort to bring down the U.S. budget deficit. He said the White House plans to extend expiring tax cuts for middle- and lower-income Americans, and expects to undertake a broader revision of the tax code next year.

His comments came as a number of Democrats, among them North Dakota Sen. Kent Conrad, have begun agreeing with Republicans and some economists who want to extend the Bush-era tax cuts for all earners, including couples earning above $250,000 and individuals earning above $200,000. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut independent, added his voice on Thursday, saying through a spokesman that he was "concerned about the impact of allowing the tax cuts to expire during our fragile economic recovery."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703467304575383131306753688.html?mod=WSJ_WSJ_US_News_5

Cap and Trade threat fades, blame game begins among liberals

Barack Obama took office pledging to deal with a “planet in peril.” Democrats in the House answered by passing a tough, infamous cap-and-trade bill. A massive climate conference in Copenhagen, with Obama at the center of the action, focused the world on the myths and fantasies of man made global warming.

Then came the nation’s worst-ever environmental disaster, an oil spill in the Gulf that put momentum behind environmentalists and scarred the image of big, polluting industries.

But by Thursday, the White House’s biggest energy and environmental initiative sat in tatters, relegated to an unknown election-year abyss after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said he didn’t yet have 60 votes and would instead move to the lowest hanging energy fruit.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0710/40132.html#ixzz0uVgq1wWj

Top Blogs:

1.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/07/delegitimizing_liberalism_1.html
 

Delegitimizing Liberalism

J. Robert Smith
 
Five decades after liberalism began to fail, it's still with us and finding potent ways to diminish liberty. Liberalism has -- or seems to have -- more lives than a cat. It's sustained principally by two things, both powerful: myth and interest. If liberalism as a political and societal force is ever to be marginalized, it first must be separated from the myth that it grows in the same garden of liberty and republican virtues as conservatism and libertarianism. Voters and the public need to learn and appreciate that liberalism is largely a statist creed alien to the nation's heritage.
 
Within the Tea Party movement, this message has resonated. But the challenge is to spread this message into broader communities, where the independent-minded and the independent voter have little or no familiarity with the argument that liberalism has never been moored to founding principles.
 
It's through myth that liberalism draws much of its legitimacy. Much of the myth is that liberalism partakes in a common heritage with the aforementioned conservatism and libertarianism (classical liberalism). We are, as liberals would like Americans to believe, all sons and daughters of the revolution; we share broadly in the principles that founded the nation. 
 
But this is untrue. Liberalism's roots are in the middle to late 19th century, not in the late 1700s. It owes far more to Hegel, Marx, and Darwin than it does to Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton. Hamilton and the Federalists may have desired more energetic government, but they would react with jaw-dropping revulsion at today's statist liberalism. Modern liberalism, which is increasingly a captive of the hard left, is more and more a Marxist construct. 
 
Liberalism is a rejection of the belief that there are universal and enduring truths. It's rooted in relativism and historicism, or the beliefs that truth is situational and changes throughout history and that human nature is malleable. And beginning in the middle to late 20th century, liberalism's march leftward divorced itself from the belief that Providence is the wellspring of liberty and the rights of man.
 
The great misapprehension by conservatives and freedom-loving Americans has been that liberalism's manifest failures, and conservatism's conspicuous successes, would marginalize liberalism (such was the prevailing conviction with the Carter debacle and Reagan's ascendancy). Empiricism was believed to the antidote to infectious liberalism. But such has not been the case. 
 
Liberalism's claim to compassion, fairness, and equality (of result) resonates with a good portion of the electorate and the public. But, tellingly, liberals have always claimed that they aim to create a more compassionate, fairer, and equal society without diminishing the birthright of liberty. Liberals stoutly deny that consolidating power in a central government to achieve their ends tramples the Founders' intent -- or, moreover, that it reduces freedom. 
 
Most liberals still praise Washington, Jefferson, and Jackson while seeking to increase government and arrange a less free society. But liberalism has always been a silent repudiation of the Founders and founding principles -- and a hypocrisy. From the earliest days, liberals twisted themselves into pretzels trying to rationalize and justify their statism as one with the revolution and founding. When liberals can't persuade Americans that their beliefs square with those of the Founders, they fall to sophistry. 
 
Anyone who has sat through an undergraduate class in political science, political philosophy, or history has been subjected to the argument that there are such things as "negative" and "positive" freedom. However elegant or clever the arguments, there's nothing positive, nor is freedom regarded, when government uses the law and the implicit threat of force to achieve redistributionist ends. Forcibly taking from one person to enhance the "freedom" of another prostitutes the principle of freedom. 
 
Is there really any doubt among honest men and women how Jefferson and Madison would view today's government overreach and mangling of the Constitution? Would these men see liberalism as benevolent or dangerous? Freedom-giving or freedom-taking? 
 
As Thomas Jefferson wrote simply: "I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive."
 
