Quotes of the Week
Source: PIG News Wire [07/23/10]

Obama is totally on board with the agenda shared by many of the so-called "environmentalists." That agenda is to destroy free enterprise in America. Obama hates the private sector, so does much of the "environmental" movement. Obama thinks the profit motive is obscene ... ditto the "environmentalists." The Gulf oil disaster is seen by many on the left as an excuse to damage our free market economy by denying it the life-blood of oil. Remember ... elections have consequences. The last election put a man in the White House who bragged that he was going to "fundamentally transform the United States of America." Now you're getting a better idea of just how he planned to do that.

- Neal Boortz

"What if the owners of the "Phonix Suns" discovered that hordes of people were sneaking into games without paying? What if they had a good idea who the gate-crashers were, but the ushers and security personnel were not allowed to ask these folks to produce their ticket stubs, thus non-paying attendees couldn't be ejected. Furthermore, what if "Suns'" ownership was expected to provide those who sneaked in with complimentary eats and drink? And what if, on those days when a gate-crasher became ill or injured, the "Suns" had to provide "free" medical care and shelter?"

- This was posted by Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer on FaceBook

Quotes of the Week
Source: PIG News Wire [07/16/10]

In a world increasingly hellbent on abandoning logic and the ensuing escalation of Obama madness, it is clearly time for the maximum celebration of the good old, always reliable Uncle Ted crowbar of logic.

I am ThumpMaster, hear me roar.

In the otherwise universally recognized perfection of the American experiment in self-government, where evil monsters like Che Guevara and Mao Zedong are routinely worshipped by the very imbeciles that these historical murderers would have slaughtered unhesitatingly, to a community-organizer-in-chief whose terminal rookie agenda is maniacally to spend our way out of debt and drop charges against clear and present criminal New Black Panther thugs threatening voters in Philadelphia, to black-robed idiots claiming Americans have no right to self-defense, where pimps, whores and welfare brats party hearty with the mindless fantasy that Fedzilla will wipe their butts eternally, ad nauseam - I am compelled to increase my crowbar swinging to new heights every day. I am the steel ballerina. Let's dance.

It is not good enough simply to spotlight cockroaches: Ultimately, all caring people must always rally to the requisite stomping party. For us varmint hunters, these are truly the good old days of a target-rich environment with no bag limit. Let the stomping increase to a furious frenzy and cacophony of good over evil. May America create the splat heard round the world. My steel-toed boots are giddy with anticipatory delight. Stomp on into a voting booth near you. (Ted Nugent)

The race obsession of the Obama administration is a sight to behold. Remember, these are people who adamantly refuse to see the Islamic underpinnings of jihadist terror, although those underpinnings are obvious and undeniable to anyone willing to look. Yet, racism, their unified field theory for interpreting all human phenomena, somehow explains al Qaeda. Sure. (Andy McCarthy)

The truth is, anybody that becomes famous is an ass for a year and a half. You've got to give them a year and a half, two years. They are getting so much smoke blown, and their whole world gets so turned upside down, their responses become distorted. I give everybody a year or two to pull it together because, when it first happens, I know how it is. (Bill Murray)

"What you've seen in some of the statements that have been made by these terrorist organizations is that they do not regard African life as valuable in and of itself. They see it as a potential place where you can carry out ideological battles that kill innocents without regard to long-term consequences for their short-term tactical gains." (Barry)
"Additionally, U.S. intelligence has indicated that al Qaeda leadership specifically targets and recruits black Africans to become suicide bombers because they believe that poor economic and social conditions make them more susceptible to recruitment than Arabs. Al Qaeda recruits have said that al Qaeda is racist against black members from West Africa because they are only used in lower level operations. In short, al Qaeda is a racist organization that treats black Africans like cannon fodder and does not value human life." (An unnamed ‘administration official’)

"Today we have two Vietnams, side by side, North and South, exchanging and working. We may not agree with all that North Vietnam is doing, but they are living in peace." (Demoncrat Congresswench Sheila Jackson Lee)

Food For Thought
Source: PIG News Wire [07/09/10]

We found this compelling take on "Free Speech" on Objectivism Online.

It is a serious mistake to use the term “free speech” as a noun – as if it were an entity distinct from “non-free” speech.

This error comes from the premise that certain (politically-correct) ideological speech should not be regulated, but other kinds of speech may. The origin of idea is the collectivist premise that the sole freedom guaranteed to all individuals is to participate in the democratic process. No other rights exist, as the actions allowable to individuals (including non-political speech) are to be decided by the democratic process.

According to this ideology, everyone should have the freedom to “have a say” in which politician should be elected, but no one is to be granted any other rights, including the freedom to engage in commercial speech and non-mainstream ideological speech. Furthermore, this philosophy of “letting everyone have a say” leads to the violation of legitimate rights, via such things as campaign-finance laws and the use of government funds for political campaigns.

This political philosophy is a reversal of reality, as there is no inherent right to participate in the political process. The existence of a free society depends on the existence of limitations that ensure that only qualified citizens decide on the future of their civilization. For example, this is why (as a minimum) people convicted of serious crimes should not be able to vote.

In conclusion, the right to communicate with others is derived from the individual’s right to life, and the need to cooperate with others to successfully co-exist in society, not the need to participate in a democratic dictatorship.

There is no such thing as “free speech.” All speech should be free. If you want to refer to the right to communicate, say “freedom of speech.”

Charles Krauthammer paints a rhetorical bull’s-eye on Messiah Barry’s narcissism.

In his major addresses, Obama's modesty about his own country has been repeatedly on display as, in one venue after another, he has gratuitously confessed America's alleged failing -- from disrespecting foreigners to having lost its way morally after 9/11.

It's fine to recognize the achievements of others and be non-chauvinistic about one's country. But Obama's modesty is curiously selective. When it comes to himself, modesty is in short supply.

It began with the almost comical self-inflation of his presidential campaign, from the still inexplicable mass rally in Berlin in front of a Prussian victory column to the Greek columns framing him at the Democratic convention. And it carried into his presidency, from his posture of philosopher-king adjudicating between America's sins and the world's to his speeches marked by a spectacularly promiscuous use of the word "I."

Notice, too, how Obama habitually refers to Cabinet members and other high government officials as "my" -- "my secretary of homeland security," "my national security team," "my ambassador." The more normal -- and respectful -- usage is to say "the," as in "the secretary of state." These are, after all, public officials sworn to serve the nation and the Constitution -- not just the man who appointed them.

It's a stylistic detail, but quite revealing of Obama's exalted view of himself. Not surprising, perhaps, in a man whose major achievement before acceding to the presidency was writing two biographies -- both about himself.

Obama is not the first president with a large streak of narcissism. But the others had equally expansive feelings about their country. Obama's modesty about America would be more understandable if he treated himself with the same reserve. What is odd is to have a president so convinced of his own magnificence -- yet not of his own country's.

Steve McCann explains that the Marxist Messiah, and his Capitol Hill cohorts, misread the political state of America, making them overreach.

‘Over the past fifty years, regardless of who was in the White House or in charge of Congress, no one has been able to halt the incessant spread of Progressivism in our institutions and the concurrent uncontrolled spending and growth of government. When a president as accomplished as Ronald Reagan was unable to do so, no future Republican president or Congress, short of a major national catastrophe, could ever fully turn back this tide, as they could not overcome the apathy of the people and the hostility of the media, academia, the entertainment establishment, and federal bureaucracies.

A long as the American people remained largely disengaged (the result of unprecedented prosperity), the damage done to the society as a whole and to the long-term financial health of the country was unknown to the vast majority. This indifference has begun to undergo significant change as the reality of the nation's future comes into focus, but that reality has started to come to the fore only as the result of the policies being pursued by a far-left government...’

