What On Earth?

Three Cheers for Romneycare!

2012-02-01T16:36:00.001-08:00

Three Cheers for Romneycare!
By Ann Coulter
2/1/2012

If only the Democrats had decided to socialize the food industry or housing, Romneycare would probably still be viewed as a massive triumph for conservative free-market principles -- as it was at the time.

It's not as if we had a beautifully functioning free market in health care until Gov. Mitt Romney came along and wrecked it by requiring that Massachusetts residents purchase their own health insurance. In 2007, when Romneycare became law, the federal government alone was already picking up the tab for 45.4 percent of all health care expenditures in the country.

Until Obamacare, mandatory private health insurance was considered the free-market alternative to the Democrats' piecemeal socialization of the entire medical industry.

In November 2004, for example, libertarian Ronald Bailey praised mandated private health insurance in Reason magazine, saying that it "could preserve and extend the advantages of a free market with a minimal amount of coercion."

A leading conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation, helped design Romneycare, and its health care analyst, Bob Moffit, flew to Boston for the bill signing.

Romneycare was also supported by Regina Herzlinger, Harvard Business School professor and health policy analyst for the conservative Manhattan Institute. Herzlinger praised Romneycare for making consumers, not business or government, the primary purchasers of health care.

The bill passed by 154-2 in the Massachusetts House and unanimously, 37-0, in the Massachusetts Senate -- including the vote of Sen. Scott Brown, who won Teddy Kennedy's seat in the U.S. Senate in January 2010 by pledging to be the "41st vote against Obamacare."

But because both Obamacare and Romneycare concern the same general topic area -- health care -- and can be nicknamed (politician's name plus "care"), Romney's health care bill is suddenly perceived as virtually the same thing as the widely detested Obamacare. (How about "Romneycare-gate"?)

As The New York Times put it, "Mr. Romney's bellicose opposition to 'Obamacare' is an almost comical contradiction to his support for the same idea in Massachusetts when he was governor there." This is like saying state school-choice plans are "the same idea" as the Department of Education.

One difference between the health care bills is that Romneycare is constitutional and Obamacare is not. True, Obamacare's unconstitutional provisions are the least of its horrors, but the Constitution still matters to some Americans. (Oh, to be there when someone at the Times discovers this document called "the Constitution"!)

As Rick Santorum has pointed out, states can enact all sorts of laws -- including laws banning contraception -- without violating the Constitution. That document places strict limits on what Congress can do, not what the states can do. Romney, incidentally, has always said his plan would be a bad idea nationally.

The only reason the "individual mandate" has become a malediction is because the legal argument against Obamacare is that Congress has no constitutional authority to force citizens to buy a particular product.

The legal briefs opposing Obamacare argue that someone sitting at home, minding his own business, is not engaged in "commerce ... among the several states," and, therefore, Congress has no authority under the Commerce Clause to force people to buy insurance.

No one is claiming that the Constitution gives each person an unalienable right not to buy insurance.

States have been forcing people to do things from the beginning of the republic: drilling for the militia, taking blood tests before marriage, paying for public schools, registering property titles and waiting in line for six hours at the Department of Motor Vehicles in order to drive.

There's no obvious constitutional difference between a state forcing militia-age males to equip themselves with guns and a state forcing adults in today's world to equip themselves with health insurance.

The hyperventilating over government-mandated health insurance confuses a legal argument with a policy objection.

If Obamacare were a one-page bill that did nothing but mandate that every American buy health insurance, it would still be unconstitutional, but it wouldn't be the godawful train wreck that it is. It wouldn't even be the godawful train wreck that high-speed rail is.

It would not be a 2,000-page, trillion-dollar federal program micromanaging every aspect of health care in America with enormous, unresponsive federal bureaucracies manned by no-show public-sector union members enforcing a mountain of regulations that will bankrupt the country and destroy medical care, as liberals scratch their heads and wonder why Obamacare is costing 20 times more than they expected and doctors are leaving the profession in droves for more lucrative careers, such as video store clerk.

Nothing good has ever come of a 2,000-page bill.

There's not much governors can do about the collectivist mess Congress has made of health care in this country. They are mere functionaries in the federal government's health care Leviathan.

A governor can't repeal or expand the federal tax break given to companies that pay their employees' health insurance premiums -- a tax break denied the self-employed and self-insured.

A governor can't order the IRS to start recognizing tax deductions for individual health savings accounts.

A governor can't repeal the 1946 federal law essentially requiring hospitals to provide free medical services to all comers, thus dumping a free-rider problem on the states.

It was precisely this free-rider problem that Romneycare was designed to address in the only way a governor can. In addition to mandating that everyone purchase health insurance, Romneycare used the $1.2 billion that the state was already spending on medical care for the uninsured to subsidize the purchase of private health insurance for those who couldn't afford it.

What went wrong with Romneycare wasn't a problem in the bill, but a problem in Massachusetts: Democrats.

First, the overwhelmingly Democratic legislature set the threshold for receiving a subsidy so that it included people making just below the median income in the United States, a policy known as "redistribution of income." For more on this policy, see "Marx, Karl."

Then, liberals destroyed the group-rate, "no frills" private insurance plans allowed under Romneycare (i.e. the only kind of health insurance a normal person would want to buy, but which is banned in most states) by adding dozens of state mandates, including requiring insurers to cover chiropractors and in vitro fertilization -- a policy known as "pandering to lobbyists."

For more on "pandering" and "lobbyists," see "Gingrich, Newt." (Yes, that's an actual person's name.)

Romney's critics, such as Rick Santorum, charge that the governor should have known that Democrats would wreck whatever reforms he attempted.

They have, but no more than they would have wrecked health care in Massachusetts without Romneycare. Democrats could use a sunny day as an excuse to destroy the free market, redistribute income and pander to lobbyists. Does that mean Republicans should never try to reform anything and start denouncing sunny days?

Santorum has boasted of his role in passing welfare reform in the 1990s. You know what the Democrats' 2009 stimulus bill dismantled? That's right: the welfare reform that passed in the 1990s.

The problem isn't health insurance mandates. The problem isn't Romneycare. The problem isn't welfare reform. The problem is Democrats.
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To read another article by Ann Coulter, click here.

How Barack Obama and other big government statists really bankroll their reelections

2012-02-01T16:27:00.000-08:00

Video: How Barack Obama and other big government statists really bankroll their reelections
posted at 12:50 pm on February 1, 2012 by Tina Korbe

Simply put, this is one of the best videos I’ve watched in quite some time. If you think Barack Obama will spend just $1 billion on his reelection effort, think again. This president — like the president before him and the president before him — has at his disposal “The Vote Pump,” the elegant but unsustainable system by which the government taxes and borrows money to fund entitlement programs — and by which entitlement beneficiaries, in turn, vote to ensure the government will continue to tax and borrow money to pay their benefits. You might know it better by another name: “The Wealth Redistribution Pump.”

Every minute the presidential candidates debate their plans to create jobs, reform the tax code, protect the country, achieve energy independence, explore space and strengthen the family (among other things) is a minute they don’t debate their plans to reform entitlements. Those other issues are important — but, in the end, it’s the entitlement state that is bringing us to our knees. It’s the welfare state that will, as The Washington Examiner’s Phil Klein argues, destroy us.

Bring up entitlement reform and emotionally-driven accusations will pepper the conversation. Ground rules are required. Here are the two I would propose: (1) Society has obligations to the weakest among us, to those who literally cannot work, but (2) The rule for those who can work ought to be, to borrow a Biblical principle, “He who does not work, neither let him eat.” (Ironically enough, that second principle was invoked by Lenin himself — but he limited the meaning of “work” to labor. A better definition might be the creation of value, under which definition the activity of the “bourgeoisie,” the control of the means of production, is also work.)

Incidentally, it shows far less concern for the happiness of people to give them handouts than it does to require them to earn their success. The correlation between earned success and happiness is well-documented. It’s shabby and shameful that politicians care more about their own reelection and the consolidation of power among them than the happiness of those whose votes they buy with handouts.
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To read another article by Tina Korbe, click here.

Delta Force Hero Can't Speak at West Point Because of his Christian Beliefs

2012-02-01T14:55:00.001-08:00

Delta Force Hero Can't Speak at West Point Because of his Christian Beliefs
By Ken Blackwell
2/1/2012

Editor's Note: This column was co-authored by Ken Klukowski.

A three-star Army general and war hero cannot speak at West Point because he’s an outspoken Christian. So the Obama administration’s hostility toward religion—and especially Christians—continues even to the detriment of our men and women in uniform.

Lieutenant General William G. (“Jerry”) Boykin is like an action-movie hero. When the super-elite Delta Force was formed in late 1970s—our top counter-insurgent military unit that the Pentagon still does not officially discuss—this ranger in the 101st Airborne unit was tapped to be part of it.

In 1983 he was in Grenada, where Boykin survived being hit by a round from a .50-caliber gun. (Many anti-aircraft guns are “.50-cal,” and a single round can split a human body in two.) In 1992 and 93, he was part of the Delta Force team hunting (and unofficially killing) drug lord Pablo Escobar. Then in 1993, Boykin was the commanding officer of the mission in the Battle of Mogadishu in Somalia forever memorialized in the movie “Black Hawk Down.”

After these heroics, General Boykin he served as the commanding general of U.S. Army Special Forces Command, then commanding general of U.S. Army Special Warfare Center. He also served at the CIA and as Deputy Undersecretary of Intelligence at the Department of Defense.

Jerry Boykin has done it all. He’s been in battle as part of America’s most elite fighting force, then rose to command those troops as a general, and also served in the CIA and Pentagon on the strategic planning and management side of this equation.

He is also a Christian evangelist who speaks at churches nationwide. As a private citizen retired from the Army, General Boykin was invited to speak at a prayer breakfast at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He seems like an ideal choice, as someone who has served as the tip of the spear at the highest ranks, who is also a man of profoundly deep faith.

But the Far Left exploded. Boykin has cast America’s war against radical Islamic terrorists as fighting Satan. So his religious language has made strange bedfellows of various Islamic groups joining with atheists to call on West Point to disinvite this American hero who risked and achieved so much for this country. Evidently it’s not politically correct to suggest that blowing up children is the devil’s work.

After heavy pressure, General Boykin chose to withdraw. This soldier fears no foe, but the situation evolved in a direction where his message of faith and courage would be overshadowed by controversy to the possible detriment of the West Point cadets.

This sad episode is yet another example of the Obama administration’s ongoing hostility to people of faith, especially Christians. President Obama’s pick to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is a lesbian activist who says that homosexual rights should always trump religious liberty. This is the same EEOC that argued it had the power to order a church to reinstate as a minister a person the church had fired for violating church teaching, a position the Supreme Court unanimously rejected. And the administration has enacted regulations under Obamacare forcing Evangelical and Catholic universities and hospitals to provide contraceptives against the religious beliefs of those church-affiliated institutions.

Now this hostility is doing a disservice to our military. People of deep faith are opposed and marginalized by the Obama administration’s civilian political appointees. Weeks ago, they were caught banning Bible reading at Walter Reed hospital, a policy they immediately reversed when the media picked it up and House Republicans demanded answers.

All this paints a picture of radical secularism. Many of the greatest heroes our military has ever seen were people of fervent prayer and deep faith. Many find their battlefield courage in their unshakeable belief that their sins are forgiven, their lives are in God’s hands, and that when they die they would go to an eternal reward.

Sounds like the kind of people you want at a prayer breakfast for those who may soon land on one of those battlefields.
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To read a related article, click here.
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To read another article by Ken Blackwell, click here.

The Republican Party Becomes the Whig Party

2012-02-01T14:42:00.000-08:00

The Republican Party Becomes the Whig Party
By Ben Shapiro
2/1/2012

In 1831, Henry Clay formed a new political party. He called it the Whig Party. His goal was to ensure Jeffersonian democracy and fight President Andrew Jackson, a Democrat. Over the course of the next 20 years, the Whig Party achieved several presidential victories. But as slavery assumed more and more national importance in the political debate, the Whig Party began to shatter. Southern Whigs were slave owners; Northern Whigs were industrial gurus who hated slavery. In 1849, the Illinois Whig leader, one Abraham Lincoln, quit politics completely in frustration with the party's inability to come together. With the Compromise of 1850, in which Whig leaders strengthened the Fugitive Slave Act on the one hand and admitted California as a free state on the other, the Whig Party was fractured beyond repair.

In 1852, the anti-slavery faction of the Whig Party prevented the nomination of the incumbent, controversial president, Millard Fillmore; the party settled on a compromise choice, the bland, boring and elderly Gen. Winfield Scott. He lost in dramatic fashion to the handsome, young cipher Franklin Pierce. In 1854, with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Whigs were irrevocably split. Northern Whigs joined the Republican Party. Southern Whigs vanished.

By 1860, Abraham Lincoln was president of the United States -- as a Republican.

Why tell this story? Because the party of Lincoln seems about to splinter the same way its predecessor did.

The center of the Republican Party cannot hold. With Mitt Romney's victory in the Florida primary, it's clear that large swaths of the Republican establishment have rejected the Tea Party; it's similarly clear that the Tea Party has largely rejected Romney and his backers. While Republicans hope that the party will unite behind Romney in opposition to President Obama, that hope seems strained. Democrats, optimists think, fought a brutal Hillary vs. Obama battle in 2008, then united to defeat Republicans. They forget, however, that the Hillary vs. Obama battle was not so much a battle over message as a battle over messenger. More than anything, it was a fight over whether to push for the first black president or the first female president. When it came to ideology, however, Obama and Hillary were virtually identical.

The same is not true within the Republican Party. On what basis will the party unite? On fiscal responsibility? Romney and his cohorts have said nothing about serious entitlement reform; the Tea Party, meanwhile, calls for it daily. On taxation? Romney has a 59-point plan that smacks of class warfare; the Tea Party wants broad tax cuts across the board. On health care? Romney and much of the establishment aren't against the individual mandate in principle; the Tea Party despises the individual mandate as a violation of Constitutionally-guaranteed liberties. On foreign policy? Paleoconservatives want a Ron Paul-like isolationism; neoconservatives want a George W. Bush-like interventionism; realists want something in between.

There is the very real potential for the Republican Party to spin apart in the near future. It could easily become a set of regional parties knit together by opposition to extreme liberalism. Chris Christie and his followers don't have all that much in common with Rick Perry and his followers. Never has that chasm been so obvious.

The Republican Party is like a bed of nails. It works so long as the nails are relatively close together -- but as the nails are moved further apart, the chances of winding up spiked from head to toe grow. Right now, the nails are too far apart. The Republican Party is about to be cut to shreds, even as the establishment declares victory over those redneck insurgents from the Tea Party. Romney's victory may very well end up being pyrrhic for the GOP in the end.
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To read another article by Ben Shapiro, click here.

Is Rick Santorum the logical conservative alternative?

2012-02-01T12:52:00.000-08:00

Is Rick Santorum the logical conservative alternative?
posted at 1:25 pm on February 1, 2012 by Ed Morrissey

Last night, a number of people on Twitter pointed out that Mitt Romney didn’t get a majority of the Florida primary vote and claimed that combining the percentages of all other competitors showed that he could still be stopped. I pointed out earlier that this assumes everyone wouldn’t vote for Romney as a second choice, which polling shows to be false (he was second among second choices in Florida), but let’s put that aside for a moment. To whom should conservatives look as the consolidation candidate? After watching Newt Gingrich lose two debates and suffer a steep reversal of fortunes in Florida, some look to Rick Santorum, such as Andrew Malcolm, who wonders if Gingrich has worn out his welcome:

In an amazingly graceless non-concession concession speech after not phoning the victor out of common competitive courtesy, Gingrich chose to talk not about minor matters such as how he proposes to win the Nov. 6 national general election against $1 billion.

No. Instead, Gingrich described in great detail what all he is already planning to do and sign during his first day in the Oval Office, in between taking the presidential oath and numerous inaugural parties.

Seriously.

After a humiliating defeat, Gingrich spoke of a two-man race, assuming his own GOP nomination and general election victories. Big ideas? Try loony ideas. The guy is living in a parallel universe.

Now, Gingrich takes his campaign to Nevada, the state with the most foreclosures in the nation, where he has three days to explain what he did for that $1.6 million that mortgage giant Freddie Mac paid him.

Jeffrey Anderson at The Weekly Standard looks at the numbers ahead:

In Missouri, where the next Republican primary will take place (next Tuesday), a new poll by PPP shows Rick Santorum leading Mitt Romney by 11 percentage points — 45 to 34 percent — while Ron Paul has 13 percent support. Newt Gingrich isn’t on the ballot in Missouri, so the Show Me State offers a prime opening for Santorum to build on his earlier victory in neighboring Iowa.

Perhaps even more encouraging for Santorum are the candidates’ respective favorability ratings among prospective primary voters in the state. Santorum’s net favorability rating is +42 percent (63 percent favorable to 21 percent unfavorable), compared to +10 percent for Romney (46 percent favorable to 36 percent unfavorable). (Paul’s net favorability rating is minus-29 percent — 28 percent favorable to 57 percent unfavorable.)

Those aren’t the only numbers that suggest that Santorum could stand up better to Romney than Gingrich. PPP polling in key upcoming states show that Santorum challenges Romney more strongly in Ohio as well as Missouri:

Rick Santorum is leading the way for next week’s ‘beauty contest’ primary in Missouri with 45% to 34% for Romney, and 13% for Ron Paul. Newt Gingrich is not on the ballot for that, but he will be in the picture for Missouri’s caucus and leads the way for that with 30% to 28% for Santorum, 24% for Romney, and 11% for Paul.

In Ohio Gingrich is at 26% to 25% for Romney, 22% for Santorum, and 11% for Paul.

What might be most interesting in both states is what happens in a head to head between Romney and either Gingrich or Santorum:

-In Missouri Santorum leads Romney 50-37 and in Ohio Santorum leads 45-38.

-In Missouri Gingrich leads Romney 43-42 and in Ohio Gingrich leads 42-39.

Two takeaways from those numbers: if this ever came down to Romney, Paul, and just one out of Gingrich and Santorum, Romney would be in a lot of trouble. And he’d be in more trouble if the single conservative alternative ended up being Santorum.

It’s not just the numbers, either. The debates in Florida last week showed that Gingrich’s claim to mastery of the format simply don’t hold up. He lost both of those debates, and spent the rest of the week attacking Romney on religious freedom and proposing a lunar base that would cost hundreds of billions of dollars in an era where Republicans are arguing for reduced spending. If Gingrich was actually making the conservative case against Romney, I could see Sarah Palin’s point, but he’s not. He’s making a case for “big ideas” that involve a huge amount of spending, attacking Romney on any basis that happens to be handy, and he’s attacking the media.

The candidate actually making the conservative case on the campaign trail is Rick Santorum. Santorum scored points off of Romney in both Florida debates, especially the last one, because Santorum hasn’t ever backed an individual mandate as a health-care solution and doesn’t have to defend that position. He’s never backed TARP, either. That doesn’t make Santorum a perfect conservative candidate, but he seems to be the only one who’s focusing on the actual conservative agenda. Even if the motivation is to back a conservative alternative to Romney to “sharpen his steel” and force him to follow the conservative agenda, it’s Santorum who is most effective at making that the agenda.

Plus, there is one more thing to consider, and that is the quality of leadership. Both of the frontrunners and their allies have engaged in disappointing attacks on free market enterprise in an attempt to exploit each others’ weaknesses, but Santorum has refrained from doing so, even though he has specifically targeted blue-collar voters who might respond to those attacks. Santorum has maintained a high level of integrity in his campaigning, and that’s something to consider when choosing the man who will represent the party in the 2012 elections.

Santorum also has a new ad out today, “Deal,” which targets Gingrich. It’s running in Nevada and Colorado this week.
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To read another article by Ed Morrissey, click here.

'Right-to-work' means freedom and choice

2012-02-01T12:23:00.000-08:00

'Right-to-work' means freedom and choice
By Jeff Jacoby
2/1/2012

SOON -- PERHAPS AS EARLY AS TODAY -- Gov. Mitch Daniels will sign legislation making Indiana the nation's 23rd right-to-work state. Labor unions angrily oppose the change, but their opposition has no legitimate or principled basis.

Labor unions vehemently oppose right-to-work laws. What principled reason can they have for doing so?

State right-to-work laws, authorized by the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, are not anti-union. They are pro-choice: They protect workers from being forced to join or pay fees to a labor union as a condition of keeping a job. In non-right-to-work states, employees who work in a "union shop" are compelled to fork over part of each paycheck to a labor organization -- even if they want nothing to do with unions, let alone to be represented by one. Laws like the one Indiana is poised to enact simply make union support voluntary. Hoosiers can't be required to kick back part of their wages to the Republican Party or the Methodist Church or the Animal Liberation Front; the new measure will ensure that they don't have to give a cut of everything they earn to labor unions, either.

Most Americans regard compulsory unionism as unconscionable. In a new Rasmussen survey, 74 percent of likely voters say non-union workers should not have to pay dues against their will. Once upon a time, labor movement giants like Samuel Gompers, a founder of the American Federation of Labor, agreed. "I want to urge devotion to the fundamentals of human liberty -- the principles of voluntarism," declared Gompers in his last speech to the AFL in 1924. "No lasting gain has ever come from compulsion." Those words can be seen chiseled on Gompers's memorial in Washington, DC.

But far from rejecting compulsion, Big Labor now fights tooth and nail to defend it. And no wonder: Unions have long since squandered the affection of the American public. In the years right after World War II, more than one-third of the US workforce was unionized; now the union membership rate is just 11.8 percent, and most of those members are government employees. In the productive economy, Americans continue to flee from organized labor. Last year only 6.9 percent of workers at private companies belonged to unions.

So as a matter of by-any-means-necessary expediency, it is easy to understand why Big Labor long ago embraced what liberal scholar Robert Reich (who served as Bill Clinton's secretary of labor) dubbed "the necessity for coercion." In order "to maintain themselves," Reich said in 1985, "unions have got to have some ability to strap their members to the mast." Or, as Don Corleone might have put it, to make them an offer they can't refuse.

But is there any ethical reason -- any honorable basis -- for the union shop?

Great labor leaders once championed freedom and choice. "No lasting gain has ever come from compulsion," insisted Samuel Gompers, the first and longest-serving president of the American Federation of Labor.

Labor and its allies are ruthless, and usually quite effective, in beating down right-to-work bills. Indiana will be the first state in more than a decade that has succeeded in banning labor contracts that oblige all employees to pay money to a union as a condition of employment. (A similar bill in New Hampshire last year was vetoed by Governor John Lynch.) No-holds-barred vehemence in defense of principle might be understandable. But what legitimate principle are the unions defending?

To hear them tell it, they only object to "free riders." Labor leaders claim it would be unjust to allow employees to avoid paying for the unions that negotiate benefits on their behalf. "There's always going to be a certain amount of the population that will take something for free if they can get it for free," says Nancy Guyott, head of the Indiana AFL-CIO.

That's not a principle, it's a shameless pretext. Unions demand monopoly bargaining power -- the right to exclusively represent everyone in a workplace -- and then insist that each of those workers must pay for the privilege. This is the "principle" of the squeegee-man who aggressively wipes your windshield when you stop at a red light, then demands that you pay for the service he has rendered you.

By the union's "free-rider" logic, shouldn't all voters be forced to subscribe to a daily newspaper, since all of them benefit from its journalism? And shouldn't every company be compelled to support the Chamber of Commerce, which lobbies on behalf of business whether individual firms ask it to or not?

The passion with which Big Labor fights right-to-work helps explain why so many Americans have abandoned unions. The labor movement was born in freedom and choice. That's not what it stands for anymore.
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To read another article by Jeff Jacoby, click here.

Free Speech - For Some

2012-02-01T12:15:00.000-08:00

Free Speech - For Some
By Frank Gaffney
2/1/2012

According to the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), there is a grave threat to America that must be suppressed at all costs. The threat is that Lieutenant General William “Jerry” Boykin might be allowed to exercise his constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech.

This proposition is bizarre on multiple levels. For one, General Boykin, who is a friend and greatly admired colleague of mine, is one of the United States’ most accomplished and decorated military heroes. He served in and led our most elite special forces units for decades, including in many of our most dangerous recent combat operations. He also held a number of senior positions in the intelligence community, including as the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence.

For another, Jerry Boykin is also an ordained minister. And the sorts of events CAIR has lately insisted he must not address include prayer sessions convened by the mayor of Ocean City, Maryland and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

What makes the suppression of General Boykin’s right to express himself – and, for that matter, to enjoy freedom of religion – all the more outrageous is the nature of the organization demanding that he be silenced. Four federal judges have affirmed that CAIR is associated with the Muslim Brotherhood and was spawned by one of its American affiliates – the Islamic Association for Palestine. Indeed, we know from wiretapped conversations at the time of its founding that CAIR was established by Muslim Brotherhood operatives as a political arm and fundraising mechanism for Hamas, a designated terrorist organization and the Brotherhood’s franchise in “Palestine.”

Unfortunately, CAIR and its fellow Muslim Brotherhood fronts are not simply trying to muzzle Jerry Boykin. They have gone after a number of other truth-tellers about the doctrine the Brothers seek to insinuate into this country – the totalitarian, supremacist politico-military-legal program the Islamists call shariah.

For example, another colleague, former Congressman Fred Grandy, was removed from his position as one of Washington’s most popular talk radio show hosts when he refused to allow Muslim critics to dictate who could appear on his program and what they could say.

Last fall, Stephen Coughlin – one of the nation’s foremost non-Muslim experts on shariah – was similarly subjected to a CAIR-led effort to deny his ability to speak. In that case, he was denied by the Obama administration the opportunity to provide training to Central Intelligence Agency personnel about what impels our enemies to engage in murderous and stealthy forms of jihad, namely shariah.

More recently, New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has been subjected to a campaign of vilification by CAIR and its friends. His offense? Mr. Kelly gave an interview to the makers of a superb documentary, “The Third Jihad,” and allowed that film to be used in training his officers.

CAIR’s desire to suppress this film is not hard to understand. After all, The Third Jihad brilliantly exposes what it and other Muslim Brotherhood fronts are up to in this country. In the words of the Brotherhood’s own strategic plan, that is “a kind of grand jihad…in destroying and eliminating the Western civilization from within” by our own hands.

The movie’s narrator and central figure is Zuhdi Jasser. Dr. Jasser happens to be one of the most prominent and courageous of American Muslims who oppose political Islam and its use of shariah to justify the subversion and destruction of our Constitution, form of government and society.

Obviously, it is difficult to pillory Zuhdi Jasser the way CAIR et.al. attack such non-Muslims as Messrs. Boykin, Grandy, Coughlin and Kelly, namely as “Islamophobic.” The Brotherhood and its official, multinational counterpart – the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) – brandish this term as a means of intimidating, smearing and silencing those who understand what they are about and oppose them effectively. In fact, the more effective the opposition, the more intense are the Islamists’ efforts to silence those mounting it.

Dr. Jasser’s right to free expression is being subjected to a similar kind of suppression. As he put it recently in the New York Post, “One of the chief ways that radical Islamists across the globe silence anti-Islamist Muslims is to publicly push them outside of Islam, to declare them non-Muslims, not part of the community (ummah), and so subject them to takfir (declaring them apostates). That is what the vicious distortions about this film do to my work and the work of so many others within the House of Islam who are trying to publicly take on the American Islamist establishment.”

Of particular concern is the fact that the U.S. government is now effectively encouraging what amounts to free speech for some – and abetting it. Team Obama has begun according Islamophobia the status of a serious problem. Worse yet, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has joined forces with the OIC in trying to find ways to suppress this fictitious problem by treating instances of what should be protected free speech as prosecutable “incitement.” To paraphrase the famous German pastor, Martin Niemöller, first they are coming for the “Islamophobes” and for Muslims who oppose shariah’s political agenda. How soon will they decide that you have no right to speak freely, either?
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To read another article by Frank Gaffney, click here.

Political Finger-Pointing

2012-02-01T12:12:00.000-08:00

Political Finger-Pointing
By Jonah Goldberg
2/1/2012

Jesse Jackson is right.

In response to the face-off in Arizona between President Obama and Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer last week, Jackson said, "Even George Wallace did not put his finger in Dr. King's face." And it's true; he didn't. Similarly, not even Josef Stalin wrote two autobiographies the way Obama has. And even Genghis Khan didn't have a Swiss bank account the way Mitt Romney did.

Of course, Jackson's non sequitur is a single note in the cacophony of asininity surrounding the wildly overhyped confrontation between Obama and Brewer. An MSNBC host (and putative expert in matters racial) said the photo reminded her more than anything else of the iconic image of Elizabeth Eckford, the 15-year-old black girl who was harassed in 1957 by racists on her way to a desegregated school in Little Rock, Ark. And liberal talk radio host Stephanie Miller concurred that Brewer was "playing the fragile-white-woman-scared-of-black-man card." Al Sharpton, Bill Maher and Maureen Dowd sounded similar refrains.

Lost in all of this is the simple fact that the president instigated the confrontation. He was upset with how an earlier meeting with Brewer was characterized in her book, "Scorpions for Breakfast" (full disclosure: my wife collaborated on the book). She probably shouldn't have raised her finger, even if it was only to get a word in edgewise.

But good Lord, given the liberal overreaction to this incident, you'd think the governorship of Arizona outranked the presidency, or that Obama was a beleaguered civil rights activist sneaking into Arizona by cover of night, and not the president of the United States touching down in Air Force One.

Obama simply messed up a campaign swing by stepping on his message. But his most ardent supporters had to turn the incident into some sort of racial Gotterdammerung. Obama had it right later when he said it was all "not a big deal."

But this absurd controversy is surely a harbinger of greater inanities to come. As even some Democrats in Washington concede, Obama can't run on his record. That's why he's running against a "do-nothing Congress" and unfairness in the tax code. That's simply not exciting enough for his supporters, particularly given the fizzling of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

And nothing more excites the base of the Democratic Party -- or gets more free media -- than wildly implausible hysterics over racism, even when there's so little evidence to support the claim.

Take what appears to be the left's strongest claim: Newt Gingrich's blowout victory in South Carolina was a triumph for his racist "dog-whistle" political rhetoric on child labor and the huge rise in food stamp use under Obama.

"Dog-whistle politics" is a term imported from Britain that implies politicians use language with two frequencies, one for normal people and one for less savory constituencies. Dog-whistle messages are real. But dog-whistle spotting can be hard -- you're listening for things that, by definition, normal people cannot hear -- and prone to wild misinterpretation.

For instance, Gingrich has been talking about food stamps and child labor for a long time. During that time, he also worked harder than most GOP politicians to reach out to minority groups, even to Sharpton. Does he phrase things too provocatively? Absolutely. But he does that about everything from tax cuts to moon bases.

When Gingrich came down like a ton of bricks on Juan Williams in the South Carolina debate on the food stamp issue, liberals instinctively saw it as a racial transaction, pure and simple. And although I have no doubt that racists enjoyed seeing Gingrich belittle a black journalist, there's zero evidence that Republicans overall cheered for racist reasons. They've cheered Gingrich for attacking white moderators from every outlet, including Fox News.

And to the extent there are racial implications to what Gingrich proposes, they're no more racist than remarks made by prominent African Americans who see the culture of poverty perpetuating poverty.

But for reasons that say a lot more about the weaknesses of the first black president, liberals yearn to hear racism where it isn't to make this campaign into something more exciting than a referendum on Obama.
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To read another article by Jonah Goldberg, click here.

Getting Nowhere, Very Fast

2012-02-01T12:08:00.001-08:00

Getting Nowhere, Very Fast
By Thomas Sowell
2/1/2012

California has a huge state debt and Washington has a huge national debt. But that does not discourage either Governor Jerry Brown or President Barack Obama from wanting to launch a very costly high-speed rail system.

Most of us might be a little skittish about spending money if we were teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. But the beauty of politics is that it is all other people's money, including among those other people generations yet unborn.

The high-speed rail system proposed for California has been envisioned as a model for similar systems elsewhere in the United States. A recent story in the San Francisco Chronicle used the high-speed rail system in Spain as an analogy for California.

Spain is about the same size as California, and has a similar population density -- and population density is the key to the economic viability of mass transportation, from subways to high-speed rail.

It so happens that I have ridden on Spain's high-speed rail system. It was very nice, especially since I did not have to pay the full costs, which were subsidized by the Spanish taxpayers.

While the Spanish government has been subsidizing the passengers on its high-speed rail system, the European Union has been subsidizing the Spanish government. Someone once said that government is the illusion that we can all live off somebody else. Spain's high-speed rail system is not even covering its operating costs, never mind the enormous costs of setting up the system in the first place. One reason is that half the seats are empty in the high-speed trains in Spain.

That is what happens when you don't have the population density required for passengers to cover the operating costs. You would need the hordes of Genghis Khan riding the high-speed rail system to cover the additional costs of the rails and the trains.