The other fallback argument liberals make when confronted with their hypocrisy is truer from their standpoint. They argue that the Founders were right in their time, but the times changed. America at its founding was a raw nation of modest coastal commerce, little manufacturing, farmers, and frontier. Limited, decentralized government worked because it was a better fit for the nation as it was.
 
But with the industrial revolution, with the great influx of immigrants, America changed. Complexity came to the nation with industrialization and population diversity, and so government had to change fundamentally to meet the needs of the new America. Government needed to assume more of a role in the regulation of commerce; it had to attend to the welfare, betterment, and assimilation of immigrants. Government had to erase inequities amongst all Americans.
 
The argument that a complex America needed greater government, more centralization, and control in Washington reveals a convolution of reason and liberal conceit. If anything, complexity begs more freedom, not less. Simplicity is more susceptible to control. By that understanding, infant America should have been more amenable to strong central government. The notion that a complex America is better-run by a relative handful of Washington politicians and bureaucrats would be farcical if it weren't proving to be such a liability and danger to liberty.
 
Make no mistake; the Founders would utterly repudiate statist liberalism. After all, the men who made a revolution and then made a nation did so explicitly rejecting the statism of the day: monarchy. One need only read Jefferson and Madison, especially, to appreciate their fear of tyranny developing in the emerging national government. The Founders would be leading the opposition -- one thinks fiercely -- to Mr. Obama and the left.
 
In the American experience, while liberals have no legitimate claim to the Founders, they do have their ancestors. Modern liberalism is the descendant of early-20th-century progressivism, which was embodied by Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and yes, Teddy Roosevelt (progressivism enjoyed favor in both parties then -- at least portions of both). Roughly, Wilson is the liberals' Jefferson, while FDR is their Washington. But to read anything of Wilson's thoughts and ideas about government and its relationship to the people is to read a man who is nearly the antithesis of Jefferson.   
 
Today, we are a nation divided; a nation, if you will, of two peoples with distinctly different heritages -- politically, at least. Liberty-loving Americans have Locke, Montesquieu, Blackstone, and Adam Smith, while statist liberals have Marx, Hegel, and Darwin -- and, lest we forget, Saul Alinsky. Freedom-loving Americans embrace the Founders, while statist liberals have Wilson and FDR. A solid majority of Americans are lovers of liberty, however. It's they who must be rallied to the great cause of reclaiming lost freedoms and returning government to its proper limited role in a free society. 
 
Contemporary liberals mustn't be permitted to get away with making claims on the Founders or founding principles. The narrative against liberalism must include arguments as to why liberals are deeply divorced from the founding principles that make America truly free. Knowledge is power, and the more Americans are equipped to make right choices at the ballot box and in their daily lives, the greater the chances of marginalizing that century-long deviancy called liberalism.

2.

The New Racial Mess

Victor Davis Hanson
PatriotPost.us

Weren't we supposed to enter a new age of tolerance with the election of President Barack Obama?

His half-black, half-white ancestry and broad support across racial lines suggested that at last Americans judged each other on the content of our characters -- not the color of our skin or our tribal affiliations.

Instead, in just 18 months of the Obama administration, racial discord is growing and relations seem to have been set back a generation.

Black voters are galvanizing behind Obama at a time of rapidly falling support. White independents, in contrast, are leaving Obama in droves.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has claimed that the loosely organized Tea Party includes "racist elements." The National Council of La Raza has ripped the state of Arizona for its new anti-illegal alien legislation. Jesse Jackson characterized aspects of the multimillion-dollar bidding war to acquire basketball superstar LeBron James in terms of masters and slaves. Pundits are arguing whether the fringe racist New Black Panther Party is analogous to the Klan.

In turn, a number of Americans want to know why -- nearly a half-century after the Civil Rights Act, affirmative action and Great Society programs -- some national lobbying organizations still identify themselves by archaic tribal terms such as "colored people" or "La Raza" ("the race") when it would be taboo for other groups to adopt such racial nomenclature.

Indeed, race seems to be the subtext of almost every contemporary issue, from the soaring deficit and government spending to recent presidential appointments and the enforcement of existing immigration law. In times of growing deficits, white people are stereotyped as being angry over supposedly paying higher taxes to subsidize minorities, while minorities are stereotyped as being mostly on the receiving end of entitlements.

Why the escalation of racial tension in the supposed postracial age of Obama?

First, Obama's reputation as a racial healer was largely the creation of the media. In fact, Obama had a number of racially polarizing incidents that probably would have disqualified any other presidential candidate of the past 30 years.

His two-decade apprenticeship at Trinity Church under the racist and anti-Semitic Rev. Jeremiah Wright has never been adequately explained. Obama indulged in racial stereotyping himself when he wrote off the white lower-middle class of Pennsylvania as clueless zealots clinging to their guns, religion and xenophobia.

Obama also characterized his grandmother as a "typical white person" when he implied that her supposed fear of young black males symbolizes the prejudices of the entire white community. Michelle Obama did not help things when, in clumsy fashion, she indicted America as "just downright mean"-- a nation she had not been proud of in her adult life until it embraced the hope and change represented by her husband's candidacy.