‘...President Obama and his party have failed to understand the basic character of the American people and the many polls taken over the years showing this to be a right-of-center country. They further underestimated the power of the alternative media before they had an opportunity to silence it. But above all, they could not repeal the Constitution, which would allow the citizens the means to change the failed policies of any elected government.

While the timing may have been there to have a "moderate" Barack Obama elected president, the timing to turn the United States into a bastion of socialism was not. The infiltration of the entertainment and educational institutions by the Progressives has not been in place long enough to change the character of the majority of the population. Further, the use of the strategy of guilt to intimidate American citizens has run its course. It has been overdone.

While the damage to date has been considerable, it is not irreversible. In essence, Barack Obama and the present Congress won their offices at the wrong point in the history of our nation to achieve all their objectives; but by attempting to do so and overreaching, this left-wing government has given the country an opportunity to awaken from its fifty-year slumber and repair the foundation. Only a radical presidency and Congress could have accomplished this before it was too late to turn back the tide.

The only questions that remain: Will the aroused and more knowledgeable populace continue to be aware and elect those who will make the necessary changes and repeal or roll back the policies of this and previous administrations and Congresses? Will we as a nation take advantage of this potential reprieve before it is too late?...’

Recommended Reading
Source: PIG News Wire [07/02/10]

Neal Boortz gets real about Barry...Yes, AGAIN.

OK .. so it may be a little cliche, but just hear me out. The absolute top-of-mind issue for Americans is jobs and the economy. This has been the issue since 2008. Now think back to 2008, the time of the election of our great Community Organizer. If the American people were so concerned about jobs and the economy, they should have picked the right guy to handle the job. Perhaps a community organizer with zero private sector business experience, an avowed enemy of the private sector, was not the appropriate choice to handle the job. If the American people were board members of a private company, and they had elected Barack Obama as their CEO in these economic times, shareholders would have fired the Board by now and those clowns would be cleaning out their desks. The fact is that the American people put the wrong guy in charge at the wrong time. Too many idiot voters got suckered by (A) the Hopey-Changey message; and (B) Hue. Now, we are paying the price. Now, we must try and distract our politicians in Washington from doing anything about the economy .. because every time they try they end up spending more of our money and have little to show for it.

Somebody needs to remind these footstools of a very simple fact: government does not create jobs. But that is exactly what the Obama administration has been trying to do - artificially create jobs, for which there is no demand, and which must be paid for by the taxpayers. This is simply not how a capitalist system works. Just like Obama and his dogwashers are creating their own set of laws, they also seem to be setting up their own faux economy. It is an economy where the government IS the creator of jobs. The problem with that is that this crowds out the private sector and leaves the taxpayers on a bigger and bigger hook to foot the bill for these "services" that the government thinks we need. Even if we don't need it, we will get it anyway. That's the way the Obama administration works.

What's the result? The rest of the business owners, the investors, the workers ... everyone is sitting around waiting for Washington to realize that they are playing an imaginary game. But we ain't seen nothing yet. The scary part will be when Washington DOES finally figure this out, and starts to focus on the economy. What will be the result? I guarantee it will be higher taxes and more regulations. It's coming, folks. The business world knows it and they are anxious about it. They are just sitting around waiting for it to happen. And what happens to you? You don't get hired, you don't get a raise, or maybe you get laid off. The biggest problem with our economy is the uncertainty factor. If you can be sure of two things under an Obama rule (yes, rule) it is that your taxes will increase and you will see more government regulation. How's that for certainty??

Now you can see why our economy is stalling. Figures from Automatic Data Processing Employer Services showed that companies in the U.S. expanded payrolls by 13,000 in June. Ok, great. But the figures were forecast to show a gain of 60,000 jobs. Uh oh. And just yesterday, the Congressional Budget Office released a study saying that our national debt will reach 62% of our GDP by the end of this year. "And while the national debt would stabilize at 67 percent of GDP over the next decade if current law were maintained, extending tax cuts enacted during the administration of President George W. Bush and keeping growth in appropriations in line with inflation would mean that the debt would reach almost 90 percent of GDP by 2020." Who wants to start a business or hire new employees when our country is facing THAT?

Writing in the London Telegraph, Janey Daley paints a rhetorical bull’s-eye on the welfare state.

‘At last, we are having the right argument for our time. Virtually everybody who is in touch with political reality now accepts that the old contest – socialism vs capitalism – is over. We all believe, with greater or lesser degrees of enthusiasm, in free-market economics. So the real source of contention that remains is the size and role of the state.

Anyone who thinks that this is a puny arena – that the boundaries of debate have shrunk to a less inspirational, purely managerial scale – is mistaken. The passion with which those on the Left are now defending their new turf should make it clear: this fight will be to the death because the power of government to control social and economic outcomes is seen by them as the last plausible incarnation of their moral world-view. The current arguments about welfare reform which the Government has robustly initiated are going to bring this abstract confrontation into the day-to-day experience of national life.

Now it is perfectly understandable that those who have a vested interest in state power – public sector trade union leaders, for example – should be prepared to risk everything to preserve it, but have the more thoughtful Left-liberal proponents really thought this through? Are they actually prepared to go down fighting for the idea that the state is the source of social virtue and must be the answer to all of our civic problems?

If we learnt anything from the terrible ideological crimes of the 20th century, it was that over-powerful states were dangerous: that even if they did not commit murder or enslave their own populations, their good intentions ended up producing perverse effects simply through the gross, insensitive interventions of central bureaucracy which could take no account of individual needs. Can anyone still believe that the largely catastrophic consequences of Big State solutions to poverty, to housing shortages, to unemployment, to educational disadvantage, have been pure coincidence?...’

‘...But we must be clear that we have not got to where we are by accident. It is the basic premise of Big State thinking that has produced the monstrous edifice that we know as the benefits trap: the idea that “the poor” are a fixed and immutable section of society who must be “protected”. Sadly, what “protecting the poor” generally amounts to in practice is “protecting poverty” – which is to say, preserving it. Welfare dependency creates huge disincentives to entering employment because few jobs at entry level can offer a competitive package of payments and support equivalent to the benefits system.

At this point the Big State camp will shriek: “Why should people be forced into demeaning, low-paid jobs?” Answer: because most of them will not stay on such low pay for long. All the statistical evidence from the US welfare-reform programmes shows that people who are “forced” into minimum wage jobs initially, move up the earnings ladder quite quickly into better-paid employment, with their places at the bottom being filled by newer recruits to the workforce. Getting a job at almost any rate of pay is, indeed, the best and most lasting route out of poverty.

There may always be a cohort of people in low-paid work, but the important thing is that they not be the same people. Poverty should always be regarded as temporary: the goal should be to facilitate people moving out of it. At the moment, our tax and benefits system penalises people both for taking a job in the first place and then for climbing up the income ladder. This is crazy – and it is a direct consequence of the tendency of government programmes to regard personal initiative and effort as a bureaucratic inconvenience.

The tragic inevitability of government intervention is that when you create a permanent agency to deal with a problem it has an inherent tendency to make the problem itself permanent. This is not only for self-serving reasons – to justify its own continued existence – but because it prefers to deal in fixed entities such as poverty, deprivation, or educational inequality, rather than to view the infinite range of human possibilities and personal circumstances as a dynamic, ever-changing spectrum in which individual vagaries matter more than any total result...’

PIGish Prose From Rational Adults
Source: PIG News Wire [06/25/10]

Ted Nugent cuts to the chase with a discussion of our Declaration of Independence, which he renames as the Declaration of Defiance.

Our forefathers knew when they signed the Declaration that they were pledging their sacred honor, fortunes and, more than likely, their lives in hopes that we could live free. They knew their Declaration of Defiance would bring war against the world's most powerful, undefeated military. Our forefathers then fired a shot heard around the world.

America faces new challenges that once again require our steadfast defiance if we are to leave future generations of Americans with a more vibrant republic, more freedom and more liberty. That is the goal, right?