An economics professor at the University of Barcelona says that Spain "has not recovered one single euro from the infrastructure investment."

The most famous high-speed rail system is that in Japan, one of the most densely populated countries in the world. The "bullet train" between Tokyo and Osaka has 130 million riders a year. Tokyo alone has more than three times the population of San Francisco and Los Angeles put together.

In California, an element of farce has been added to the impending economic tragedy, if the envisioned high-speed rail system actually materializes.

The first leg of the system is planned to run between Fresno and Bakersfield. If those names don't ring a bell with you, there is a reason. They are modest-sized communities out in the agricultural San Joaquin Valley, well removed from San Francisco or Los Angeles.

You can bet the rent money that high-speed rail traffic between Fresno and Bakersfield will never come within shouting distance of covering the operating costs. Some people have analogized putting such a rail line between these two towns to the infamous "bridge to nowhere" in Alaska.

Why are they doing it? Because they can.

If they began this project where they want it to go -- between San Francisco and Los Angeles -- they would run into so much opposition from the environmentalists, and from local politicians influenced by the environmentalists, that the delays could take the high-speed rail advocates beyond the time limit for using the federal subsidy money. But the green fanatics have not yet taken over politically out in the San Joaquin Valley.

The only reason for even thinking about building a high-speed rail line between Fresno and Bakersfield is just to get the project underway with federal money, making it politically more difficult to stop the larger project for a similar rail line between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

In other words, they are going to start wasting money out in the valley, so that they will be able to waste more money later on, along the coast. This may not make any sense economically, but it can make sense politically for Jerry Brown and Barack Obama.

An old song ended, "You've been running around in circles, getting nowhere -- getting nowhere very fast." On high-speed rail.
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To read another article by Thomas Sowell, click here.

Obama's Racial Politics

2012-02-01T12:04:00.000-08:00

Obama's Racial Politics
By Walter E. Williams
2/1/2012

There's been a heap of criticism placed upon President Barack Obama's domestic policies that have promoted government intrusion and prolonged our fiscal crisis and his foreign policies that have emboldened our enemies. Any criticism of Obama pales in comparison with what might be said about the American people who voted him in to the nation's highest office.

Obama's presidency represents the first time in our history that a person could have been elected to that office who had long-standing close associations with people who hate our nation. I'm speaking of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama's pastor for 20 years, who preached that blacks should sing not "God Bless America," but "God damn America." Then there's William Ayers, now professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago but formerly a member of the Weather Underground, an anti-U.S. group that bombed the Pentagon, U.S. Capitol and other government buildings. Although Ayers was never convicted of any crime, he told a New York Times reporter, in the wake of the September 2001 terrorist attack, "I don't regret setting bombs. ... I feel we didn't do enough." Obama has served on a foundation board, appeared on panels, and even held campaign events in Ayers' home, joined by Ayers' former-fugitive wife, Bernardine Dohrn. Bill Ayers' close association with Obama is reflected by his admission that he helped write Obama's memoirs, "Dreams from My Father."

Many Americans thought that with Obama's presidency, we were moving to a "post-racial society." Little can be further from the truth. Victor Davis Hanson, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, in a National Review (1/18/2012) article titled "Obama's Racial Politics," says that Obama's message about race and his charges of racial bigotry are "usually coded and subtle." Criticizing Republicans, before a Mexican-American audience, Obama said that he ran for office because "America should be a place where you can always make it if you try -- a place where every child, no matter what they look like (or) where they come from, should have a chance to succeed." If you don't get it, "no matter what they look like" is code for nonwhite. Hanson says that Obama's attorney general, Eric Holder, has "found race a convenient refuge from criticism -- most recently accusing his congressional auditors of racism, for their grilling him over government sales of firearms to Mexican cartel hitmen."

Obama's racial politics are aided and abetted by a dishonest news media. When Republican candidate Texas Gov. Rick Perry referred to "a big black cloud that hangs over America, that debt that is so monstrous," he was dishonestly accused of racism by MSNBC's Ed Schultz, who said, "That black cloud Perry is talking about is President Barack Obama." Schultz omitted the second half of Perry's quote. Chris Matthews referred to Perry's vision of federalism as "Bull Connor with a smile."

The media have help from black congressmen in stirring up racial dissent. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., said white presidents must be "pushed a great deal more" to address black unemployment than would a black president. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, said that argument over the debt ceiling is proof of racial animosity toward Obama. Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., said that Republicans are trying to deny blacks the vote. Rep. Andre Carson, D-Ind., said the tea party wishes to lynch blacks and hang them from trees. Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., said Perry's job creation in Texas is "one stage away from slavery."

All of this places a heavy burden on people who care about our nation. We must ensure that the 2012 elections are the most open and honest elections in U.S. history. Should Obama lose, I wouldn't put it past leftists, progressives, the news media and their race-hustling allies, as well as the president, to fan the fires of hate and dissension by charging that racists somehow stole the election, thereby giving support and excuses for the kind of violence and lawlessness that we've witnessed in flash mobs and Occupy Wall Street riots.
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To read another article by Walter Williams, click here.

First, They Came for the Catholics

2012-02-01T12:01:00.001-08:00

First, They Came for the Catholics
By Michelle Malkin
2/1/2012

President Obama and his radical feminist enforcers have had it in for Catholic medical providers from the get-go. It's about time all people of faith fought back against this unprecedented encroachment on religious liberty. First, they came for the Catholics. Who's next?

This weekend, Catholic bishops informed parishioners of the recent White House edict forcing religious hospitals, schools, charities and other health and social service providers to provide "free" abortifacient pills, sterilizations and contraception on demand in their insurance plans -- even if it violates their moral consciences and the teachings of their churches.

NARAL, NOW, Ms. Magazine and the Feminist Majority Foundation all cheered the administration's abuse of the Obamacare law to ram abortion down pro-life medical professionals' throats. Femme dinosaur Eleanor Smeal gloated over the news that the administration had rejected church officials' pleas for compromises: "At last," she exulted, the left's goal of "no-cost birth control" for all had been achieved.

As always, tolerance is a one-way street in the Age of Obama. "Choice" is in the eye (and iron fist) of the First Amendment usurper.

Like the rising number of states who have revolted against the individual health care mandate at the ballot box and in the courts, targeted Catholics have risen up against the Obamacare regime. Arlington (Va.) Bishop Paul Loverde didn't mince words, calling the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services order "a direct attack against religious liberty. This ill-considered policy comprises a truly radical break with the liberties that have underpinned our nation since its founding." Several bishops vowed publicly to fight the mandate.

Bishop Alexander Sample of Marquette, Mich., asserted plainly: "We cannot -- we will not -- comply with this unjust law."

It's not just rabid right-wing politicos defying the Obama machine. Pro-life Democratic Sen. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania denounced the "wrong decision." Left-leaning Bishop Robert Lynch threatened "civil disobedience" in St. Petersburg, Fla., over the power grab. Lefty Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne wrote that Obama "botched" the controversy and "threw his progressive Catholic allies under the bus" by refusing to "balance the competing liberty interests here."

White House press secretary Jay Carney blithely denied on Tuesday that "there are any constitutional rights issues" involved in the brewing battle. Yet, the Shut Up and Hand Out Abortion Pills order undermines a unanimous Supreme Court ruling issued just last week upholding a religious employer's right to determine whom to hire and fire. And two private colleges have filed federal suits against the government to overturn the unconstitutional abortion coverage decree.

Hannah Smith, senior counsel at the nonprofit law firm The Becket Fund, which is representing the schools, boiled it down for Bloomberg News: "This is not really about access to contraception. The mandate is about forcing these religious groups to pay for it against their beliefs."

How did we get here? The first salvo came in December 2010, when the American Civil Liberties Union pushed HHS and its Planned Parenthood-championing secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, to force Catholic hospitals to perform abortions in violation of their core moral commitment to protecting the lives of the unborn.

The ACLU called for a litigious fishing expedition against Catholic hospitals nationwide that refuse to provide "emergency" contraception and abortions to women. In their sights: Devout Phoenix Catholic Bishop Thomas Olmsted, who revoked the Catholic status of a rogue hospital that performed several direct abortions, provided birth control pills and presided over sterilizations against the church's ethical and religious directives for health care.

The ACLU and the feminists have joined with Obama to threaten and sabotage the First Amendment rights of religious-based health care entities. The agenda is not increased "access" to health care services. The ultimate goal is to shut down health care providers -- Catholic health care institutions employ about 540,000 full-time workers and 240,000 part-time workers -- whose religious views cannot be tolerated by secular zealots and radical social engineers.

Is it any surprise their counterparts in the "Occupy" movement have moved from protesting "Wall Street" to harassing pro-life marchers in Washington, D.C., and hurling condoms at Catholic school girls in Rhode Island? Birds of a lawless, bigoted feather bully together.
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To read another article by Michelle Malkin, click here.
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To read a related article, click here.

Romney: "I’m Not Concerned With the Very Poor"

2012-02-01T10:15:00.000-08:00

Romney: "I’m Not Concerned With the Very Poor"
Here we go again.
by John Hayward
02/01/2012

People often criticize Mitt Romney for being stiff, but that’s ridiculous. Look how easily he can put his foot in his mouth!

Appearing on CNN just hours after his big Florida win, Romney bid fair to throw it all away, by obligingly handing opponents across the political spectrum a new sound-bite club to beat him with:

Romney says, "I'm not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs a repair , I'll fix it. I'm not concerned about the very rich.... I'm concerned about the very heart of America, the 90-95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling."

O'Brien asked him to clarify his remarks saying, "There are lots of very poor Americans who are struggling who would say, 'That sounds odd.'"

Romney continues, "We will hear from the Democrat party, the plight of the poor.... You can focus on the very poor, that's not my focus.... The middle income Americans, they're the folks that are really struggling right now and they need someone that can help get this economy going for them."

Let’s take the obvious result of this encounter first: you’re going to hear a lot of attack ads, both now and during the general election, repeating that boldfaced sentence. Unlike the previous feeding frenzy over Romney’s “I like to be able to fire people” comment, it won’t be necessary to chop the sentence in half, deliberately misconstrue what he said, or completely eliminate all mention of vital context.

The rest of Romney’s comments would ameliorate the damage, if his opponents and their Super PACs would be so kind as to relay them during the attack ads. I wouldn’t count on it, especially not from Obama and the largest Super PAC in history, the mainstream media. Class warfare is not conducted with quiet introspection and a thoughtful consideration of opposing viewpoints.

Romney has some good points to make here, both during the snippet of interview that will receive the widest play, and in his longer remarks surrounding it. The social welfare safety net for the destitute is a very small portion of our titanic federal spending. The very poor are routinely invoked by liberals as the justification for programs and policies that actually have very little to do with feeding and sheltering people who would otherwise starve and freeze. Compared to the other issues that will land on the next President’s plate, any holes that might exist in that social safety net will be a relatively minor concern.

The impending bankruptcy and collapse of the entire government is a far more pressing issue. Flat GDP growth is reducing tax revenue, and Obama’s soak-the-rich sucker plays will reduce them even further, as everyone except dyed-in-the-wool liberals and their victims understands. Wild Obama spending has produced massive debt which carries enormous servicing costs, which will increase if America’s credit rating is downgraded further.

All of this will leave very little money for repairing that social safety net… and the President who stuffed millions of dollars into the pockets of his billionaire contributors has very little of value to say on the subject. How many starving waifs could have been fed with George Kaiser’s half-billion-dollar Solyndra payoff? Also, despite Obama’s legendary prowess in distributing food stamps, a lot of those stamps are finding their way into the hands of people who are not “very poor,” much less starving.

Also, Romney could make the point that a robust middle class is the best hope for the poor, for their paramount objective should be achieving entry to the middle class. Statist governments are stale, while dynamic free-market economic liberty brings income mobility. The best way to help the poor is to give them a way to climb out of poverty, and that is a massive project for all of society, not a problem to be addressed by a couple of Big Government programs with heartwarming names.

Nothing is less helpful for the poor than sucking huge amounts of money out of the already anemic private sector, pumping it through the complex and rusted pipes of ancient government welfare programs, and dropping a couple of pennies into the cupped hands of the downtrodden. The poor should want nothing more than to live in a free economy that manufactures something other than poverty.

The problem for Romney is that it is necessary to express these thoughts carefully, without producing loaded sound bites that can be easily fashioned into weapons. Some orators can spin provocative thesis statements into soaring speeches, but Romney is not one of those orators. He’s also not a blogger for a free-market think tank. He’s a political candidate. No one should have to explain to him that the rules are different for those, particularly when they hail from the Republican Party.

I found the beating Romney took over his “I like to be able to fire people” comment to be deeply unfair and unreasonable, as it relied on butchering the quote and twisting it until it defied logic. Even leaving aside the immediate context of the remark – he was talking about the role of choice in health care – that earlier assault simply defied common sense. Who doesn’t like to be able to fire people, when they don’t deliver adequate services?

This time is different. It’s going to swamp Romney with an ill-timed media firestorm. Instead of consolidating his Florida win and forging ahead to the next caucuses and primaries, he’ll spend valuable time defending and explaining this remark… and his track record on rhetorical defense is not terribly encouraging. Republican voters are very nervous about self-destructing candidates, as Romney’s campaign has been happy to remind them, when the topic was the hand-grenade pin sticking from Newt Gingrich’s teeth. It looks like Romney could teach Gingrich a few things about self-destruction.
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To read another article by John Hayward, click here.

Obama's Calculated Deception

2012-02-01T09:52:00.000-08:00

Obama's Calculated Deception
By Peter Ferrara on 2.1.12 @ 6:08AM

He thinks you're really stupid. But Paul Ryan has his number.

Calculated deception as a central public manipulation strategy practiced by President Obama involves the President taking advantage of what he thinks the average person doesn't know and won't be told by a compliant media. Such calculated deception was central to last week's State of the Union Address. That address is useful only as an outline of the President's reelection strategy.

A powerful practical answer will come at the end of March in the form of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's 2013 budget proposal, which will be passed by the Republican-controlled House. That budget, which all the Republicans will run on, and the President's State of the Union Address will frame the 2012 election debate.

He Thinks You're Stupid

The Obama SOTU exhibited again Obama's core "progressive" conviction that the average American is hopelessly stupid. Obama bemoans America as "a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by." You may identify with that statement, as it correctly applies to Obama's America today. But not to Reagan's America, or my America.

As Henry R. Nau explained in the January 26 Wall Street Journal, "the U.S. grew by more than 3% per year [in real terms] from 1980 to 2007, and created more than 50 million new jobs, massively expanding a middle class of working women, African-Americans and legal as well as illegal immigrants. Per capita income increased by 65%, and household income went up substantially in all income categories."

But Obama continued last week, "Long before the recession, jobs and manufacturing began leaving our shores." Mr. Obama, let me introduce you to Mr. Nau, who, unlike you, is a real professor. The 25-year Reagan boom from 1982 to 2007 added 50 million jobs. The recession began in December, 2007, and it is your policies that have prevented America from recovering from it.

Obama recalled, "[T]he basic American promise that if you worked hard, you could do well enough to raise a family, own a home, send your kids to college, and put a little away for retirement." He said, "The defining issue of our time is how to keep that promise alive. No challenge is more urgent. No debate is more important."

Actually, that debate is over, Barack. Reagan already showed us how to do it. As Professor Nau also explained:

Yes, "the middle class has shrunk," as Mr. Obama said while campaigning last month. But not because it's getting poorer, but because it's getting richer. According to Stephen Rose of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, fewer people live today in middle-class households with incomes between $35,000 and $105,000, while the percentage of households making less than $35,000 has remained the same. Where did the missing households go? They became richer. In the past three decades [1980 to 2007], the percentage of households making more than $105,000 in inflation adjusted dollars doubled to 24% from 11%.

Where were you from 1980 to 2007, Mr. Obama? Sleeping? In Indonesia? In an ideologically induced stupor?

But Obama continued to drone on with his fairy tale bedtime stories in the SOTU. He proclaimed, "But I intend to fight obstruction with action, and I will oppose any effort to return to the very same policies that brought on the economic crisis in the first place." One of Obama's top fairy tales is the calculated deception that he has been trying so hard to get the economy to recover, but he has been "obstructed" by the "Republican Congress."

But there is no "Republican Congress." Obama is certain that you are too stupid to know that while the House of Representatives is firmly in Republican control, the Democrats still hold a majority in the Senate. Moreover, that Republican House has been busily passing good legislation that would help to restore the economy, from the repeal of Obamacare on day one, to the Ryan 2012 budget, that would cut $6.2 trillion in federal spending in the first 10 years alone, balancing the budget, and ultimately actually paying off the national debt, if continued long enough.

Moreover, the Ryan 2012 budget would do that while slashing income tax rates to 10% for those making less than $100,000 per year, and 25% for those making above, with the federal corporate tax rate slashed to 25% as well, which along with Reagan monetary and regulatory policies would restore the Reagan economic boom.

But the Democrat Senate has refused to even take up any of this legislation passed by the Republican House. Indeed, the Democrat Senate has refused to even pass any budget for 2 years, in violation of federal law. Which raises the question, if Harry Reid and his Senate Democrats don't have to obey the law, why should the rest of us have to?

Moreover, Obama is also certain that you, or at least your friends and neighbors, are too stupid to know that during the first two of his three years in office, the Congress was completely controlled by Democrat supermajorities that were able to give Obama anything he wanted. Congressional Republicans during those years were reduced to hapless bystanders, which is how Obamacare was passed.

Fairy Tale Bedtime Stories

But let us not pass over Obama's staunch opposition "to the very same policies that brought on the economic crisis in the first place." Obama's second biggest tall tale is that the financial crisis of 2008 was caused by the Reaganomics policies of deregulation and tax rate cuts begun 30 years ago.

But as readers of this column know, the real causes of the financial crisis were government policies of overregulation and cheap dollar monetary policy, as thoroughly documented in such books as Paul Sperry's The Great American Bank Robbery: The Unauthorized Report About What Really Caused the Financial Crisis (Thomas Nelson, 2011), Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner's Reckless Endangerment (Times Books, 2011), John B. Taylor's Getting Off Track (Hoover Institution Press, 2009), and my own book, America's Ticking Bankruptcy Bomb (HarperCollins, 2011). The minimal interest rate, cheap dollar monetary policy of the Fed pumped up the housing bubble. Overregulation mandated the looting of the banks, forcing them to trash traditional lending standards because they were "discriminatory" to the poor who couldn't afford their own home, which further pumped up the housing bubble and ensured that the banks were maximally vulnerable to the bubble. Government backing for the securitization of these toxic mortgages by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac ensured this vulnerability was spread throughout the financial community of the U.S., and the entire world.

These policies of overregulation and cheap dollar monetary expansion were the opposite of Reaganomics. For years, the ultra-leftist Obama himself had been promoting precisely these very policies at the root of the crisis. The opposite policies of Reaganomics, opposed in detail by Obama, were the causes of the Reagan boom discussed above. As Professor Nau explains,

What were the policy trends that produced this Great Expansion? Precisely the free-market policies of deregulation and lower marginal income-tax rates that Mr. Obama decries. President Reagan's decision to reverse the high tax, loose-money, and interventionist government policies of the 1970s brought an end to the painful "stagflation of that decade….Sadly, [Obama's] policies resemble those that brought on the stagflation of the 1970s, not those that ignited the Great Expansion.

But the all time whopper of calculated deception that Obama tells is the fable of the Great Hustler Warren Buffett. As Obama regaled us in the SOTU, "Right now, Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary….Tax reform should follow the Buffett rule: If you make more than $1 million a year, you should not pay less than 30 percent in taxes."

The picture of America's tax policy that Obama paints is the opposite of reality, and the American people will suffer the loss of the American Dream if they fall for it. In 2007, before President Obama was even elected, the top 1% of income earners paid 40.4% of all federal income taxes, about twice their share of income. In fact, the top 1% of income earners paid more in federal income taxes than the bottom 95% combined! This is all as reported in official IRS data. This was after nearly 40 years of the policies of Reaganomics!

Moreover, this does not count the burdens of the corporate income tax, which is how not only Obama but dishonest liberal Democrats across the board create the phony statistic about Buffett and his secretary. They just ignore the existence of the federal corporate income tax entirely, with its 35% rate. The Wall Street Journal reported the actual facts on January 26, saying, "In fact, the Congressional Budget Office notes that the effective income tax rate of the richest 1% is about 29.5% when including all federal taxes such as the distribution of corporate taxes, or about twice the 15.1% paid by middle class families."

The capital gains tax is paid on top of the corporate income tax, not instead of it. Investment income is taxed once by the corporate income tax, and then by the capital gains or dividends tax when it is passed through to the individual. That makes for a total effective rate on investment income of 45%. Bringing it down to the 30% of Obama's Buffett Rule would require further tax rate cuts.

But what Obama is proposing would actually double the capital gains tax rate to 30%, leaving America with the third highest capital gains rate in the developed world. That would be on top of the second highest corporate tax rate in the developed world. And it would be on top of all the tax rate increases already scheduled to go into effect next year under current law, with the Obamacare taxes becoming effective, and the Bush tax cuts scheduled to expire. Obama calculates that the average American doesn't know anything about that.

Obama and the Democrats play-acting as if they don't understand the corporate income tax leaves America uncompetitive and falling behind in the world. It means fewer jobs and declining income for you and your friends and neighbors. But they don't care as long as their calculated deception can trick enough voters to get them past the next election.

As for Mr. Buffett, a higher capital gains rate will not affect the tax shelter fund that has made him a billionaire. It would only make it more attractive as a tax shelter alternative. So he prospers by calling for higher taxes and a reduced standard of living for the rest of us. In fact, he is lionized in the leftist media and by President Obama as a result. The wily, 82-year old coot will be hustling America until his dying day.

Is This Fair?

Obama proclaimed in his SOTU that his goal is "to restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules." Everyone would play under the same set of rules under a flat tax, where Warren Buffett would precisely pay the same tax rate as his secretary.

But that is not what Obama is for. He is for the nation's small businesses, job creators, and investors paying almost all of the federal income taxes, and his supporters in his political machine paying nothing. That would be the result of adding still further tax increases on disfavored taxpayers.

But are the results of Obama's policies really fair? The recession started in December 2007. Since the Great Depression recessions in America have previously lasted an average of 10 months, with the longest previously lasting 16 months. When President Obama entered office in January 2009, the recession was already in its 13th month. His responsibility was to manage a timely robust recovery to get America back on track again.

Supposedly a forward-looking progressive, Obama proved to be America's first backward-looking regressive. His first act was to increase federal spending, borrowing, deficits, and the national debt by nearly a trillion dollars to finance a supposed "stimulus" package, based on the proven failed Keynesian theory left for dead 30 years ago holding that increased government spending, deficits, and debt are what promotes economic growth and recovery.

As should have been long expected, Obama's trillion dollar Keynesian stimulus did nothing to promote recovery and growth, and almost surely delayed it. That is because borrowing a trillion dollars out of the economy to spend a trillion back into it does nothing to promote the economy on net. Indeed, it is a net drag on the economy, because the private sector spends the money more productively and efficiently than the public sector.

After the stimulus, Obama veered steadily left. Through Obamacare, he increased future federal taxes and spending by trillions more, adopting or wildly expanding three entitlement programs, on top of the entitlement crisis America already suffers. Through the EPA, Dodd-Frank, and other regulatory expansions, he wildly rocketed up regulatory costs, burdens, and barriers. He has already enacted in current law increases in the top tax rates of virtually every major federal tax for next year. And as in the SOTU, every time he speaks he calls for and threatens still more tax increases, especially on the nation's job creators and investors.

The National Bureau of Economic Research scored the recession as ending in June 2009, the longest on record. Yet, today, in the 49th month since the recession started, there has still been no real recovery, not like recoveries from previous recessions in America.

Unemployment actually rose after June 2009 and did not fall back down below that level until 18 months later in December 2010. Instead of a recovery, America suffered the longest period of unemployment near 9% or above since the Great Depression. Even today, 49 months after the recession started, the U6 unemployment rate counting the unemployed, underemployed, and discouraged workers is still 15.2%. And that doesn't include all the workers who have fled the workforce under Obama's economic oppression. The unemployment rate with the full measure of discouraged workers is reported at www.shadowstats.com as a depression level 23%. Is this fair, Mr. Obama?

Today, more than four years since the recession started, there are still almost 25 million Americans unemployed or underemployed. That includes 5.6 million who are long-term unemployed for 27 weeks, or more than six months. Under President Obama, America has suffered the longest period with so many in such long-term unemployment since the Great Depression. Is this fair?

Indeed, African Americans have already long been suffering another depression under Obama, with unemployment today, 49 months after the recession started, still at 15.8%. Black unemployment has been over 15% for two and a half years under Obama. Black teenage unemployment today is over 40%, where it has persisted for over two years as well.

Hispanics have also been suffering a depression under Obama, with unemployment today still in double digits at 11%. Hispanic unemployment has been in double digits for three years under President Obama. Over one-fourth of Hispanic youths remain unemployed today, which also has persisted for years. Is this fair?

The Census Bureau reported in September that more Americans are in poverty today than at any time in the entire history of Census tracking poverty. Americans dependent on food stamps are at an all-time high as well. Real wages and incomes have been falling so steadily under Obama and his confused, throwback, Keynesian/neo-Marxist Obamanomics, that the Census Bureau also reported that real median family income in America has fallen all the way back to 1996 levels. Is this fair, Mr. Obama?

Obama apologists cannot argue that this is because the recession was so bad, because the historical record in America is that the worse the recession the stronger the recovery. Based on historical precedent, we should at worst be finishing the second year of a booming recovery by now.

Ryan's Salvation

In March, Paul Ryan will again propose to restore traditional, American, world-leading prosperity and growth, with a budget that will cut federal spending by trillions over the next 10 years, leading to a balanced budget, and sharply reduced national debt. Like last year, that budget will again include tax reform, reducing rates to restore prosperity, and long-term entitlement reform. With restored Reagan regulatory and monetary policies, this would reignite the Reagan boom.

And that is what the election this year will be all about. Do we want the traditional, real America, with world leading economic growth and prosperity? Or do we want to trash all that for Obama's neo-Marxist vision of robbing from job creators and investors to buy votes through still more government dependency, resulting in the fairness of the equal sharing of misery, and the decline of America to become just another country?
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To read another article by Peter Ferrara, click here.

Romney's Cheap and Empty Win

2012-02-01T09:36:00.000-08:00

Romney's Cheap and Empty Win
By George Neumayr on 2.1.12 @ 6:09AM

The GOP is signing its own political death warrant by backing him.

Mitt Romney's plastic and philosophically vapid campaign secured an easy victory in Florida on Tuesday night. Sunshine state GOP voters swallowed his "electability" argument whole, according to the exit polls.

It appears that country club Republicans have succeeded again in duping the GOP electorate into crowning a "centrist" Republican. Never mind that "centrist" Republicans rarely win the center. They usually lose the center while sapping the spirit of the party's conservative base.

Out of Bob Dole's and John McCain's tattered Big Tent steps another "reformed" RINO, Mitt Romney, who will receive, should he win the nomination, a similar thumping from the Democrats.

But let's say that he is "electable," for the sake of argument. Who cares? The purpose of politics in a republic is not simply to win but to win on sound principles. A party that pursues victory by scrapping or sidelining its platform will have no truth left with which to govern once it does.

If "electability" is the goal, why don't the politically correct plutocrats of the GOP just call for a one-party state? That way they could win every time.

The "electability" argument is bankrupt on both philosophical and practical grounds. It destroys the party's soul and guarantees defeat.

Even though Romney paid for this Florida win on his debit card -- outspending Newt by millions -- he still couldn't nail down the rank-and-file vote. Seven out of ten self-described conservatives didn't vote for him. This foreshadows the boredom and disgust that will keep conservatives home in the fall.

Visions of a former Paul Tsongas voter and Planned Parenthood supporter won't exactly blast them out of bed in the morning. The confederacy of weasels that is the GOP establishment couldn't even find a moderate with an engaging personality to run. They settled on a robotic bore.

His high-priced strategists -- the ones who bragged to the New York Times about engineering his post-South Carolina comeback -- wind him up and then find photographers to capture him "doing his own laundry," buying a Big Mac, or woodenly tossing bags of potato chips to media jackals on his campaign plane.

This pitifully plastic campaign is what passes for winning politics in the GOP. Newt, Romney supporters crow, is a loser and "embarrassment." But what about their own candidate? Romney's teleprompter-dependent drivel is far more risible than Newt's grandiose opining. Romney comes off as the blinkered technocrat whose idea of wit is to compare his opponent to "Lucille Ball at the chocolate factory." All one can say for Romney is that he looks presidential. If Newt looked like Romney and Mitt looked like an overfed blowhard, Gingrich would be winning.

That Romney is a corny businessman of narrow learning and culture wouldn't be so deadly if he harbored conservative convictions. But he doesn't. He has been taught how to play a semi-conservative Republican on TV, but his deepest instincts remain liberal. Hence, his dogged pride in Romneycare, legislation that Barack Obama himself would have fathered had he governed the Bay State.

What's notable about the rise of Romney is not the extent to which he has pandered to conservatives -- the usual media narrative -- but the ease with which he has left his liberalism open for all to see and still won. In the debates, he has defended statist mandates, extolled gay rights (short of marriage), and waxed nostalgic about FDR's New Deal. Remember his rebuke of Rick Perry for even contemplating a system other than Social Security? Good Republicans, Mitt let Perry know, don't entertain such impure thoughts.

Almost two years after energy from the Tea Party swept Republicans back into congressional power, a politician who embodies the antithesis of that spirit stands on the verge of victory. This is regress, not progress, and the GOP will pay a severe price for the Faustian bargain of "electability" that it entails. A party that chooses power over principle will lose both.
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To read another article by George Neumayr, click here.

Susan G. Komen Ends Funding for Planned Parenthood

2012-01-31T19:14:00.000-08:00

Susan G. Komen Ends Funding for Planned Parenthood
By Katie Pavlich
1/31/2012

I may be doing my first Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure this summer; they've cut ties with Planned Parenthood. The breast cancer organization used to provide funding to the abortion provider for mammograms, but has made the decision to discontinue this practice. Planned Parenthood has issued a statement on their website about the issue:

“We are alarmed and saddened that the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation appears to have succumbed to political pressure. Our greatest desire is for Komen to reconsider this policy and recommit to the partnership on which so many women count,” said Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

In the last few weeks, the Komen Foundation has begun notifying local Planned Parenthood programs that their breast cancer initiatives will not be eligible for new grants (beyond existing agreements or plans).

Remember, Cecile Richards is the woman who thinks seeing a baby before having an abortion is "abhorrent."

Planned Parenthood is trying to blame the Komen decision on political pressure, but really, it's most likely the unethical actions of Planned Parenthood, such as promoting underage sex trafficking, had a bigger impact.

Or maybe Komen cut funding based on the fact that Planned Parenthood actually doesn't provide mammograms.

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To read a related article, click here.
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To read another article by Katie Pavich, click here.

In The Beginning...

2012-01-31T19:01:00.000-08:00

an article from 2008...

The Opportunistic Rise of Barack Obama
By Guy Benson
2/17/2008

By now it's a familiar tale: On July 27, 2004, Barack Obama strode to the podium at the Democratic National Convention and captivated the nation with a soaring and memorable keynote address entitled "The Audacity of Hope." The speech marked America's first encounter with a rising political star. By the time Obama took the stage in Boston, he was already a shoo-in to become the next United States Senator from Illinois; he enjoyed a massive lead in the polls back home, where the state Republican Party was in total disarray and his carpet-bagging opponent seemed to specialize in alienating voters. Since that summer night more than three years ago, Obama has rocketed into the political stratosphere and now faces the possibility—if not the probability—of becoming his party's standard-bearer in the 2008 election.

Several questions still linger. How did Barack Obama rise from relative obscurity to his current level of prominence? How many Americans have heard of Alice Palmer, Blair Hull, or Jack Ryan? These names may hold no significance to the legions who now chant "yes we can," but they are names that Barack Obama should remember well. The mainstream press, which affords Obama nearly unanimous glowing coverage, has repeatedly failed to report a reality that doesn't quite fit the Obama-as-Messiah narrative. Namely, that this self-stylized agent of hope and change is a political opportunist extraordinaire. Barack Obama's dizzying ascendancy to political celebrity has been marked by less-than-inspirational bare-knuckle politics, an unremarkable legislative career, and a slew of lurid scandals that conveniently sunk formidable opponents.

Obama's first big break came in 1995 when Democratic Congressman Mel Reynolds resigned from office amid allegations of a sexual relationship with an underage girl. As state officials convened a special election, a venerable Chicago politician and civil rights leader named Alice Palmer chose to vacate her State Senate seat to pursue the open Congressional slot. After she was defeated handily, Palmer returned to run for re-election, only to discover that her hand picked successor was unwilling to relinquish his spot on the ballot. Though a series of legal challenges, Barack Obama strong-armed Palmer—and several other Democratic challengers—off the ballot, clearing a path to victory by destroying all potential competition.