Such campaign trash talk did not stop during the first 18 months of the Obama presidency. The race-baiting Van Jones -- the short-lived presidential advisor on "green jobs" -- should never have been appointed. Then, the president himself criticized Cambridge, Mass., police for acting "stupidly" when they arrested his friend, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates.

Then there was the outburst of Attorney General Eric Holder, who blasted America as "a nation of cowards" for not talking more about race on his terms. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor was almost obsessive in self-referencing herself as a "Latina." She also suggested that her racial background and experiences made her "wise" in a way white male colleagues could never be.

Recently, Obama appealed to voters along exclusionary race and gender lines -- not traditional political allegiances -- when he called upon "the young people, African-Americans, Latinos and women, who powered our victory in 2008."

Yet the country passed the old white/black divide years ago. We are a racially diverse society of Asians, blacks, Hispanics, whites, and mixtures of all that and more. In a world of conservative Cubans and liberal whites, race is no longer necessarily a guide to politics.

Who now, exactly, is the racial "Other" deserving of special consideration in hiring and education? A half-Punjabi immigrant whose father owns 500 acres? A three-quarters Puerto Rican who just arrived in New York? A Korean-American son of an orthodontist? The African-American children of a Cabinet official?

The more the president appeals to his base in racial terms, the more his appointees identify themselves as members of a particular tribe, and the more political issues are framed by racial divisions, so all the more such racial obsession creates a backlash among the racially diverse American people.

America has largely moved beyond race. Tragically, our president and a host of his supportive special interests have not.

(C) 2010 TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

3.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/23/us/23arizona.html?_r=1&ref=us

Obama White House attempts to lay out case against Arizona Immigration law

PHOENIX — With just a week remaining before Arizona’s stringent new immigration law is set to take effect, a federal judge in Phoenix heard, for the first time, from Obama administration lawyers urging her to strike down the controversial legislation while dozens of demonstrators argued both sides outside the courthouse.

Gov. Jan Brewer spoke to reporters Thursday after a hearing on Arizona’s new immigration law, which is being challenged by the Justice Department.

As protesters blocked traffic, chanted, sang, yelled and banged on bass drums, lawyers from the Justice Department and for the State of Arizona sparred over whether the law, known locally as SB1070, violates the United States Constitution’s supremacy clause, which says federal law generally trumps state law. The federal judge, Susan R. Bolton, asked pointed questions of both sides, but made no ruling from the bench before adjourning at 3 p.m.

The hearing marked the first opportunity for the Obama administration to explain why it feels Arizona should not be allowed to empower local police to demand some proof of citizenship from people they suspect are illegal immigrants.

Edwin S. Kneedler, the lawyer for the federal government, argued that the federal government has the sole authority to enforce immigration laws under the Constitution and that Arizona was, in essence, establishing its own immigration policy — which in some cases would be stricter than the federal law and does not take into account either humanitarian concerns or the government’s foreign policy goals.

“The regulation of immigration is unquestionably, exclusively, a federal power,” he said.

With Gov. Jan Brewer, who signed and has fervently defended the legislation, sitting in the courtroom, the lawyer representing Arizona, John J. Bouma, asserted that the state law actually mirrors the letter of the federal law, even if that federal law is not enforced fully in practice. He argued the state had every right to ask its peace officers to call up federal authorities and check on a person’s immigration status during routine traffic stops or other arrests, even if it created a headache for federal authorities.

Congressman Spencer Bachus (R-Al) – top Republican on Financial Services Committee – weighs in supporting Arizona

    Bachus was joined by 75 House Members and 5 Senators in signing an amicus brief for the federal district court in Arizona hearing a challenge to the state law filed by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and the Obama Administration.
 
    “The State of Arizona had every right to pass its very reasonable law, and in fact Congress has repeatedly encouraged the states to help enforce federal immigration law.  One of the reasons why we’re at a crisis point with illegal immigration and the drugs and violence rampant along the border is because the federal government has failed to enforce its own laws.  Instead of trying to preempt state law, the Obama Administration should be working cooperatively with the states to secure our border,” Bachus said.
 
    The legal brief, which is attached, argues in part, “The Executive’s power to enforce federal immigration law does not confer the power to preempt state immigration enforcement by choosing, for foreign policy or other reasons, to selectively enforce the laws.”
 
    Congressman Bachus has personally visited the Arizona border to speak with border patrol agents and U.S. citizens who are dealing daily with the problems caused by illegal immigration.  He has sponsored legislation to help stop illegal immigration including the SAVE (Secure America Through Verification and Enforcement) Act and the CLEAR (Clear Law Enforcement for Criminal Alien Removal) Act. 

Thursday's Web

Political Truth and Fact.Com

Neither fair nor balanced, but absolutely factual

Opinion:
The Liberal conspiracy to shout “racist” when facts defeat their arguments

A major tactic of Democrat politicians has revealed itself.  Tersely stated, it is “when your back is to the wall, yell ‘racist’”.