Those of us who truly care must stand in defiance of an out-of-control spending Fedzilla that clearly is intent on bankrupting America with an orgy of proven wasteful spending. The share of the national debt for each taxpayer is now more than $115,000, and it keeps climbing wildly every day. That's despicable and intolerable. Toss the Fedzillacrats out this coming November and all future Novembers. All of them.

We must stand in strong defiance of those who support amnesty to illegal invaders and virtually open up our borders, and we must instead stand arm in arm with Arizona and draw a line in the sand on the banks of the Rio Grande.

Law-and-order Americans must defy those who support turning violent, recidivistic punks loose from prison while advocating disarming the American public. The only good carjacker or rapist is a dead carjacker or rapist. Case closed. It's so simple only stupid people could find fault with that. A polite society is an armed society.

Americans must defy those who seek to enslave us to foreign energy when America can and must be energy-independent. We have the energy. What we lack is the leadership and the will.

We must defy those who, because of their fantasy-driven ideologies, seek to tear down America and reshape her in their warped cultural, social and political views. Clowns belong in the circus, not in charge of anything.

Americans must stand in defiance of Fedzilla taking over the world's premier health care system and smothering it with bureaucrats, lawyers, stacks of new requirements and more government agencies. If you enjoy standing in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles, you will adore Fedzilla Care.

We must stand in defiance of those who blame America first instead of promoting and believing in American exceptionalism. If you don't like it here, pack your trash and set sail for Mexico or Cuba, where all your wishes are already public policy. Mexico and Cuba put the fun in dysfunction.

Americans must defy those bureaucratic numbnuts and toxic bloodsuckers who believe more government is the answer to our problems. All clear-thinking and sober Americans know a drastically reduced Fedzilla is the solution.

We must stand in defiance of those Fedzillacrats who seek to reshape Wall Street without first cleaning up the root cause of the economic meltdown - Fedzilla's very own Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and the gaggle of power abusers run amok. We know who they are, and they need to be brought to justice.

Defy the sheeplike epidemic of apathy that has willingly opened the door to the Mao Zedong fan club in the White House.

Let your uniquely American defiant DNA rise to the surface. Join those organizations and support those individuals who most closely align their beliefs and ideologies with the dreams and aspirations of our forefathers. Raise your healthy voice in defiance.

Get angry. Get passionate. Get cracking. Take back America from the Fedzillacrats, who, if they get their way, ultimately will destroy the dreams of our forefathers. Slay Fedzilla at the ballot box. Do it for your grandchildren.

Live free or die. Throw some tea in the harbor. Remember the Alamo. Tell 'em "Nuts!"

Thomas Sowell wonders if the USA is on the slippery slope to tyranny.

When Adolf Hitler was building up the Nazi movement in the 1920s, leading up to his taking power in the 1930s, he deliberately sought to activate people who did not normally pay much attention to politics.

Such people were a valuable addition to his political base, since they were particularly susceptible to Hitler's rhetoric and had far less basis for questioning his assumptions or his conclusions.

"Useful idiots" was the term supposedly coined by V.I. Lenin to describe similarly unthinking supporters of his dictatorship in the Soviet Union.

Put differently, a democracy needs informed citizens if it is to thrive, or ultimately even survive.

In our times, American democracy is being dismantled, piece by piece, before our very eyes by the current administration in Washington, and few people seem to be concerned about it.

The president's poll numbers are going down because increasing numbers of people disagree with particular policies of his, but the damage being done to the fundamental structure of this nation goes far beyond particular counterproductive policies.

Just where in the Constitution of the United States does it say that a president has the authority to extract vast sums of money from a private enterprise and distribute it as he sees fit to whomever he deems worthy of compensation? Nowhere.

And yet that is precisely what is happening with a $20 billion fund to be provided by BP to compensate people harmed by their oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Quotes of the Week
Source: PIG News Wire [06/18/10]

When asked by a caller how to keep her hubby from flirting with, chatting up, attractive women, Televangelist Pat Robertson served up an inspirational dose of tough love.

CO-HOST: Pat, this is from Anne who says, “My husband has always been a flirt and loves to talk with other women he finds attractive. He says he would never cheat on me but his actions are starting to get to me. What should I do?”

ROBERTSON: Anne, first thing is you need to make yourself as attractive as possible and don’t hassle him about it. And why is he doing this? Well, he’s doing it because he wants affirmation that he is still a man, that he is attractive — and he gets an affirmation of himself. That means he’s got an inferiority complex that’s coming out. And he’s not gonna cheat on you. He’s just playing. But you need to not drive him away or start hassling and hounding on him, but make yourself as beautiful as you can, as fun as you can, and say let’s go out here, let’s go there, let’s go to the other thing..."

WSJ scribbler Dorothy Rabinowitz takes Messiah Barry to the woodshed.

The deepening notes of disenchantment with Barack Obama now issuing from commentators across the political spectrum were predictable. So, too, were the charges from some of the president's earliest enthusiasts about his failure to reflect a powerful sense of urgency about the oil spill.

There should have been nothing puzzling about his response to anyone who has paid even modest critical attention to Mr. Obama's pronouncements. For it was clear from the first that this president—single-minded, ever-visible, confident in his program for a reformed America saved from darkness by his arrival—was wanting in certain qualities citizens have until now taken for granted in their presidents. Namely, a tone and presence that said: This is the Americans' leader, a man of them, for them, the nation's voice and champion. Mr. Obama wasn't lacking in concern about the oil spill. What he lacked was that voice—and for good reason.

Those qualities to be expected in a president were never about rhetoric; Mr. Obama had proved himself a dab hand at that on the campaign trail. They were a matter of identification with the nation and to all that binds its people together in pride and allegiance. These are feelings held deep in American hearts, unvoiced mostly, but unmistakably there and not only on the Fourth of July.

A great part of America now understands that this president's sense of identification lies elsewhere, and is in profound ways unlike theirs. He is hard put to sound convincingly like the leader of the nation, because he is, at heart and by instinct, the voice mainly of his ideological class. He is the alien in the White House, a matter having nothing to do with delusions about his birthplace cherished by the demented fringe.

Brain Food
Source: PIG News Wire [06/11/10]

Bruce Walker sounds off on the dominance of politics over our daily lives.

Our world, more and more, looks like the dying carcass-to-be of Soviet Russia. Those in Russia who did not join the Communist Party in the Soviet Union could rise only so far in Soviet society. It did not much matter whether these people believed in Marxist-Leninism (in fact, books written by dissidents expose the grotesque fact that no one in the Soviet Union, especially those at the top, believed in Marx or Lenin -- they believed, instead, in wealth, perks, and privilege). Those who want to rise in American society, more and more, had better mouth the party line. The species Homo sapiens in America has been supplanted by the new Frankenstein's monster, Homo politicus.

No area of our life, it seems, is free from exhortations to follow the transitory goals of the Party. Quit tobacco and destroy the tobacco companies! Punish those oil companies who fuel our cars and those fast food companies whose burgers we buy! Homo politicus lives in a universe in which he is surrounded by what the Party wants him to see and hear. He must echo that or face exile.

Because text is dangerous to the Party, Homo politicus, like everyone in Fahrenheit 451, lives in a world without text. Minions like Holder and Napolitano condemn bills which they have never read. The image of the Arizona law is much more important than the actual language of the bill. Homo politicus expects leaders to look good and to read canned speeches beautifully from a teleprompter -- they do not need to grasp the meaning of what the teleprompter displays.

If Homo politicus is confused, then the Party has an army of "experts" who soothingly counsel the misguided subject back into correct thinking. Professionals in medicine, mental health, law, and a dozen similar fields have converted traditionally apolitical organizations into organs of the Party, spouting the same line on issues. Groups like the AARP, ostensibly an organization to protect the interests of older Americans, represent only those who are a big cog in the political machine.