During his unexceptional tenure in Springfield, Obama managed to rack up 129 "present" votes, including numerous noncommittal tallies on controversial issues such as abortion and gun rights. He also developed a curious, albeit rare, pattern of registering incorrect votes—including an accidental "no" vote on a hotly contested child welfare bill. When confronted with his mistaken vote, Obama asserted that he was "unaware" that he had voted the way he had, and asked that the record reflect that he had "intended" to vote the other way. Similar cases of supposed vote-casting confusion afflicted Obama on five additional occasions.

As the 2004 general election approached, Obama began to eye greener pastures. He decided to run for US Senate, positioning himself as an antiwar candidate. His longshot effort attracted throngs of college students, yet Obama gained little traction against the party's frontrunner, millionaire Blair Hull. But a bombshell scandal resurrected Obama's prospects. In amazingly short order, Hull experienced what the Chicago Tribune described as "the most inglorious campaign implosion in Illinois political history." Late in the primary race, unsealed divorce papers revealed allegations that Hull had verbally and physically abused his ex-wife. The Hull campaign tanked, and Team Obama celebrated. The nomination was theirs.

Illinois political observers then turned their attention to what promised to be a fiercely competitive general election race between Obama and GOP frontrunner Jack Ryan, a well-funded, charismatic businessman. Once again, however, scandal lurked in sealed divorce papers. Over the objections of both Ryan and his ex-wife—actress Jeri Ryan—the damning documents were made public, and the resulting headlines were salacious: Ryan had allegedly pressured his wife to visit sex clubs. Like Reynolds and Hull before him, Ryan dropped out of public life in disgrace, with Obama happily playing the role of beneficiary.

With Jack Ryan out of the picture, a desperate Republican Party trotted out a polarizing non-Illinoisan to face Obama in the fall. Alan Keyes' disastrous Senate campaign is perhaps best remembered for Keyes' spate of vicious, counterproductive attacks launched against Obama, including the assertion that Jesus Christ himself would have voted against Obama. The rout was on.

DNC organizers, anticipating Obama's assured victory and recognizing his potential widespread appeal, wisely offered him a coveted primetime speaking slot during the summer convention. Although the Beantown gathering was designed to be a political infomercial for the ill-fated Kerry/Edwards ticket, Obama stole the show with a speech that inspired millions and, more-importantly, transformed him into an instant media darling. Obama had seized his moment and smashed a rhetorical homerun. Less than half a Senate term later, he announced his Presidential bid.

Now only two figures impede Obama's path to the presidency. Unless Hillary Clinton can revitalize her sputtering campaign, or John McCain can defy the political odds and prevail in a tough electoral climate for Republicans, Barack Obama will become our next Commander-In-Chief. Unlike most seasoned politicians, who earn presidential nominations through many years of legislative, executive, or military accomplishments, Obama has exploited his rock-star status to skip to the front of the line. With many of his supporters apparently distracted by his powerful persona and vague, uplifting message, few people seem to notice, or care, that Obama's qualifications to be president are more than a bit thin. Americans would be well-served to shake themselves from the "change" trance long enough to examine Senator Obama's relatively meager record.
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To read another article by Guy Benson, click here.

Hamas and the Washington establishment

2012-01-31T18:44:00.001-08:00

Hamas and the Washington establishment
By Caroline Glick
1/31/2012

To date, the Republican presidential primary race has been the only place to have generated any useful contributions to America's collective understanding of current events in the Middle East. Last month, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich became the first major political figure in more than a generation to pour cold water over the Palestinian myth of indigenous peoplehood by stating the truth, that the Palestinians are an "invented people."

As Gingrich explained, their invention came in response to Zionism, the Jewish national liberation movement. Since they were created somewhere around 1920, the Palestinians' main purpose has not been the establishment of a Palestinian state but the obliteration of the Jewish state.

For his truth telling, Gingrich was attacked by fellow politicians and policy hands on both sides of the ideological divide. To his credit, Gingrich has not backed away from the truth he spoke. Rather he has repeated it in two subsequent Republican candidates' debates.

The second important contribution that Republican presidential candidates have made to the discourse on the Middle East was undertaken by Texas Gov. Rick Perry during a candidates' debate in South Carolina on January 17, shortly before he pulled out of the race. When asked about Turkey, Perry said that country "is being ruled by what many would perceive to be Islamic terrorists." He went on to say that the US ought to be having a debate about whether Turkey should continue to serve as a member of NATO.

Like Gingrich, Perry was pilloried by all right thinking people in the US foreign policy elite. And like Gingrich, Perry was right. The hoopla his statement generated showed just how destructive so much of America's received wisdom about the Middle East has become. Moreover, it demonstrated the extent to which the US has adopted Middle East policies that are inimical to its national interests.

After Hamas won the Palestinian elections in January 2006, Turkey was the first country to invite Hamas's terror master Khaled Mashal to Ankara. Turkish Prime Minister Recip Tayyip Erdogan's move provoked criticism from the Bush administration. But Erdogan just shrugged it off. And he was right to do so. By 2006, then secretary of state Condoleezza Rice had come to view Erdogan as the US's indispensable ally in the Muslim world. As she saw it, he was proof that Islamist parties could be democratic and moderate.

The fact that Erdogan embraced Hamas could not get in the way of Rice's optimistic assessment. So, too, the fact that Erdogan embarked on a systematic campaign to stifle press freedom, curb judicial independence and imprison his political critics in the media and the military could not move Rice from her view that Erdogan personified her belief that moderate jihadists exist and ought to be embraced by the US.

Rice's starry-eyed view of Erdogan set the stage of US President Barack Obama's even stronger embrace of the increasingly tyrannical Turkish Islamist. Since Obama took office, not only has Ankara stepped up its support of Hamas, and ended even the pretense of a continued strategic alliance with Israel that it maintained during the Bush years. Turkey began serving as Iran's chief diplomatic protector while vastly expanding its own strategic and economic ties with Tehran.

In the face of Turkey's openly anti-American behavior and actions, Obama clings to Erdogan even more strongly than Rice did. Obama reportedly views Erdogan as his most trusted foreign adviser. According to the media, Obama speaks with Erdogan more often than he speaks to any other foreign leader. In a recent interview with Time magazine, Obama listed Erdogan as one of the key foreign leaders with whom he has formed a friendship based on trust.

Over the past few weeks, Turkey has emerged as Hamas's largest financier. During an official visit in Turkey, Hamas's terror master in Gaza Ismail Haniyeh received a hero's welcome. Erdogan pledged to finance the jihadist movement to the tune of $300 million per year.

COMMENTATORS CLAIM that Turkey's sponsorship of Hamas was necessitated by Iran's abandonment of the terror group. Iran, it is claimed, cut Hamas off in August due to the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood's refusal to actively assist Iran's other Arab client - Syrian President Bashar Assad - in massacring his domestic opponents.

These analyses are problematic for two reasons. First, it is far from clear that Iran cut Hamas off. Iran's rulers have invited Haniyeh to Tehran for an official visit. This alone indicates that the mullahs remain committed to maintaining their relationship with the jihadist movement that controls the Gaza Strip.

And why would they want to cut off that relationship?

By serving as Hamas's chief sponsor since 2006, Iran has won enormous credibility in the Arab world. This credibility has bought Tehran influence with the likes of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and beyond. Particularly now, with the Brotherhood taking over Egypt and much of the Arab world, Iran would only stand to lose by cutting off Hamas.

The second problem with these assessments is that it makes little sense to believe that Turkey has replaced Iran as Hamas's main state sponsor since Iran and Turkey are not necessarily competing over Hamas. Given the interests shared by Tehran and Ankara, it is far more reasonable to assume that they are coordinating their moves regarding Hamas.

Iran became Hamas's chief financier and weapons supplier the same year that Erdogan emerged as Hamas's most important political supporter. And in the six years since then, Iran and Turkey have become strategic allies. Even with regards to Syria, the fact that Assad remains in power today is due in no small measure to the fact that Erdogan has used his influence over Obama to ensure that the US has remained on the sidelines and so effectively supported Assad's survival.

In light of Erdogan's enormous influence over leaders in both US parties, it is little wonder that Perry's factual statement about the nature of the Turkish government and the need for the US to reassess its strategic alliance with Turkey provoked such an across the board outcry. Erdogan's close relationship with Obama - like his previously close relationship with Rice - renders it well nigh impossible for US government officials and inside-the Beltway "experts" to make the kind of commonsense assessments of Turkey's counterproductive regional role that an outsider like Perry was able to make from his perch in Austin, Texas.

CONTRARY TO what several leading commentators have argued since the onset of the Syrian popular rebellion against Assad, Hamas has not been seriously damaged by the events. True, its leaders are looking for a new place to station their headquarters. But there is no law that requires terrorist organizations to have one central office. The families of Hamas's leadership have decamped to Jordan. Hamas leaders have close relations with the Qataris - who remain major funders - as well as with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and the Sudanese regime.

In addition to these state supporters, through its relations with Turkey and Fatah, Hamas has Washington as well. To understand how Washington acts as Hamas's protector, it is necessary to consider not only the corrosive impact of Washington's relations with Turkey, but also the nature of the Palestinian-Israeli peace process.

Since its inception in 1993, the peace process has been predicated on Israeli concessions to the Palestinians. To the extent that Israel makes concessions, the peace process is seen as advancing. To the extent that Israel fails to make concessions, the peace process is seen as collapsing. True, at certain times, the Bush administration blamed the Palestinians for the failure of the peace process, but the blame owed to the fact that Palestinian terrorism made Israel less amenable to concession making.

Palestinian terrorism was not in and of itself blamed for the demise of the peace process. Rather it was perceived as the means through which Israel avoided making more concessions. And at certain times, the US supported Israel's avoidance of concession making.

Since Israeli concessions to the Palestinians are the only tangible component of the peace process, the US, as the chief sponsor of the peace process, requires the Palestinian Authority - run by Fatah - to be accepted as a credible repository for Israeli concessions regardless of its actual nature. Consequently, despite Fatah's two unity deals with Hamas, its sponsorship of terrorism, its incitement of terrorism, its refusal to accept Israel's right to exist, its adoption of negotiating positions that presuppose Israel's demise, and its conduct of political warfare against Israel, neither the Bush administration nor the Obama administration ever showed the slightest willingness to consider ending their support for the PA.

If Israel has no peace partner, then it can't make concessions. And if it can't make concessions, there is no peace process. And that is something that neither the Bush administration nor the Obama administration was willing to countenance.

It is true that under Obama the US has become far more hostile towards Israel than it was under Bush. The most important distinction between the two is that whereas George W. Bush sought to broker a compromise deal between the two sides, Obama has adopted Fatah's negotiating positions against Israel. As a consequence of Obama's actions, the peace process has been derailed completely. Fatah has no reason to compromise since the US will blame Israel no matter what. And Israel has no reason to make concessions since the US will deem them insufficient.

Noting this distinction, Washington Post commentator Jennifer Rubin wrote this week that for the benefit of the peace process, it is important for a Republican administration to be elected to replace Obama in November. As she put it, "If history is any guide, progress is made in the 'peace process' when the Israeli prime minister operates from a position of strength and has the full support of the US president. We might get there, albeit not until 2013."

The problem with her analysis is that it is of a piece with the insiders' attacks on Gingrich and Romney alike. That is, it is based on the false assumptions of the peace process and the generally accepted wisdom embraced by the American foreign policy elite on both sides of the aisle that the PA is a reasonable repository for Israeli concessions.

Here it is worth noting that this week Fatah-controlled PA TV aired a sequence venerating the murderers of the Fogel family. Udi and Ruth Fogel and their children Yoav, Elad and Hadas were brutally murdered in their home last March.

Fatah's glorification of their murderers is yet further proof that the foundations of the peace process are false. Peace cannot be based on appeasing societies that uphold mass murderers as role models. It can only be based on empowering free societies to defeat societies that embrace murder, terror and in the case of Hamas, genocide.

And this brings us back to the Republican primaries and Gingrich's and Perry's statements. For the US to secure its interests in the Middle East, it requires leaders who are willing to reassess what passes for common wisdom on both sides of the aisle.
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To read another article by Caroline Glick, click here.

Social Pressure to Marry Is Dead

2012-01-31T17:03:00.000-08:00

Social Pressure to Marry Is Dead
By Mona Charen
1/31/2012

The advice columns of newspapers are good windows into the conscience of a culture. There you will find a field guide to what is considered socially acceptable and unacceptable. One of the advice columnists for the Washington Post, Carolyn Hax, is consistently sensible and solid in her suggestions. Straightening out busybodies, drug abusers, interfering in-laws and ungrateful children with equal aplomb, she's usually a pleasant read with the morning coffee.

But not always. A recent response to a letter from "Grandmother-to-be" provides an example of the collapse of social wisdom on the subject of marriage and childbearing. "My 26-year-old son's girlfriend -- of four months -- is pregnant," wrote grandma. "I have very mixed emotions about this, mainly because he just met her, and I do not know her. They work and live across the country. I am disappointed in their behavior. How do I tell my friends the news? I am embarrassed."

If I were an advice columnist, I would start with the reminder that telling one's friends is a low priority at the moment, while acknowledging that feeling ashamed of her son (not the young woman, as she has no relationship with her and thus cannot justifiably feel disappointed in her) is understandable under the circumstances.

Next, I would have pointed out that since the couple will be parents, the very highest priority should be to encourage them to marry as soon as possible. A shotgun wedding? Obviously not. Those days are gone. But for all concerned -- most particularly for the unborn child -- a stable family is now essential.

Hax indeed began by dismissing the friend worry but with a very different emphasis. "There's a child on the way, and this is your big concern? ... American adults overwhelmingly choose premarital sex . . . Plus, birth control isn't perfect, so you have statistical permission not to single this couple out for shaming."

Well, if shame still attached to getting pregnant outside of marriage, it would be no bad thing. But fine, Hax seemed to be going in the right direction with the next sentence. "Any big concern belongs with the stability of the home that will welcome this baby . . ." But then, instead of recommending an immediate and tasteful elopement, she wrote, "If they plan to raise the baby as a couple . . ."

If? For so many 21st century Americans, that's the way it's done. A child on the way will not affect the couple's decision about marriage. They may move in together. They may not. She may move into her mother's house. He may visit every day -- for a while. She may try to raise the child by herself. It may not be her first or his. The fate of the relationship is regarded as utterly separate from the fact of the child's existence.

Many, many young adults who already have babies and toddlers will explain that they "aren't ready" for the commitment of marriage, or that they haven't found the right person. How have we managed to get so confused?

The collapse of marriage among the lower and lower-middle classes is rapidly tapping our national strength. Women from wealthier families get it. They basically wait until they're married to have babies. They know that two parents create stability, financial security and the social structure to optimize the chances of rearing happy, healthy and productive new citizens. The illegitimacy rate among women with college educations, while it has tripled since 1960, is still only about 8 percent. By contrast, 67.4 percent of illegitimate births were to women with less than a high school diploma in 2006, and 51.4 percent were to women with only a high school degree.

The failure to marry on the part of the lower and lower-middle classes, not the tax code, Wall Street or competition from China, is what is aggravating inequality in America.

The toll is incalculable. In every way that social science can measure -- school performance, drug abuse, unemployment, suicide, poverty, depression, dependence on government handouts, mental illness, violence, and far more -- children raised by single parents (especially when their parents never married) are at a severe disadvantage. The failure to form families is devastating our schools, exacerbating inequality and diminishing happiness on a grand scale.

So yes, "Grandmother-to-be" should be worried -- not about what to tell her friends -- but about what will become of her grandchild if his/her parents choose to join the ranks of the great unwed.
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To read another article by Mona Charen, click here.

Pipes calls for Americans to repeal, replace ObamaCare

2012-01-31T14:31:00.000-08:00

Pipes calls for Americans to repeal, replace ObamaCare
The Pipes Plan' lays out a 10-step solution
by Neil W. McCabe
01/27/2012

At the Jan. 26 launch party in Washington for her new book, The Pipes Plan, the president of the Pacific Research Institute called on Americans to reject and dismantle the president’s healthcare reform agenda before it is too late.

When then-speaker Nancy Pelosi said Congress had to pass a 2,700-page healthcare reform bill no one had read, so people could find out what was in it, she decided to write a 270-page book that everyone could read to learn how to get rid of it, said Sally C. Pipes, whose book is a 10-step plan to repeal and replace ObamaCare.

There was a personal reason, too, she said. Her first-hand experience dealing with her own mother's illness also compelled her to present a concrete solution to the healthcare problem.

“It is interesting that Obama in his State of the Union address only devoted 44 words to healthcare,” she said.

“I think it’s because the American people don’t like the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” she said.

“Fifty-three percent of Americans want it repealed and as to the individual mandate, 82 percent, according to Gallup, want that repealed.”

Pipes said the American people have been fooled by the claims by President Barack H. Obama Jr., especially the claims that reforms will bend the cost curve downward and that his program will achieve universal coverage.
“Under the plan, still 23 million Americans will be uninsured by 2019,” she said.

Joining Pipes at the event was Virginia Atty. Gen. Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, was one of the leading opponents of president’s healthcare reform, who made his own remarks before Pipes.

“I am a specialist at dismantling ObamaCare, so, it is good to have other people who have thought through replacing it,” said Cuccinelli, a member of the group of more than 20 state’s attorneys general suing the federal government in order to have the entire law revoked.

“After we beat this thing in court,” he said. “I think it will be the only time that anyone has eliminated an entitlement—it will be kinda sad that the only time way we’ve ever done it is by court action, but we will take what we can get.”

The next day, those who fought to end the healthcare reform will have the obligation to present an alternative plan, he said.

“Our side, the limited government side, will be face with a different kind of battle from that moment,” he said.

“This president will go on the attack and we will be blamed for any person who passes away for any reason—including 100-plus-year-olds,” he said.

“Be ready for it, it is all they do,” he said.

“Campaigns are sales marketing and communications, and this president is outstanding at those things,” Old Dominion’s attorney general said. “Governing is a lot more—which he has found, and we have suffered.”

Cuccinelli said one of the great obstacles to getting rid of the healthcare law passed in 2010 is that so many people will benefit from its funding and regulatory regime.

By picking out winners, there is now an entrenched and enriched group of people who will fight to save and expand their gold mine, he said.

Pipes, who was raised in Canada, said in her own discussions with that country's Prime Minister Stephen J. Harper, she was surprised when he told her there was no way politically he could dismantle Canada's government-controlled head-on.

Harper told her the forces supporting the status quo were too powerful, she said.

When her own mother took ill, Pipes said it forced her to deal with the Canadian system, which was a wake-up call to her about what was coming to America before the winners from ObamaCare became too powerful.

“What the American people don’t realize is the in Canada, the government is the sole provider of healthcare,” she said. Private providers are prohibited by law there.

“But, they have an escape because Canadians can come to the United States and pay out-of-pocket,” she said.

In a well-publicized case, the Newfoundland premier was criticized in the Canadian press when he went to Miami for cardiac treatment, she said.

“When he got back, he said: ‘It’s my heart. It’s my health. It’s my choice,’” she said.

“My own mother died in December of ’05 of colon cancer,” she said.

The previous June, she convinced her mother to see a doctor about getting a colonoscopy, which is detailed examination with a very small camera or through a fiber optic cable, Pipes said.

“Her doctor said: ‘You know, at your age we cannot get you a colonoscopy —we have people in their 50s waiting six months,’” she said.

“By November of ’05, my mother had lost 30 pounds and called me to tell me she was hemorrhaging,” she said.

“We got her into an ambulance and to the hospital,” she said. “She spent two days in the emergency room, two days in the transition lounge waiting for a bed, she finally she got her colonoscopy, then my mom died two weeks later from metastasized colon cancer.”

Pipes said, “This is what happens with the government global budget and says who get what.”
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To read a related article, click here.

When Nobody's Business Is Everybody's Business

2012-01-31T12:54:00.000-08:00

When Nobody's Business Is Everybody's Business
By Robert Knight
1/31/2012

When I was a copy editor at the Los Angeles Times, a young reporter submitted an article about a single mother having trouble obtaining government checks.

The story was designed to elicit outrage at callous bureaucrats who should be showering this poor woman with subsidies. I asked the reporter if she knew anything about the father. Was he providing any assistance? Was he a deadbeat dad?

The reporter, who has probably gone on to MSNBC, responded: “How dare you ask that question? How dare you be so judgmental? It’s nobody’s business.”

Well, given that the unfortunate woman was asking taxpayers to take the place of the man who sired her children, it was everybody’s business.

It’s no secret that the decline of marriage has contributed mightily to poverty, crime, abortion, drug and child abuse, alcoholism, school dropout rates, sexually transmitted diseases and virtually every known social ill while exponentially bloating state and federal budgets. Every liberal attack on marriage ensures more government jobs for liberals to pick up the pieces.

As the federal government lurches toward a $16 trillion national debt and the states face bankruptcy, the welfare state is strangling freedom and the economy while keeping millions in wretched dependency.

Every attempt to rein in the behemoth is met with threats by public employee unions, fusillades from left-wing think tanks, and media smears.

Exhibit A is unfolding in the City of Brotherly Love, where the welfare state works so well that Philadelphia is a perennial contender for murder capital of the U.S. There's something to be said for Philly, the home of Ben Franklin, Bill Cosby, Independence Hall and hoagie sandwiches. But Philadelphia is also awash in liberal bureaucracy and social pathologies unleashed by the collapse of minority families thanks to the Great Society’s vision of the Good Life.

Here’s the gist of the current drama:

At issue: Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare (DPW) Secretary Gary Alexander’s attempts to reduce waste and fraud.

The real target: Republican Gov. Tom Corbett.

The goat: Robert W. Patterson, a DPW official. I worked with Mr. Patterson a few years back at the Family Research Council. He’s a good guy and a careful writer.

Patterson, who was appointed policy adviser in October, came under fire in mid-January from the Philadelphia Inquirer, which “began asking about Patterson’s side job as editor of The Family in America, published by an Illinois-based research center that advocates for the ‘natural human family … established by the Creator.” You know, the Creator that America’s founding fathers cited in the Declaration of Independence, which the Continental Congress adopted in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776.

However, The Family in America is not a faith-based journal but a scholarly compilation of articles and research summaries published by the Howard Center, whose president is Allan C. Carlson, arguably the nation’s leading social historian. To the Philly hit team, the journal is immediately suspect because it isn’t aggressively secular.

Here’s a snippet from a Philadelphia Daily News editorial:

“Religion is at the center of the Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society, where Patterson works as an editor. It’s fair to wonder how right it is for his extreme views to help shape a policy – in Patterson’s case, welfare policy – that will affect so many in need. And we can’t help but be disturbed by the contempt Patterson must have held, given his beliefs, for many of the clients served by the department.”

Add mind-reading to the amazing powers of the Philly scribes, along with shockingly casual religious bigotry. They KNOW that Mr. Patterson harbors bad motives. After all, he promotes marriage between one man and one woman.

The Inquirer and its cousin Daily News zeroed in on an article in the New Research section of the Family in America that summarized a scientist’s findings that semen had some positive effects on women. Here’s how a Daily News blog describes Patterson’s most colorful crime: “he wrote stories about semen as a mental elixir for women.”

An Inquirer article on January 26 attacked Patterson again, giving a cartoonish version of his views and noting his “musings on how condom use could rob women of reported mood-enhancing benefits of chemicals.”

Unmentioned was the fact that Mr. Patterson had digested a Sept. 22, 2010 blog article in Scientific American summarizing several scientists’ research on the topic. If you want to provoke a liberal wolf pack, try introducing scientific evidence for male-female complementarities.

At the same time the papers were hammering Patterson, the Inquirer ran stories about the Corbett administration’s attempt to reform Medicaid. The January 18 headline screams: “Since August, 88,000 Pennsylvania children have lost Medicaid benefits.”

The article includes unanswered volleys such as “They have chosen to send a signal, and it is very callous,” by a senior fellow from the hard-left Center for American Progress, identified as “a Washington think tank.”

Think of this as a microcosm of what the national press will do when House Republicans this year renew their common sense plan to reform Medicaid in similar fashion to the 1996 welfare reform that replaced open-ended federal matching funds with finite block grants.

Finally, there was this gem:

“Sen. Vincent J. Hughes (D-Phil.) said he believed the reviews were part of a pattern ... of the Corbett administration’s ‘putting their foot on the neck of poor people.’”

Is that all? From the tone of the articles and editorials, one would think Corbett had commissioned a traveling guillotine squad, perhaps with Patterson in a black hood.

But only one head fell in the flurry of liberal righteous indignation, and that was Bob Patterson’s. He resigned from the DPW and will continue to edit the Family in America.

It’s bad news for Pennsylvania, but good news for the rest of the nation.
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To read another article by Robert Knight, click here.

War Through Weakness?

2012-01-31T12:46:00.000-08:00

War Through Weakness?
By Cal Thomas
1/31/2012

One of the memorable slogans from the Reagan administration was "peace through strength." Reagan believed a strong defense was a safeguard against enemy attacks and the best hope of victory should America go to war.

President Obama is taking the opposite approach. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta recently announced cuts in defense spending of $487 billion over the next 10 years. Supposedly, these cuts will reduce the federal deficit, but Congress always finds new ways to spend money, so I am not optimistic.

The cuts were announced before critical questions were asked: What is America's role in the world in the 21st century? Where does the military fit into that role? The administration thinks a sleeker, more mobile military -- like SEAL Team Six, which has had recent successes taking out Osama bin Laden and rescuing hostages from Somali pirates -- is the way to go, but even the highly-trained SEALs can't confront, say, a nuclear threat from Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or China's increasing military power. The administration says it will preserve its manpower and weapons systems in the Middle East and shift resources to Asia.

Ships and planes take time to build. If America is not building them to ward off present and future threats, someone else -- like the Chinese -- will. The world does not remain stagnant and threats are not always obvious.

Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO), chairman of the Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee, says he is "deeply concerned" by the announced defense reductions, including the elimination of "at least 12 new Navy ships over the next five years and retiring at least nine ships earlier than planned."

Akin also worries about what will happen to the estimated 100,000 soldiers and Marines who will become unemployed in a struggling economy.

According to the website U.S. Government Spending.com, defense spending fluctuated in the last century. It hit a peak of 42 percent of GDP during World War II, declining to 10 percent during the Cold War to about 5 percent today.

Reagan's defense buildup followed cuts during the Carter administration. Reagan increased defense spending from 5.6 percent of GDP in 1979 to 7 percent of GDP by 1986. President George W. Bush's administration increased defense spending from 3.6 percent of GDP near the end of the Clinton administration in 1999, to 6 percent in 2010, to confront Islamic extremism.

The Obama administration, usgovernmentspending.com adds, plans to drop defense spending to 4.6 percent of GDP by 2015.

Do these reductions parallel a decline in the threats against America and American interests? Quite the opposite. The administration engages in wishful thinking about the so-called "Arab spring," which is devolving into a religious tornado with the radical Muslim Brotherhood calling the shots in Egypt and elsewhere and the Taliban poised to regain control in Afghanistan.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai have agreed that NATO should pull out all combat forces from Afghanistan by next year, not 2014, as planned. This can only encourage the Taliban, who have recently been sending signals they are not the bad guys most people rightly think they are.

A recent Wall Street Journal story noted that public statements by the Taliban make them sound more "moderate," adding, "The big unknown is whether this new rhetoric represents a meaningful transformation -- or is merely designed to sugarcoat the Taliban's real aims."

It's a safe bet to say it's the latter.

The "big unknown" is what a sound U.S. defense strategy should take into account. As former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once put it, "There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns ... there are some things we de not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know."

It is to protect not only against the "known knowns," but the "unknown unknowns" that a credible defense strategy should be maintained. Cutting our defenses without a plan of action is an invitation to war.
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To read another article by Cal Thomas, click here.

Democrats Fully Engaged in Fast and Furious Coverup

2012-01-31T12:30:00.000-08:00

Democrats Fully Engaged in Fast and Furious Coverup
By Katie Pavlich
1/31/2012

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee are officially trying to cover for Attorney General Eric Holder just before he testifies on Thursday about Operation Fast and Furious, with anti-Second Amendment Ranking Member Elijah Cummings leading the way. Last night, Cummings released a 95 page waste of paper and taxpayer money report, alleging that top Justice Department officials did not authorize the program, despite evidence showing otherwise. The report tries to pin the blame back on a few "rogue" managers in the ATF Phoenix Field Division. This is the same argument we've heard since the beginning of the scandal: it was a local operation, nobody important knew anything.

A few important points:

First, Deputy Attorney General of the Criminal Division Lanny Breuer (the number two man in DOJ), approved wiretaps for Operation Fast and Furious. Wiretap applications require excruciating detail about a case to be presented before approval. Wiretaps are considered the most intrusive tool law enforcement can use. Breuer, who read through the wiretap applications, knew details of the strategy used in Fast and Furious, letting guns walk into Mexico without alerting Mexican authorities, yet he approved it anyway. New emails released last Friday in a late night document dump, show Attorney General Eric Holder was briefed about Brian Terry's death just hours after he was murdered in the early morning hours on December 15, 2010. Later in the day, Holder's deputy chief of staff at the time Monty Wilkinson, was told directly by former Arizona U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke that the guns found at the murder scene were part of Operation Fast and Furious. According to the report, Wilkinson doesn't "recall" that email, despite replying to it with, "Call you tomorrow." Burke, who resigned from his position as U.S. Attorney in August, was in "complete agreement" with former ATF Special Agent in Charge of the Phoenix Division Bill Newell about Fast and Furious tactics according to a January 8, 2010 briefing memo.

If Wilkinson's "I don't recall," argument sounds familiar, there's a reason why. On May 3, 2011, Attorney General Eric Holder testifed before the House Judicary Committee that he had only known about Fast and Furious, "for a couple of weeks." Five months later, memos addressed directly to Holder surfaced, with details and discussion about the program. In defense, Holder said he didn't read the memos and that his staff didn't inform him of their content.

Second, the report claims Fast and Furious was not used as a way for the Obama administration to push through back door gun control measures.

"The report debunks many unsubstantiated conspiracy theories. Contrary to repeated claims by some, the Committee has obtained no evidence that Operation Fast and Furious was a politically-motivated operation conceived and directed by high-level Obama Administration political appointees at the Department of Justice," Cummings wrote in the report.

FLASHBACK: Designed to Promote Gun Control

"Internal ATF emails seem to suggest that ATF agents were counseled to highlight a link between criminals and certain semi-automatic weapons in order to bolster a case for a rule like the one the DOJ announced yesterday [Monday]."

Townhall has obtained the email which states "Can you see if these guns were all purchased from the same FfL and at one time. We are looking at anecdotal cases to support a demand letter on long gun multiple sales. Thanks Mark R. Chait Assistant Director Field Operations."

Remember this email from Assistant Director in Charge of Field Operations Mark Chait?

Wondering what a demand letter is? This:

“The international expansion and increased violence of transnational criminal networks pose a significant threat to the United States. Federal, state and foreign law enforcement agencies have determined that certain types of semi-automatic rifles – greater than .22 caliber and with the ability to accept a detachable magazine – are highly sought after by dangerous drug trafficking organizations and frequently recovered at violent crime scenes near the Southwest Border. This new reporting measure -- tailored to focus only on multiple sales of these types of rifles to the same person within a five-day period -- will improve the ability of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to detect and disrupt the illegal weapons trafficking networks responsible for diverting firearms from lawful commerce to criminals and criminal organizations. These targeted information requests will occur in Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas to help confront the problem of illegal gun trafficking into Mexico and along the Southwest Border.”

Although Cummings claims he wants to bring justice to the Terry family for his murder, which was a direct result of this recklass program, he has done the opposite by using the scandal to promote new gun control measures, implying ATF should be given more power and as a chance to blame President Bush for using the "same tactics" that were used during Fast and Furious for other programs during his time in the White House. During Bush-era "gunwalking" programs, the Mexican government was informed and cooperating with ATF to interdict and follow guns into Mexico. During Fast and Furious under President Obama, Mexican officials were left in the dark as 2500 guns were delivered to the hands of ruthless cartel members thanks to DOJ and ATF officials.

Note to Cummings: Your cover-up is showing.
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To read a related article, click here.

Five Reasons So Many Grassroots Conservatives Don't Like Mitt Romney

2012-01-31T12:15:00.000-08:00

Five Reasons So Many Grassroots Conservatives Don't Like Mitt Romney
By John Hawkins
1/31/2012

It's a mystery to some people why so many Tea Partiers and grassroots conservatives can’t stand Mitt Romney. What is it about him that turns them off so much that at one time or another, they've preferred Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Rick Santorum, and Newt Gingrich to him nationally despite the fact that he has every advantage in the race? Would Mitt Romney be better than Barack Obama? Sure, but there are some very good reasons that so many grassroots conservatives still find him to be a thoroughly unlikable candidate.