Democrats face major losses this November, so they have adopted a specific tactic of using racism as a political weapon.  No one wants to be called a racist, and it’s a hard charge to defend.  Proving a negative is practically impossible.

“Prove you are not a racist” is a challenge that can leave any politician groping for an answer.

It has been revealed that far left journalists, academicians, and activists, have been conspiring politically.  These liberals were advised to shout “racist” to defend against the on-going videos of Obama’s closest associate, his pastor of 20 years, the Rev.  Jeremiah Wright.  Wright treated his parishioners to regular tirades – obscene rants, hate filled rants preaching hatred of white Americans.  Wright’s rants even condemned America itself.  His damning of America was joined by Wright’s praise of Louis Farrakhan – among the most virulent anti Semitic, racists in today’s public. 

Notably, Obama was directly and frequently linked with Farrakhan in the monthly publication of Wright’s Church.

Obama responded to Wright’s racism and hate speech with a “who me?”  He claimed he never realized his own spiritual advisor is an anti-American race baiter whose sermons were peppered with hatred on a par with a Grand Dragon of the old KKK.

Obama was either lying about being aware of and endorsing Wright’s extremism or admitting he is a fool.  He spend 20 years sitting in a pew in Wright’s Church.  Wright married the Obamas and Christened their children.

Clearly, facts reveal a mentor and closest advisor of Obama to be a raving racist and undisguised bigot.  Liberals were stumped about how they could defend Obama.

Those far left journalists adopted a facile tactic:

According to records obtained by (Tucker Carlson’s)The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.

In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.

We saw that tactic repeated in the NAACP convention.  It lashed out at the Tea Party Movement, accusing it of racism.  The charge is a lie, but it  reflects the adopted defense tactic of the far left journalistic conspiracy..

When Nancy Pelosi, joined by far left members of Congress, rudely shoved their way into Tea Party Protesters opposing the radical health schmes. She was most disappointed no one among the demonstrators responded violently. There were no incidents.  Accordingly, far left Democrats  resorted to the old tactic and created claims of racial slurs – no evidence of any such slurs has been found – and probably cant be.

The bottom line is clear.  The NAACP assaulted the Tea Party movement because that movement is the most effecting political force in America today.  It is also conservative.  How to confront it?  Resort to the old tactic and accuse it of being racist.

In the most recent case of White House racial response – one in which an NAACP member and official in Obama’s Department of Agriculture, was fired because the White House thought she had made a racist statement – it is reveal fear the incident would be used on Fox News, led to intemperate judgement.

Obviously, Fox News has huge power thus liberals will attempt to use their racist strategy against it.

There is no need to condemn such tactics.  Normal Americans see it, and can judge just how sleazy and un-American they are.

Be prepared.  As Democrat fortunes continue to fade, cat calls of racism, and accusations of bigotry, will be hurled from the darkness of unprincipled politics – people who, devoid of honest principle – will do anything to win.

Do not be fooled, and make sure you explain these tactics to friends and relatives who may not know.

America’s future is at stake.

Buddy

The day’s top political news:

The Vast Left-Wing Media Conspiracy Is Uncovered and exposed.

Everyone knew most of the press corps were signed on to supporting  Obama in 2008. Newly released emails show that hundreds of them were actively working to promote him. Hundreds of journalists have gotten together, on an online listserv called JournoList, to promote liberalism and liberal politicians at the expense of traditional journalism.

The emails among the liberal journalists were meant to be private. (Tucker Carlson hasn't revealed how he obtained the emails.) In June, his Daily Caller disclosed a series of emails from David Weigel, then a Washington Post blogger assigned to cover conservatives. His emails showed he loathes conservatives, and he was subsequently fired.

Fred Barnes, who learned this week that he is among those who had been targeted by this conspiracy of liberal journalists, expands on the story and describes the degree to which “honest journalism” has become an oxymoron as might be applied to what is called “the Mainstream Media. Not just corruption – overt conspiracy against their readers and their viewers.  When it comes to Obama “never is heard, a discouraging word”.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704684604575381083191313448.html

Analysis: Race issues beset Obama's "post-racial" presidency

Many supporters of Barack Obama hoped his election as America's first black president might herald an era of post-racial politics, but race has been an issue his administration just can't seem to avoid.Division and tension between black and white Americans has cropped up repeatedly over Obama's 18 months in office, hurting his popularity and distracting from his political agenda.

The issue surfaced this week when the Agriculture Department pushed a black official to resign after allegations she discriminated against a white farmer, only to apologize a day later for acting too quickly and without the facts.Some said the White House was too eager to prove to its critics on the right that it does not favor blacks.

Racial problems have primarily come from Democrats and other Obama supporters, not from his opponents.  Additionally the recent racist dust up reveals how much the Obama WQhite House fears Fox News and its commentators.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE66K6JN20100721

Gallup: Congress Ranks Last in Confidence in Institutions

The Fifty percent of those polled, having "little"/"no" confidence in Congress reading is a record high according to the Gallup Organization headquartered at Princeton.