Very little in our lives ought to be political. There is a vast universe to explore and to treasure. The tiny mind and tinier heart of the Party man, the political bureaucrat, the shrill busybody, the goateed academic, and the smiling elected official ought to have almost nothing to do with our free lives. But like some awful, progressive disease, America is becoming transformed from the Land of the Free to the home of Homo politicus.

Robin of Berkeley asks some tough questions about Messiah Barry.

‘So what is the matter with Obama? Conservatives have been asking this question for some time. I've written a number of articles trying to solve the mystery.

Even some liberals are starting to wonder. James Carville railed about Obama's blasé attitude after the catastrophic oil spill. The New York Times' Maureen Dowd revamped Obama's "Yes We Can" motto into "Will We Ever?"

The liberal women of the TV show "The View" have expressed sympathy for Michelle Obama's living with a man so out of touch. Peggy Noonan, hardly a vehement Obama foe, recently pronounced him disconnected.

Obama's odd mannerisms intrigue a psychotherapist like me. He also presents a serious diagnostic challenge.

For one, Obama's teleprompter and the men behind the Blackberry keep him well-scripted. We know so little about the facts of his life.

But it's more than just a lack of information. Obama himself is a strange bird. He doesn't fit easily into any diagnostic category.

Many people attribute Obama's oddness to his narcissism. True, Obama has a gargantuan ego, and he is notoriously thin-skinned.

Yet a personality disorder like narcissism does not explain Obama's strangeness: his giggling while being asked about the economy; his continuing a shout-out rather than announcing the Ft. Hood shootings; or his vacations, golfing, partying and fundraising during the calamitous oil spill.

Take also Obama's declaring on the "Today Show" that he wants to know whose ass to kick. Consummate narcissists would never stoop to this vulgar display of adolescent machismo.

Obama is flat when passion is needed; he's aggressive when savvy is required. What's most worrisome is that Obama doesn't even realize that his behavior is inappropriate.

So if it's not just simple narcissism, what is wrong with Obama? Since I've never evaluated him, I can't say for sure. But I can hazard some educated guesses.

If I saw a client as disconnected as him, the first thing I would wonder: Is something wrong with his brain?...’

‘...Along with the brain issues are personality disorders: narcissism, paranoia, passive-aggressiveness. There's even the possibility of the most destructive character defect of all, an antisocial personality. Untreated abuse can foster antisocial traits, especially among boys.

If my assessment is accurate, what does this mean?

It means that liberals need to wake up and spit out the Kool-Aid...and that conservatives should put aside differences, band together, and elect as many Republicans as possible.

Because Obama will not change. He will not learn from his mistakes. He will not grow and mature from on-the-job experience. In fact, over time, Obama will likely become a more ferocious version of who he is today.

Why? Because this is a damaged person. Obama's fate was sealed years ago growing up in his strange and poisonous family. Later on, his empty vessel was filled with the hateful bile of men like Rev. Wright and Bill Ayers.

Obama will not evolve; he will not rise to the occasion; he will not become the man he was meant to be.

This is for one reason and one reason alone: He is not capable of it!...’

Recommended Reading
Source: PIG News Wire [06/04/10]

Neal Boortz paints a bull’s-eye on the Rabid Libertard Moonbat assault on the First Amendment.

There is a growing demand out there for the FCC to monitor "hate speech" on talk radio and cable news networks. Where is this demand coming from? Actually it seems to be stemming from Hispanic media coalitions and Latino organizations, and they are feeling particularly enraged in the wake of the passing of Arizona's law. In a letter to the FCC, over 30 organizations claim that syndicated radio and cable television programs make it hard for the public to separate facts from "bigotry masquerading as news." They also claim that talk radio and these news programs use hate as a profit model. Here's a little excerpt from the letter to the FCC from the National Hispanic Media Coalition:

NHMC's Petition urges the Commission to examine the extent and effects of hate speech in media, including the likely link between hate speech and hate crimes, and to explore non-regulatory ways to counteract its negative impacts. As NHMC has awaited Commission action, hate, extremism and misinformation have been on the rise, and even more so in the past week as the media has focused on Arizona's passage of one of the harshest pieces of anti-Latino legislation in this country's history, SB 1070 ...

Then my favorite line is this ... "Many communities and individuals do not have the information they want and need to intelligently engage in our democracy." Is there such thing anymore, considering the information I just shared above about our Entertainment Tonight America?

Remember what I told you yesterday. Hate speech is any utterance in opposition to progressive or liberal ideology. In the case of the NHMC "hate speech" would be defined as any reminder that "undocumented workers" are, in fact, illegal aliens and have committed a crime coming into this country, and continue to commit crimes by staying and working here.

Geoffrey P. Hunt Takes Barry & His Identity Politics To Task.

‘...Would someone remind us again why the nation elected this man to be president? A man with no resume, a man with no experience in running anything other than a political campaign, a man who is ignorant of history, economics, and technology? A man who is shallow and lazy? A man who shares neither character nor temperament with the American people in this vast republic? How did this happen?

Voters were smitten by the ideological handmaidens of identity politics and the promise of big government. The identity politics substituted a cosmetic profile for character and experience. The promise was that big government has the benevolent power and enlightened expertise to remake America from the top down into a more capable, more caring, kinder, gentler, and more respected place.

What we've received instead was on display at the president's long-awaited press conference in the last week of May. Only a partisan or a fool could deny the irredeemable failure of these ideological handmaidens, the genius of Obama's shrinking presidency. No amount of posturing, buffing up, or Q&A briefing book drills could hide the reality that this man is on a raft at sea accompanied by an equally bewildered boatload of companions who have no idea how they arrived in such deep water, hundreds of miles from land, and with no clue that they are in trouble, let alone what to do about it.

What we've received instead from the ideology of identity politics and big government has been the spread of competency and accountability so thin that the federal government is utterly incapable of defending our shores and borders from invasion -- one by sea in the form of a massive crude oil slick, the other by land in the waves of illegal immigrants flooding Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California. In utter exasperation, the citizens of Arizona finally took matters into their own hands, only to be vilified by Obama and his cohorts, who have neither the will nor the capacity to do anything about it...’

Obama's presidency is finished because identity trumped competency. And without competency, his big government is dysfunctional and destructive.

So what's the alternative? Simple. The ideology of limited government. Why? Because limited government is the antithesis of identity politics. The ideology of limited government wouldn't need to rely on overextended organization competencies to manage vast and complex bureaucracies because those bureaucracies would be unnecessary and wouldn't exist. Without identity politics, people who actually know what they're doing could occupy key jobs.

Limited government has to assemble and target just those competencies needed to carry out the limited duties envisioned in the U.S. Constitution, such as providing for the common defense, facilitating interstate commerce and a monetary system, and defending the rights reserved to the people. Everything else can be better-managed by private enterprise, where distributed self interest can gather competencies in units small enough to accomplish something useful.

Identity politics combined with incompetence have exposed the absurdity in the ambitions of big government and made Obama the weakest, most anemic and flaccid president in the modern era. The Latinate word would be diminutive. In simple Saxon tongue, the word is small. This is Obama's presidency.

Recommended Reading
Source: PIG News Wire [05/28/10]

An American born Jihadikaze Imam, Anwar al-Awlaki, explains how the Washington Post’s betrayal of our secrets saved his sorry terrorist ass.

“I had posted an article of mine in support of what Nidal Hasan did,” al-Awlaki said in Arabic, referring to the Army major now charged with 13 murder counts in the Fort Hood massacre. “And so, they shut down my website.”

Al-Awlaki added, “Then I read in the Washington Post that they were monitoring my communications. So I was forced to stop these communications. I left that region, and then the American air strikes took place.”

A Nov. 16, 2009 Washington Post article on al-Awlaki written by Sudarsan Raghavan of the Post’s Foreign Service -- with a dateline of Sanaa, Yemen and featuring contributions from Post staff writer Spencer S. Hsu in Washington -- included the revelation from anonymous federal law enforcement officials that the terrorist cleric was under surveillance.