1) He's not a conservative. There have been a lot of conservatives who've talked a good game during the primaries and then have let us down in D.C., but if Mitt Romney becomes the nominee and gets elected, some people seem to be hoping that he'll be the first Republican moderate to go to D.C. and turn into a fire-breathing conservative. Based on his record, if Mitt Romney is nominated, he will be the least conservative candidate since Nixon.

Moreover, keep in mind that in 1994, when Mitt Romney was 47 years old, he was telling people that, "I was an independent during the time of Reagan-Bush. I’m not trying to return to Reagan-Bush" and the Contract with America was "not a good idea." Eight years later in 2002, when he was 55 years old, Mitt Romney was saying, "I think people recognize that I'm not a partisan Republican, that I'm someone who is moderate, and that my views are progressive.” Oh, joy! So he was a progressive, like Hillary Clinton! After four years of governing as a barely right of center moderate and coming up with Romneycare, a piece of signature legislation that any liberal Democrat would be proud of, Mitt Romney supposedly became a conservative -- precisely at the same moment he started running for President. What a stunning coincidence!

One of the great ironies of the campaign is that Newt Gingrich has been quite properly dinged for being a good Republican soldier and endorsing Dede Scozzafava over the Conservative Party's Doug Hoffman and now, a lot of the "good Republican soldiers" are endorsing a male version of Scozzafava for President over Newt.

2) He doesn't believe in anything politically other than Mitt Romney. What conservative cause has Mitt Romney ever fought like hell for in his career? There are none. What has Mitt Romney ever done for conservatives in his career? Nothing of significance...oh wait, I forgot; when he was asked about it in the Florida debate, he noted that he started a family and a business, which is nice, but probably puts him on par with about half of the people reading this column.

In the last decade alone, Mitt has been against an amendment to stop gay marriage and for an amendment to stop gay marriage, for cap and trade and against cap and trade, against Bush's tax cuts and for Bush's tax cuts, for abortion and against abortion, for gun control and against gun control....it goes on and on. Like Arlen Specter, Romney would feel just as comfortable running as a Democrat or Republican and like Barack Obama, all of Mitt's promises come with an expiration date. It's almost impossible to know where Romney will be on any issue in six months, including Obamacare, much less where he'd be after he got elected and settled down inside the Beltway. How do you get fired up about a guy like that? How do you believe in him the way conservatives believe in guys like Jim DeMint?

Mitt Romney is a repeat of the same show conservatives have seen over and over again and we all know the ending if the candidate gets elected. These plastic men, these political Stretch Armstrongs get inside the Beltway Bubble, the media starts working on them, the establishment starts whispering in their ear and next thing you know, they're explaining how important comprehensive immigration reform is to the conservative cause or why we need another Bridge to Nowhere.

When you're a grassroots conservative who has been mocked, ridiculed and attacked for believing in conservatism, capitalism, and the Constitution, sold out again and again by people in your own party, and told your nation is on the verge of a debt-driven crisis that could bankrupt us, the last thing you want is to be treated like you're stupid by a phony Massachusetts moderate who tells you he believes the same things you do when you damn well know he doesn't mean a word of it.

3) Mitt Romney has benefitted from a tremendous media double standard. Other than Herman Cain, who at least is a conservative who has worked tirelessly for the Tea Party, Mitt Romney is the single least qualified man running for office in the Republican field. Yes, Mitt's business experience is a plus, but it didn't help him in Massachusetts, where he was an awful, unpopular governor whose signature program, Romneycare, has been a miserable failure. Romney has gotten where he is because he's rich, the establishment is behind him, and much of the conservative media has been greasing the skids for him.

The double standards have been extraordinary and grating. The other candidates had to bring up Bain Capital because much of the conservative media wouldn't touch the very issue that Ted Kennedy used to beat Mitt Romney's brains in back in 1994. Even today, when you try to point out that Mitt's "100,000" jobs created number is pure vapor, that he made a lot of money off of deals where the taxpayers and the FDIC had to pick up the tab, or that it looks awful for Mitt to make millions on deals where businesses went under and hundreds of middle class workers lost their jobs, you're answered with cries of "capitalism" and "free enterprise!" Good luck with that strategy in the general election if, God help us all, Mitt gets that far.

Furthermore, remember when Newt Gingrich was ahead of Mitt in Iowa, running a positive campaign, and was told "Politics ain't beanbag" after Mitt creamed him with millions in negative ads? Then remember when those same people squealed with outrage when Mitt got exactly what he had been dishing out after New Hampshire? We were told Newt was campaigning like a liberal when he hit Mitt on Bain Capital, but when Mitt ran dishonest ads featuring Tom Brokaw crowing about a now discredited ethics investigation, the same people were silent. After the last debate, it was amazing to hear talking heads telling everyone how wonderful Mitt did after Rick Santorum gutted him like a Christmas turkey on Obamacare and Romney was booed by the audience after he was caught lying about not having seen an ad that he personally endorsed.

Let's be honest and name some names: Jen Rubin, Charles Krauthammer, George Will, National Review, Fox News and the Drudge Report among others have been shilling for Mitt Romney and attacking his adversaries during this primary the way the New York Times will for Barack Obama in the general election. That doesn't make them RINOS, liberals, part of the establishment or bad people. Reasonable people can reach different conclusions about which candidate to support. But that being said, these people should realize that as far as a lot of other conservatives are concerned, they are betting their reputations on Mitt Romney. What they are in effect saying in so many words is, "Vote for Mitt Romney and we promise you that not only will he get elected, he'll govern conservatively." Given his record, that's liquidating your house and putting it on a spin of the roulette wheel.

4) Mitt Romney is cozying up to the establishment, not the Tea Party. Never have so many self-interested, politically-gutless establishment space fillers gathered in one place as on the endorsement list for Mitt Romney. If Bob Dole, John McCain, Susan Molinari, Lisa Murkowski, Jim Talent, Joe Scarborough, Mel Martinez, Jim Gerlach, Judd Gregg, Jon Huntsman, John Sununu and Norm Coleman are all lining up behind a candidate in a contested GOP primary, it's an almost ironclad guarantee that candidate is not going to be worth a bucket of warm spit once he gets into office. If you want to know why you're seeing so many Tea Partiers lining up behind Newt Gingrich, who despite his flaws has done more for the conservative cause than any other living politician, it's because they see the politicians backing Mitt Romney and they're well aware that they're not friends of grassroots conservatives.

It's absolutely unbelievable that after the grassroots helped the GOP have its best year in half a century that we may end up with a human "SCREW YOU!" to the Tea Party like Mitt Romney as the nominee. Here we have a moderate establishment-endorsed candidate who supported TARP, is open to more bailouts, came up with the mother of Obamacare, and he has no bold plans to tackle the deficit -- and this is the guy Tea Partiers are supposed to support after fighting to beat Republicans like that in primaries during the 2010 election cycle? Why don't we just drag Robert Bennett out of retirement to run at the top of the ticket?

5) Mitt just isn't likable enough to be a good politician. Mitt Romney comes across like a sort of bizarro-world combination between John Kerry, Richie Rich, Charlie Crist, and Data from Star Trek. This is what makes the first part of this Saturday Night Live skit so funny -- Mitt really does come across as that weirdly out of touch with hu-man emotion sometimes.

He's also an extremely nasty campaigner -- a little like Barney Frank, without the modicum of vicious charm that endears him to liberals. Want to know why this campaign has been so divisive? That's easy: Mitt Romney embraced win-at-all-costs character assassination and negative advertising as the primary tactic of his campaign and the other candidates had to respond to it. Since he's proven too unlikable to be pulled up very much, Mitt's strategy has been to pull the other candidates down, even if it leads to a mud fight that lessens anyone's chances of winning in a general election.

Additionally, as Mike Huckabee has noted, "[Romney] looks like the guy who fires you, not the guy who hires you" -- and by the way, he does. This, along with the incredibly effective Bain ads that helped sink Mitt in South Carolina are why he's had to release pictures of himself awkwardly doing laundry -- because his campaign believes it allows normal human beings to be able to relate to him better. Is that a good sign? That our "super electable" GOP candidate feels compelled to release pictures of himself standing in front of a washing machine to reassure people that he's more like them? Of course, it won't work because Mitt Romney may be the first politician I've ever seen who has the ability to NEVER appear to be completely sincere about anything. Combine that with his campaign's smug "Megan McCainesque" sense of entitlement and Mitt Romney would be going into the 2012 campaign with a likability deficit even compared to Barack Obama, who has nauseated the entire country with his radicalism, incompetence, and Barney the Dinosaur style sloganeering. What it all comes down to is that when people see a pampered, prissy, fake, spiteful son of a governor who's being served the GOP nomination on a silver platter because he kissed the right establishment behinds, benefitted from an enormous media double standard, and has more money than everyone else, well, let's just say that's exactly the sort of person who inspired someone to come up with the word schadenfreude.
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To read another article by John Hawkins, click here.

The Florida Smear Campaign

2012-01-31T11:28:00.001-08:00

The Florida Smear Campaign
By Thomas Sowell
1/31/2012

The Republican establishment is pulling out all the stops to try to keep Newt Gingrich from becoming the party's nominee for President of the United States -- and some are not letting the facts get in their way.

Among the claims going out through the mass media in Florida, on the eve of that state's primary election, is that Newt Gingrich "resigned in disgrace" as Speaker of the House of Representatives, as a result of unethical conduct involving the diversion of tax-exempt money. Mitt Romney is calling on Gingrich to release "all of the records" from the House of Representatives investigation.

But the Wall Street Journal of January 28, 2012 reported that these records -- 1,280 pages of them -- are already publicly available on-line. Although Speaker Gingrich decided not to take on the task of fighting the charge from his political enemies in 1997, the Internal Revenue Service conducted its own investigation which, two years later, exonerated Gingrich from the charges. His resignation was not due to those charges and occurred much later.

Do the Romney camp and the Republican establishment not know this, a dozen years later? Or are they far less concerned with whether the charges will stand up than they are about smearing Gingrich on the eve of the Florida primaries?

There are also charges made about what Congressman Gingrich said about Ronald Reagan on March 21, 1986. But this too is a matter of public record, since his remarks are available in the Congressional Record of that date, so it is remarkable that there should be any controversy about it at this late date.

On that date, Gingrich praised Reagan's grasp of the foreign policy issues of the day but later questioned whether the way the actual policies of the Reagan administration were being carried out was likely to succeed. Gingrich was not alone in making this point which such conservative stalwarts as George Will, Charles Krauthammer and others made at the time.

Since a column of my own back in the 1980s suggested that the administration's policies seemed to be to "speak loudly and carry a little stick," I can well understand the misgivings of others. But that is wholly different from saying that all who expressed misgivings were enemies of Ronald Reagan.

One can of course lift things out of context. But if you want to read the whole context, simply go on-line and get the Congressional Record for March 21, 1986. Among the other places where the smears are exposed are the Wall Street Journal of January 29th, Jeffrey Lord's article in the American Spectator's blog of January 27th, and an article by Heather Higgins in Ricochet.com of January 29th.

Unfortunately, there are likely to be far more people who will see the smears than will have time to get the facts. But, if nothing else, there needs to be some understanding of the reckless accusations that have become part of the all-out attempt to destroy Newt Gingrich, as so many other political figures have been destroyed, by non-stop smears in the media.

Gingrich is by no means above criticism. He has been criticized in this column before, over the years, including during the current primary season, and he will probably be criticized here again.

But the poisonous practice of irresponsible smears is an issue that is bigger than Gingrich, Romney or any other candidate of either party.

There have long been reports of people who decline to be nominated for federal judicial appointments because that means going before the Senate Judiciary Committee to have lies about their past spread nationwide, and the good reputation built up over a lifetime destroyed by politicians who could not care less about the truth.

The same practices may well have something to do with the public's dissatisfaction with the current crop of candidates in this year's primaries -- and in previous years' primaries. Character assassination is just another form of voter fraud.

There is no law against it, so it is up to the voters, not only in Florida but in other states, to punish it at the ballot box -- the only place where punishment is likely to stop the practice.
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To read another article by Thomas Sowell, click here.

They Have Islamist Fanatics, We Have Secularist Fanatics

2012-01-31T11:16:00.000-08:00

They Have Islamist Fanatics, We Have Secularist Fanatics
By Dennis Prager
1/31/2012

The Muslim world is threatened by religious fanaticism. The Western world is threatened by secular fanaticism.

Both seek to dominate society and to use state power to do so. Both seek to eliminate the Other -- for Islamic fanatics, that means non-Muslim religions and secularism; for secular fanatics, it means Christianity and virtually any public invoking of God. The Islamists impose Sharia law; the American Civil Liberties Union and the left generally impose secular law. The Taliban wiped out public vestiges of Buddhism in Afghanistan; the ACLU and its allies seek to wipe out public vestiges of Christianity in America -- as it did, for example, in Los Angeles County, when it successfully pressured the County Board of Supervisors to remove the tiny cross from the county seal. A city and county founded by Catholics -- hence the name "The Angels" -- was forced to stop commemorating its founders because they were religious.

This fanaticism has been on display most recently in the state of Rhode Island. This past Christmas, the governor, Lincoln Chafee, renamed the state Christmas tree a "holiday tree." Though Christmas is a national holiday, for the secular fanatic, anything Christian -- or, as we shall see, anything that relates to religion or God -- must be banned from public life.

The latest expression of the secular equivalent of Islamism is the lawsuit brought against a Rhode Island high school, Cranston High School West, for allowing a banner, written by a seventh grader in 1963, to remain hanging on one of the school walls. An atheist student, along with the ACLU, brought the lawsuit and a judge ruled that it is unconstitutional for it to hang in a public school.

To appreciate how fanatical the student, the ACLU and the ruling are, you have to know the words on the banner. So here they are:

Our Heavenly Father

Grant us each day the desire to do our best, to grow mentally and morally as well as physically, to be kind and helpful to our classmates and teachers, to be honest with ourselves as well as with others. Help us to be good sports and smile when we lose as well as when we win. Teach us the value of true friendship. Help us always to conduct ourselves so as to bring credit to Cranston High School west. Amen

The idea that this prayer violates the Constitution of the United States is as much a mockery of the Constitution as it is of common sense. Only a fanatic can welcome the removal of such a non-denominational, sweet, moral exhortation from a high school wall. America is indeed as endangered by the ACLU as the Muslim world is by Islamists.

Defenders of the judge's decision point to the U.S. Supreme Court decision of 1962 banning state-mandated prayer in public schools. The parallel is invalid. No student is asked, let alone compelled, to state what is on the Rhode Island high school banner. But arguments citing the Supreme Court ruling serve only to confirm my argument: that secular fanaticism has been taking over America. The New York State prayer that the Warren Court outlawed 50 years ago was as non-sectarian, as morally uplifting and as inoffensive as the Rhode Island prayer.

Here is it is in its entirety:

"Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country."

After reading that one sentence, it is intellectually dishonest to maintain that the Warren court's decision was not an expression of fanaticism. One would have to deny that there could even be any such thing as secular fanaticism. Indeed, if it could have, the Warren Court would have declared the Declaration of Independence unconstitutional for its citing the Creator.

It is no wonder, then, that Alaska Airlines announced last week that it would no longer dispense along with meals its famous little cards with a verse from Psalms.

There are Americans who think that we are a better society without a state Christmas tree, and without high school students seeing a prayer to be kind human beings, and without the Alaska Airlines attempt to elevate American life in a small -- and, again, non-denominational -- way.

But the Islamist thinks he is improving Muslim life, too, of course.
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To read another article by Dennis Prager, click here.
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To read another Democrats vs. religious liberty article, click here.

CBO projects $1.08 trillion deficit, 8.9 percent jobless rate in 2012

2012-01-31T10:35:00.000-08:00

CBO projects $1.08 trillion deficit, 8.9 percent jobless rate in 2012
By Erik Wasson - 01/31/12 12:43 PM ET

The Congressional Budget Office on Tuesday predicted the deficit will rise to $1.08 trillion in 2012.

The office also projected the jobless rate would rise to 8.9 percent by the end of 2012, and to 9.2 percent in 2013.

These are much dimmer forecasts than in CBO's last report in August, when the office projected a $973 billion deficit. The report reflects weaker corporate tax revenue and the extension for two months of the payroll tax holiday.

A rising deficit and unemployment rate would hamper President Obama's reelection effort, which in recent weeks has seemed to be on stronger footing.

If the CBO estimate is correct, it would mean that the United States recorded a deficit of more than $1 trillion for every year of Obama’s first term.

CBO Director Doug Elmendorf told reporters that Congress will have to make important choices this year regarding the supercommittee trigger and tax policy that will have huge effects on the deficit.

While unable to recommend choices, Elmendorf said that addressing the deficit sooner rather than later is easier.

The deficit was $1.4 trillion in 2009, $1.3 trillion in 2010 and $1.3 trillion in 2011. The largest deficit recorded before that was $458 billion in 2008.

CBO had forecast an 8.5 percent unemployment rate for the end of 2012 in its August report. It now expects the jobless rate to be higher and to still be at 7 percent in 2015.

The higher unemployment numbers are due to lower economic growth than previously estimated. Gross domestic product for 2011 is now estimated to have grown 1.6 percent in 2011, down from the 2.3 percent forecast in August. CBO a year ago had predicted 3.1 percent growth for 2011.

The outlook for 2012 has also worsened. GDP is forecast to grow only 2 percent this year, compared to a previous estimate of 2.7 percent.

Budget cuts from the August debt deal and projected tax increases set to kick in when the Bush tax rates expire at the end of the year, will “restrain economic growth this year and significantly restrain growth in 2013,” according to CBO. But it says the fiscal prudence will help growth in the out years.

It is unclear whether the Bush tax cuts will be allowed to expire. Republicans want all of the tax rates to be extended, and the White House wants Bush tax rates for families with annual income below $250,000 to be extended.

Gross federal debt would rise from $14.8 trillion at the end of 2011 to $21.7 trillion under CBO's projections.

The CBO uses a “current policy” baseline that assumes the Bush-era tax rates will not be extended after 2013, however.

The deficit will be much higher if Congress takes several actions that many expect.

If the Bush tax rates are extended, for example, the deficit would rise.

It would rise if Congress patches the Alternative Minimum Tax, which lawmakers have routinely done to prevent higher taxes from being imposed on middle class taxpayers.

It would also rise if Congress continues to pass the “doc fix” that prevents a cut to Medicare payments to doctors, something that Congress has done on a near-annual basis.

Finally, if Congress does not follow through on cuts mandated by the failure of the supercommittee, the deficit will grow. Lawmakers are already talking about canceling scheduled cuts to the Pentagon’s budget.

In the “alternative fiscal scenario” where these things happen the gross federal debt rises to $29.4 trillion by 2022.

Elmendorf noted that allowing the lower tax rates to be extended or for the triggered cuts to be dodged would boost short term growth by as much as 2.9 percent in 2013 and lower unemployment to as low as 7.4 percent.

But he said such a choice would come with a steep price, with $400 billion added to the deficit in 2013 alone.

“There is no plausible scenario where the alternative fiscal scenario is sustainable,” he said.

Elmendorf noted that extending all the Bush era tax rates and patching the AMT adds $5.4 trillion to the deficit. He said that just ending tax reductions for the wealthy could contribute about $1 trillion to deficit reduction.

Despite political rhetoric that focuses on discretionary spending, Elmendorf made clear that the bigger driver of the deficit increase are entitlement programs.

“Clearly the deficit will not be brought under control without changes in either revenues or Social Security and federal healthcare programs,” he said. “The gap that has opened between what we are used to getting from the government and the revenue that we are used paying into the government has widened and will only get wider in the coming decade.”

Obama will release his 2013 budget request on Feb. 13. He is expected to included in it recommendations for reducing the deficit by $4 trillion over a decade and to call for the end of Bush-era tax rates for the wealthy.

By the end of March, House Republicans plan to vote on their alternative budget, authored by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). Ryan hopes to release a budget similar to his 2012 budget, which included changing Medicare into a private insurance system for future retirees.

"With four straight years of trillion-dollar deficits, no credible plan to lift the crushing burden of debt, and a Senate majority that has failed to pass a budget for over 1,000 days, the president and his party’s leaders have fallen short in their duty to tackle our generation’s most pressing fiscal and economic challenges," Ryan said in reaction to the CBO report.

Bishop: Obama Administration Is Telling Catholics ‘To Hell With You’

2012-01-31T10:17:00.000-08:00

Bishop: Obama Administration Is Telling Catholics ‘To Hell With You’
By Terence P. Jeffrey
January 30, 2012

(CNSNews.com) - Roman Catholic Bishop David A. Zubik of Pittsburgh says the Obama administration is telling American Catholics: “To Hell with you.”

“The Obama administration has just told the Catholics of the United States, ‘To Hell with you!’” the bishop said in a column posted on his diocesan website. “There is no other way to put it.”

The bishop was responding to a regulation, finalized by Health and Human Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on Jan. 20, that orders all health-care plans in the United States to cover sterilizations and all FDA-approved contraceptives--including those that induce abortions--without any fees or co-pay.

The regulation includes an exemption for “religious employers.” But to qualify for this exemption, the employer must primarily serve members of its own faith, primarily employ members of its own faith, and primarily focus on inculcating the tenets of that faith—a rubric that would not apply to Catholic hospitals, universities, or charitable organizations.

There is no exemption at all for individual citizens or private businesses.

The Catholic Church teaches that sterilization, artificial contraception and abortion are morally wrong and that Catholics cannot be involved in them. After the regulation was first announced in August, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Catholic lay leaders urged the administration to rescind it while pointing out that it would require Catholics to act against their consciences and their faith and was thus a violation of the First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion.

Last fall, the Catholic bishops called the regulation an “unprecedented attack on religious liberty” and took the unusual step of asking local pastors to urge parishioners from the pulpit to contact HHS and ask that the regulation be rescinded. Cardinal-designate Timothy Dolan of New York, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, personally met with President Barack Obama in November to explain the Catholic Church’s objections to the regulation.

But a week ago Friday, Sebelius announced that the regulation would take effect for individuals and private businesses as of Aug. 1 of this year. She said that religiously affiliated non-profit organizations—such as Catholic hospitals, universities and charitable organizations—would be given until Aug. 1, 2013 to “adapt” to the regulation, but then they would be required to adhere to it also.

“It is really hard to believe that it happened. It comes like a slap in the face,” Bishop Zubik wrote of the administration’s decision to force Catholics to act against their faith.

“Let’s be blunt,” said Bishop Zubik. “This whole process of mandating these guidelines undermines the democratic process itself. In this instance, the mandate declares pregnancy a disease, forces a culture of contraception and abortion on society, all while completely bypassing the legislative process.

“This is government by fiat that attacks the rights of everyone--not only Catholics; not only people of all religion,” said the bishop. “At no other time in memory or history has there been such a governmental intrusion on freedom not only with regard to religion, but even across-the-board with all citizens.”

“Last September I asked you to protest those guidelines to Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of the U.S. Department for Health and Human Services, and contact your political leadership in the federal government,” said Bishop Zubik. “I asked that you request that this flawed mandate be withdrawn because of its unprecedented interference in the religious liberty and freedom of conscience of the Catholic community, and our basic democratic process.

“You did,” said the bishop. “And you were joined by Catholics throughout the country (and many others as well) who raised their voices against the mandate, raised their voices against a meaningless religious exemption.

“On January 20, 2012, the Obama administration answered you and me,” said Bishop Zubik. “The response was very simple: ‘To Hell with You.’”

“Kathleen Sebelius and through her, the Obama administration,” the bishop wrote, “have said ‘To Hell with You’ to the Catholic faithful of the United States, to Hell with your religious beliefs, to Hell with your religious liberty, to Hell with your freedom of conscience.”

Bishop Zubik said the Catholic Church cannot submit to this regulation and urged Catholics to again tell President Obama, HHS Secretary Sebelius and members of Congress to rescind it.

“They have given us a year to adapt to this rule,” he said. “We can’t! We simply cannot! Write to the president. Write to Secretary Sebelius. Write to our Senators. Write to those in Congress.”

Bishop Zubik was far from alone in condemning the regulation and calling on Catholics to demand its reversal. Across the country over the past week, many Catholic bishops wrote similar articles and statements.

“The bell is tolling for religious liberty in America. All of us should listen well,” said Bishop James D. Conley, apostolic administrator of the Archdiocese of Denver.

Bishop Conley called on Catholics to fight the administration’s health-care plan.

“If plans go unchanged, the Catholic Church, acting through our Catholic institutions, will no longer have legal protection for the free exercise of religion,” he said in a column posted on the diocesan website. “Secretary Sebelius is wrong; this is not a year to ‘adapt.’ The Catholic Church will not adapt by violating fundamental elements of our faith. Instead of adapting, this is a year to unify, and to fight injustice and flagrant disregard for the institutional protection of our religious practice.

“The recent decision by HHS should make clear for all Catholics that under the proposed health care plan, the freedom to practice our religious faith is in jeopardy,” said Bishop Conley.

In a column for his diocesan newspaper, Archbishop Jose H. Gomez of Los Angeles said the administration is trying to seize a power the U.S. government has never had.

“The Health Department justifies denying exemptions to Catholic charities, hospitals and colleges because it says they are not really ‘religious’ institutions. This may be the most troubling part of this new mandate,” said Archbishop Gomez. “Because in effect, the government is presuming it has the competence and authority to define what religious faith is and how believers should express their faith commitments and relationship to God in society. These are powers our government has never before assumed itself to have.”

“But the issues here go far beyond contraception and far beyond the liberties of the Catholic Church,” said Archbishop Gomez. “They go to the heart of our national identity and our historic understanding of our democratic form of government.”

Archbishop Gomez also called on Catholics to defend their faith and their religious freedom.

“But this is clear: Now is a time for Catholic action and for Catholic voices,” said Archbishop Gomez. “We need lay leaders to step up to their responsibilities for the Church’s mission. Not only to defend our faith and our rights as Catholics, but to be leaders for moral and civic renewal, leaders in helping to shape the values and moral foundations of America’s future.”
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To read another article by Terry Jeffrey, click here.
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To read another article about Obama's disregard for Religious Freedom, click here.

Navy Seal Team 6

2012-01-31T09:35:00.000-08:00

Navy Seal Team 6

Let's be clear on this: OBAMA did NOT kill Bin Laden. An American sailor, who Obama, just a few weeks ago, was debating on whether or not to PAY, did. In fact, if you remember a little less than two years ago, his administration actually charged and attempted to court-martial 3 Navy Seals from Seal Team Six, when a terrorist suspect they captured, complained they had punched him during the take down and bloodied his nose. His administration further commented how brutal they were. The left were calling them Nazi's and Baby Killers. Now all of a sudden, the very brave men they vilified are now heroes when they make his administration look good in the eyes of the public. Obama just happened to be the one in office when the CIA finally found the b...... And our sailors took him out. Essentially, Obama only gave an answer. Yes or No, to him being taken out. This is NOT an Obama victory, but an AMERICAN victory!! Forward on IF YOU AGREE!!"

Ed Schreiber
Col. USMC (Ret.)
"Semper Fi"

OBAMA'S OWN WORDS TRAP HIM:

2008: "Navy Seal Team 6 is Cheney's private assassination team."
2011: "I put together Seal Team 6 to take out Bin Laden."

2008: "Bin Laden is innocent until proven guilty, and must be captured alive and given a fair trial."
2011: "I authorized Seal Team 6 to kill Bin Laden."

2008: " Guantanamo is entirely unnecessary, and the detainees should not be interrogated."
2011: "Vital intelligence was obtained from Guantanamo detainees that led to our locating Bin Laden."

Whoops! No Global Warming For the Last 15 Years

2012-01-30T18:32:00.000-08:00

Whoops! No Global Warming For the Last 15 Years
Science is all about questioning theories.
by John Hayward
01/30/2012

Opponents of the global warming cult have often been confronted with a little presto-chango logical fallacy. When the dearth of evidence that human activity contributes to any sort of climate change became painfully inconvenient, the cult began deliberately conflating “man-made” or “anthropogenic” warming with temperature fluctuations that might be entirely natural phenomena.

This allowed the fanatics to posture as reasonable people of science, while dismissing those who advanced reasonable questions as fanatics. If you agreed that the globe might be warming, you were automatically signed on to the entirely different belief that human activity was causing it. Various studies purporting to show increases in temperature were cited, and magically transformed into “proof” that the economy-destroying, power-centralizing agenda of the Church of Global Warming must be adopted immediately. Greenhouse gases are killing the Earth! The science is settled!

This was always about power and money, not science. Here’s a little data crunching from one of the great cathedrals of global warming alarmism, the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit – which was also the source of the “Climagate” emails that revealed much of the global warming movement was based on deliberate fraud. As reported by the UK Daily Mail:

The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.

The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.

Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.

“Released without fanfare,” eh? That’s funny, because this has to be one of the most important stories in modern history. The entire global warming movement just went up in smoke. All of the shrieking hysteria about greenhouse gases, which still drives multi-billion dollar command economics programs in the United States has just been revealed as a pile of anti-scientific garbage.

Meanwhile, leading climate scientists yesterday told The Mail on Sunday that, after emitting unusually high levels of energy throughout the 20th Century, the sun is now heading towards a ‘grand minimum’ in its output, threatening cold summers, bitter winters and a shortening of the season available for growing food.

Solar output goes through 11-year cycles, with high numbers of sunspots seen at their peak.

We are now at what should be the peak of what scientists call ‘Cycle 24’ – which is why last week’s solar storm resulted in sightings of the aurora borealis further south than usual. But sunspot numbers are running at less than half those seen during cycle peaks in the 20th Century.

So the primary factor driving “climate change” is not people running their air conditioners and driving around in cars, but rather… the Sun. Were your kids told any of this when their public-school teachers were busy indoctrinating them in Green dogma about man-made global warming? Was it ever even suggested that maybe human activity had far less to do with global temperature changes than solar activity?

The modern “climate change” movement began with warnings of global cooling, and the threat of an impending Ice Age, back in the Seventies. This was changed for purely political reasons, because it obviously wasn’t something that could be blamed on human activity. But car engines are hot, and hot gas comes out of their mufflers, so maybe that gas is forming into toxic clouds in the upper atmosphere, and turning the Earth into an oven! Factory smokestacks even look kind of like ovens, don’t they? We can scare people into giving up their economic liberty with that!

A Duke University climatologist quoted by the Daily Mail noted “if temperatures continue to stay flat or start to cool again, the divergence between the models and recorded data will eventually become so great that the whole scientific community will question the current theories.” Questioning theories? Now that sounds like science! Unfortunately for the cultists, it’s not very helpful for getting cap-and-trade legislation passed, or selling “carbon credits.”

Other stories hinting at this outcome have popped up over the past few years, but this one is definitive… and utterly devastating to the official religion of the U.S. government. Think of all the millions charlatans like Al Gore have raked in from gullible suckers over the years. “An inconvenient truth,” indeed. The birth of global warming was heralded by big-budget Hollywood movies and hysterical political campaigns. Its final demise occurred without fanfare.
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To read another article by John Hayward, click here.
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To read about more Global Warming hijinx, click here.

They Killed Him

2012-01-30T18:04:00.000-08:00

They Killed Him
By Bruce Bialosky
1/30/2012

January 22nd was a sad day in America. A pitiful and depressing episode that confirms how a lawyer-controlled and weak-kneed society, ended with the tragic death of Joe Paterno. As sure as day turns into night, the actions taken last November by the Board of Trustees of Penn State University were responsible for the premature death of this great man.

I grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, next door to Paterno’s domain: Pennsylvania. My father graduated from Ohio State, and I was – and still am – a born-and-bred Buckeye fan. I clearly remember the emergence of Joe Pa at Penn State, which had not yet joined the Big Ten – that wouldn’t happen for another 25 years.

In that time we had the great Woody Hayes, but now we were butting heads with this scrawny- looking guy with goofy glasses who was somehow stealing a number of our recruits. Because he wasn’t in the Big Ten – and, of course, because Michigan was the center of everything evil in the world – I developed a mild liking for the guy. If the Buckeyes weren’t winning the national championship, then Penn State and Joe Pa seemed to be an acceptable alternative. It was certainly better than some others (like USC). Sure enough, it didn’t take him too long to produce undefeated seasons – reeling off three very quickly in 1968, 1969 and 1973 – but he had to wait until 1982 to win his first national championship.

Paterno went on to become a national icon. There have been many great college coaches with stellar, decades-long careers, but Joe Pa was beginning to set records. From the time he turned 70 – and then 80! – we all participated in the annual rite of speculation about whether he would or should retire.

Whenever I was asked about it, my answer was always the same: the Bear Bryant Syndrome. Joe knew very well that Bryant had passed away a little over a month after his retirement, and in fact had told sportscaster Brent Musburger that Bryant’s untimely death was one of the reasons he continued coaching. His team, school, and community – along with his wife of nearly 50 years – had become his life.