Gallup's 2010 Confidence in Institutions poll finds Congress ranking dead last out of the 16 institutions rated this year. Eleven percent of Americans say they have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in Congress, down from 17% in 2009 and a percentage point lower than the previous low for Congress, recorded in 2008.

Underscoring Congress' image problem, half of Americans now say they have "very little" or no confidence in Congress, up from 38% in 2009 -- and the highest for any institution since Gallup first asked this question in 1973. Previous near-50% readings include 48% found for the presidency in 2008, and 49% for the criminal justice system in 1994.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/141512/Congress-Ranks-Last-Confidence-Institutions.aspx

Today’s Blogs:

1.

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/541156/201007211852/The-Smoking-Gun-For-Media-Bias.aspx

The Smoking Gun For Media Bias

Journo-Gate: For decades, moderates and conservatives have been derided and ridiculed for complaining about the mainstream media's pervasive liberal bias. As it turns out, however, their worst fears were true.

If you don't know about Journolist, you should. It's a semi-secret listserv maintained by Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein. Don't bother to try to log on. If they want you, they'll ask you to take part. No outsiders need apply.

And who uses it? Almost exclusively liberal journalists and left-leaning movers and shakers. Sound innocuous? It isn't.

Journolist has become a forum for lefty journalists to talk about how to push their progressive agenda on America, protect President Obama and hurt his foes. It is a safe-space for the often-vile expression of hatred toward conservatives and their ideas.

It all came to light a few weeks ago when news broke that then-Washington Post writer David Weigel, hired to cover the conservative movement for the Post, had made disparaging comments about those he covered on Journolist.

Weigel's remarks were bad enough. But in the ensuing weeks, other comments emerged that made it clear his comments weren't atypical. Not only do the liberal journalists despise conservatives and their non-progressive vision for America, but they actively colluded — one might say plotted — to undercut them.

This isn't journalism. It's political activism.

What's disappointing is not just the lie that journalists put forth about being "objective." That's long since been proved false by survey after survey showing that members of the media are not only overwhelmingly Democratic in their political orientation but also far to the left of average Americans on virtually every major social and economic issue, from tax cuts to abortion.

No, the biggest disappointment is the nastiness they appear to harbor toward right-leaning journalist colleagues.

During the 2008 debate over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, President Obama's personal pastor who repeatedly expressed his contempt for America in shockingly racist terms, some on Journolist suggested ways to squelch coverage. As Spencer Ackerman of the inaptly named Washington Independent suggested, "What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. ... Take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists."

When ABC News' Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos dared to ask Obama about his longtime ties to Wright, Richard Kim of the Nation called Stephanopoulos a "disgusting little rat snake."

This was no isolated incident. As the Daily Caller, which revealed many of the Journolist messages on its Web site, noted: "Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpouring of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage."

Some comments are just plain hateful. Sarah Spitz, a National Public Radio producer, wrote about what she'd do if she saw conservative radio talk host Rush Limbaugh stricken with a heart attack: "Laugh loudly like a maniac and watch his eyes bug out."

Nice. And remember, you pay part of her salary through taxes.

The Tea Party's sudden rise seems to have spooked the Journolisters. Bloomberg's Ryan Donmoyer wondered, "Is anyone starting to see parallels here between the teabaggers and their tactics and the rise of the Brownshirts (Germany's Nazis)?"

Never mind that all Americans, not just those on Journolist, have constitutional rights to freedom of expression. Donmoyer and others of his ilk on the left really seem to think that small-government Tea Party participants are as much of a threat as the Nazis.

When the debate turns to Fox TV, Journolisters become positively unhinged, recommending that the full power and force of the federal government be used to shut up the one network that dares to present center-right viewpoints in its programming.

UCLA law professor Jonathan Zasloff asked on Journolist: "I hate to open this can of worms, but is there any reason why the FCC couldn't simply pull their broadcasting permit once it expires?"

Yes, "professor," there is a reason: It's the First Amendment.

The examples could go on and on. Journolist has about 400 members, a veritable who's who of the left-wing journalistic intelligentsia.

The point is, this is America's "mainstream" media, supposedly. Except it's not. It's in fact a support wing for one party and one vision for America. And as with the rest of the progressive movement, it's concerned not with the truth, but with power.

2.

http://bigjournalism.com/kschlichter/2010/07/20/journolist-and-the-msm-template-minimize-marginalize-and-drop-it-down-the-memory-hole/

JournoList and the MSM Template: Minimize, Marginalize, and Drop It Down the Memory Hole

Kurt Schlichter
 
JournoList [1] is back.  As Jonathan Strong makes clear in the latest Daily Caller revelations [2] from the Journolist archives, the (publicly) unspoken strategy of the MSM mandarins is to support and protect their liberal/left favorite politicians and policies.  Understanding the tactics they use to achieve their goals – tactics I deal with frequently in litigation – is the first step in the counterattack.