“U.S. intelligence agencies intercepted e-mails from Hasan” to al-Awlaki, the Post story revealed, “but the FBI concluded that they posed no serious danger and that an investigation was unnecessary,” the law enforcement officials told the paper. (News Max)

Writing in Reason Magazine, Peter Suderman, sounds a warning about FCC Commissioner Michael Copps' mania to use ‘decency’ as an excuse to dictate Internet content.

‘...[During a recent panel discussion, Copps] —the same bureaucrat whose legal counsel recently joked that he'd love to have "jurisdiction over everything"—reportedly dodged a question about regulating indecency on the web while noting that Americans want "something done" about explicit content:

Copps said that the [indecency] issue concerns him as well, suggesting that a majority of Americans want "something done" about "over the top" "mindless violence" or sexual material, but dodged Smith's question about whether regulation or "voluntary codes" should be applied to the Internet, saying that "we need to have a national discussion about" applying public interest and decency standards to the Net.

There may be exceptions, but it's usually pretty safe to assume that anytime a politician or bureaucrat dodges a question while calling for "a national discussion about" the proposal at hand, what he or she really means is, "I want to indicate that I support this idea without actually going on record as supporting it." In this case, Copps' proposed national conversation could complicate things for Julius Genachowski, the FCC's Chairman, who has spent a fair amount of time this year denying that his agency has any intention of regulating the Internet. He gets away with this by making a distinction between the Net's infrastructure layer, which his agency most certainly intends to regulate, and the content layer, which he's insisted the FCC won't touch. But if Copps becomes any more open about imposing indecency regulations on the web, it will be tougher for Genachowski to make his case.

Mark Steyn paints a rhetorical bull’s-eye on socialism.

It no longer matters whether you’re intellectually in favour of European-style social democracy: simply as a practical matter, it’s unaffordable.

How did the Western world reach this point? Well, as my correspondent put it, we assumed that we were rich enough that we could afford to be stupid. In any advanced society, there will be a certain number of dysfunctional citizens either unable or unwilling to do what is necessary to support themselves and their dependents. What to do about such people? Ignore the problem? Attempt to fix it? The former nags at the liberal guilt complex, while the latter is way too much like hard work: the modern progressive has no urge to emulate those Victorian social reformers who tramped the streets of English provincial cities looking for fallen women to rescue. All he wants to do is ensure that the fallen women don’t fall anywhere near him.

So the easiest “solution” to the problem is to throw public money at it. You know how it is when you’re at the mall and someone rattles a collection box under your nose and you’re not sure where it’s going but it’s probably for Darfur or Rwanda or Hoogivsastan. Whatever. You’re dropping a buck or two in the tin for the privilege of not having to think about it. For the more ideologically committed, there’s always the awareness-raising rock concert: it’s something to do with Bono and debt forgiveness, whatever that means, but let’s face it, going to the park for eight hours of celebrity caterwauling beats having to wrap your head around Afro-Marxist economics. The modern welfare state operates on the same principle: since the Second World War, the hard-working middle classes have transferred historically unprecedented amounts of money to the unproductive sector in order not to have to think about it. But so what? We were rich enough that we could afford to be stupid.

That works for a while. In the economic expansion of the late 20th century, citizens of Western democracies paid more in taxes but lived better than their parents and grandparents. They weren’t exactly rich, but they got richer. They also got more stupid. When William Beveridge laid out his blueprint for the modern British welfare state in 1942, his goal was the “abolition of want.” Sir William and his colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic succeeded beyond their wildest dreams: to be “poor” in the 21st-century West is not to be hungry and emaciated but to be obese, with your kids suffering from childhood diabetes. When Michelle Obama turned up to serve food at a soup kitchen, its poverty-stricken clientele snapped pictures of her with their cellphones. In one-sixth of British households, not a single family member works. They are not so much without employment as without need of it. At a certain level, your hard-working bourgeois understands that the bulk of his contribution to the treasury is entirely wasted. It’s one of the basic rules of life: if you reward bad behaviour, you get more of it. But, in good and good-ish times, who cares?

By the way, where does the government get the money to fund all these immensely useful programs? According to a Fox News poll earlier this year, 65 per cent of Americans understand that the government gets its money from taxpayers, but 24 per cent think the government has “plenty of its own money without using taxpayer dollars.” You can hardly blame them for getting that impression in an age in which there is almost nothing the state won’t pay for. I confess I warmed to that much-mocked mayor in Doncaster, England, who announced a year or two back that he wanted to stop funding for the Gay Pride parade on the grounds that, if they’re so damn proud of it, why can’t they pay for it? He was actually making a rather profound point, but, as I recall, he was soon forced to back down. In Canada, almost every ethnocultural booster group is on the public teat. Outside Palestine House in Toronto the other week, the young Muslim men were caught on tape making explicitly eliminationist threats about Jews, but c’mon, everything else in Canada is taxpayer-funded, why not genocidal incitement? We’re rich enough that we can afford to be stupid.

It’s not so much the money as the stupidity, which massively expands under such generous subvention. When it emerged that President Barack Obama had appointed a Communist as his “green jobs czar,” I carelessly assumed it was the usual youthful “idealism”: no doubt Van Jones, the Communist Obama appointee in question, had been a utopian college student caught up in the spirit of ’68 and gone along for the ride. A passing phase. Soon grow out of it. But, in fact, Mr. Jones became a Communist in the mid-nineties, after the fall of the Soviet Union. He embraced Communism after even the commies had given up on it. Like the song says, he was commie after commie had ceased to be cool. On Fox News, Glenn Beck made a fuss about it. But the “mainstream” media thought this was frankly rather boorish, and something only uptight right-wing squares would do. I mean, what’s the big deal? True, everywhere it’s been implemented, Communism causes human misery—not to mention an estimated 150 million deaths. But it doesn’t make you persona non grata in the salons of the West. Quite the opposite. The Washington Post hailed the grizzled folkie Pete Seeger as America’s “best-loved commie”—which, unlike “America’s best-loved Nazi,” is quite a competitive title. Even so, why would you stick a commie in the White House and put him in charge of anything to do with jobs, even “green jobs”?

Well, because “green jobs” is just another of those rich-enough-to-be-stupid scams. The Spanish government pays over $800,000 for every “green job” on a solar-panel assembly line. This money is taken from real workers with real jobs at real businesses whose growth is being squashed to divert funds to endeavours that have no rationale other than their government subsidies—and which would collapse as soon as the subsidies end.

Quotes of the Week
Source: PIG News Wire [05/21/10]

Rick Manning - Director of Communications for Americans for Limited Government - sounds off on the Libertard assault on free speech in America.

From a Supreme Court nominee who thinks that a modern day pamphlet in the tradition of Thomas Paine's "Commonsense" should be banned if a corporation publishes and distributes it, to an FCC that is trying to regulate the Internet, to a White House that tolerates blatant hate speech from the left while lecturing those on the right to tone down the rhetoric, the uniquely American right to free speech is under attack.

So, when Obama muses in a very public and carefully considered speech that the many new forms of media are putting "strains on democracy," and that some, "don't always rank that high on the truth meter." Be concerned, be very concerned. He's talking about anyone who doesn't agree with him cluttering the minds of the masses with inconvenient facts and arguments.

When it comes to the assault on each of our First Amendment rights, in my Dad's words, "speak now or forever hold your peace," ring in my ears. This is the time to speak up — before it is too late.

Wesley Pruden serves up his own views on the Libertard assault on free speech in America.

Once upon a time we could count on lawyers and law school professors to defend the First Amendment, the most important 46 words in the Constitution. Those 46 words make everything else possible. Shut up the people and the government can shut down every other freedom.