The Jerry Sandusky scandal shocked everyone; it always smacks your senses when someone is accused of such despicable acts. I read the transcript of the grand jury testimony with utter horror, and yet the fact that it engulfed the entire Penn State University made this sordid story even more appalling and disgraceful. Still, something seemed to be missing.

Mike McCreary, a young staffer for the football team, had walked into the locker room in the Penn State athletic complex while Sandusky, now a former employee, was sodomizing a young boy in the showers. McCreary claimed that he reported it to Paterno, who promptly informed his superiors, Athletic Director Tim Curley and Vice-President for Finance and Business Gary Schultz. When Curley and Schultz testified that they had heard a different story than what McCreary related to the grand jury, the two men were indicted despite no further verification by the grand jury and then summarily fired by the Board of Trustees. Then McCreary changed his story, telling the press something different than he told the grand jury. The Trustees still fired Paterno.

The most iconic person in Penn State history, an employee for over 60 years, was fired via telephone call. He was not given the chance to explain his side of the story. A group of weaklings who were more concerned with protecting their jobs and fending off lawsuits just started canning people. Even someone who has been with the University for one year deserves to have their side heard. Someone with 60 years of exemplary service merits a little extra consideration.

The villain in this story, Jerry Sandusky, was now lost in the shuffle and the focus of the sports world was on Paterno and the Trustees. Every sanctimonious sportscaster started whimpering about how they would have done more and how everyone involved should have done more. They, of course, were only thinking of the children.

When Joe Pa finally broke his silence, it was accompanied by yet a third version of McCreary’s story. Apparently, he never really told Paterno what actually happened in the shower. He justifiably couldn’t bring himself to tell a 76-year-old legend the ugly details. The fact that an aging Paterno wasn’t really able to comprehend the whole matter will not convince some of his lack of blame. Some people will insist that he should have been able to understand such despicable behavior, and they will never accept that some among us come from an era where such repulsive activities were utterly inconceivable. So Coach Paterno reported what he had heard from McCreary, and that was all he knew.

Some say Joe died of a broken heart. I say he died from a knife in the back. Does it shock me that the man is now dead? No – there is, after all, the Bear Bryant Syndrome.

There will always be those who maintain that Paterno should have done more. There are those who claim that if they were in the same situation, they would have done more. But the only thing anyone should really say is if they are ever in the shoes of the Trustees, that they would give everyone the decency and fairness of an honest hearing, that they wouldn’t jump to conclusions, and that they would never, ever try to cover their own butts by ruining the lives of others.
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To read another article by Bruce Bialosky, click here.
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To read a related article, click here.

The Audacity of Deceit: Notes on the State of the Union

2012-01-30T17:44:00.001-08:00

The Audacity of Deceit: Notes on the State of the Union
By Frank Gaffney
1/30/2012

Knowing President Obama’s Alinskyite proclivities, his third State of the Union address – coming as it did amidst a reelection campaign – could have been predicted to be filled with lofting, sometimes inspiring but routinely bait-and-switch rhetoric. Even so, his exploitation of the U.S. military for nakedly political purposes translates into an extreme plumbing of what might be called his audacity of deceit.

If the President had been simply paying homage to the amazing men and women in uniform and extolling their courage, patriotism and selflessness, that would have been one thing. It would have been understandable, even commendable, to have cited such qualities in a call for legislators to come together as our troops do to accomplish the difficult missions at hand.

The fact that Mr. Obama wrapped such comments – literally as the opening and closing bookends for his speech – around so many distortions, misrepresentations and outright falsehoods about our national security situation, however, transforms what might have been a welcome presidential paean to the armed forces into a further betrayal of our troops.

Let’s start with his portrayal of the “end of the war in Iraq.” This antiseptic, no-fault characterization of what he has done must not be allowed to obscure the reality: President Obama simply quit that front in the larger war we are in. I call it the War for the Free World.

That doesn’t mean the battle for Iraq is over, let alone the war won. Instead, we have simply surrendered the strategic territory over which we had shed so much blood and spent so much treasure.

In Iraq, as elsewhere, that is translating into a vacuum of power. It is being filled by enemies of our country and setting the stage for this war’s next, likely still-more-horrific phase.

The same can be said of the President’s profoundly misleading description of the “isolation” of Iran, his “decisive blows” against al Qaeda and the prospects for an Afghanistan that will, in the aftermath of his cutting and running there and his negotiating our surrender terms with the Taliban, somehow “never again [be] a source of attacks against America.”

Some have described such remarks as delusional. They are worse. They are designed to delude us.

Ditto one of the President’s bigger applause lines: “Anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn't know what they're talking about.” No objective analysis – of our contracting military presence around the world, of our retreat from leadership on the ground and in space, of our military now in the process of being hollowed out, of the condition of our fraying alliances or the emboldening of our increasingly assertive enemies – would support his contention.

To the contrary, the facts indicate that, under his post-American policies, the “fundamental transformation of America” that he promised on the eve of his election has moved forward inexorably: our transformation from an unrivaled superpower, to a nation that no longer is a reliable ally and no longer a feared adversary.

It doesn’t have to be that way – and we dare not let it continue in this fashion. But the first step towards turning around a perilous trend is to recognize what is happening. And speeches that are not simply pollyannish, but fraudulent, will not do that. To the contrary, they are certain to have the effect of making such a turn-around unlikely until it is still harder, if not as a practical matter impossible, to effect.

Unfortunately, given the nature of the man delivering such a skewed portrayal of the State of the Union, we can only conclude that his remarks were calculated to have that effect – a prime example of his audacity of deceit.
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To read another article by Frank Gaffney, click here.
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To read a related article, click here.

Obama's Trickle Down Government

2012-01-30T16:36:00.001-08:00

Obama's Trickle Down Government
By Terry Paulson
1/30/2012

In President Obama's State of the Union Address, the president shared a quote by Abraham Lincoln that finally got Republicans to rise and applaud a core principle that America used to stand for: "You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.”

Unfortunately, his programs and policies don't match his words. On the one hand, he talks of an America that rewards hard work and success and ensures that all play by the same rules but, moments later, promises to change the rules and raise taxes on a very few wealthy Americans.

His double-speak would be comical if it were not so maddening: "We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do extremely well while a growing number of Americans barely get by, or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules." Obama's liberal definition of "fairness" is anything but fair. Liberal "fairness" demands that government must take more from the top five percent of wealthy Americans who already pay 60% of the income tax load to fund the benefit programs for Americans who pay no income taxes and, according to liberals, can't get by without government help.

Gov. Mitch Daniels in the GOP response rightfully called this approach "trickle-down government." Americans have a choice this November--a government that will do everything it can to get out the way so that private enterprise can flourish and jobs can be created or a government that keeps extending handouts and adding debt.

If President Obama had embraced Abraham Lincoln's full quote, he would have had the non-partisan support he says that he wants: “You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by encouraging class hatred. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn. You cannot build character and courage by taking away man’s initiative and independence. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.”

During the Republican January 16th debate in South Carolina, Newt Gingrich received a standing ovation. Why? Because he took a politically incorrect stand for conservative principles that contrasted America's choice: More government dependence or more personal responsibility and opportunity.

Questioned by Juan Williams on whether referring to President Obama as "the food stamp president" was belittling people, Gingrich stood his ground: "The fact is that more people have been put on food stamps by Barack Obama than any president in American history. Now, I know among the politically correct you're not supposed to use facts that are uncomfortable.... They haven't helped the people. They haven't done anything. (cheers and applause) I believe every American of every background has been endowed by their creator with the right to pursue happiness, and if that makes liberals unhappy, I'm gonna continue to find ways to help poor people learn how to get a job, learn how to get a better job, and learn someday to own the job."

Rush Limbaugh recently observed that there is a political Berlin Wall that divides America. Conservatives embrace a West Berlin mentality; the liberal special interest groups are trapped in East Berlin thinking. One side embraces freedom and opportunity; the other settles for "special treatment" and more government dependence.

We need a president who will tear down the wall and truly let all Americans play by the same rules and reap the benefits and consequences that freedom allows. Instead of depending on Washington handouts, it's time to let neighbors help neighbors instead of continually expanding government entitlement programs.

Let me end with another admonition from Lincoln: “I don’t believe in a law to prevent a man from getting rich; it would do more harm than good. So while we do not propose any war on capital, we do wish to allow the humblest man an equal chance to get rich with everybody else.” Let's elect a president who still believes that "We the people" can achieve our American dream by coping with life's challenges and seizing available opportunities.
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To read another article by Terry Paulson, click here.
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To read more about Obama's SOTU address, click here.

An America Built to Be Last

2012-01-30T16:25:00.000-08:00

An America Built to Be Last
By Star Parker
1/30/2012

The theme President Obama gave to his State of the Union address was “An America Built to Last.”

But his vision would be better described as an “An America Built to Be Last.”

As the president asked us to be patient and keep drinking the same kool-aid he’s been serving up for three years, the New York Times reported that the Federal Reserve’s latest assessment of our economy is that “…a full recovery is years away.”

Even his most loyal constituency, black Americans, is losing patience. In Gallup’s latest tracking poll, black approval rate for Obama was 79 percent. This is seventeen points under the 96 percent of blacks who voted for him in 2008, and the first time that black approval has dropped under 80 percent.

The debate will go on for many years about what caused the horrible economic collapse from which we are still trying to recover.

The president continues to sell the idea, which serves his agenda to continue to expand government, that the cause was insufficiently regulated business.

There is much convincing research, in which the president shows little interest, that government caused it, by mandating expansion of low quality mortgages and enabling this expansion because taxpayers ultimately guaranteed these loans.

But economists are still debating what caused the Great Depression of the 1930’s.

What Americans must come to terms with now is what we choose to believe this country is about, why in the past it seemed to work so well, and why today things are falling apart.

According to the president, everything will be okay if we allow him and his government to continue to build and consolidate power over our lives.

He gave more reasons to grow government and barely lip service to what is tearing our nation apart today and dragging it down.

The major factors driving us into insolvency, spending on entitlement programs – Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid – and covering the interest on our nation’s debt, which is now surpassing the size of our entire economy, got attention in two sentences in an hour plus long speech.

The unraveling of our social fabric doesn’t seem to bother our president a whit.

You would think our nation’s leader would be concerned that today four of every ten of our babies are born to unwed mothers.

He called on “every State to require that all students stay in high school until they graduate or turn eighteen.”

Rather than addressing broken families and why poor kids don’t care about learning, our president thinks he’ll solve this problem by turning our failing public schools into prisons.

It’s nice to know that the president believes what “Republican Abraham Lincoln believed: That government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves, and no more.”

But unlike our president, Lincoln was the Great Emancipator. Lincoln’s agenda was freedom.

According to a new poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation, 54 percent feel that the Supreme Court should find the Obamacare mandate forcing every American to buy government defined health insurance unconstitutional. Only 17% agree with this flagrant violation of individual freedom.

Now the Department of Health and Human Services has ruled that religious institutions must, like all employers under the new Obamacare law, provide free birth control and sterilization services as part of health coverage.

Catholic universities and charitable organizations are now left with the choice of violating their religious convictions, not offering health insurance and pay millions of dollars in fines, or just shut down.

Catholic charities serve over 10 million of America’s poor.

Diminished freedom and moral relativism is no way out of the morass we’re in.

An America built on government, as President Obama sees it, severed from our roots as a free people under God, is surely an America “built to be last.”
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To read another article by Star Parker, click here.
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To read a related article, click here.

Thou Shall Not Covet

2012-01-30T16:12:00.000-08:00

Thou Shall Not Covet
By Michael Prell
1/30/2012

Thou shall not covet your neighbor’s house, your neighbor’s wife, not “anything that is your neighbor’s.”

Not anything.

If talk of Biblical Commandments makes you feel uncomfortable, then let’s call them “Ten Helpful Guidelines.”

On purely secular and practical grounds, is it better or worse for a society to follow the “Helpful Guideline” to not covet?

Imagine you are in a dark alley and you are approached by a gang. Would you feel better or worse if you knew that gang followed the Helpful Guideline to not covet your wallet?

What if it’s an “Occupy Wall Street” gang? Coveting is the foundation of their movement. A movement that – in a short few months of public coveting – has already racked up multiple counts of assault, rape, murder – and stealing wallets.

Which alley would you rather be in? Which society would you rather be in?

In November, when a group of Occupy Wall Street protesters shouted at President Obama, the President took their side and shouted back: “You’re the reason I ran for office.”

Taking the President at his word, is there any evidence – in his words, deeds or policies – of coveting?

“At a certain point you’ve made enough money.” Says who? The President of the United States. He also said, “I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.” In a CBS News story entitled “Obama Versus the ‘Fat Cats,’” President Obama “ratcheted up his rhetoric against Wall Street” calling them “fat cat[s]” and scolding them for not showing “‘a lot of shame’ about their behavior and outsized compensation.” And Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign is built almost entirely on coveting – the promise to reach into the wallets of rich “Fat Cats” and take their money away.

I interviewed Economics Professor Walter E. Williams, a regular guest host on the Rush Limbaugh Show, and asked him what he thought about government playing the “Covet Card” to demonize so-called rich “Fat Cats.” He said: “Politicians use so much demagoguery along these lines. I’ve said to people: Bill Gates is the richest man in the world. What can Bill Gates make me do? Can he force me to send my kids to a school that I don’t want to send them to? Can he force me to use 1.8 gallons to flush my toilet…what can he do? But, by contrast [the] government…can make my life miserable. So, when people talk about the power of the rich, and government has to protect us against the rich, that’s BS.”

When you and I covet, it’s a sin. When government covets, it’s policy.

Government has the power to turn its covetous policies into coercive action.

Like the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform’ Act (which empowers the government to literally “occupy” Wall Street). Its co-author Barney Frank revealed the true covetous nature of the Bill to NPR: “When it comes to Wall Street’s bottom line, yes; if we do not see some reduction in profits at some of the largest financial institutions as a result of this Bill, I’ve wasted a year.”

The central theme of President Obama’s re-election campaign is coveting. His word for it is “fairness.” What’s “fairness?” According to the Ten Helpful Guidelines: it’s none of your business. Nor is it the business of the President.

If we minded our own business, and followed the Helpful Guideline to not covet, it would not matter to us if our neighbors had more. There would be no class warfare. We would never descend into the covetous madness of declaring what’s “fair” between what our neighbors have and what we don’t have. Following this one Guideline alone would end the most corrosive debate of our time: the covetous urge to take away from the “haves” and give to the “have-nots” in pursuit of some mythical fantasy of fairness in a world that has never been fair – not once, not for a second – since our Ten Helpful Guidelines were first etched into stone.

President Obama is not a stupid man. Therefore he knows that his covet-based promise of “fairness” is an empty promise. A manipulative ruse. A lie.

There’s a Helpful Guideline against that, too.
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To read another article by Michael Prell, click here.
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To read about another example of religious injustice, click here.

Aborting Hitler

2012-01-30T16:03:00.000-08:00

Aborting Hitler
By Mike Adams
1/30/2012

Someone once asked me whether I would abort Adolf Hitler if I knew in advance he would try to launch a Holocaust against millions of Jews. I said I would not. That is because aborting Hitler would not have prevented the Holocaust. It would have justified it. The killing of millions of innocents does not begin with the killing of one innocent. It begins with the idea that in the larger scheme of things it is permissible to kill one innocent person.

The movie Judgment in Nuremburg (1961) shows that, even in Hollywood, Americans once appreciated this important principle. The movie is three hours long. But one only needs to watch the last ten minutes of the movie in order to see how far we have fallen in just a half-century.

For those who do not remember the end of the movie, Spencer Tracy plays an American judge who sentences former Nazis for their involvement in the Holocaust. One Nazi judge who sentenced innocents to death was himself sentenced to life in prison. As the sentence is read, he stares off in disbelief. He initially believes he is innocent because he was simply following the law. He later realizes his life sentence was just.

Only a couple of days after he is sentenced, the former Nazi judge requests that the American judge visit him in his jail cell. As he faces the man who sentenced him, he makes an odd request: he asks him to keep his personal memoirs - adding that they must be placed in the hands of a man who can be trusted. It is then that he declares the sentence passed upon him was just.

After pausing for a moment, the condemned Nazi judge says of the millions of dead Jews, “Those millions of people. I never knew it would come to that.” Spencer Tracy, playing the American judge, responds with one of the most profound lines of his storied acting career saying, “It came to that the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent.”

That has been the story of the American Holocaust as well. It began in 1966 in my native state of Mississippi. Just two years after I was born, a law was passed that made it legal to abort in the case of rape or incest. But then, the very next year, Colorado passed legislation allowing abortion in cases of rape, incest, or threat to the health of the mother.

Then the floodgates were opened. By the end of the year, several states were pushing legislation modeled after the Colorado statute. Within just six years, abortion for mere convenience was not just permitted by several states. It was enshrined as a fundamental constitutional right.

Some have declared that they will not rest until Roe v. Wade is overturned. Others say that is too lofty a goal. I disagree. I believe it is too shortsighted. We must reach further back if we want to reverse our moral free fall. Pre-1973 thinking is not enough. We must go back to the time when no state authorized the killing of innocents – a time when only the rapist, not the product of rape, was eligible for a sentence of death.

Ideas have consequences. And so do exceptions. One of the consequences of embracing an evil exception is that it hardens our hearts and clouds our thinking in advance of our consideration of other exceptions. Eventually we come to a point where we cannot imagine life without that initial exception.

It is fitting that it all began in Mississippi. We have a legacy of executing innocents by denying their personhood. It happened with slavery. It happened again with abortion. Now we have learned to justify our own Holocaust. We didn’t need Hitler after all.
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To read another article by Mike Adams, click here.

Allen West: Pelosi, Obama, Reid and DWS Need to Get Their Message the Hell Out of America

2012-01-30T15:41:00.000-08:00

Allen West: Pelosi, Obama, Reid and DWS Need to Get Their Message the Hell Out of America
By Katie Pavlich
1/30/2012

Rep. Allen West doesn't seem to be a fan of the class warfare rhetoric being spewed by Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Barack Obama on a daily basis. He told them to take their message "the hell out of the United States of America," during a Palm Beach County GOP Lincoln Day Dinner over the weekend.

Click here to watch video.

"Take your message of equality of achievement, take your message of economic dependency, take your message of enslaving the entrepreneurial will of the American people somewhere else. You can take it to Europe, you can take it to the bottom of the sea, you can take it to the North Pole, but get the hell out of the United States of America."

"This is about 100 percent America."

"This is a battle field."

"I will not allow President Obama to take the United States of America and destroy it."
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No Room for Allen West- or You- in Romney’s GOP
By John Ransom
1/30/2012

Get ready for the all new GOP, under the lead of Mitt Romney.

It’s a GOP where the Tea Party won’t be welcome, where the federal government will continue to bailout out banks and unions and everyone who’s anyone will continue to make money- except of course you and me.

We’ll just continue to get stuck with the 100 year mortgage payment, as the GOP continues to be the “tax collector for the welfare state,” in the WSJ’s apt phrase.

That’s the takeaway from Florida where Florida Representative Will Weatherford, a Romney proxy, helped redistrict Tea Party favorite Congressman and retired Col. Allen West into a much more liberal district than he previously represented.

I guess Tea Party ideas of limited government and fiscal responsibility aren't wanted in the GOP under Mitt.

Writes the Florida political blog the Shark Tank:

West’s congressional district inexplicably sheds the most out support as compared to all other incumbent Republican and Democrat Congressman. A few weeks back we quoted an unnamed legislator saying that, “Allen West was screwed”, a statement which was originally made about made five months before the purposed maps were made public, leading insiders to believe that the fix was in against Allen West. But in light of Weatherford’s comment, it is increasingly clear that this is a fait accompli.

Republicans control both houses of the Florida state legislature plus the governor’s office and could have written the new congressional districts however they wanted. But they decided to throw a bone to liberals in the state by redistricting Allen West out of a job.

Why should that surprise anyone?

Throwing a bone to liberals is the thing that Romney, McCain, Dole, Bush and company do best. They recoil under the assault of the left-wing media in this country, seeking refuge in the “bipartisan” label, reaching across the aisle to “get things done” so that they can hit the cocktail circuit and make jokes about guys like Col. West…oh, and you too.

This is the same GOP gang that gave us Charlie Crist, Romneycare, real estate bailouts, automaker bailouts, abortion bailouts, assault weapon bans.

Yeah, yeah, Obama is the Devil, but Mitt and company have been willing accomplices.

And because of that complicity, conservatives will under-vote for president in 2012 rather than support another Bush-Dole-Bush clone in the White House. Heck, there are lots of positive things to say about the Bushes and the Doles, but little good to say about Romney.

He’s Bush-Dole without character.

But give him this: The guy really, really wants to be president. Toward that end, he’ll say anything you want to hear just as soon as he knows what you want to hear. So don’t believe anything that comes out of Romney’s mouth. When he says “read my lips,” you should plug your ears- and just imagine Mitt saying whatever you want to hear.

It won’t matter anyway.

As Romney advisor, former Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman- you know, the guy who lost to Al Freakin’ Franken?- admitted recently, Romney is not going to repeal Obamacare no matter what he says on the campaign trail.

Observes the Wall Street Journal:

It was a remarkable admission, especially given the aspiring Republican President whose ear Mr. Coleman happens to have. Then again, it may also be evidence of his kind of crack political thinking that couldn't outwit Al Franken of all people in the 2008 race and again in the 2009 recount and thus provided the 60th Senate vote for ObamaCare.

The larger point is that the path of least political resistance for the GOP would be to revert to its historic minority role as tax collectors for the welfare state, and this temptation is especially strong for health care. No one doubts that repealing and replacing ObamaCare will be a hard slog if the party does take the White House and Senate in 2012, namely because the American political system is designed to make change hard (even if those controls failed in 2010 amid Democratic abuses). Mr. Coleman's advice is, essentially, why bother trying.

But that hasn’t stopped Romney from bravely telling us that Obamacare’s individual mandate is unconstitutional, while Romenycare’s individual mandate is not.

The Obamacare repeal will be Mitt’s 0-97 vote in the Senate, just the way Obama’s budget was an oh-fer in 2011.

Oh-well-they-tried.

And here it is: Romney is lying to you one way or another.

He’ll keep one big, fat Obamacare or he’ll try to foist on you 57 varieties of Romneycare that add up to the same thing.

But in either case, like Allen West, the rest of us will pay the price for Romney’s intellectual inconsistencies in pursuit of the great, white house.

Because if Romney wins the nomination, expect neither hope nor change for the GOP.

Expect four more for Obama or in the best case scenario, Obama lite.
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To read another article by John Ransom, click here.
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To read another article about Allen West, click here.

'You Should Be Called Out, Fired, Fined and Shamed'

2012-01-30T12:15:00.000-08:00

'You Should Be Called Out, Fired, Fined and Shamed'
By Michael Brown
1/30/2012

For years I have been saying that those who came out of the closet one generation ago (speaking of gay activists) want to put us in the closet today. For making that statement, I have been derisively scorned and ridiculed: “No one is trying to put you in the closet!” But as the tide continues to turn in favor of the gay activist agenda, I’m noticing a shift. People are now saying to me, “Bigots like you belong in the closet!”

Last Wednesday (January 25th), Dr. Frank Turek and I engaged in a radio dialogue-debate with gay activist Mitchell Gold, founder of Faith in America, which is devoted to “ending the harm of religion-based bigotry.”

Speaking at a reception on Capitol Hill December 2, 2011, Gold made reference to this alleged “religion-based bigotry,” saying, “I know those . . . three words might seem harsh or incendiary to some, but unfortunately those are the words that best describe the disease that has and is dividing our country and too many families.”

In other words, if you have any moral or religious or social objection to homosexual practice you are suffering from a divisive and destructive “disease.” In fact, if you simply affirm that marriage is the union of a man and a woman, not the union of two people, you are suffering from the “disease” of “religion based-bigotry.” And bigots, of course, should not be tolerated.

In the midst of our very spirited debate (the three of us are from New Jersey or New York), I repeatedly told listeners they needed to read the book Mitchell edited, Crisis: 40 Stories Revealing the Personal, Social, and Religious Pain and Trauma of Growing Up Gay in America. In keeping with the sub-title, I reiterated that it was important that those of us who opposed gay activism understood the personal dimensions involved. In fact, I started the show by asking Mitchell to tell his own story, wanting others to know the pain he suffered growing up with same-sex attractions.

I also made clear that rampant, no-fault divorce among heterosexuals (including all too many Christians) had done more to destroy marriage than all gay activists combined.

Still, when I asked Mitchell what he thought I should do with my deeply held spiritual and moral convictions, the fruit of 40 years of study, prayer, and reflection, he basically said that I needed to keep studying until I abandoned my opposition to homosexual practice. So much for tolerance, diversity, and religious freedom.

The emails I received from those in Mitchell’s camp were even more enlightening (I have not corrected the typos).

From Rosemarie: “You are the one that is blinded by bigotry. Read how the churches handled slavery, mixed marriages, etc. . . . You and others like you will have a lot to answer for at the judgement. You might make it in the gates and you will most likely be surprised who is there and who is not there.”

From John: “I just finished listening to your program featuring Mitchell Gold, and I feel like crying. . . . It's such a bold, unquestioned arrogance. . . . I'm a very loving, open-minded athiest as an adult. I whole-heartedly wish that all of humanity would abandon belief in god(s) and truly learn what it is to be kind, and loving and gentle to each other. In all likelihood, it will never happen, but I sincerely believe it's the only way we will avoid extinction. Upon hearing the message of your show... (devicive, bigotted, self-righteousness) wrapped in the guise of love, I am far-from-assured in my hope for humanity.”

From Cindy: “As a Christian, I was deeply offended by your comments as well as Frank Turek's comments. . . . Your arguments are outdated and preposterous. You and Mr Turek reminded me of my grandmother when she would rant on and on about black folk. She was fearful.”

From Jeana: “More than 60% of the congregation in my church are divorced. Don't blame that on the gays. There are 4 pregnant unwed teenagers in my church. Don't blame that on the gays. Porn addiction is an epidemic among the married men in my church. Don't blame that on the gays. In other words stop blaming the world's problems on the gays just so you can justify your hate. You can deny your hate all you want but if you listened to yesterday's broadcast, your disgust and hate comes through loud and clear.” (My emphasis.)

From Jess: “I couldn't believe how obnoxious you and Mr. Turek were to Mitchell Gold. You two acted like immature teenage boys...bullying someone who's diiferent than you.” (But of course. Bullying!)

And clearest of all, from Pablo: “Free speech espousing hate even disguised as pseudo or real religious speech is still hate speech. Hate speech in any and all circumstances is not protected by US law. If you use religion to disguise your hatred of other groups you should be called out, fired, fined and shamed.”

Now, go back and re-read the opening paragraph and tell me if it sounds far-fetched to you.
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To read another article by Michael Brown, click here.
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To read an article by Frank Turek, click here.
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To read articles about Gay Agenda Influence, click here.

Fast and Furious: Holder’s Perjury Defense Gets Shaky

2012-01-30T11:51:00.000-08:00

Fast and Furious: Holder’s Perjury Defense Gets Shaky
The latest Friday night document dump raises questions.
by John Hayward
01/30/2012

To the great annoyance of congressional investigators, Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department has been dragging its feet turning over subpoenaed documents relating to several inquiries – most infamously the “Fast and Furious” gun walking operation, in which American guns were deliberately allowed to fall into the hands of Mexican drug cartel killers.

DOJ has a habit of releasing these subpoenaed documents in massive “dumps” on Friday night, to guarantee minimal media coverage. Last Friday’s dump weighed in at 500 pages, and turned out to contain some very interesting emails sent in the wake of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry’s murder. Among the first media outlets to dig out these messages was… National Public Radio:

The email messages show the former top federal prosecutor in Arizona, Dennis Burke, notifying an aide to Holder via email on Dec. 15, 2010 that agent Brian Terry had been wounded and died. "Tragic," responds the aide, Monty Wilkinson. "I've alerted the AG, the acting Deputy Attorney General..."

Only a few minutes later, Wilkinson emailed again, saying, "Please provide any additional details as they become available to you."

Burke then delivered another piece of bad news: "The guns found in the desert near the murder [sic] ... officer connect back to the investigation we were going to talk about — they were AK-47s purchased at a Phoenix gun store."

Uh-oh. This is very bad news for Attorney General Eric Holder’s perjury defense - which rests on the assertion that he has no idea what’s actually going on at the Justice Department, doesn’t read his email, and was totally out of the loop on Operation Fast and Furious until it became a media sensation. Specifically, Holder told Congress in May 2011 that he “probably heard about Fast and Furious for the first time over the last few weeks.” Later, he changed his mind and said it was more like “a couple of months.”

But here we have emails clearly demonstrating that Holder’s aide, Monty Wilkinson, was fully aware of the Fast and Furious connection to Agent Terry’s murder on December 14, 2010 almost immediately. NPR’s summary of the incriminating emails leaves out some very important details, which the Washington Times provides:

The released emails show a conversation between one official, whose name was redacted, and now-former Arizona U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke.

“On December 14, 2010, a BORTAC agent working in the Nogales, AZ AOR was shot. The agent was conducting Border Patrol operations 18 miles north of the international boundary when he encountered [redacted word] unidentified subjects. Shots were exchanged resulting in the agent being shot. At this time, the agent is being transported to an area where he can be air lifted to an emergency medical center,” the email read.

Another email sent an hour later, read: “Our agent has passed away.”

Burke then forwarded those two email to Eric Holder’s then-deputy chief of staff, Monty Wilkinson, adding that the shooting was “not good,” due to the fact that it had happened “18 miles w/in” the United States border.

Wilkinson responded with, “I’ve alerted the AG [Holder], the Acting DAG, Lisa, etc.”

Later that day, Burke sent an email to Wilkinson alerting him that the guns used to kill Brian Terry were weapons from the gunrunning operation, Fast and Furious.

“The guns found in the desert near the murdered BP officer connect back to the investigation we were going to talk about – they were AK-47s purchased at a Phoenix gun store,” Burke wrote to Wilkinson in an email.

Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) of the Senate Judiciary Committee, one of the leading investigators of the Fast and Furious scandal, said via Twitter that these documents “clearly show Holder’s people knew about gun running days before I opened my investigation, yet they lied.” (Note: I have taken the liberty of transcribing Grassley’s comment from highly compressed Twitter-speak.)

Now, in order to maintain his “Sergeant Schultz” defense against perjury, Holder would have to claim that his aide, Wilkinson, never actually briefed him after claiming to have done so, and never passed along any of the Fast and Furious-related details of Terry’s murder.

If Wilkinson is willing to go under the bus for his boss, he might try claiming he was somehow distracted from researching this immensely significant story, after plainly stating he would look into it, and keep Holder up to speed. Keep in mind that the emails make it absolutely and unambiguously clear that Wilkinson knew weapons found at the scene of Terry’s murder were connected to an investigation he and Burke “were going to talk about.” It strains credulity that Wilkinson simply lost interest in the Terry murder, which generated a huge amount of DOJ message traffic, and near-panic among the ATF brass running Operation Fast and Furious.

Or, alternatively, Holder would have to claim that Wilkinson dutifully prepared a detailed briefing within a day or two of Terry’s murder, but Holder never bothered to read it.

Burke, by the way, is a key Fast and Furious player who admitted, after resigning, that he leaked a Justice Department memo to the press, in an attempt to discredit whistle-blowing ATF agent John Dodson. To date, he’s pretty much the only person to lose his job because of the Obama Administration’s deadly gun-walking scandal. He just happens to have been the subject of a critical profile in the Arizona Republic this weekend, which pointed out that many observers think he was thrown under the bus to protect his superiors, perhaps including AG Holder:

Curiously, the supporters and detractors agree on one point: They say Burke became a scapegoat to protect higher officials in the Justice Department or White House. Dave Workman, a gun-rights blogger, described Burke as "the chief sacrificial lamb."

Sen. Grassley, in an October statement, said: "Mr. Burke is to be commended, to some extent, for being the only person to resign and take responsibility for the failed operation. Of course, I do not believe he should feel obligated to be the only fall guy."

Phoenix attorney Andy Gordon, a close friend for nearly two decades, said Burke may be loyal to a fault, protecting higher-ups in the Justice Department. "DOJ threw him under the bus. That's my view," Gordon said.

Another friend, attorney Tim Nelson, said: "I don't know the workings of the Obama administration, whether they were looking for a fall guy or what. But it certainly looks that way."

It is difficult to see how Holder could remain in office after making these claims – the man would clearly be a dangerous incompetent whose continued presence posed a clear and present danger to the Justice Department’s operations and accountability. However, if he doesn’t continue his cluelessness defense, he’ll be facing perjury charges. All of this is sure to come up when Holder makes his next appearance before the House Oversight committee tomorrow. If former U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke really wants to clear his name, this would be a good time to come forward, and tell Congress exactly what he discussed with Holder’s aide, in the hours after Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry’s murder.
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To read another article by John Hayward, click here.
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To read a related article, click here.