The template for responding to breaking news that undermines their political favorites is almost always the same, a three step process designed to undercut the validity of the story, destroy the credibility of the storyteller, and then ensure that no one outside the new conservative media ever hears about it – or at least about the most important elements.  And the Daily Caller’s story illustrates them all.

The first step is to minimize the story.  So, the arm of the Democrat Party named ACORN [3] feels it’s just fine to give advice to would be child sex traffickers?  It’s nothing – it’s just a side show that happened in once…okay, twice…I mean three times…I mean… anyway, it’s not important.  How about New Black Panthers [4] intimidating voters?  Well, it’s just one precinct in Philadelphia and all the voters there were probably voting for Obama anyway so it’s really not that important.  Maybe a government bureaucrat admitting [5] – publicly and proudly – that she treats white farmers in need of assistance worse than black ones?  Well, that’s one woman and she’s off in the boonies of Georgia!  It’s not important.

You minimize a story to deprive it of the greater meaning that it truly has.  By making it one single, remote event, you remove it from any context.  In the Journolist scandal, the leftist journalists immediately recognize the danger to their favorite presidential aspirant and apply the tactic to the story of Rev. Wright’s racist ramblings.  The noxious Chris Hayes [5] of the Nation puts it into perspective – of a kind:

Our country disappears people. It tortures people. It has the blood of as many as one million Iraqi civilians — men, women, children, the infirmed — on its hands. You’ll forgive me if I just can’t quite dredge up the requisite amount of outrage over Barack Obama’s pastor.

Of course, there’s a small problem – you need to be willing to sell out your purported principles to do it:

Katha Pollitt – Hayes’s colleague at the Nation – didn’t disagree on principle, though she did sound weary of the propaganda. “I hear you. but I am really tired of defending the indefensible. The people who attacked Clinton on Monica were prissy and ridiculous, but let me tell you it was no fun, as a feminist and a woman, waving aside as politically irrelevant and part of the vast rightwing conspiracy Paula, Monica, Kathleen, Juanita,” Pollitt said.

The second step is to marginalize the speaker.  That’s the truly fun part for the MSM laptop thugs.  Here, you can unload on the person who dares break the story in order to shift the focus from what the story shows to the myriad personal failings – real or just made-up, it doesn’t matter – of the one who tells.  In the ACORN scandal, the real story is the wicked James O’Keefe, or antichrist du jour Andrew Breitbart – compared to the ACORN drones who were merely facilitating child prostitutes, these rightwingers were a million times worse.

The loathsome Spencer Ackerman makes no bones about how he wants to shift the spotlight:

What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically.

And I think this threads the needle. If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us. Instead, take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction.

The “racist” label – always a favorite of the Left as a means to tar conservatives, like the NAACP’s recent shenanigans regarding the Tea Party – is the H-Bomb of slanders, and Ackerman is the Curtis LeMay [6] of massive leftwing retaliation.

The third and final step:  Drop it down the memory hole.  Again, the Journolistas are right up front about their intent, with the Daily Caller chronicling Chris Hayes again sounding off:

Chris Hayes of the Nation posted on April 29, 2008, urging his colleagues to ignore Wright. Hayes directed his message to “particularly those in the ostensible mainstream media” who were members of the list.

The Wright controversy, Hayes argued, was not about Wright at all. Instead, “It has everything to do with the attempts of the right to maintain control of the country.”

** *

Hayes castigated his fellow liberals for criticizing Wright. “All this hand wringing about just how awful and odious Rev. Wright remarks are just keeps the hustle going.”

“Our country disappears people. It tortures people. It has the blood of as many as one million Iraqi civilians — men, women, children, the infirmed — on its hands. You’ll forgive me if I just can’t quite dredge up the requisite amount of outrage over Barack Obama’s pastor,” Hayes wrote.

Hayes urged his colleagues – especially the straight news reporters who were charged with covering the campaign in a neutral way – to bury the Wright scandal. “I’m not saying we should all rush en masse to defend Wright. If you don’t think he’s worthy of defense, don’t defend him! What I’m saying is that there is no earthly reason to use our various platforms to discuss what about Wright we find objectionable,” Hayes said.

And sure enough, CNN became a  Rev. Wright-free zone [7].  The goal is to simply ignore the stories, to starve them of oxygen before they can take root outside the conservative new media.  ACORN, the John Edwards scandal, Climategate, the New Black Panthers – you looked in vain for any mention of these in the pages of the New York Times or the Washington Post until the story simply could not be contained, and then found only short, cryptic and incomplete references buried on page 15 next to the Bulgarian crop reports and the latest Bangladeshi ferry disaster.

The minimize-marginalize-memory hole template only works when no one is looking for it.  And it only works when all of the pieces work – when one fails, the template falls apart.  You can marginalize the storytellers and drop it down the memory hole, but a story like ACORN’s taxpayer-assisted child sex advice simply cannot be minimized.  ACORN ended up defunded.  You can lie about “N-word” shouting tea partiers all you want, but when they won’t accept marginalization you can’t be marginalized.  And all of us can help drag important stories out of the memory hole – on sites like the “Bigs” and others, through talk radio, through fair and balanced news outlets, and through social media like Facebook and Twitter [8].