The genius of the Founding Fathers was their ability to write the Constitution in the plain English that everybody could understand. Lawyers, who can employ entire boring paragraphs to say "good morning" (many young women have dozed off while their lawyer swains were on their knees with a proposal of marriage) would inflict damage later.

A good lawyer, or even a bad one, can put loopholes in any proposal. To wit, Elena Kagan's explanation of the First Amendment. It's perfectly OK, she wrote in the University of Chicago Law Review, for the government to restrict free speech as long as it means well and calls it something else. The word "restrictions" sounds bad, like a leather restraint, but Mzz Kagan's "redistribution of speech" can sound benign, like free cheese. Who doesn't like cheese? She argued that the government can employ Orwellian restrictions on speech if it thinks such speech might "harm" others, either by direct action or inciting someone else to take direct action. Who gets to decide when such restrictions are imposed for the greater good? Why, the government, of course.

Here's how the Founding Fathers, ever suspicious of ambitious Lilliputians, wrote the guarantee of free speech: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." Note that the First Amendment does not say that Congress "should" make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or that it would be nice if it didn't. The operative words are "shall make no law."

The Constitution has "evolved" since then, of course, and now the liberal left, led by the Warren Court and its bastard progeny, has discovered all manner of "emanations" and "penumbra," like an embedded Da Vinci code, that the Constitution doesn't really mean what the words say it means. What part of "shall" can Mzz Kagan not understand?

Newt Gingrich cuts to the chase on the Libertard destruction of America.

"The degree to which the secular-socialist left represents a fundamental replacement of America, a very different world view, a very different outcome, I think is a very serious threat to our way of life.

"When you have a pay czar in the White House who thinks that they have enough power and knowledge to set the salaries for hundreds of people in dozens of companies, in an industry they've never been in -- I mean, if that's not socialist -- if the government is the largest owner of General Motors and Chrysler, the largest funder of AIG -- they just nationalized student loans so they're now all 100 percent government program. If you can get $757 billion out of the Congress and no elected official has even read the bill, that's the behavior of a Chicago-style machine."

Congressman Tom McClintock serves up some border enforcement chin music, on Mexican President Calderon.

Above all, this is a debate of, by and for the American people. If President Calderon wishes to participate in that debate, I invite him to obey our immigration laws, apply for citizenship, do what 600,000 LEGAL immigrants to our nation are doing right now, learn our history and our customs, and become an American. And then he will have every right to participate in that debate.

Until then, I would politely invite him to have the courtesy while a guest of this Congress to abide by the fundamental rules of diplomacy between civilized nations not to meddle in each other’s domestic debates.

Recommended Reading
Source: PIG News Wire [05/14/10]

Neal Boortz assigns some homework, for those clueless cretins who just discovered there’s more to American life than iPods, Reality Shows, and Lady Gaga.

* Look into the Social Security Trust Fund. Does is really exist? Social Security benefits now exceed the amount collected in Social Security taxes. If there is no money in the Trust Fund, where will the money come from to pay these benefits?

* China seems to be running into a little snag with their economy. Soon they might not be in the mood to buy any foreign debt. When that happens (when, not if) who will se sell our bonds too? At what interest rate?

* Here's a simple task. Try to find someone who can explain to you how we will be able to afford to pay Social Security and Medicare benefits ... together with ObamaCare ... in, say, ten years.

* The United States has the second-highest corporate income tax in the world - second to Japan. Ask some businessmen to explain how this helps create much-needed jobs.

* Virtually all of the personal income taxes in the United States are paid by just 47% of those who actually have income. This means that about 53% of the people are getting a free ride. Jobs and economic growth come from the 47%, not the 53%. What does this tell you about America's future?

* Speaking of America's future: The life-expectancy of a representative government based on the rule of law with personal and economic liberty is right around 200 years. We're about three decades beyond our life expectancy. Try to explain why we're bulletproof and our system of government simply cannot collapse under regulatory and debt load.

* If two fat Asian women wearing traditional Japanese garb robbed a bank, try to explain how police would catch these two without profiling. Would the "BOLO" alert simply say "Be on the lookout for two people who robbed a bank ....... ?"

* Study the 10th Amendment to our Constitution. Then try to find one politician in Washington who actually tries to govern in accordance with these instructions from our founding fathers.

* Are you watching what's happening in Greece? Do you know that the European Union and the International Monetary Fund have just approved a ONE TRILLION dollar bailout fund for countries like Greece, Portugal, Spain and others? Oh, you did? Well ... did you know that American taxpayers are on the hook for $50 billion of those dollars in that bailout fund? Just where is that money going to come from?

* Do you have health insurance through your employer? Well, isn't that special. Are you aware that some of America's largest employers are considering dropping their employee health benefits as ObamaCare goes into effect? Why? Because they get rid of a massive headache. Besides, it would be cheaper for them just to pay the penalty to the government rather than pay for all of those expensive health plans. Reconcile this with Obama's promise that you would be able to keep your health insurance plan if you liked it.

* A little reading of history will show you that despots and tyrants know that they must control the flow of information if they are to maintain power. In recent days your President has been telling graduates that all of this information is "putting pressure" on them and "our democracy." Obama's FCC has also made moves to control the Internet. Is there any reason to believe that Obama has a problem with the free flow of information in our society?

* A wager earner pays $5000 in income taxes. He needs that money to bring his mortgage current and to pay for some medical expenses. Instead the money is given to a puppet theatre to build some new puppets and scenery. Do you have a problem with that?

* Do illegal immigrants in the Southwest United States believe that they are there illegally? Do you realize that 58% of the people in Mexico are of the opinion that the Southwestern United States actually belongs to Mexico and not to the United States?

* Our borders with Mexico are still wide open. List the reasons why politicians might not want to stem the flood of illegals into the United States.

* Try to figure out why a school system owned by the government, operated by the government and staffed by government employees would NOT teach your children that government is the answer to all of their problems.

* Do some research to figure out where the jobs come from. You'll find that almost all new private sector jobs ... as much as 80% ... come from small businesses, not corporations. The owners of these small businesses report their income on their personal income tax returns. They aren't hiring. Study the situation and try to figure out why they're sitting on the sidelines. Could it possibly have anything to do with the fact that they're scared s#!tless about all of the regulations and tax increases Obama has in store for them?

* Considering the fact that we have a president who has called the private sector "the enemy;" a president who clearly does not favor the concept of free enterprise and capitalism ... is there the slightest chance that this president might be engaged in an intentional effort to destroy or cripple our free market economy so that he can replace it with a centrally-planned economy more to his liking? Even the SLIGHTEST chance?

Quotes of the Week
Source: PIG News Wire [05/14/10]

Rudy Giuliani sounds off on the Red Shed’s fight against terrorism.

“I really at this point am frustrated by the lack of urgency that is shown about these terrorism matters. I mean, we've had three now where we've seen, you know, big breakdowns: Fort Hood, Christmas Day, and now -- and now this one.”

“It's about time that we stopped thinking about it and we stopped studying it. I don't know how often the attorney general said he was studying things. How about we stop studying and we start doing things, like we change Miranda, like we fix what appears to be a policy of political correctness in which we missed every signal that related to Major Hasan and promoted him in the military?”

Giuliani said some “very big signals” were missed in Time Square bomber Faisal Shahzad’s patterns in the year leading up to the attack. He was “going back to Pakistan, remaining there for five or six months, bringing in -- I've forgotten exactly how much cash he brought in from Pakistan, but I think it was something like $60,000... “

“Maybe we've got to say to ourselves, let's go back and fix all this, rather than study it, to see what we're going to do. We've been at this long enough now to stop studying and start doing things.”

“They're at war with us, and we're spending time studying what rights they have,” Giuliani said. “This doesn't make much sense, Jake [Tapper]. We're worried more about the rights of the terrorists, it seems -- or at least pondering that -- more than we are urgency about actually curing some of these things that will keep us safe and not have us rely on luck, which is how we got -- got through these last two ones.”