This Conscience Thing

2012-01-30T11:34:00.000-08:00

This Conscience Thing
By W. James Antle, III on 1.30.12 @ 6:08AM

Catholic leaders object to an Obama administration rule on contraceptive coverage, but will Americans listen?

Has President Obama's Department of Health and Human Services awakened a sleeping giant?

In pews across America, Catholics listened yesterday to letters from their bishops denouncing an HHS requirement that forces virtually every employer in America to pay for health insurance that covers contraception, sterilization, and abortifacients.

As Nancy Pelosi complained during the health care debate, many of her coreligionists have "this conscience thing" concerning the sanctity of human life. Now the executive branch of the federal government is telling them to drop dead.

There is technically a small religious exemption, but it doesn't apply to most activities engaged in by communities of faith. For now, a church doesn't have to buy condoms for monks or the pill for nuns. But religious schools, hospitals, and social service providers will have to comply with the regulation.

Oddly, the best way for religious leaders to follow their conscience without running afoul of the government is to not serve or employ people outside the faith. "Sectarian self-segregation is O.K., but good Samaritanism is not," observes the columnist Ross Douthat. "The rule suggests a preposterous scenario in which a Catholic hospital avoids paying for sterilizations and the morning-after pill by closing its doors to atheists and Muslims, and hanging out a sign saying 'no Protestants need apply.'"

The American Catholic bishops have pointed out that even Jesus and his disciples might not have qualified for the narrowly tailored religious exemption. The practical result may be to force religious traditionalists out of charitable activities, much like the Catholic Church has been pushed out of the adoption business in Massachusetts.

According to some folks, that's perfectly fine. "Perhaps the Catholic Church should divest itself from activities that are not 100 percent religious in nature," was one typical reader response to an article about the controversy.

Never mind that caring for the sick, feeding the poor, and clothing the naked are considered religious activities in many faiths. Forget that no one is forced to work for a Catholic hospital or Baptist college. Pay no attention to other ways such workers could affordably obtain these services if they so choose. Under the HHS regulation, the coverage is required even if the employee objects.

Religious communities in contemporary America are voluntary. No one is forced to attend or support any church, profess any doctrine or creed. Government, however, upholds community norms at gunpoint.

You don't have to look very far to find comments suggesting that this rule is a good way to stick it to churches whose social teachings are deemed too reactionary. Even many American Catholics disagree with their church on birth control. But the regulation does raise interesting questions for people of many political stripes.

Will libertarians defend the freedom of conscience not just for the "individual who wants to sell lemonade, paint his or her house purple, hop on an airplane, ingest intoxicants, or marry someone from the same sex," but also the individual who doesn't want to fork over her money to help pay for activities that offend her faith?

Will conservatives who backed the Bush-era "faith-based initiatives" see the risk inherent in allowing administrations with different values to fund and regulate the missions of organizations guided by faith?

Will the Catholic left see how allowing the federal government to force people to buy health insurance they do not want can have unintended consequences?

This move could prove to be detrimental to a president whose reelection fight may well hinge on the outcome in a few states with large Catholic populations. Or it could reveal that in our tolerant age, many Americans possess little tolerance for values that are not their own.
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To read an article by W. James Antle, III, click here.
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To read another article about the Democrat's war on religion, click here.

The Rich Ate My Vote

2012-01-30T11:26:00.000-08:00

The Rich Ate My Vote
By Larry Thornberry on 1.30.12 @ 6:07AM

A report from the Nelson/Durbin inquisitional rally on voters under Republican duress.

TAMPA -- With Florida Republicans set to vote Tuesday for their preferred presidential nominee -- almost surely Mitt Romney -- Democrats chose Friday to put on a political show-trial accusing Republicans of attempting to deny the vote to blacks, the young, the elderly, and selected other Democratic constituencies (no mention yet of widows and orphans, but it's early).

The show took place at the Hillsborough County Court House in downtown Tampa Friday, and it starred Democratic U.S. Senators Dick Durbin of Illinois and Bill Nelson of Florida, along with a supporting cast of useful witnesses who (as we have learned to say) stayed on message.

Nelson, seeking re-election this year, has charged that changes made by the heavily Republican Florida Legislature last year to Florida's voter laws are nothing short of attempts at voter suppression, suppression that strikes at the very heart of democracy and self-government. Durbin used his Senate Judiciary subcommittee to orchestrate this overwrought charge by holding a hearing Friday in which witness after witness repeated the Democratic talking points. I've been to pep rallies that were less one-sided.

Republicans, including the legislative sponsors of the legislation, spokesmen for the Florida Secretary of State's and the governor's office, and the chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, say the charges are bogus -- cheap and transparent political theater. The laws were changed to save some election expense and to guard against voter fraud, they say, and do not prevent anyone from registering and voting.

The Durbin/Nelson rodeo got going Friday morning in front of the courthouse with the usual demonstrators with quaint costumes and loudspeakers forecasting the end of self-government if these evil laws are not struck from the books. Scattered among the college students and various leftist indignatos were a few counter-demonstrators who weren't going along with the gag. Most of these thought Nelson, rather than Florida's new voting laws, should go.

Dueling signs carried such messages as: "Those who fear our votes don't deserve our votes," and "Buh bye Bill Nelson." There were several rat-bags with signs indicating they were "part of the 99 percent" (of what, their appearance did not make clear). And there was one lonely guy whose sign carried this universal but ambiguous message: "The joke's on us."

Retiree Lew Green of Apollo Beach thought he knew what the joke was. He didn't miss the irony of a senator from Illinois, with its colorful history of voting practices, lecturing Floridians on how to vote. "I'm from Chicago," Lew told me. "I can't wait till I die so I can go back home to vote."

So what's the ostensible cause of all this heavy breathing on the part of Nelson, Durbin, et al.? No, the poll tax hasn't been re-instated. The legislature, however, did cut early voting days in Florida from 14 to eight, but added evening and weekend hours so plenty of non-work hours are available to all voters. The time that third-party registration outfits have to turn in voter paper work to supervisors of elections offices was more than cut in half and penalties added for late filing.

That's it. Inside the court house, witness after witness said what Nelson and Durbin wanted to hear, that the new arrangements leave blacks and Hispanics and students and the elderly at wits end as how to ever register and cast a vote. No mention that Florida counties have multiple supervisor of elections offices and that other venues, Department of Motor Vehicles offices and public libraries to name just two, are available for the eligible to register or to deal with matters such as address changes.

There's ample time to deal with these matters before elections. But Friday's witnesses, many from various racial and ethnic grievance groups, panted that this minimal level of responsibility required on the part of potential voters is just too big an obstacle for their constituencies. One witness shot the moon by saying the new laws were worse than Jim Crow, an absolutely knee-buckling thing to say, not just because the guy saying it wasn't even born when Jim Crow, a truly nasty fellow, was run out of town. Neither Durbin nor Nelson had anything to say about this remarkable assertion. Apparently when accusing Republicans of perfidy, there is no upper limit, no credibility test at all. One is justified in wondering if there would have been even a ripple if a witness had claimed the new law requires poll workers to eat Democrats if they attempted to vote.

At the end of the proceedings, the spinning of the issue complete, the unanswered charges laid out in breathless detail, Nelson said, "Mr. Chairman, I think that rule of law has been assaulted here in this state by this election law under the pretense of election fraud." There was indeed a good deal of pretense going on in Tampa on Friday. But not the kind Nelson wants the world to believe. The purpose of the "hearing" was clearly not to gather information but to deliver a point of view. If anything was assaulted, it was common sense.

For the most part the mainstream media in Florida played their assigned role in this charade. No matter how transparently overwrought and politically motivated the charges are, Florida reporters mostly rose to the bait, as Nelson knew they would. News outlets took the charges seriously in newspaper stories and TV stand-ups, rarely quoting anyone on the other side of the issue.

Florida isn't the only state in the voting law hot seat this year. Durbin said his subcommittee will be looking at the laws of more than 30 states in search of similar frontal attacks on the franchise. His ministry will be supported by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who has crooned about how evil Republicans are attempting to require Democratic voters to meet unreasonable standards at the polls, like having to show a photo I.D. to ensure the voter is who he represents himself to be. (Yes, a photo I.D. The same thing many Americans have to show to cash a check or to buy a six-pack of beer.)

When services were over Friday after two-plus hours of fantastical testimony, I felt like I'd been at the Queen of Heart's court with the Mad Hatter as bailiff. But I ask for no sympathy from TAS readers. Further, I caution those on the mainland not to just enjoy a laugh at Florida's expense and move on. This political circus may soon be coming to a courthouse near you.
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To read another article by Larry Thornberry, click here.

Romney Explains Why He Can't Beat Obama

2012-01-30T11:20:00.000-08:00

Romney Explains Why He Can't Beat Obama
By David Catron on 1.30.12 @ 6:08AM

"It's not worth getting angry about."

Most media coverage of last Thursday's GOP debate has focused on the war of words fought by the two front runners, but the crucial exchange of the evening didn't occur between Gingrich and Romney. The most telling moment of the debate was the latter's response to Rick Santorum's eloquent explanation of Obamacare's importance to the GOP's strategy in the general election and why giving Romney the nomination would be tantamount to surrendering the high ground on health reform: "Folks, we can't give this issue away in this election. It is about fundamental freedom." The former Massachusetts governor responded with the usual rote talking points, which Santorum vehemently rejected. Romney then uttered the most revealing words of the debate: "First of all, it's not worth getting angry about."

Most Republican voters, and more than a few independents, would disagree. Romney apparently didn't notice that the hundreds of thousands of people who showed up at the nation's capitol to protest the impending passage of Obamacare were pretty angry. In fact, after the law was passed over their vehement objections, a significant portion of the voters were so outraged by the back-room skullduggery used to pass "reform" that many Democrats were actually afraid to hold town hall meetings and face their own constituents during the run-up to the 2010 midterms. Moreover, despite the many whoppers told by the President's accomplices in the media about the "anti-incumbent mood" of the electorate, the drubbing the Democrats received in that election was obviously driven by voter indignation about being force-fed Obamacare.

And the anger remains. That is why Obama's recent State of the Union address contained only three references to his "signature domestic achievement." This is, as Michael Barone puts it, "the strongest evidence possible" that the President sees Obamacare as "a millstone around the neck of his campaign." Thus, he and his minions will not have missed the significance of Romney's prissy rebuke of Santorum's passionate plea not to "give this issue away." They no doubt recognized it as a Freudian slip betraying Romney as a man without real convictions, and realize that this is the source of his countless flip-flops. In the art of politics, as in the art of war, the key to victory is knowledge of one's enemy. Having cut their political teeth in Chicago, the President's men know a trimmer when they see one and what it takes to defeat him.

The only real difference between Romney and Obama's long-ago-vanquished opponents is that the Chi-town pols were less amateurish. Romney's reversals of position have been so frequent and transparently self-serving that a moderately intelligent preschooler could see through them. Health reform is Exhibit A. When running against Ted Kennedy for the Senate in 1994, Romney represented himself as the champion of a free market health system: "I do not believe in a government takeover of the healthcare system." After becoming Governor of Massachusetts, however, his position changed so radically that he signed a health reform law that later became the model for Obamacare. Now, he claims to oppose Obama's version of the plan, though the two laws are identical in all important respects.

Romney would also have us believe that he will repeal Obamacare in its entirety. He has made this claim in virtually every Republican debate. During his exchange with Santorum on Thursday, for example, he phrased it thus: "It's bad medicine, it's bad for the economy, and I will repeal it." Predictably, this differs from what he said immediately after the law was passed: "I hope we're ultimately able to… repeal the bad and keep the good." It also conflicts with what his people are saying even now. During a recent interview one of Romney's most important advisors said, "We're not going to do repeal… but you will see major changes… You can't whole-cloth throw it out. But you can substantially change what's been done." This is no more than the President and the Democrats themselves have promised.

Romney's affinity with Democrat positions has not been limited to health reform, of course. He has, for example, often agreed with them on Second Amendment rights. While running for Governor of Massachusetts in 2002 he repeatedly stated that he supported that state's tough gun laws. And, in 2004, he famously signed into law a ban on so-called assault weapons and even certain types of shotguns. By the time he had begun his first presidential campaign, however, his views had "evolved." In a 2007 speech to the NRA, he declared, "I support the Second Amendment as one of the most basic and fundamental rights of every American." During his current bid for the presidency, Romney has dodged gun control questions in the debates and his campaign website offers no hint as to his position du jour.

Perhaps the most egregious of Romney's one-eighties have involved abortion. He has changed his position on that issue at least three times. During the 1994 Senate race against Kennedy he said, "I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country." In 2001, however, he published a letter in The Salt Lake Tribune in which he wrote, "I do not wish to be labeled prochoice." If the "evolution" had stopped there, many would accept what could well have been a genuine change of heart. But when he ran for governor of Massachusetts in 2002 he declared, "I will protect the right of a woman to choose under the law of the country and the laws of the Commonwealth." Now, for purposes of his current presidential campaign, he's again "pro-life." How he avoids vertigo while executing so many pirouettes is anyone's guess.

Presumably, Romney would admonish us that his about-faces are "not worth getting angry about." That may be the one thing he really believes. What he and his supporters in the GOP establishment don't get, however, is that real voters take these things very seriously. Those who vote based on abortion and gun rights are justifiably angered by politicians who make promises about which they forget the day after being elected. When Rick Santorum's tone during last Thursday's debate betrayed annoyance at Romney's health care contortions, it was because he actually cares about the threat to basic liberty presented by Obamacare. It's not an easy thing for a man of genuine principle to tolerate an opportunist like Romney, who obviously sees the issue as just another lever that he can use to hoist himself into public office.

It will, however, be very easy for Obama and his creatures to exploit Romney's flip-flops in the general election. They will make sure the voters understand that these reversals reveal Romney as just another unprincipled politician willing to say anything to win the election. That the President himself is cut of the same cloth won't matter. The reporters and bloggers whose job it is to point that out will be dutifully reciting White House talking points. One wonders if, after his resultant loss in November, Romney will find this "worth getting angry about."
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To read another article by David Catron, click here.

Obama's Helter-Skelter Strategy

2012-01-30T11:07:00.000-08:00

Obama's Helter-Skelter Strategy
By Jed Babbin on 1.30.12 @ 6:09AM

Critics of the president's Pentagon cuts are missing the overriding problem with his military spending "plans."

If you're wondering where to find the strategic thinking behind Obama's slashing of the military budget, you won't find it in Clausewitz, Kissinger, or David Galula. After days of searching, I think I found it lying at some unequal distance between the Beatles' "Helter Skelter" and the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter."

Obama's plan to slash $487 billion in Pentagon spending over ten years comes sandwiched between the $400 billion in cuts he made using Robert Gates as his knife and the possible sequestration of another $600 billion in cuts under last year's random results from the failed "supercommittee."

Congress and the pundit community have fallen into the political trap that these cuts pose. They are attacking the cuts by defending the constituencies -- individual military assets they favor, contractors in their states -- and losing the battle. They are losing because they don't argue against the underlying theories of the so-called "plans," none of which match the others.

There are so many internal contradictions and inconsistencies in these "plans" that we should focus on them first and debate the budget numbers later.

To do this, congressional Republicans need to look at the three statements of the plan issued by Obama and his administration. First was the 5 January "Sustaining Global Leadership" strategy issued by Obama which states his goals in refashioning our global military role. Second is the 26 January "Defense Budget Priorities and Choices" paper published by the Pentagon. In the middle was the president's State of the Union address. (Next month, when the Pentagon 2013 budget is actually submitted to Congress, there will be a fourth round of contradictions to analyze.)

There are too many contradictions and internal inconsistencies to review them all in one column. Just for starters, let's look at a few of the more glaring examples.

The 5 January "strategy" says that the Pentagon will be implementing "…the Joint Operational Access Concept, sustaining our undersea capabilities, developing a new stealth bomber, improving missile defenses, and continuing efforts to enhance the resiliency and effectiveness of critical space-based capabilities."

So how does the 26 January budget outline accomplish these objectives?

The Joint Operational Access concept, according to the Pentagon, means getting U.S. forces to the theater of battle and enabling them to move quickly within the theater. This is to be accomplished, according to the budget outline, by retiring 27 C-5A heavy airlifters and 65 older C-130s, and canceling the new Army C-27 tactical transport. Those reductions in airlift come on top of Obama's decision to stop production of the C-17 heavy airlifter.

And all that ignores the question of how much airlift do we need? Where is the study that shows the threats we have to meet, the forces we need to move to defeat them, and how much airlift we need to do it? The budget outline references "air mobility studies" in support of the cuts, but no such studies comparing the airlift requirement to the threat and how forces need to be moved to defeat them have been done in many years.

The "strategy" paper says we are going to sustain our undersea capabilities, which means kicking the budget can down the road, as accomplished in the budget outline. It says we'll delay those undersea capabilities indefinitely, beyond the "Future Years Defense Plan" that forecasts spending for six years. Among those assets delayed is a new Virginia class hunter-killer submarine. The replacement for the Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines is also delayed for at least two years. Do we need those assets sooner or later? Given the age of our current fleets, the answer is sooner because the threats they are meant to deter or defeat are not shrinking, particularly in the Asia-Pacific theater toward which Obama says we're "rebalancing."

That paper also says that we're going to have a new stealth bomber. But when? It will take at least ten years to design, develop, and fly a prototype. Neither the "strategy paper" nor the budget outline says when we will have it, what it might cost or -- the critical question -- when we'll need it. Which means that Obama is giving lip service to the new bomber and looks forward to piddling funding at it without actually producing it.

The "strategy" also says we're going to enhance the resiliency and effectiveness of critical space-based assets. (I'm as tired of the air quotes as you are, dear reader, but Microsoft Word lacks a sarcasm font.) The budget outline funds upgrades for the Global Positioning Satellites, the Space-Based Infrared System, and the Advanced Extremely High Frequency satellites.

All of those assets are important, and previous budget plans included them. But there's more. A lot more.

Our entire military and intelligence capabilities are built around a satellite infrastructure. Our "net-centric warfare" strategy, around which all of our military forces are built, relies on the instant communication, reconnaissance, and battle-management provided by satellites. Our intelligence community is just as dependent on satellites for imagery and other electronic intelligence gathering.

Right now there are hundreds of satellites in orbit, most of them top-secret in capabilities and many so secret that their existence is not disclosed. In the unclassified world, we know about the MILSTAR satellites that our forces depend on for jam-resistant communications at all levels, from the lowliest Marine squad leader to the national command center. They are -- as best we can make them -- protected against quickly-evolving cyberwar attacks. So is the Wideband Global SATCOM constellation of satellites that provides high-capacity communications to deployed forces.

Nothing in the budget paper says we will replace these assets, all of which are aging out. A satellite of these types -- and the classified ones -- routinely cost $1 billion each, take years to develop, and cost hundreds of millions to launch. How are we going to "enhance" our space-based assets? We aren't, at least according to the Obama documents.

We won't be able to afford satellites, ships, or aircraft in part because Obama is diverting the defense budget to his "green energy" plans to starve us of energy. Forget drilling: in his State of the Union address, Obama said: "And I'm proud to announce that the Department of Defense, the world's largest consumer of energy, will make one of the largest commitments to clean energy in history -- with the Navy purchasing enough capacity to power a quarter of a million homes a year."

The Green Grifters will get money -- millions? billions? -- that could actually be spent on assets that kill people and break things. To sustain the Green Grifters, Obama is robbing our military of capabilities it needs.

Last, and not least, is the idea of "reversibility." Panetta's budget outline says that it makes "… major adjustments in a way that best allows for their reversal or for regeneration of capabilities if future circumstances change." Really?

Obama has terminated production of the F-22, C-17, DDG-1000, and much more. When a production line is shut down, it's not kept in mothballs. It's broken up, people are reassigned, and factories are either emptied and sold or filled with machinery and people to build other products. If you want to resume production of one of those systems, you'll have to pay billions to do it, and spend the time it will take, which will be measured in five-year chunks. Panetta's easy "reversal or regeneration" is a fantasy.

Obama's strategy and Pentagon budget will not produce the defense capabilities we need now or in the future. They may as well have been drafted by Paul McCartney and the late John Lennon:

Do, don't you want me to love you
I'm coming down fast but I'm miles above you
Tell me, tell me, tell me, come on tell me the answer
You may be a lover but you ain't no dancer.

Helter skelter, helter skelter
Helter skelter.

Obama may be a lover and a dancer, but he ain't no strategist.
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To read another article by Jed Babbin, click here.

Environmentalist-in-Chief

2012-01-30T10:58:00.000-08:00

Environmentalist-in-Chief
By William Tucker on 1.30.12 @ 6:09AM

At the rate he's going, our president will soon be taking credit for the discovery of natural gas.

In Ancient China, the Emperor went out every spring and walked the fields to bless the harvest and encourage the crops to grow. Sure enough, when the peasants put the seeds in the ground, the crops appeared and the Emperor took credit.

The job of President of the United States is often much the same. According to the legend embraced by some, he is responsible for just about everything good that happens in the country. If a group of wildcatting oil geologists in North Dakota, for instance, use 3-D seismographic to discover a whole new strata of shale oil, and if "fracking" techniques developed in Texas should make these deposits accessible for the first time in history -- well then, it must be the President who made it all happen.

This was the mantle, at least, that President Barack Obama was willing to assume last week when he declared in his State of the Union address:

Over the last three years, we've opened millions of new acres for oil and gas exploration, and tonight, I'm directing my administration to open more than 75 percent of our potential offshore oil and gas resources. Right now -- right now -- American oil production is the highest that it's been in eight years. That's right -- eight years. Not only that -- last year, we relied less on foreign oil than in any of the past 16 years.

Now those with long memories might be wondering at this point from whence this new enthusiasm for fossil fuels. They might remember the President's Inaugural Address three years ago when he proclaimed:

We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.

They remember that the words "oil" or "gas" or "fossil fuels" were never mentioned on that January afternoon.

Then there was the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill after which the President suspended all new drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and then after the ban was lifted made it so difficult to secure new permits that most drilling rigs have long left the Gulf for Brazil, the coast of Africa, and other more hospitable places around the globe.

Most curious of all, however, is the President's claim to have opened up "millions of new acres for oil and gas exploration," implying that this is why "American oil production is the highest it has been in eight years" so that "we relied less on foreign oil than in any of the past 16 years." As more than one wag suggested, once you've run an economy into the ground with 9 percent unemployment, you're bound to get a little decreased oil consumption.

The Institute for Energy Research is one of those Washington think tanks that runs around trying to keep track of such proclamations. Before the newspapers were on the stands the next day, IER had put out a report casting a little light on the President's claims. One of its graphs shows the number of permits for oil and gas exploration issued by the Bureau of Land Management. As IER notes, the Obama Administration has auctioned off less than half the number of leases annually as the Clinton Administration.

Then there were graphs illustrating the production of oil and gas on federal lands as opposed to private and state lands: As the numbers show, the obvious trend has been reduced production on federal lands and increased production from the private and state sector:

Now this is not necessarily a bad thing. When Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot conceived the Conservation Movement, they cast the federal government in the role of an aristocratic landholder who is not troubled by an immediate need for money but is able to hold resources off the market in anticipation that they will later become more valuable. This speculative venture is the way the market conserves resources. It is not the government alone that follows this practice. Last week Chesapeake Energy, the nation's second largest developer of natural gas, announced it will drill no more wells in the Marcellus Shale for the time being because the price of gas has dropped so low. It will save the resources for another day. President Obama is doing the same thing with federal resources. He can certainly take credit as the nation's Chief Conserver. But Oil-and-Gas-Developer-in-Chief? Best save that for the wildcatters out in the Marcellus and the Bakken.

Most curious of all was the President's claim that if there has been a boom in natural gas production over the past decade, government research was responsible:

The development of natural gas will create jobs and power trucks and factories that are cleaner and cheaper, proving that we don't have to choose between our environment and our economy. And by the way, it was public research dollars, over the course of thirty years, that helped develop the technologies to extract all this natural gas out of shale rock -- reminding us that Government support is critical in helping businesses get new energy ideas off the ground.

This is a claim put forth in December by the Breakthrough Institute in a paper entitled "Decades of Government Funding Behind Sale Revolution." Breakthrough is the brainchild of Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, authors of the 2003 essay, "The Death of Environmentalism" (and subsequent book), in which they argued that environmentalism had become too "timid" and "complaint-based" and should leverage global warming to become grandiose and ambitious once again. "The Era of Small Thinking is Over" is their slogan. Naturally such a group needs a bigger government to fulfill its plans and so it spends time trying to show government is responsible for all good things.

Most people who know the history of fracking technology give credit to George P. Mitchell, the Texas wildcatter who spent twenty lonely years trying to pry gas out of the Barnett Shale with his pioneering technology. Breakthrough corrals Dan Stewart, however, a former vice president at Mitchell Energy who is willing to give the federal government some credit. "They did a hell of a lot of work, and I can't give them enough credit for that," says Stewart, obviously with an eye on the next Department of Energy grant. "DOE started it, and other people took the ball and ran with it. You cannot diminish DOE's involvement."

DOE's involvement, it turns out, consisted mainly of research done in the 1970s by the Carter Administration during the "Energy Crisis." The 1976 Eastern Gas Shale Project mapped fields in Appalachia and made some early estimates of the potential of shale gas deposits. Mitchell later drew on this research in tackling the Barnett.

We got the DOE and GRI involved in the Barnett in the early 1990s. [The GRI is the Gas Research Institute, the private research arm of the gas industry.] Mitchell hadn't wanted to get them involved because we were trying to understand it and didn't want competition for the Barnett until we had a handle on what we were doing.

By the early 1990s, we had a good position, acceptable but lacking knowledge base, and then Mitchell said, "Okay, I'm open to bringing in DOE and GRI" in 1991.

DOE participation involved paying one-third the cost of the first horizontal well and contributing to the development of microseismic mapping techniques at the Sandia National Laboratory. "The DOE gave money to the GRI, and the GRI kept DOE updated," Stewart recalls. But while the DOE was putting up money here and there, it was Mitchell who bore the brunt of the risks:

Mitchell had the money to invest in R&D. And he had the vision. He had people in the company saying this is bulls--t, this is wasting our money, you're using our retirement money on something that's no good. They'd say, "Dan, if Barnett is the best thing we have, then we don't have s--t."

Breakthrough did not interview Mitchell, although he might have shed a little more light on the situation.

So does all this mean that President Obama can claim credit for the shale boom as well? Or is this just a case of victory having a thousand fathers?

CNN unleashed a "truth squad" after the President's speech and came to the following conclusion:

Federal research helped boost shale research in the last decades of the 20th century, particularly in the 1970s. But private industry originated the technology and picked up the slack as federal investments in research waned.

Most fascinating of all, however, is a single bland sentence in the Breakthrough report that describes one of the federal government's earliest attempts to unlock gas from shale deposits:

The U.S. for years funded radically experimental efforts, including large explosions underground, that were too expensive and risky for private firms to do.

As CNN discovered, it's a little more interesting than that. These early experiments were nuclear explosions:

[O]ne series of tests in the late 1960s and early 1970s raises eyebrows today. In the ultimate "fracking," the U.S. government attempted three times to use nuclear bombs to open up subterranean gas formations in the Rocky Mountains -- two in western Colorado and one in New Mexico. The tests produced less gas than predicted, and what was freed was radioactive.

I say let's let Obama take credit for that one.
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To read another article by William Tucker, click here.

For Santorum - Michelle Malkin

2012-01-30T10:35:00.000-08:00

For Santorum
By Michelle Malkin
January 30, 2012 08:24 AM

Rick Santorum opposed TARP.

He didn’t cave when Chicken Littles in Washington invoked a manufactured crisis in 2008. He didn’t follow the pro-bailout GOP crowd — including Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich — and he didn’t have to obfuscate or rationalize his position then or now, like Rick Perry and Herman Cain did. He also opposed the auto bailout, Freddie and Fannie bailout, and porkulus bills.

Santorum opposed individual health care mandates — clearly and forcefully — as far back as his 1994 U.S. Senate run. He has launched the most cogent, forceful fusillade against both Romney and Gingrich for their muddied, pro-individual health care mandate waters.

He voted against cap and trade in 2003, voted yes to drilling in ANWR, and unlike Romney and Gingrich, Santorum has never dabbled with eco-radicals like John Holdren, Al Gore and Nancy Pelosi. He hasn’t written any “Contracts with the Earth.”

Santorum is strong on border security, national security, and defense. Mitt the Flip-Flopper and Open Borders-Pandering Newt have been far less trustworthy on immigration enforcement.

Santorum is an eloquent spokesperson for the culture of life. He has been savaged and ridiculed by leftist elites for upholding traditional family values — not just in word, but in deed.

He won Iowa through hard work and competent campaign management. Santorum has improved in every GOP debate and gave his strongest performance last week in Florida, wherein he both dismantled Romneycare and popped the Newt bubble by directly challenging the front-runners’ character and candor without resorting to their petty tactics.

He rose above the fray by sticking to issues.

Most commendably, he refused to join Gingrich and Perry in indulging in the contemptible Occupier rhetoric against Romney. Character and honor matter. Santorum has it.

Of course, Santorum is not perfect. As I’ve said all along, every election cycle is a Pageant of the Imperfects. He lost his Senate re-election bid in 2006, an abysmal year for conservatives. He was a go-along, get-along Big Government Republican in the Bush era. He supported No Child Left Behind, the prescription drug benefit entitlement, steel tariffs, and earmarks and outraged us movement conservatives by endorsing RINO Arlen Specter over stalwart conservative Pat Toomey.

I have no illusions about Rick Santorum. I wish he were as rock-solid on core economic issues as Ron Paul.

And I wish Ron Paul was not the far-out, Alex Jones-panderer on foreign policy, defense, and national security that he is.

If Ron Paul talked more like his son, Rand Paul, about the need for common-sense profiling of jihadists at our State Department consular offices overseas and if he talked more about the need for strengthened visa screening and airport security scrutiny of international flight manifests, I might have more than a kernel of confidence that he would take post-9/11 precautions to guard against jihadi threats and protect us from our enemies foreign and domestic. But he doesn’t, so I can’t support Ron Paul.

Mitt Romney has the backing of many solid conservatives whom I will always hold in high esteem — including Kansas Secretary of State and immigration enforcement stalwart Kris Kobach, former U.N. ambassacor John Bolton, and GOP Govs. Nikki Haley and Bob McDonnell. With such conservative advisers in his camp, Romney would be better than Obama. And a GOP Congress with a staunch Tea Party-backed contingent of fresh-blood leaders in the House and Senate will help keep any GOP president in line. Romney’s private-sector experience and achievements are the best things he’s got going. Only recently has he risen to defend himself effectively. But between his health care debacle, eco-nitwittery, and expedient and unconvincing political metamorphosis, Mitt Romney had way too much ideological baggage for me in 2008 to earn an endorsement — and it still hasn’t changed for me in 2012.

Then there’s Newt, who has long made a career out of trashing progressive Saul Alinsky while employing his tactics at every turn. I’ve been making this point for years and have chronicled his dalliances with leftists as long as anyone in the conservative blogosphere.

Many grass-roots conservatives were awakened to Newt’s double-talk and double-dealing during the NY-23 race. Inconvenient truth: Newt’s transgressions are not from decades ago. It’s not ancient history. It’s here and now. Readers of this blog know the truth: It’s not just “the GOP establishment” that’s repulsed by Gingrich’s combination of moral baggage and K Street/Beltway culture of corruption. It’s the very grass-roots that Gingrich’s cheerleaders purport to represent.

Remember October 2009?

From reader Barnaby, who sent back his crossed-out Republican solicitation forms with a “NO RINOS” sticky note for Newt Gingrich:

Remember the rebuke in Dubuque? May 11, 2011:

Guy: Speaker Gingrich, what you just did to Paul Ryan is unforgivable.

Gingrich: I didn’t do anything to Paul Ryan!

Guy: Yes, you did. You undercut him and his allies in the house.

Gingrich: No, I…

Guy: You’re an embarrassment to our party.

Gingrich: I’m sorry you feel that way.

Guy: Why don’t you get out before you make a bigger fool of yourself.

Lest we forget, this election is not about choosing a showboat candidate to run against John King or Juan Williams or Wolf Blitzer.

It’s not about “raging against” some arbitrarily defined GOP “machine.”

For many grass-roots conservatives across the country, Romney and Gingrich are the machine.

And at this point in the game, Rick Santorum represents the most conservative candidate still standing who can articulate both fiscal and social conservative values — and live them.