Understanding the template is the first step to smashing it.  Refuse to allow important stories to be minimized – fight back.  Refuse to acquiesce to being marginalized – fight back.  And refuse to allow important stories about our country be tucked away in the media memory hole – fight back.

The Daily Caller has done a great service in dragging the MSM’s grandees and their shameful manipulation out into the disinfecting sunlight.  Now do your part – ignore the MSM and pass this critical story on to others, before the MSM gatekeepers get a chance to minimize, marginalize and drop it in the memory hole with all the others.

3.

Congressman Spencer Bachus (R-Al) Opposes the Bill to Legalize on-line Gambling:

 
Congressman Spencer Bachus (AL-6), Ranking Member on the House Financial Services Committee, has stated his opposition to legislation (H.R. 2267) that would legalize online gambling in the U.S. Congressman Bachus delivered the following statement at a committee hearing 
 
“The timing of today’s hearing on Chairman Frank’s proposal to legalize gambling over the Internet strikes some of us as ironic, to say the least.  After all the talk during the last year about shutting down the casinos on Wall Street, it does not make any sense to me why we would be taking steps to open casinos in every home, dorm room, library, iPod, Blackberry, iPad and computer in America. 
 
“This morning, President Obama signed legislation whose proponents claim will protect consumers from unwise financial decisions and from predatory practices by financial institutions.  This afternoon, this Committee is considering the merits of a bill that will fleece Americans by reversing current restrictions on Internet gambling, which is perhaps the ultimate example of Americans making unwise and harmful financial choices.  It seems that Democrats’ solicitude for the well-being and protection of American consumers has its limits. 
 
“As we all know, Chairman Frank is leading the effort to legalize Internet gambling and is promoting a plan to tax online wagering and regulate it at the Treasury Department.  For more than a decade, I have worked to deter – not promote – illegal Internet gambling, and to ensure that current regulations, which are far stronger than any offered in this bill, are fully enforced. 
 
“Internet gambling’s characteristics are vastly different than those of other forms of gambling: online players can gamble 24 hours a day from home; children may play without sufficient age verification; and betting with a credit card can undercut a player’s perception of the value of cash, leading to addiction, bankruptcy and crime.  Young people are particularly at risk because when you put a computer in the bedroom or dorm room of a young person, the temptation is too great for many of them to resist.  John Kindt, Professor of Business Administration at the University of Illinois calls Internet gambling “the crack cocaine” of betting and says: “It’s ‘click the mouse, lose your house.’”
 
“Since this Congress took action in 2006 to address the scourge of Internet gambling, offshore gaming interests have been relentless in their campaign to repeal the law, or at least, to undermine it.  Lots of these groups have innocuous names like, “The Safe and Secure Internet Gambling Initiative.”  But in spite of their names, these are large corporate interests that are protecting their bottom line at the expense of addiction and destruction to our homes and communities.  That is why it makes no sense to me how the same Democrats who claim they are protecting consumers by further regulating Wall Street can say with a straight face that unleashing Internet gambling will keep kids from becoming Internet gamblers. 
 
“Finally, I want to make a point about revenues.  Last October, in response to a request from Rep. McDermott, who has introduced companion legislation to H.R. 2267 to tax Internet gambling, the Joint Committee on Taxation produced four different revenue estimates of the revenue-generating potential of the two bills.  The Committee concluded that the amount of those revenues depends almost entirely on the federal preemption made possible by H.R. 2267. 
 
“H.R. 2267 does provide a restrictive opt-out mechanism through which the States may decline to participate in the Federal licensing system.  However, the Joint Committee on Taxation’s most expansive of four different estimates -- $42 billion -- is based on discarding even these State opt-out rights in favor of complete federal preemption.  In that estimate, the Joint Committee explicitly assumed that “no State or tribal government will be permitted to limit federally licensed Internet gambling operators from providing online gambling services in their jurisdictions.”  In other words, the McDermott bill will generate $42 billion only if H.R. 2267’s opt-out procedure -- its principal provision for preserving the States’ ability to protect their citizens against the harms that flow from gambling over the Internet -- is eviscerated.  The Joint Committee on Taxation estimate that is most closely based on the texts of the Frank and McDermott bills indicates that they will generate just $10 billion in Federal reven
ue.   That wouldn’t even pay for half of the funding needed for Chairman Frank’s so-called Wall Street reform bill.
 
“This rush to embrace Internet casino gambling seems at least partially motivated by the Majority’s desperate search for more revenue to pay for an ever-bigger Federal government.  I ask my colleagues: how does raking in cash from gambling addicts differ from taking a cut from the heroin sold to drug addicts?  Is the logic that if we don’t, somebody else will?  I’m sorry, but the Federal government should not take advantage of the young, the weak and the vulnerable in the name of new revenues to cover more government spending.
 