U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr. admits that he has been talking out of his ass on Arizona’s SB1070.

"I've just expressed concerns on the basis of what I've heard about the law. But I'm not in a position to say at this point, not having read the law, not having had the chance to interact with people are doing the review, exactly what my position is."

Senator Barbara "A Pet Rock is Smarter" Boxer, pulls oil production data out of her moonbat ass

“If all of the people in the country for 25 days had the proper tire pressure in their cars you would replace all of the [West Coast’s untapped] oil. There is…this is such a little bit of oil in this area only enough to power the country for, you know, a year or so. So 25 days of people doing the proper pressure would replace it.”

Brain Food
Source: PIG News Wire [05/07/10]

Byron York cites the ‘Top 10 dumbest things said about the Arizona immigration’:

1. “The statute requires police officers to stop and question anyone who looks like an illegal immigrant.”
– New York Times editorial

2. “As the Arizona abomination makes clear, there is a desperate need for federal immigration action to stop the country from turning into a nation of vigilantes suspicious of anybody with dark skin.”
– Dana Milbank, Washington Post

3. “I can’t imagine Arizonans now reverting to German Nazi and Russian Communist techniques whereby people are required to turn one another in to the authorities on any suspicion of documentation.”
– Cardinal Roger Mahony

4. “This law creates a suspect class, based in part on ethnicity, considered guilty until they prove themselves innocent. It makes it harder for illegal immigrants to live without scrutiny — but it also makes it harder for some American citizens to live without suspicion and humiliation. Americans are not accustomed to the command ‘Your papers, please,’ however politely delivered. The distinctly American response to such a request would be ‘Go to hell,’ and then ‘See you in court.’”
– Michael Gerson, Washington Post

5. “In case the phrase ‘lawful contact’ makes it appear as if the police are authorized to act only if they observe an undocumented-looking person actually committing a crime, another section strips the statute of even that fig leaf of reassurance. ‘A person is guilty of trespassing,’ the law provides, by being ‘present on any public or private land in this state’ while lacking authorization to be in the United States — a new crime of breathing while undocumented.”
– Linda Greenhouse, New York Times

(Greenhouse’s “trespassing” allegation was based on an early version of the Arizona bill that was not the bill that became law. Her mistake was later removed from the Times site, but you can see original version here.)

6. “Federal law treats illegal immigration as a civil violation; Arizona law criminalizes it by using the legally dubious mechanism of equating the mere presence of undocumented immigrants with trespassing.”
– Washington Post editorial

(This editorial makes the same mistake as Linda Greenhouse’s “trespassing” column above.)

7. “I am saddened today at the prospect of a young Hispanic immigrant in Arizona going to the grocery store and forgetting to bring her passport and immigration documents with her. I cannot be dispassionate about the fact that the very act of her being in the grocery store will soon be a crime in the state she lives in…An immigrant who is charged with the crime of trespassing for simply being in a community without his papers on him is being told he is committing a crime by simply being.”
– Bishop Desmond Tutu, Huffington Post

(Tutu is perhaps relying on the erroneous information in the New York Times and Washington Post above.)

8. “It harkens back to apartheid where all black people in South Africa were required to carry documents in order to move from one part of town to another.”
– Cynthia Tucker, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, on ABC’s “This Week”

9. “You can imagine, if you are a Hispanic American in Arizona…suddenly, if you don’t have your papers and you took your kid out to get ice cream, you’re going to be harassed.”
– President Barack Obama

10. “This week, Arizona signed the toughest illegal immigration law in the country which will allow police to demand identification papers from anyone they suspect is in the country illegally. I know there’s some people in Arizona worried that Obama is acting like Hitler, but could we all agree that there’s nothing more Nazi than saying ‘Show me your papers?’ There’s never been a World War II movie that didn’t include the line ’show me your papers.’ It’s their catchphrase. Every time someone says ’show me your papers,’ Hitler’s family gets a residual check. So heads up, Arizona; that’s fascism. I know, I know, it’s a dry fascism, but it’s still fascism.”
– Seth Myers, “Saturday Night Live”

(From Byron’s Washington Examiner commentary)

Quotes of the Week
Source: PIG News Wire [05/07/10]

Quote 1:
“American citizens who choose to become affiliated with foreign terrorists” [should be stripped] of their citizenship and, therefore, their Miranda rights.

“Some of us have started to talk about it here, which is that there is an existing law — which hasn’t been much used — that says if an American citizen is shown to be fighting in a military force that is an enemy of the United States, then that person loses their citizenship and they no longer have the rights of citizenship.”

“I think it’s time for us to look at whether we want to amend that law to apply it to American citizens who choose to become affiliated with foreign terrorist organizations, whether they should not also be deprived automatically of their citizenship, and therefore be deprived of rights that come with that citizenship when they are apprehended and charged with a terrorist act.”

Senator Joe Lieberman

Quote 2:
I mean the thing is is that and I get frustrated and there was part of me that was hoping this was not going to be anybody with ties to any kind of Islamic country because there are a lot of people who want to use this terrorist intent to justify writing off people who believe in a certain way or come from certain countries or whose skin color is a certain way. I mean they use it as justification for really outdated bigotry.

And so there was part of me was really hoping this would not be the case that here would be somebody who is not the defined. I mean he’s accused he’s arrested you know I don’t want to convict him before it’s time to do so. He’s the guy authorities say is involved. But that being said I mean we know even in recent history you have the Hutaree militia from Michigan who have plans to let’s face it create terror.

That’s what they were planning to do and they were doing so from far different backgrounds then what this guy is coming from. So, the threat is not just coming from people who decide that America is the place to be and you know come here and want to become citizens. Obviously this guy did.

MSNBC News Moonbat Contessa Brewer

Quote 3:
"Society today is paedophile, that is the problem. So, people easily fall into it. And the fact it is denounced is a good sign," said Archbishop Grings.

He denounced the abuse within the church, but he said internal punishment of priests guilty of abuse was sufficient and that police should not be involved. "For the church to go and accuse its own sons would be a little strange," he said.

The archbishop also said it was important to help children avoid homosexuality. "We know that the adolescent is spontaneously homosexual. Boys play with boys, girls play with girls," he said. "If there is no proper guidance, this sticks. The question is - how are we going to educate our children to use a sexuality that is human and suitable?"

Archbishop Grings also said the acceptance of homosexuality in society could pave the way for the acceptance of paedophilia. "When sexuality is trivialized, it's clear that this is going to affect all cases. Homosexuality is such a case. Before, the homosexual wasn't spoken of. He was discriminated against. When we begin to say they have rights, rights to demonstrate publicly, pretty soon, we'll find the rights of paedophiles."

Archbishop Dadeus Grings, a Brazilian Rosary True Believer

Recommended Reading
Source: PIG News Wire [04/30/10]

Mark Steyn excoriates the gutless wonders at Comedy Central.

Meanwhile, Comedy Central — you know, the “hip,” “edgy” network with Jon Stewart, from whom “young” Americans under 53 supposedly get most of their news — just caved in to death threats. From a hateful 83-year-old widow who doesn’t like Obamacare? Why, no! It was a chap called Abu Talhah al Amrikee, who put up a video on the Internet explaining why a South Park episode with a rather tame Mohammed joke was likely to lead to the deaths of the show’s creators. Just to underline the point, he showed some pictures of Theo van Gogh, the Dutch film director brutally murdered by (oh, my, talk about unfortunate coincidences) a fellow called Mohammed. Mr. al Amrikee helpfully explained that his video incitement of the murder of Matt Stone and Trey Parker wasn’t really “a threat but just the likely outcome.” All he was doing, he added, was “raising awareness” — you know, like folks do on Earth Day. On Earth Day, lame politicians dig a hole and stick a tree in it. But aggrieved Muslims dig a hole and stick a couple of comedy writers in it. Celebrate diversity!