Side note: Unlike many bloggers and pundits weighing in on GOP 2012, I have zero connections to any of the final four GOP candidates’ campaigns. I have neither received a single penny from, nor donated a single penny, to any of their campaigns. I have not served as any kind of consultant or adviser to any of the campaigns. I have not written any speeches or talking points or briefing papers for any of their campaigns. I have not organized any blogger calls or social media efforts for any of their campaigns. I have not spoken to Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich since interviewing them for Hot Air at CPAC in 2006, and as far as I can recall, I have not communicated directly with either Santorum or Paul. My first and only contact with Santorum’s campaign came last week when a spokesman called to assure me that Santorum was not withdrawing from the Florida primary or the race in general and was in it for the long haul.

So much for my “establishment” credentials, eh?
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To read another article by Michelle Malkin, click here.
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To read more about Rick Santorum, click here.

Why Rick So Irritates Mitt

2012-01-28T23:13:00.000-08:00

Why Rick So Irritates Mitt
By Kevin McCullough
1/29/2012

Mitt Romney desperately needs both Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum to stay in this Presidential race as long as possible. Though it is not a reality the former Governor relishes. In fact the disdain he has for the situation seems to be aging him on the trail right before our very eyes.

Former Speaker Newt Gingrich is an easy villain for Romney and his notoriously dirty campaign team. Beginning back in 2008 when they passed verifiably false information to National Review that was repeated with nary a breath of inspection, the Romney campaign has always utilized a multi-angle position of attack.

Unfortunately for the Governor these days he is on the receiving end of some multi-pronged offensives of his own. The difference being they have become very public--usually taking place on debate stages--and they are made up of facts, instead of fomented fiction.

Rick Santorum has especially shone bright when picking the Governor's weak spots, and if the withering sweat dribbles that Romney exhibits under the factual correction of his GOP colleagues, I hesitate to express any desire to see what would happen under the billion dollar assault that President Obama will level at him.

Sen. Santorum has reminded folks of Romney's two biggest vulnerabilities and he has single-handidly voiced the most articulate response to them.

A number of debates back it was Senator Santorum, not Bachmann, Perry, or Cain, who dismantled Romney's epic myth that he had fought for the sanctity of marriage as then governor of Massachusetts. Santorum correctly asserted the facts: that while the judges in the state had definitively over-reached, the Governor was never ordered by the bench to execute their wholesale change in the writing of laws, nor could he have been compelled to under the separation of powers in the commonwealth. Santorum's articulate and precise observation was that not only did Romney not ignore the court--which he was in position to do--he went the extra step in enforcing the court's non-legislative law into existence and even forced the first several marriage licenses to be processed. Santorum's view like most GOP base voters is simple. The Governor was in position to call the court's bluff and should have done so. It would have created a temporary crisis in the state courts, but it likely would've been resolved by a higher court, and Romney would've been able to truly claim the mantle of someone who fought to keep marriage defined as it always has been.

This week in debate number nineteen of this election cycle Senator Santorum nailed Governor Romney to the wall on his biggest fiscal weakness--Obamacare. Senator Santorum calmly laid out the facts that Obama looked to Romney's own model as not-so-much the blueprint for the federal version, but more like the actual skeleton.

Santorum pointed out that the mandate, penalties, co-ops, and oversight all work the same way in the Obama version of health care reform as they do in the Romney version. He didn't even mentioned the state-tax-payer-supported $50 abortions that Romneycare went out of their way to include.

Romney countered by merely claiming that his version didn't do certain things like raise taxes and rob medicare programs. (Of which only the latter claim is true. Romney raised taxes on BLIND PEOPLE in Massachusetts who needed state certification of their condition to qualify for state aid.)

Wolf Blitzer attempted to rescue Governor Romney but Senator Santorum did not allow it. Re-stating what he had previously asserted he asked Romney if the mandates, penalties, and population coverage was the same in his plan, and Romney was forced to concede the point.

It showed utter weakness for the potential nominee to have to reconcile the similarities, and Santorum illustrated that this would be the exact weakness Obama would exploit in a campaign match-up between the two.

The crowd seemed overly populated with Romney fans--a strategy more likely to be carried out by Ron Paul's campaign--but even the majority of the people in the room applauded Santorum when he forced the Governor to finally concede his weakness.

This has to bother the Governor immensely. But Santorum's case is sound.

Many knew that Romney has been inconsistent as a social conservative, but Santorum forced the world to see how weak he is as a FISCAL nominee as well.

Ann Coulter said it less than a year ago, "Mitt Romney will be the nominee, and the republicans will lose."

Senator Santorum demonstrated why Ann was right to say that, and while there may not be time for the Santorum team to make the long steep climb they need to, at least everyone in the room is aware of what the greater issue should be to primary voters--Romney can't win.

And as Ann Coulter believed, he probably won't.
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To read another article by Kevin McCullough, click here.
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To read another article by Rick Santorum, click here.

Top 10 perils of Pelosi

2012-01-28T23:01:00.000-08:00

Top 10 perils of Pelosi
by Human Events
01/28/2012

It has been a year since Nancy Pelosi surrendered her gavel and stepped down as speaker of the House as a result of the Republican mid-term tsunami. To help ensure that history is not repeated, and to underscore the importance of this year’s elections, we present the Top 10 Perils of Pelosi.

1. Piled up trillions in debt

When Nancy Pelosi became speaker in January 2007, the national debt was $8.67 trillion. By the time she was deposed by the Tea Party Republicans four years later, that debt increased 60%, reaching $13.87 trillion. Since appropriation bills must constitutionally originate in the House, it is fair to blame Princess Pelosi and her kingdom of liberal Democratic congressmen for the spending spree.

2. ObamaCare abstinence

Despite the unpopularity of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. ObamaCare), Pelosi used parliamentary maneuvers and partisan arm-twisting to ram the legislation through the House. Her classic statement urging its passage—“We have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it”—is an appropriate slogan for her tenure as speaker.

3. Tea Party assault

When the Tea Party arose to counter Pelosi’s profligate spending, her response was to smear the movement. She tried to cast doubt on its authenticity, saying, “It’s not really a grassroots movement. It’s astroturf by some of the wealthiest people in America.” She later likened Tea Partiers to Nazis, and fiscal-conservative Republicans to terrorists. Of course, the mainstream media followed suit and have attacked the Tea Party ever since.

4. Occupy hypocrisy

Unlike her scorn for the Tea Party, Pelosi was quick to support the Occupy Wall Street crowd and embraced the group’s assertion that that the top 1% is unfairly profiting from the 99%. Yet Pelosi is firmly ensconced in the upper reaches of that 1%, with a net worth of some $101 million, making her the sixth wealthiest member of the House. Even as the 99% suffer through hard times, Pelosi saw her net worth soar in the Great Recession.

5. Airplane brouhaha

Flying back and forth between Washington, D.C., and her district in San Francisco proved to be too grueling for the House speaker when the military-provided transport she used had to land for refueling. Pelosi threw a fit and demanded that the Pentagon summon a larger aircraft capable of a non-stop flight—at triple the cost.

6. Special waivers

When the Democrats took over the House in 2007 Pelosi led the charge to raise the federal minimum wage. An exception to the wage mandate in the bill, cosponsored by Pelosi, was made for the U.S. territory of the Northern Marianas Islands, where a major employer—StarKist-Tuna—is owned by Del Monte, which is headquartered in Pelosi’s congressional district. Oh, and an astounding 20% of the all waivers to ObamaCare approved by the administration last spring were for businesses in Pelosi’s district.

7. Insider trading

An average citizen who profits from insider stock trading faces the risk of spending time behind bars. Not so for Pelosi, who took advantage of a loophole for members of Congress and made millions participating in a special Initial Public Offering by VISA at the same time Congress was considering credit-card legislation that would cost the company a bundle.

8. Lied about torture briefing

While Pelosi railed against the Bush Administration for using enhanced interrogation techniques on terror detainees, she seemed to have conveniently forgotten that she was briefed on the use of waterboarding way back in 2002. When news of the briefing became public in 2009, Pelosi charged the CIA with lying, but was refuted by Obama-appointed CIA director Leon Panetta.

9. Taxpayer extravagance

Wealthy Pelosi knows how to live the good-life. Witness her recent vacation in Hawaii where she and her husband stayed in a $10,000-per-night hotel. While we don’t begrudge the rich spending their own money, it irks us when they are extravagant at taxpayers’ expense. Pelosi’s congressional travel expenses for a two-year period exceeded $2 million, including over $100,000 spent on in-flight alcohol and food. Only the best liquor was served—Grey Goose vodka, Courvoisier cognac and Bombay Sapphire gin.

10. Taxpayer-funded Botox

Most healthcare plans don’t pay for cosmetic surgery that has no medical rationale. But the very first Omnibus Spending Bill passed in the Nancy Pelosi era made sure that the healthcare plan for members of Congress included taxpayer-funded Botox injections and face-lifts for members of Congress—a measure that the former speaker seems to have taken full advantage of.
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To read another Top Ten Human Events article, click here.

Winners and Losers

2012-01-28T22:31:00.000-08:00

Winners and Losers
Saturday, January 28, 2012
by Burt Prelutsky

All in all, 2011 provided us with some pretty good news. For one thing, our military took care of Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki, God got rid of Kim Jong-Il and, for good measure, Barney Frank finally got around to announcing his retirement.

It was to be expected that Jimmy Carter, who insisted on paying his last respects to the otherwise unlamented Yasser Arafat, was probably the only person in the civilized world demented enough to send his sincere condolences to North Korea on the passing of its longtime dictator, the aforementioned Kim Jong-Il. So it is that although Carter’s claim to the title of Worst President of the United States has been usurped by Barack Obama, Mr. Peanut retains clear title to being the Worst Ex-President of the United States.

Speaking of titles, I had been unaware until reading his obituary that among Kim Jong-Il’s own honorifics were Best Leader Who Realized Human Wisdom; Master of Literature, Arts and Architecture; Humankind’s Greatest Musical Genius: World’s Greatest Writer; and, contrary to Al Gore’s opinion, Greatest Man Who Ever Lived.

One of the titles I fully expected to see, but didn’t, was Greatest Golfer in the Universe. After all, even the likes of Tiger Woods, Jack Nicklaus, Phil Mickelson and Arnold Palmer, could only fantasize about shooting a round of 38 that included 11 holes-in-one. Although I have no reason on earth to doubt the North Korean news agency that reported such a miraculous round of golf, I have always wondered why Jong-Il required 27 shots to complete those other seven holes. I can only imagine that those damn little windmills threw him off his game.

An odd coincidence is that I believe 38 is the same score that Obama once reported bowling, a score that justifiably earned him the title of World’s Biggest Wienie.

Speaking of the man who is destined to take his place with the likes of James Buchanan, Warren G. Harding and Jimmy Carter, as America’s most inept one-term presidents, Obama has been accused of picking winners and losers in the business world by subsidizing the winners with our tax dollars. Furthermore, cynics claim that he selects them solely on the basis of the owners’ financial contributions to his re-election campaign. Pshaw! Even someone as openly partisan as I am can see how unjust that is. If that charge had any merit at all, Solyndra, as well as several other green energy concerns handpicked by this administration would be flourishing. So where, I ask on Obama’s behalf, are all these alleged winners? Instead, I say that Obama has exhibited the exact same questionable instincts when picking winners in the world of commerce that he’s shown in picking cabinet members, friends and religious mentors.

Finally, in all the squabbling between Republican presidential contenders, I have yet to hear anyone utter the unfortunate truth about Arabs and Muslims. For all the joyous blather that greeted the so-called Arab spring, the world has had no reason to rejoice over the results in Egypt, Libya or Syria. For their part, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, continue to be the same cesspools they were before America sacrificed blood and treasure in the hope of protecting one group of medieval terrorists from another.

In Saudi Arabia, one of our alleged allies in that part of the world, school textbooks continue to promote the official Islamic bilge that women are “weak and irresponsible,” that homosexuals “should be killed,” and that “the hour of judgment will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them.”

In the meantime, any Christian unfortunate enough to find himself in the Middle East is fair game for jihadists.

But all the while, we Americans are trained to parrot the lie, so often repeated by George Bush and Barack Obama, that Islam is a religion of peace and that America’s Muslims -- in spite of Major Hasan’s murderous rampage at Fort Hood, the campaign to erect a victory mosque at Ground Zero, and the Muslims in Dearborn, Michigan, who, along with their friends and relatives in Gaza, celebrated on 9/11 -- are every bit as benign and patriotic as the folks in the Tea Party movement.

Until we get a president who is willing to acknowledge that we are at war with Islamic fundamentalists; that Muslims played absolutely no role in the creation of the United States; that they are dedicated to a worldwide caliphate, whose primary goal would be the extermination of Jews and Christians; and that in any war waged between one Muslim sect and another, our place should be on the sidelines, cheering them on; we will continue being drawn into one bloody and ultimately futile enterprise after another.
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To read another article by Burt Prelutsky, click here.

The Zionist Imperative

2012-01-27T12:14:00.000-08:00

The Zionist Imperative
By Caroline Glick
1/27/2012

European and American perfidy in dealing with Iran's nuclear weapons program apparently has no end. This week we were subject to banner headlines announcing that the EU has decided to place an oil embargo on Iran. It was only when we got past the bombast that we discovered that the embargo is only set to come into force on July 1.

Following its European colleagues, the Obama administration announced it is also ratcheting up its sanctions against Iran... in two months. Sometime in late March, the US will begin sanctioning Iran's third largest bank.

At the same time as the Europeans and the Americans announced their phony sanctions, they reportedly dispatched their Turkish colleagues to Tehran to set up a new round of nuclear talks with the ayatollahs. If the past is any guide, we can expect for the Iranians to agree to sit down and talk just before the oil embargo is scheduled to be enforced. And the Europeans - with US support - will use the existence of talks to postpone indefinitely the implementation of the embargo.

There is nothing new in this game of fake sanctions. And what it shows more than anything is that the Europeans and the Americans are more concerned with pressuring Israel not to attack Iran's nuclear installations than they are in preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power.

Obama has a second target audience - American Jews. He is using his fake sanctions as a means of convincing American Jews that he is a pro-Israel president and that in the current election season, not only should they cast their votes in his favor, they should sign their checks for his campaign.

Both Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak were quick this week to make clear that these moves are insufficient. They will not force Iran to abandon its nuclear weapons program. More is needed.

As to American Jewry, the jury is still out.

In truth, American Jewry's diffidence towards taking a stand on Iran, or recognizing Obama's dishonesty on this issue specifically and his dishonesty regarding his position on US-Israel ties generally is not rooted primarily in American Jews' devotion to Obama. It isn't even specifically related to American Jewry's devotion to the political Left. Rather it has to do with American Jewish ambivalence to Israel.

The roots of that ambivalence - which is shared by other Western Jewish communities to varying degrees - predate Obama's presidency.

Indeed, they predate the establishment of the State of Israel. And now, as the US and the EU have given Iran at least another six months to a year to develop its nuclear bombs unchecked, it is worth considering the nature and influence of this ambivalence.

Today's principal form of Jew-hatred is anti- Zionism. Anti-Zionism is similar to previous dominant forms of Jew hatred such as Christian anti-Judaism, xenophobic and racist anti- Semitism, and Communist anti-Jewish cosmopolitanism in the sense that it takes dominant, popular social trends and turns them against the Jews. Anti-Zionism's current predominance owes to the convergence of several popular social trends which include Western post-nationalism, and anti-colonialism.

The problem that anti-Zionism poses for American Jewry is that it forces them to pay a price for supporting Israel. This is problematic because Zionism has never been fully embraced by American Jewry. Since the dawn of modern Zionism, the cause of Jewish self-determination placed American Jewish leaders in an uncomfortable dilemma.

UNLIKE EVERY other Diaspora Jewish community, the American Jewish community has always perceived itself as a permanent community rather than an exilic community. American Jews have always viewed the United States as the new Promised Land.

With the formation of the modern Zionist movement in the late 19th century, American Jews found themselves on the horns of a dilemma. Clearly, the state of world Jewry was such that national self-determination had become an existential necessity for non-American Jews.

But while supporting Jewish refugees and a scrappy little country was okay, support for the Zionist cause of Jewish national liberation involved an acceptance of the fact that Israel - not the US - is the Jewish homeland. Moreover, it involved accepting that there are Jewish interests that are independent of - if not necessarily in contradiction with - American interests. For instance, irrespective of the prevailing winds in Washington, and regardless of whether the US supports Israel or not, it is a Jewish interest that Israel exists, thrives and survives.

In a recent op-ed in Haaretz, Hebrew University political science professor Shlomo Avineri contrasted world Jewry's massive mobilization on behalf of Soviet Jewry in the 1970s and 1980s and their relative silence today in the face of Iran's Holocaust denial and open calls for the annihilation of the Jewish state. Avineri is apparently confounded by the disparity between Western Jewry's behavior in the two cases.

But the cause of the disparity is clear. Supporting the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate was easy. Unlike Israel, Soviet Jews were powerless. As such, they were pure victims and supporting them cost Diaspora Jews nothing in terms of their position in their societies.

Just as important, the cause of freedom for Soviet Jewry was perfectly aligned with the West's Cold War policies against the Soviet Union. The frequent Jewish demonstrations outside Soviet legations provided Western leaders with another tool to fight the Cold War.

In contrast, supporting Israel, and the cause of Jewish freedom and self-determination embodied by Zionism, is not cost-free for Diaspora Jews. At root, to support Israel and Zionism involves accepting that Jews have inherent rights as Jews. To be a Zionist Jew in the Diaspora means that you embrace and defend the notion that the Jews have the right to their own interests and that those interests may be distinct from other nations' interests. That is, to be a Zionist involves rejecting Jewish assimilation and embracing the fact that Jews require national independence and power to guarantee our survival. And this can be unpleasant.

PRO-ISRAEL AMERICAN Jews have historically tried to tie their support for Israel to larger, more universal themes, in order to extricate themselves from the need to admit that as Jews and supporters of Israel they have a right and a duty to support Jewish freedom even if it isn't always pretty. Again, for Israel's first several decades, it was about helping poor Jews and refugees. In recent years, the predominant defense has been that Israel deserves support because it is a democracy.

Certainly, these are both reasonable reasons for supporting Israel. But neither support for Israel because it was poor nor support for Israel because it is free is a specifically Zionist reason for supporting Israel. You don't have to be a Zionist to support poor Jewish refugees and you don't have to be a Zionist to support democracy.

You do have to be a Zionist however, to defend the Jews in Israel and throughout the world in a coherent manner when the predominant form of Jew-hatred is anti-Zionism.

You have to be willing to accept and defend the right of the Jewish people to freedom and self-determination in our national homeland against those who deny that right. You have to be a Zionist to defend Israel's right to survive and thrive even though it is no longer poor and its democratically elected government is not liked by the Obama administration.

And you have to be a Zionist to realize that since Jewish survival is dependent on Jewish power, and anti-Zionists reject the right of Jews to have power, that anti-Zionists seek to bring about a situation where Jewish survival is imperiled.

The weakness of American Jewry's response to Iran's genocidal intentions towards Israel is of a piece with its weak response to the forces of anti-Zionism generally and to Jewish anti- Zionists particularly. Since 2007, the US government has effectively ruled out the use of force against Iran's nuclear weapons program and embraced a policy of pursuing negotiations with ayatollahs while enacting impotent sanctions to quell congressional pressure. At least in part, this policy is due to the US's assessment that a nuclear Iran does not pose a high-level threat to US national security.

Both then-president George W. Bush and later Barack Obama determined that an Israeli military strike against Iran's nuclear weapons program does pose a high-level threat to the US. As a consequence, both administrations have taken concerted steps to prevent Israel from attacking Iran.

On the merits, both of these policies are easily discredited. But the fact that they continue to be implemented shows that they are supported by a large and powerful constituency in Washington.

To oppose Iran's nuclear program effectively, American Jews are required to oppose these strongly supported US policies. And at some point, this may require them to announce they support Israel's right to survive and thrive even if that paramount right conflicts with how the US government perceives US national interests.

That is, it may require them to embrace Zionism unconditionally.

No doubt, if they do so, their own conditions will improve. They will finally be able to speak coherently against the gathering forces of anti-Zionism - both from within the Jewish community and from without. This in turn will act as a lightning rod for inspiring American Jews to embrace their Judaism.

With their leaders having abjectly failed to contend with the most powerful form of Jew-hatred, it is no wonder that so many Diaspora Jews are leaving the fold. If they reverse course and go after their attackers, American Jewish leaders will give community members a meaningful reason to proudly embrace their identity.

In a speech this week at the Knesset, Netanyahu explained the different lessons the Holocaust teaches the international community on the one hand, and the Jews on the other.

As far as its universal lessons are concerned, Netanyahu said, "The lesson is that the countries of the world must be woken up, as much as possible, so that they can organize against such crimes.

The lesson is that the broadest possible alliances must be forged in order to act against this threat before it is too late."

As for the Jews, Netanyahu embraced Zionism's core principle: "With regard to threats to our very existence, we cannot abandon our future to the hands of others.

"With regard to our fate, our duty is to rely on ourselves alone."

We must hope that world Jewry will recognize today that the fate of the Jewish people in Israel and throughout the world is indivisible and rally to Israel's side whatever the social cost of doing so. But even if they do not recognize this basic truth, the imperatives of Zionism, of the Jewish people, remain in place.
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To read another article by Caroline Glick, click here.

Obama's Misstatements on the Union

2012-01-27T12:06:00.000-08:00

Obama's Misstatements on the Union
By David Limbaugh
1/27/2012

Only a president long shielded from criticism and accountability could make the kind of State of the Union speech President Obama did Tuesday night. It's hard to know where to begin, given his repetition of tired ideas from his previous SOTUs, his taking credit for successful policies he resisted and omitting failed ones he promoted, his numerous misrepresentations on issues big and small, and his glaring refusal to address the main issues that threaten the nation.

Let me touch on just a few highlights in this brief space.

Excessive spending is the primary threat to our nation's and Americans' financial future, yet Obama glossed over it and distorted his record.

He said, "We've already agreed to more than $2 trillion in cuts and savings. But we need to do more." But everyone knows he's had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the cutting table. His unrelenting passion is spending. Even The Washington Post said, "Obama does not mention that Republicans forced him to accept $2 trillion in budget cuts during the debt-ceiling impasse."

Obama said, "I'm prepared to make more reforms that rein in the long-term costs of Medicare and Medicaid and strengthen Social Security, so long as those programs remain a guarantee of security for seniors." Well, that's mighty magnanimous of him, but why is he so grudging about it? As president, he should be singularly focused on entitlement reform. Yet he has obstructed and demagogued such reforms. His condition that the "programs remain a guarantee of security for seniors" is completely dishonest, because Paul Ryan's plan did just that and he rejected it while ridiculing and demonizing Ryan.

Obama said, again, that to avoid Warren Buffett's secretary's paying a higher tax rate than her boss, we should adopt the "Buffett rule," prescribing that "if you make more than $1 million a year, you should not pay less than 30 percent in taxes." The Heritage Foundation tells us that according to Congressional Budget Office data, the top 1 percent of income earners already pay 30 percent of their income in all federal taxes. In addition, when wealthy people pay a lower effective income tax rate, it's a result either of lawful deductions (often charitable) or of capital gains and dividends on property they've acquired with money that has already been taxed. Also, before the wealthy realize many of these gains, the businesses that produce these gains have already paid a corporate income tax rate of 35 percent (the highest in the world). This means that Buffett, on much of this income, pays an effective rate of 50 percent (35 percent corporate plus 15 percent capital gains). Indeed, 99.4 percent of millionaires and billionaires pay far more in taxes in actual and relative terms than middle- and low-income earners, and for Obama to suggest otherwise is not only deeply deceitful but also damaging -- because of the class envy he constantly stokes -- to the social fabric of this country.

Obama said he wants to lure American companies home yet has steadfastly refused, notwithstanding his SOTU rhetoric, to agree to rectify the primary reasons they leave: punitive corporate income tax rates and onerous regulations.

Obama suggested that he is not only a pioneer in clean energy but also bullish on domestic energy. His record on the former is disgraceful, and both his claim and record on the latter are insulting. He has wasted billions of taxpayer dollars on quixotic green-energy programs with Solyndra and its cousins, spending $5 million for every single "renewable energy" job he has created. He has defiantly refused to take responsibility and is continuing to pursue more. He has waged war on domestic coal, natural gas and oil. He not only imposed a punitive moratorium on offshore drilling in the Gulf but also lawlessly reinstituted another one after federal district and appellate courts shot down his initial moratorium. When he lifted this revised moratorium, drilling remained in limbo because of the administrative obstacles his administration had imposed on drilling permits. His actions caused devastating losses to the Gulf economy and jobs, which rippled throughout the nation's economy. Most recently, to placate his environmental extremist base, he blocked the job-producing Keystone XL pipeline for no legitimate reason.

Obama threatened to withhold federal subsidies to colleges unless they hold tuition costs down without recognizing that one of the main reasons they've skyrocketed is the profligate subsidies he continues to increase.

He railed against bailouts after having established a record as President Bailout. He blamed banks again for causing the housing crisis and economic meltdown by making loans to people who couldn't afford them, without admitting that government, mainly his party, was the primary culprit.

He said he'd established the closest military cooperation with Israel in history, but he has bullied that nation for three years, and our relationship has rarely been more strained.

Believe me, I could go on.
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To read another article by David Limbaugh, click here.
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To read a related article, click here.

Obama's Vision for a Spartan America

2012-01-27T11:52:00.000-08:00

Obama's Vision for a Spartan America
By Jonah Goldberg
1/27/2012

President Obama's State of the Union address was disgusting.

The president began with a moving tribute to the armed forces and their accomplishments. But as he has done many times now, he celebrated martial virtues not to rally support for the military, but to cover himself in glory -- he killed Osama bin Laden! -- and to convince the American people that they should fall in line and march in lockstep.

He said of the military: "At a time when too many of our institutions have let us down, they exceed all expectations. They're not consumed with personal ambition. They don't obsess over their differences. They focus on the mission at hand. They work together. Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example. Think about the America within our reach."

That is disgusting.

What Obama is saying, quite plainly, is that America would be better off if it wasn't America any longer. He's making the case not for American exceptionalism, but Spartan exceptionalism.

It's far worse than anything George W. Bush, the supposed warmonger, ever said. Bush, the alleged fascist, didn't want to militarize our free country; he tried to use our military to make militarized countries free.

Indeed, Obama is upending the very point of a military in a free society. We have a military to keep our society free. We do not have a military to teach us the best way to give up our freedom. Our warriors surrender their liberties and risk their lives to protect ours. The promise of American life for Obama is that if we all try our best and work our hardest, we can be like a military unit striving for a single goal. I've seen pictures of that from North Korea. No thank you, Mr. President.

Of course, Obama's militaristic fantasizing isn't new. Ever since William James coined the phrase "the moral equivalent of war," liberalism has been obsessed with finding ways to mobilize civilian life with the efficiency and conformity of military life. "Martial virtues," James wrote, "must be the enduring cement" of American society: "intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command must still remain the rock upon which states are built." His disciple, liberal philosopher John Dewey, hoped for a social order that would force Americans to lay aside "our good-natured individualism and march in step."

This is why Obama's administration believes a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. This is why Obama has been prattling about "Sputnik moments" and sighing over his envy of China and its rulers. This is why his spinners endeavored to translate the death of bin Laden as some sort of vindication of his domestic agenda: because he cannot lead a free people where he thinks they should go.

At the end of his address, Obama once again cast the slain bin Laden as the Vercingetorix to his Caesar. (Vercingetorix was the defeated Gaulic chieftain whom Caesar triumphantly paraded through Rome.) "All that mattered that day was the mission. No one thought about politics. No one thought about themselves," Obama rhapsodized.

The warriors on the ground "only succeeded ... because every single member of that unit did their job. ... More than that, the mission only succeeded because every member of that unit trusted each other -- because you can't charge up those stairs, into darkness and danger, unless you know that there's somebody behind you, watching your back. So it is with America."

"This nation is great because we worked as a team. This nation is great because we get each other's backs."

No. Wrong. It is not so with America. This nation isn't great because we work as a team with the president as our captain. America is great because America is free. It is great not because we put our self-interest aside, but because we have the right to pursue happiness.

I don't blame the president for being exhausted with the mess and bother of democracy and politics, since he has proved so inadequate at coping with the demands of both. Nor do I think he truly seeks to impose martial virtues on America. But he does desperately want his opponents to shut up and march in place. And he seems to think this bilge will convince them to do so.

What I can't forgive, however, is the way he tries to pass off his ideal of an America where everyone marches as one as a better America. It wouldn't be America at all.
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To read another article by Jonah Goldberg, click here.
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To read a related article, click here.

The True State of the Union

2012-01-27T11:36:00.000-08:00

The True State of the Union
By Michele Bachmann
1/27/2012

When the American people bestowed the highest office in the land onto President Barack Obama three years ago, they did so trusting him to follow through on his promise of “hope and change.” He has not kept that promise. The supposed accomplishments the President presented in Tuesday night’s State of the Union only serve to divert America’s attention from the true state of the union. Under three years of an Obama administration, our country is suffering; millions linger without a job, gas prices have nearly doubled, and our national debt is greater than the value of the entire U.S. economy.

Though he tried to do so, President Obama cannot blame the sad reality of our nation’s state on the inaction of Congress or the ineptitude of his Presidential predecessors. After all, it was President Obama, not Congress, who asked for nearly $5 trillion dollars to be added to the national debt. It was President Obama who recently cancelled the Keystone Pipeline project, killing thousands of potential American jobs. Under President Obama the unemployment rate has risen from 6.8% when he was elected to today’s 8.5%, a reality that’s caused many Americans to simply stop looking for work. Unfortunately, the unemployment rate is not the only figure that has seen an upsurge under this Administration – gas prices have nearly doubled from the day the President took office to now. When you compare that to only a 28-cent gas price increase under the last President’s administration, it is truly disheartening.

I agreed with the President when he called for all Americans to reclaim their “American values.” But, contrary to the President’s beliefs, the time-tested values that made America great do not include redistribution of wealth or lack of incentive to prosper. In reality, our country was founded by Americans who believed in values such as hard work and determination. They believed strongly in “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” None of them believed in taking away from their neighbors to achieve their dreams, but instead worked hard to provide for their own families and carve out a home in America for the generations to come.

Yet there is still hope for our nation. There is hope because we are the descendants of these hard working Americans. The same values that inspired them to greatness inspire us today. We don’t need handouts or bailouts, we need incentive and inspiration. As a member of Congress, I will continue to fight everyday to preserve and promote these true American values.
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To read another related article, click here.

The second Florida debate: Santorum's big night

2012-01-27T11:18:00.000-08:00

The second Florida debate: Santorum's big night
Gingrich and Romney disclose all over each other.
by John Hayward
01/27/2012

It’s only natural that the front-running candidates would receive extra attention, especially when they go after each other as vigorously as Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney did during the second Florida debate, hosted by CNN. Somewhere in the melee of accusations about each others’ finances, campaign advertising, hunger to deport elderly illegal aliens, and reverence for Ronald Regan, a winner emerged: Rick Santorum.

The outcome in Florida between Romney and Gingrich wasn’t really in doubt, due to Gingrich’s spectacularly ill-advised radio ad calling Romney “anti-immigrant.” This brought the previously neutral Senator Marco Rubio into the contest, to Romney’s defense. Romney’s anger at Gingrich’s continuing insistence on calling him “the most anti-immigrant of the four candidates” was genuine – one of the most genuine moments a stiff Romney had on the stage that night – and it made Gingrich look scurrilous. Gingrich didn’t help himself with paranoid mutterings that all the stories appearing about his complex relationship with Ronald Reagan were the handiwork of the Romney attack machine. (I think Gingrich has the better of the Reagan debate in general, but he's not going to get anywhere portraying Romney as puppetmaster of the conservative press.)

For some reason, Gingrich was convinced that accusing Romney of a desire to deport illegal alien grandmothers and grandfathers was a trump card, and he kept trying to play it. Romney pointed out that his strategy involved, not roundups and deportation, but cracking down on those who employ illegals until the lack of jobs prompts them to “self-deport” – a strategy President Obama has actually proved can be quite effective, although his method of implementing it leaves much to be desired, since it involved destroying everyone's ability to work.

When Romney said our illegal immigration problem doesn’t involve 11 million grandmothers, Gingrich found himself holding a thoroughly deflated talking point. Judging by the crowd reaction, Gingrich’s odd plan to help those illegal septuagenarians live out their days on American soil with board-issued “residency” permits still isn’t selling very well.

It also wasn’t much fun watching Gingrich pretend he doesn’t know what a blind trust is, or watching Romney ignore a belated, but well stated, plea from Gingrich to save the campaign-ad nitpicking for other venues and use debate time for the discussion of important issues. It turns out both Romney and Gingrich, through trusts and mutual funds, own pieces of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The stage grew thick with stagnant pools of disclosure.