“Considering that the social and economic harm done to America’s families and to young people from unlawful Internet gambling is well-documented, I ask: is addicting the Federal government to Internet gambling taxes really worth it?   This new legislation would create a Federal right to gamble that has never existed in our country’s history, allowing gamblers to place bets not only on their home computers, but also from their Blackberries as they drive home from work or their iPhones as they wait in line at the grocery store.  No amount of regulation can begin to protect against this particularly predatory intrusion into American homes. 

Wednesday's Web

Political Truth and Fact.Com

Neither fair nor balanced, but absolutely factual

Opinion:
Democrat politicians are using racism once again Beware of the hatred

This morning’s opinion is being posted several hours behind schedule.

However, there is an immediate necessity to unveil and make clear to all that Democrat politicians and their political organizations have dug back into their sleaziest bag of political tricks and resurfaced the open use of racism.

When Democrat backs are to the wall, and no legitimate argument remains, to provide defense, they resort to accusing their opponent, or any conservative within reach of being racists.  “Call them bigots and let them prove otherwise” is a slogan.

We saw it in last week’s screed from the NAACP convention in  totally false accusations of racism within the Tea Party Movement.

Democrats such as Nancy Pelosi so wanted to incite violence from tea party demonstrators protesting the far left radical take over of health care.

Pelosi led a group of Democrat politicians –  rudely shoving their way through the crowd, hoping for violence. There was none, so Congressman John Lewis were moved to claim hearing racist slurs.  No racist slurs have been found in the massive audio recordings of the Pelosi event.

Of course, Democrats have never let truth and fact stop them from accusing an opponent of wrong doing.  Nor have Democrats traditionally veered away from using racism and bigotry to attract voters.

Such racist strategies were common in Democrat campaigns throughout the South in the 40s and 50s – some state Democrat parties barred Black voters from participation.

Now, Democrat racists and their racism has returned.

That sort of politics should be behind us.  Those who attempt to drive wedges between Americans are among the lowest politicians around.

If that’s not a “Nuff said” – it most certainly should be.

We are a nation of Americans, no matter the mixture, the structure, or the culture, Americans – real Americans – stand together against those who conspire against this country and who try to void its principles.

Buddy

The day’s top political news:

Obama Approval Drops To Lowest Point Ever, Quinnipiac University National Poll Finds; Independent Voters Turn On President Since Honeymoon

A year after President Barack Obama's political honeymoon ended, his job approval rating has dropped to a negative 44 - 48 percent, his worst net score ever, and American voters say by a narrow 39 - 36 percent margin that they would vote for an unnamed Republican rather than President Obama in 2012, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today.

This compares to a 48 - 43 percent approval for Obama in a May 26 national poll by the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University and a 57 - 33 percent approval last July, just before the political firestorm created by opposition to his health care plan galvanized political opponents and turned independent voters against him.

In this latest survey of more than 2,000 voters, independent voters disapprove of Obama 52 - 38 percent and say 37 - 27 percent they would vote for a Republican contender in 2012. American voters also say 48 - 40 percent Obama does not deserve reelection in 2012.

http://www.quinnipiac.edu/x1295.xml?ReleaseID=1478

Dems frantically talk "jobs" as elections near

Democrats are priming the House floor for a manufacturing agenda they hope will bolster the economy, produce easy bipartisan votes and boost their chances in the midterm elections — at least if the polls they’re using are on target.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) teased the plan — dubbed “Making It in America” — after a White House meeting with Obama last week. The agenda appears to be the Democrats’ final pre-election push to clear the deck of jobs-related bills that have been sitting around for months. Desperate Democrat strategy also promotes accusing any and all opponents with being racists, even when they clearly are not.

The legislative push comes after months of pleading from manufacturing-state Democrats, many of whom are on the ropes in districts hit hard by the deep economic slump. And it promises to give them legislation to highlight when they face voters angry about the nation’s 9.5 percent unemployment rate.  Some Democrat bills, such as Cap and Trade, would destroy many jobs and blow a hole in the economy/

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0710/40000.html#ixzz0uKtvwIaI

Obama’s USDA crawfishes on racial firing

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack now says he will reconsider the panicky, abrupt firing of Shirley Sherrod, a Georgia-based Agriculture Department official who was the victim of a media frenzy over comments that turned out to have been distorted.

Under frenzied orders from the Obama White House, Ms Sherrod was ordered to immediately pull off the road on which she was driving, and use her Blackberry to resign her post – the White House representative said it was crucial she resign before the incident was used on Fox News.

The Obama White House has been waging a full fledged war against Fox News – seen as the only network news source not under control of far left Obama allies.  The NAACP stammered they had been “snookered by Fox”.  In truth Fox had not carried the story until it became wide spread news.  The NAACP also made absurd claims of racism within the tea party movement.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0710/40003.html#ixzz0uKvA3S5t