Most of Gingrich’s best moments - such as saying that we should be cutting government spending down to match income instead of taxing people to meet government spending demands, or calling for the repeal of disastrous financial regulations - came from his back catalogue of greatest hits. His claim to have presided over four balanced budgets was punctured by Ron Paul, so effortlessly that Gingrich ended up agreeing with him. His attempt to recapture a bit of Rubio magic, by saying he had the young Senator in mind for “a more dignified and central role” than a Cabinet post, spawned a thousand instantaneous Twitter jokes that he obviously wasn’t thinking about Rubio for Vice President.

Maybe Gingrich has Rubio in mind for moonbase commander. The proposal Gingrich has been taking the most heat over, his desire to establish a lunar colony as a gateway to manned exploration of Mars, he actually defended quite ably. He talked about the importance of having big, inspirational ideas, and said his plans for reviving space exploration involved offering “prizes” to private citizens and companies, not big government spending programs. This is an intriguing concept he’s been talking up for a long time, in many areas besides space exploration.

Gingrich said he envisions a “90 percent privatized” space program, with the goal of routine commercial launches from our spaceports. Nevertheless, everyone else agreed space exploration is a luxury America cannot afford right now, with our titanic budget deficit and economic problems. How sad a commentary on our exhausted, indebted, crumbling leftist government that is! Our parents went to the Moon in tin cans guided by pocket calculators. Barack Obama blew the Moon and Mars on a handful of useless “green energy” junk that generated nothing except bankruptcies.

Romney gave a lot of vague answers, including a Cuba policy involved sticking to the Helms-Burton Act and hoping something better waits for that island dungeon after the Castro boys shuffle off. It tasted like the kind of platitude-flavored cotton candy nobody is supposed to remember eating after the election is over. “If I’m President,” Romney vowed, “I’ll use every resource we have to help the people of Cuba enjoy freedom after Castro leaves this planet.” Maybe he should work with Gingrich on that. Romney can help the people of Cuba, while Gingrich helps Castro leave this planet.

Romney was at his best when defending entrepreneurial success, declaring that he was proud to be in a free enterprise system making investments that create jobs, as well as paying his huge tax bill and making even larger charitable donations. “Success should be seen as an asset that can help America,” he said with conviction.

The problem is that many of Romney’s other answers, while often logical, were not memorable. People are likely to come away thinking he got the better of Gingrich in their conflict, but they’ll soon forget what it was about, and might not remember much else that Romney said during the evening. When his Massachusetts health care plan came under intense criticism, he began his response with, “First of all, it’s not worth getting angry about.” It might someday be remembered as the epitaph of his campaign.

Romney also found himself on the wrong end of an embarrassing flap over a campaign ad that was profoundly unfair to Gingrich. Romney claimed he didn't know anything about the ad, and it was probably from one of the nefarious Super PACs, but CNN checked it out in real time and found it was a bona fide campaign production, complete with "I'm Mitt Romney, and I approved this ad" at the end. The comical lengths Romney exeted to express ignorance left no one laughing. If he really is that clueless about his campaign's activities, it's even worse, because that would do a lot of damage to his image as a highly skilled professional manager of complex operations.

Ron Paul had a good night, staying focused on his themes of individual liberty, sound money, and disengaging from military deployments overseas. The collapse of the housing bubble is a big issue in Florida, and Paul gave a sharp and concise diagnosis of excessive credit, interest rates held artificially low for too long, and public money poured into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. His criticism of the Federal Reserve, and the “rip off” of fiat money, was as energetic as ever.

Paul’s faith in the power of free trade to reform dictatorships is rather inflated, and his belief that ending the welfare state and military deployments would save enough money to enable the complete repeal of income taxes is absurd, no matter how tantalizing the repeal of the Sixteenth Amendment might be to small-government enthusiasts. On the subject of spending reduction, he made a good point when he noted that his debate opponents weren’t talking about a lot of specific cuts, while he’s got a trillion dollars’ worth of them ready to go.

This was really Rick Santorum’s night to shine… right from the start, when he gave an introduction filled with lovable enthusiasm and a shout-out to his 93-year-old mother in the audience, instead of political boilerplate. He concluded with his assessment of the 2012 election as America’s decision between being “a country built from the bottom up or top down,” and an appeal to the Reagan Democrats so thoroughly abandoned by Barack Obama.

While confessing that his tax reform ideas aren’t as dramatic as the others’, Santorum demonstrated a good understanding of the way high tax rates crush investment. He was compelling in his criticism of Democrats for their “abysmal” treatment of South America, where they have sided with the likes of Chavez and Castro, and against the people of Honduras during their constitutional crisis, while a largely ignored jihadist menace festers. (He did, unfortunately, feel compelled to use the European Union as a positive example of disparate nations coming together in economic harmony. Maybe he’s been so busy campaigning that he hasn’t found time to keep up with the news from Europe.)

When it came time to move the debate along from the Romney / Gingrich squabble over petty campaign issues, Santorum was commanding. He vowed that his Administration would spend less every year until it reached a balanced budget at the end of his first term, which is a bold agenda, but not impossible. He was adept at criticizing the incumbent President, doing an especially good job of trashing his delusional State of the Union speech from this week… but he was particularly good at hammering Mitt Romney (and to a lesser extent Gingrich) over health care reform.

Calling health care a “foundational” issue that Republicans can’t give away in this election, he leveled a blistering indictment of RomneyCare, and quite simply defeated Romney on the issue of mandates and fines. He said Romney’s system amounts to forcing people to either buy insurance or pay a fine, and many of them are paying the fine because it’s cheaper than obeying the insurance mandate, just as we’ve seen happening with ObamaCare.

Santorum invoked the fear that has plagued many who don’t support Romney, that he’ll end up getting killed in the general election when Obama pats him on the head and thanks him for the swell health care reform ideas. While Romney was able to highlight some important differences between the two programs, including ObamaCare’s tax increases and Medicare raid, he also found himself claiming that his Massachusetts program would be working better if he were still in office to manage it.

In responding to a question about the role of religious faith in the Presidency, which sounded a bit like a mousetrap designed to make the GOP candidates look eccentric, Santorum had one of his best moments, expounding on the Constitution as the “how” of America, while the Declaration of Independence is the “why.” He talked about the uniqueness of our Constitutional defense of God-given rights, for “if our President believes that rights come from the State, then everything government gives you can be taken away.”

Santorum was doubtless helped by being able to stay out of the mudslinging exchange between Romney and Gingrich. Far too much of his charisma drains away when he gets angry, but at his best he seemed warmer and more authentic than the others. He had much more to offer than incoherent anger at the incumbent President. It might not be enough to totally upend the presidential race at this point, but if this debate has any impact, Santorum will have a shot at finishing second in Florida.

Maybe that will give him enough gas to stay in the race. At a minimum, it will increase his appeal as candidate for a dignified and central role in the next Republican administration, such as moonbase commander.
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To read another article by John Hayward, click here.
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To read another article about Rick Santorum, click here.

Neither liberty nor safety

2012-01-27T11:10:00.000-08:00

Neither liberty nor safety
by Roger Hedgecock
01/27/2012

"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety," said Benjamin Franklin in 1759.

Liberals everywhere were in full-throat roar protesting George Bush's Patriot Act and his War on Terror in the aftermath of the attacks of 9/11. What price in liberty to be safe from terrorism? Barack Obama himself decried the loss of liberty, the loss of personal freedoms, declaring in 2005 that the Patriot Act "puts our own Justice Department above the law."

Today only crickets from the Left as Obama assaults liberty and freedom of choice on a nearly daily basis.

Consider the list of Obama's assaults on liberty. Any one of these done by a Republican President would bring down the wrath of the Left. Done by Obama, the action is noted in the Obama reelect media for a single news cycle and then dropped

Obama's Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is more arrogantly intrusive than ever. The Fourth Amendment protection against "unreasonable" searches and seizures has been repealed at your local airport. Rep. John Mica, who authored the TSA legislation, observes that the unionized TSA now strip-searching grannies and detaining Senators bears little resemblance to his original idea.

Doctor-patient confidentiality? ObamaCare is requiring doctors and hospitals to make records of every aspect of your personal health, and health history, for use by Obama's Department of Health and Human Services. For use by the "death panels"?

ObamaCare tramples First Amendment religious freedom by ordering Catholic hospitals to cover free contraceptives, requiring Catholic adoption agencies to adopt kids to gay couples (resulting in the adoption agencies closing), and requiring Catholic taxpayers to fund federal abortion grants.

"No Child Left Behind" has been expanded to collect not only student test scores and grades, but the government now keeps permanent records on students' disciplinary actions, economic status, and even pregnancies. Worse, the feds discourage the states from allowing parents to access these "permanent records." What police state has ever done without such record keeping? Old East Germany's Stasi would be proud.

The federalization of K-12 education continues under Obama. A group of Bay Shore, Long Island, high school students will soon be wearing electronic monitors to allow school officials to track their physical activity around the clock to fight obesity. Is any excuse sufficient to ban all privacy?

The Obama EEOC has ruled that a private employer's requirement for a high school diploma to qualify for a job might violate the Americans With Disabilities Act. The act does not cover this issue, but Obama's EEOC thinks it should.

Obama wants restrictions on guns sold to Americans in violation of the Second Amendment even as his Justice Department runs the Fast and Furious program to allow the same guns to walk across the border into the hands of the Mexican drug cartels.

EPIC(Electronic Privacy Information Center), a privacy advocacy group, sued Obama's Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to discover through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) that DHS is monitoring political dissent. EPIC has more than 300 pages of contracts and memos detailing work done by General Dynamics for DHS. One "tracking report" titled "Residents Voice Opposition Over Possible Plan to Bring Guantanamo Detainees to Local Prison-Standish MI" summarizes dissent on blogs and social networking sites, quoting commenters by name.

Angry that FOIA requests and lawsuits were revealing the extent of Obama's liberty-shredding actions, Obama's "Justice Department" issued new rules allowing federal agencies to deny the existence of requested documents even when the agency knows they in fact do exist. The Right to Lie to protect the public from knowing about the loss of their liberties is now the official policy of the Obama administration.

Obama's FBI has obtained a court order against an American woman accused of mortgage fraud to force her to decrypt her PGP-scrambled hard drive so that the FBI can fish around without a warrant in her personal computer for incriminating evidence. The judge said the Fifth Amendment did not apply. For Obama, the Constitution (that "list of negative rights") does not apply whenever it acts to restrain his objectives.

The State of the Union? Slipping into dictatorship. Where's the ACLU?
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To read another article by Roger Hedgecock, click here.

Mr. and Mrs. Cranky Pants

2012-01-27T11:04:00.000-08:00

Mr. and Mrs. Cranky Pants
by Michelle Malkin
01/27/2012

So, it turns out that the cool cat billed as "No Drama Obama" by his sycophants is actually quite the drama queen. While the White House publicly pretends to ignore conservative detractors of his administration, Chief Touchy-Touchy seems to be personally consumed by our critiques. Yes, mine included.

On Wednesday, the president had himself a mini-"Toddlers and Tiaras"-style meltdown with Arizona GOP Gov. Jan Brewer after landing in Phoenix for a post-State of the Union dog-and-pony show. As Brewer told pool reporters on the scene, Obama took umbrage at Brewer's recent memoir. She minced no words on the cover: "Scorpions for Breakfast: My Fight Against Special Interests, Liberal Media, and Cynical Politicos to Secure America's Border."

And she minced no words describing her impressions of Obama as they sparred over her state's tough immigration enforcement law, which is now the subject of a Justice Department witch-hunt. Brewer called Obama "patronizing" and "condescending." I'd say she was excruciatingly polite.

According to Brewer, "He was a little disturbed about my book. ... I said to him that I have all the respect in the world for the office of the president. The book is what the book is. I asked him if he read the book. He said he read (an) excerpt." In the shadow of Air Force One, Obama complained that Brewer hadn't "treated him cordially" and then stalked off while she was responding mid-sentence.

Photogs captured the fracas on film. The civility police gasped at Brewer's "disrespectful" finger-pointing. On cue, one progressive commentator insinuated the gesture was a "racist" jab tantamount to lynching.

The president was singing a more laid-back tune last summer. As debate on Capitol Hill over the debt ceiling and spending sizzled, Obama bragged to reporters: "I'm not trying to poke at you guys. ... I generally don't watch what is said about me on cable. I generally don't read what's said about me even in The Hill (newspaper), so part of this job is having a thick skin and understanding that a lot of this stuff is not personal."

Uh-huh. At least two other Republican governors -- Rick Perry of Texas and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana -- have recounted similar presidential snit fits on the tarmac. He sulked over a letter Jindal wrote to the administration about food stamps for Gulf oil spill victims; he bolted after a half-minute meeting with Perry at an Austin airport over border security issues.

You know those "petty grievances" of "Washington politics" that Obama has long condemned? Now it can be told: He knows whereof he squawks.

As New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor's new book, "The Obamas," reveals, the president and his inner circle spent even more time carping about conservative influence on public opinion. "He wanted the media to be more of a referee; to put unfair Republican charges to rest," Kantor discovered. "He could brush off the wildest, most baseless attacks themselves, he told (senior adviser and Chicago pal) Valerie Jarrett, along with (campaign finance bundler and treasurer) Marty Nesbitt and (bundler and finance mogul) John Rogers, at lunch in the little dining room next to the Oval Office."

But what "galled him," the book observed, "was when they gained mainstream credibility despite distortions of truth."

Kantor then dutifully served as a pro-Obama referee:

"Rogers had just noticed a new book by the conservative columnist Michelle Malkin called 'Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks and Cronies.' Among many other allegations, Malkin wrote that Michelle Obama -- the president's 'bitter half' -- was secretly running the country in Lady Macbeth-like fashion. Malkin even took a hatchet to long-dead Fraser Robinson (Mrs. Obama's father), arguing with no evidence that his job at a water plant made him part of the 'Chicago political corruptocracy.' The book debuted at number one on The New York Times nonfiction bestseller list and stayed there for weeks."

The facts? It was a former alderman in Chicago, Leon Depres, who provided evidence that Robinson's job in the city water department was a reward for loyalty to the Daley political faction.

It was Washington Post writer Liza Mundy who reported that the department was "a renowned repository of patronage jobs."

It's the Illinois press that has long documented Mrs. Obama's ties to the Chicago machine. It's Kantor herself who spotlighted the first lady's internecine warfare with her husband's Cabinet. And from her meddling in everything from the AmeriCorps inspector general firing case to her aggressive, Big Labor-backed push for a publicly subsidized food police corps, Michelle Obama has been openly expanding her East Wing fiefdom in Marie Antoinette-like fashion.

How long before we see a FLOTUS tarmac tantrum? We did get two divas for the price of one. As longtime observers of the royal Obamas have long observed: Mr. and Mrs. Cranky Pants' problem has never been the color of their skin. It's the thinness.
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To read another article by Michelle Malkin, click here.

The State of the Union flop

2012-01-27T10:54:00.000-08:00

The State of the Union flop
by Charles Krauthammer
01/26/2012

WASHINGTON -- Once upon a time, small ball was not Barack Obama's game. Tuesday, it was the essence of his State of the Union address. The visionary of 2008 -- purveyor of hope and change, healer of the earth, tamer of the rising seas -- offered an hour of little things: tax-code tweaks to encourage this or that kind of behavior (manufacturing being the flavor of the day), little watchdog agencies to round up Wall Street miscreants and Chinese DVD pirates, even a presidential demand "that all students stay in high school until they graduate or turn 18." Under penalty of what? Jail? The self-proclaimed transformer of America is now playing truant officer?

It sounded like the Clinton years with their presidentially proclaimed initiatives on midnight basketball and school uniforms. These are the marks of a shrunken presidency, thoroughly flummoxed by high unemployment, economic stagnation, crushing debt -- and a glaring absence of ideas.

Of course, this being Obama, there was a reach for grandeur. Hope and change are long gone. It's now equality and fairness.

That certainly is a large idea. Lenin and Mao went pretty far with it. As did Clement Attlee and his social-democratic counterparts in postwar Europe. Where does Obama take it? Back to the decade-old Democratic obsession with the Bush tax cuts, the crusade for a tax hike of all of 4.6 points for 2 percent of households -- 10 years of which wouldn’t cover the cost of Obama's 2009 stimulus alone.

Which is why Obama introduced a shiny new twist -- the Buffett Rule, a minimum 30 percent rate for millionaires. Sounds novel. But it's a tired replay of the alternative minimum tax, originally created in 1969 to bring to heel all of 155 underpaying fat cats. Following the fate of other such do-goodism, the AMT then metastasized into a $40 billion monster that today entraps millions of middle-class taxpayers.

There isn't even a pretense that the Buffett Rule will do anything for economic growth or job creation (other than provide lucrative work for the sharp tax lawyers who will be gaming the new system for the very same rich). Which should not surprise. Back in 2008, Obama was asked if he would still support raising the capital-gains tax rate (the intended effect of the Buffett Rule) if this would decrease government revenues.

Obama said yes. In the name of fairness.

This is redistribution for its own sake -- the cost be damned. It took Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels about 30 seconds of his State of the Union rebuttal to demolish that idea. To get the rich to contribute more, explained Daniels, you don't raise tax rates. This ultimately retards economic growth for all. You (a) eliminate loopholes from which the rich benefit disproportionately (tax reform) and (b) means-test entitlements so that the benefits go to those most in need.

Tax reform and entitlement reform are the really big ideas. The first produces social equity plus economic efficiency; the second produces social equity plus debt reduction. And yet these are precisely what Obama has for three years steadfastly refused to address. He prefers the easy demagoguery of "tax the rich."

After all, what's he got? Can't run on his record. Barely even mentioned Obamacare or the stimulus, his major legislative achievements, on Tuesday night. Too unpopular. His platform is fairness, wrapped around a plethora of little things, one mini-industrial policy after another -- the conceit nicely encapsulated by his proclamation that "I will not cede the wind or solar or battery industry to China or to Germany." As if he can command these industries into existence. As if Washington funding a thousand Solyndras will make solar economically viable.

Soviet central planners mandated quotas for steel production, regardless of demand. Obama's industrial policy is a bit more subtle. Tax breaks for manufacturing -- but double tax breaks for high-tech manufacturing, which for some reason is considered more virtuous, despite the fact that high tech is less likely to create blue-collar jobs. Its main job creation will be for legions of lawyers and linguists testifying before some new adjudicating bureaucracy that the Acme Umbrella Factory meets their exquisitely drawn criteria for "high tech."

What Obama offered the nation Tuesday night was a pudding without a theme: a jumble of disconnected initiatives, a gaggle of intrusive new agencies and a whole new generation of loopholes to further corrupt a tax code that screams out for reform.

If the Republicans can't beat that in November, they should try another line of work.
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To read another article by Charles Krauthammer, click here.
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A Little Bit Ghetto

2012-01-27T10:47:00.000-08:00

A Little Bit Ghetto
By George Neumayr on 1.27.12 @ 6:09AM

CNN's GOP presidential debate in Florida revolves around trash talk and tacky questions from Wolf Blitzer.

Early in Thursday's Republican presidential debate, CNN moderator Wolf Blitzer caught Mitt Romney flatfooted on one of his anti-Gingrich ads. The ad accuses Newt of calling Spanish a "language of the ghetto." What, Blitzer asked Romney, did you mean by that? "I haven't seen the ad, so I'm sorry, I don't get to see all the TV ads," replied Romney. "I doubt that's my ad."

But it is his ad. "We did double check, just now, Governor, that ad that we talked about," said Blitzer. "We double checked. It was one of your ads. It is running here in Florida on the radio, and at the end you say 'I'm Mitt Romney and I approved this ad.'"

The exchange captured what Romney has tried to avoid -- the image of a remote plutocrat working so hard to buy an election he isn't even aware of his own ads.

Establishment pundits will no doubt ooh and ah over Romney's generally confident performance -- CNN informed viewers that he now enjoys the services of a new "debate coach" -- but rank-and-file conservatives should find the prospect of a rising Romney deeply depressing. How is it possible that two years after the Tea Party propelled the GOP back to congressional power Republicans are contemplating a former Paul Tsongas voter as the head of their party?

Gingrich spent too much of the debate responding to attacks rather than making them. He should have used every question as an occasion to remind voters of Romney's liberalism. The best licks on Romney as a liberal ended up coming from Rick Santorum. Training less fire on Gingrich at this debate than at previous ones, Santorum turned his attention to Romney with a sustained broadside against Romneycare. How, Santorum asked, will the GOP be able to argue against the Obamacare mandate with a nominee who hatched the idea? Romney said in reply: "It is not worth getting angry about." Yes, it is.

Romney's tutelage under a new debate coach admittedly bore some fruit. America's immigration problem isn't "11 million grandmothers," he said concisely after Newt had belabored his point about not deporting elderly illegal immigrants.

Newt had his moments in the debate, but he failed to deliver any knockout punches. His knowledge of policy is far more detailed than Romney's, who usually just sticks to his narrow talking points, and Newt's conservative credentials remain far stronger. Romney continues to appear as a more handsome and taller GOP version of Michael Dukakis -- the bloodless and visionless technocrat who, as Newt suggests, just wants to "manage the decay" in Washington, D.C.

Romney's contribution to the Reagan Revolution was nil, as he admitted in a roundabout way to Blitzer. Newt used the same question to remind the audience that Michael Reagan had just endorsed him. Newt added that Nancy Reagan had also conferred upon him her husband's mantle in a past speech.

The Republican establishment has been working overtime to hoodwink GOP voters into overlooking the ideological differences between Romney and Newt, trotting out Big Tenters with zero expertise on conservatism to claim that Newt is not "conservative." Against an immutable standard of conservatism, he is not, but next to Romney he looks like Edmund Burke.

The establishment never fails to choose the more liberal of two leading candidates. The boys from the yacht club have once again decided to lose with a semi-reformed RINO.

If Romney wins the nomination, he will have won largely on personal attacks and a plastic, big-bucks campaign. Some victory.

Ron Paul had one of the most endearingly direct lines in the debate when he said, after a petty back-and-forth between Newt and Mitt that Wolf Blitzer had encouraged, "That subject doesn't really interest me a whole lot." Blitzer seemed determined to ask "nonsense" questions, as Newt put it, circling back several times to now-exhausted tax return and Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac issues. When he wasn't trying to stir up trouble on that front, Blitzer was uncorking cutesy questions about the candidates' wives and an ageist question to Ron Paul about his medical records.

From time to time Blitzer kicked control of the microphone over to "CNN en Español." Modern America doesn't have segregated schools anymore, but it does have segregated channels. Media liberals call this progress.
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To read another article by George Neumayr, click here.
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Florida Fireworks Finale

2012-01-27T10:36:00.000-08:00

Florida Fireworks Finale
By Robert Stacy McCain on 1.27.12 @ 6:10AM

Romney, Santorum shine in Sunshine State debate.

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- Newt Gingrich tried to defend his claim that Mitt Romney is "the most anti-immigrant candidate" in last night's Republican presidential debate here, an accusation that Romney called "inexcusable" and "repulsive."

Gingrich did not seem to understand that this accusation, made in a Spanish-language radio ad aimed at South Florida's large Latino population, may actually end up helping Romney win next week's primary. The controversy stirred by the ad, which Gingrich ordered his campaign to pull off the air, highlights differences of policy -- and puts Gingrich clearly to Romney's left, which isn't a good place to be in a Republican primary.

After a long discussion of the issue, CNN moderator Wolf Blitzer asked Gingrich, "I just want to make sure I understand. Is [Romney] still the most anti-immigrant candidate?" The former House Speaker answered: "I think, of the four of us, yes." This provoked a long response from Romney, who said he favors "enforcing the U.S. law to protect our borders," a position that is not "anti-immigrant." Romney accused Gingrich of "the kind of over-the-top rhetoric that has characterized American politics too long," and then invoked the most popular Republican in Florida: "I'm glad that Marco Rubio called you out on it. I'm glad you withdrew it. I think you should apologize for it, and I think you should recognize that having differences of opinions on issues does not justify labeling people with highly charged epithets."

Thursday's debate, the 19th televised debate among Republican presidential candidates this year, certainly did not lack fireworks. And while many political junkies have become weary of watching these affairs, the event here on the campus of the University of North Florida may be as decisive as the South Carolina debates that were credited with helping Gingrich score a crucial win there Saturday. Polls this week in Florida show Romney pulling away, and the former Massachusetts governor had one of his best-ever debate performances Thursday, while Gingrich had one of his worst yet.

While arguments between the two Florida frontrunners got the biggest play, however, Thursday was also an impressive performance for former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum. Polls show Santorum running a distant third in the Sunshine State, but he slammed both Gingrich and Romney for their previous stances on health care. "This is the top-down model that both of these gentlemen say they're now against, but they've been for, and it does not provide the contrast we need with Barack Obama if we're going to take on that most important issue," Santorum said. "We cannot give the issue of health care away in this election. It is too foundational for us to win this election."

This provoked an extended argument between Santorum and Romney over the so-called "individual mandate" in the health legislation Romney supported in Massachusetts. When Santorum's criticism of the Massachusetts plan grew heated, Romney replied by saying "it's not worth getting angry about." Asked after the debate about that flare-up, Santorum described himself as "passionate," and his passionate performance won praise from many conservatives, including Guy Benson of Townhall.com: "What a night for the former Pennsylvania Senator … he definitely made a very serious case that he might be the best Not Romney in the race." Santorum seems unlikely to score the kind of miraculous last-minute surge in the Sunshine State that carried him to victory in the Iowa caucuses three weeks ago, but Thursday's debate could help him gain support as he seeks to rekindle his campaign's sense of momentum.

At this point, no candidate in the race has been able to win two consecutive contests. After Santorum edged Romney in Iowa, Romney came back to win convincingly in New Hampshire. But Gingrich won solidly in South Carolina, halting Romney's momentum. If current Florida polls are accurate and Romney wins here Tuesday, the biggest challenge for Romney's opponents will be to raise enough money to continue the fight through a long campaign.
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To read another article by Robert Stacy McCain, click here.

Obamination

2012-01-27T10:24:00.000-08:00

Obamination
By Lisa Fabrizio on 1.26.12 @ 6:07AM

How this president "marked" the 39th anniversary of Roe v. Wade.

So let me see if I've got this straight; because being a brainwashed, knuckle-dragging, bitter clinger sometimes makes it hard for me to absorb all of the nuanced penumbrae emanating from the declarations of men like Barack Obama. A man who goes out of his way to encourage Americans to make sure that they never offend the followers of certain faiths, yet chooses January 23 -- a day of mourning for all who cherish life -- to offend the largest segment of them; pro-life Christians. A man who is the first U.S. president in my memory to issue a statement in favor of abortion on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade.

Of all the cherished utterances of our beloved leader the last three years, perhaps none is so divisive and offensive as this, his tribute to the judicial fiat that has resulted in the deaths of more than 40 million Americans, and a testament to his twisted views:

As we mark the 39th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, we must remember that this Supreme Court decision not only protects a woman's health and reproductive freedom, but also affirms a broader principle: that government should not intrude on private family matters. I remain committed to protecting a woman's right to choose and this fundamental constitutional right.

While this is a sensitive and often divisive issue -- no matter what our views, we must stay united in our determination to prevent unintended pregnancies, support pregnant woman and mothers, reduce the need for abortion, encourage healthy relationships, and promote adoption. And as we remember this historic anniversary, we must also continue our efforts to ensure that our daughters have the same rights, freedoms, and opportunities as our sons to fulfill their dreams.

Yes, this sorry statement is not only insulting but also instructive, as it displays the same perverted outlook on the subjects of life and love he evinced when he opined that, should his daughters make a "mistake," he didn't want them "punished with a baby." What exactly can he mean by suggesting that our sons and daughters -- chilling words from the mouth of an abortion advocate -- should have the same rights and freedoms? Do they not have them now? Might he be suggesting further gender-bending fiats along the lines of gays in the military, same-sex marriage, and his elevation of gay rights as a foreign policy priority?

Yes, that's right; he has singled out discrimination against homosexuals abroad as a "deep concern" for his administration: not slavery, honor-killing, forced abortion or religious persecution. This sordid episode gives new meaning to George Washington's warning about avoiding "foreign entanglements." But what else can we expect from a man who for years sat at the feet of Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright?

A man who has the nerve to assert that "government should not intrude on private family matters," by inserting itself into America's sacred bedrooms, is the same man who, through his myrmidons in the Congress, used every unethical and thuggish subterfuge at his command to intrude that same government into every doctor's office, nursing home, and operating room in the land via Obamacare.

That this man, who uses every occasion to spurn the Constitution -- from czars, to executive orders to illegal recess appointments -- has the nerve to lecture those who actually understand and revere that august document on the definition of the First Amendment is particularly appalling. Speaking of which, this is the same purported professor of constitutional law who just released an edict, aimed primarily at the Catholic Church, stating that she must comply with healthcare dictates that directly violate her sacred teaching.

Fortunately for us, the Constitution provides for a firewall against the foreseen ravaging of a free people by a tyrant like our current commander-in-chief and his accomplices in Congress. It is indeed ironic that the U.S. Supreme Court -- the same body that found a right to abortion amid the smoking ruins of the 14th Amendment -- recently issued a slap-down to Barack Obama and all who would seek to use the arm of government to control religious entities, in the form of a shocking unanimous decision in defense of religious liberty.

Such judicial victories may pave the way for more success against the incursions of men like Barack Obama, who have little understanding of our Constitution and even less about what passes for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
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To read another article by Lisa Fabrizio, click here.

Harry Reid's Parallel Universe

2012-01-27T10:12:00.000-08:00

Harry Reid's Parallel Universe
By Peter Hannaford on 1.26.12 @ 6:07AM

Even more amazing, he's hardly the only Dingy Democrat in Washington.

One year when George W. Bush was president, there was talk of his making recess appointments when Congress would be on holiday. Senate Leader Harry Reid countered by keeping the Senate technically in session by having one or two members show up each day. Bush, with the Constitution in mind, dropped the recess appointment idea.

Barack Obama, by contrast, went right ahead with a recess appointment last month, despite the fact the House Republicans stayed in session for the same reason -- to prevent such a move.

This time, Harry Reid said it was right and proper for Obama to do what he did. Reid saw neither the irony nor he inconsistency in this, for he lives in a parallel universe.

The other day he returned to Washington with a warning to House Republicans to eschew Tea Party "extremism." The Tea Party movement was driven by a desire to stop the government's profligate spending and the rapidly growing national debt. In Harry's universe, this is "extremism."

In December, the Senate Democrats and Obama wanted a two-month extension of the payroll tax rate holiday and unemployment benefits. The House Republicans said it didn't make sense to come back after two months and re-argue the issue, so they proposed a 12-month extension. Reid wouldn't budge and ultimately the House blinked before the two items ran out on December 31.

About this Reid said, "I hope that the Republicans will understand, as they learned in the last week of last year, they can't be led over the cliff by this extremism."

Saying that Senate Democrats had "bent over backwards" to work with House Republicans, Reid declared that all he was asking for was a spirit of compromise. His version of compromise is, you give, I take.

Since January 2007, Harry Reid has been Senate Majority Leader. Speaking of bending over backwards, one thousand days have now passed since the Senate last passed a federal budget -- an all-time record, thanks to Harry Reid. By stalling over and over again, he and his Democrat colleagues have not had to make tough choices about cutting the government's bloated spending. Instead, the government operates on "continuing resolutions" that have kept existing spending in place, plus automatic annual increases. The result? Spending grows apace and the national debt is now over $16 trillion.

No wonder House members supported by Tea Party groups are upset. Harry Reid -- living off in space -- thinks uncontrolled spending is normal and fiscal responsibility amounts to "extremism."

Harry has brought some of his colleagues along into his parallel universe. Democratic National Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, for example, recently said, "I have noticed the tone take a very precipitous turn toward edginess and a lack of civility with the growth of the Tea Party movement." (Translation: Anyone who disagrees with the Democrat playbook is uncivil.) Vice President Joe Biden, who takes frequent trips to the parallel universe, has likened Tea Party members to terrorists.

These are the same folks who have extolled the "Occupy" people as earnest exercisers of First Amendment rights. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi was one who cooed over the Occupy movement. It is useful to compare its record in recent months to that of the Tea Party groups. For example, arrests: Occupy 4,149, Tea Party 0; rapes Occupy 12, Tea Party 0; anti-Semitic diatribes: Occupy 12, Tea Party 0; murder: Occupy 1, Tea Party 0; head and body lice infestations: Occupy 1, Tea Party 0; scabies outbreaks: Occupy 1, Tea Party 0; suicide: Occupy 1, Tea Party 0. Now if you live in the Harry Reid parallel universe, as so many Democrat office holders and operatives do, that is clear evidence that the Tea Party members are extremists.

Most people would say they are extremely well behaved, but the parallel universe people would like you to think they are a danger to the nation.
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To read another article by Peter Hannaford, click here.