Faced with this explicit threat of violence, what did Comedy Central do? Why, they folded like a Bedouin tent. They censored South Park, not only cutting all the references to Mohammed but, in an exquisitely postmodern touch, also removing the final speech about the need to stand up to intimidation.

Stone and Parker get what was at stake in the Danish-cartoons crisis and many other ostensibly footling concessions: Imperceptibly, incrementally, remorselessly, the free world is sending the message that it is happy to trade core liberties for the transitory security of a quiet life. That is a dangerous signal to give freedom’s enemies. So the South Park episode is an important cultural pushback.

Yet in the end, in a craven culture, even big Hollywood A-listers can’t get their message over. So the brave, transgressive comedy network was intimidated into caving in and censoring a speech about not being intimidated into caving in. That’s what I call “hip,” “edgy,” “cutting-edge” comedy: They’re so edgy they’re curled up in the fetal position, whimpering at the guy with the cutting edge, “Please. Behead me last. And don’t use the rusty scimitar where you have to saw away for 20 minutes to find the spinal column . . . ”

Terrific. You can see why young, urban, postmodern Americans under 57 get most of their news from Comedy Central. What a shame 1930s Fascist Europe was so lacking in cable.

Peggy Noonan, gets real about Uncle Sam’s sins against our inalienable liberty.

‘We are at a remarkable moment. We have an open, 2,000-mile border to our south, and the entity with the power to enforce the law and impose safety and order will not do it. Wall Street collapsed, taking Main Street's money with it, and the government can't really figure out what to do about it because the government itself was deeply implicated in the crash, and both political parties are full of people whose political careers have been made possible by Wall Street contributions. Meanwhile we pass huge laws, bills so comprehensive, omnibus and transformative that no one knows what's in them and no one—literally, no one—knows how exactly they will be executed or interpreted. Citizens search for new laws online, pore over them at night, and come away knowing no more than they did before they typed "dot-gov."

It is not that no one's in control. Washington is full of people who insist they're in control and who go to great lengths to display their power. It's that no one takes responsibility and authority. Washington daily delivers to the people two stark and utterly conflicting messages: "We control everything" and "You're on your own."...’

‘...[T]he larger point is that Arizona is moving forward because the government in Washington has completely abdicated its responsibility. For 10 years—at least—through two administrations, Washington deliberately did nothing to ease the crisis on the borders because politicians calculated that an air of mounting crisis would spur mounting support for what Washington thought was appropriate reform—i.e., reform that would help the Democratic and Republican parties.

Both parties resemble Gordon Brown, who is about to lose the prime ministership of Britain. On the campaign trail this week, he was famously questioned by a party voter about his stand on immigration. He gave her the verbal runaround, all boilerplate and shrugs, and later complained to an aide, on an open mic, that he'd been forced into conversation with that "bigoted woman."
He really thought she was a bigot. Because she asked about immigration. Which is, to him, a sign of at least latent racism.

The establishments of the American political parties, and the media, are full of people who think concern about illegal immigration is a mark of racism. If you were Freud you might say, "How odd that's where their minds so quickly go, how strange they're so eager to point an accusing finger. Could they be projecting onto others their own, heavily defended-against inner emotions?" But let's not do Freud, he's too interesting. Maybe they're just smug and sanctimonious.

The American president has the power to control America's borders if he wants to, but George W. Bush and Barack Obama did not and do not want to, and for the same reason, and we all know what it is. The fastest-growing demographic in America is the Hispanic vote, and if either party cracks down on illegal immigration, it risks losing that vote for generations.

But while the Democrats worry about the prospects of the Democrats and the Republicans about the well-being of the Republicans, who worries about America?

No one. Which the American people have noticed, and which adds to the dangerous alienation—actually it's at the heart of the alienation—of the age.

In the past four years, I have argued in this space that nothing can or should be done, no new federal law passed, until the border itself is secure. That is the predicate, the commonsense first step. Once existing laws are enforced and the border made peaceful, everyone in the country will be able to breathe easier and consider, without an air of clamor and crisis, what should be done next. What might that be? How about relax, see where we are, and absorb. Pass a small, clear law—say, one granting citizenship to all who serve two years in the armed forces—and then go have a Coke. Not everything has to be settled right away. Only controlling the border has to be settled right away.

Instead, our national establishments deliberately allow the crisis to grow and fester, ignoring public unrest and amusing themselves by damning anyone's attempt to deal with the problem they fear to address.

Why does the federal government do this? Because so many within it are stupid and unimaginative and don't trust the American people. Which of course the American people have noticed.

If the federal government and our political parties were imaginative, they would understand that it is actually in their interests to restore peace and order to the border. It would be a way of demonstrating that our government is still capable of functioning, that it is still to some degree connected to the people's will, that it has the broader interests of the country in mind...’

PIG-Worthy Quotes
Source: PIG News Wire [04/23/10]

Rush Limbaugh

● "The country is being overthrown, ripped apart, transformed, right before our very eyes."

● "The reality is that it's the Obama crowd that doesn't like government, that doesn't like the country. It's the Obama crowd and all of their related groups that have been protesting for as long as I've been alive that don't like the country; the tea party people love this country."

● "I, a guy on the radio who can't raise anybody's taxes, can't send anybody off to war, I cannot do one thing -- I can't harm you economically, I can't do a damn -- I am treated as an enemy of the state."

● "Obama urges more opposition to us than he does Islamic terrorists."

● "What is it that's remarkable about the tea party is that it's the first time an uprising of common, ordinary, average everyday citizens since the Civil War has risen up like this."

● "Like the millions of citizens who've peacefully risen up and attended thousands of rallies in protest, I seek nothing more than the preservation of the social contract that undergirds our society. I do not hate the government, as the left does when it is not running it. I love this country. And because I do, I insist that the temporary inhabitants of high political office comply with the Constitution, honor our God-given unalienable rights, and respect our hard-earned private property. For this I am called seditious, among other things, by some of the very people who've condemned this society?"

● "Let me just say it. The Obama/Clinton/media left are comfortable with the unrest in our society today. It allows them to blame and demonize their opponents (doctors, insurance companies, Wall Street, talk radio, Fox News) in order to portray their regime as the great healer of all our ills, thus expanding their power and control over our society.

A clear majority of the American people want no part of this. They instinctively know that the Obama way is not how things get done in this country. They are motivated by love. Not hate, not sedition. They love their country and want to save it from those who do not."

Neal Boortz posted some amazing predictions from the first Earth Day in 1970.

"We have about five more years at the outside to do something."
Kenneth Watt, ecologist

"Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind."
George Wald, Harvard Biologist

"We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation."
Barry Commoner, Washington University biologist

"Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction."
New York Times editorial, the day after the first Earth Day

"Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years."
Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

"By...[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s."
Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

"It is already too late to avoid mass starvation."
Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day

"Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions....By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine."
Peter Gunter, professor, North Texas State University

"Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support...the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution...by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half...."
Life Magazine, January 1970

"At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it's only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable."
Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

"Air pollution...is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone."
Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

"We are prospecting for the very last of our resources and using up the nonrenewable things many times faster than we are finding new ones."
Martin Litton, Sierra Club director

"By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate...that there won't be any more crude oil. You'll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill 'er up, buddy,' and he'll say, `I am very sorry, there isn't any.'"
Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

"Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct."
Sen. Gaylord Nelson

"The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age."
Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

Recommended Reading
Source: PIG News Wire [04/16/10]

Larry Kudlow analyzes the Tea Party Patriots’ ‘Contract From America’.

Of the top-10 planks in the Contract, the No. 1 issue is protect the Constitution. That's followed by reject cap-and-trade, demand a balanced budget and enact fundamental tax reform. And then comes number five: Restore fiscal responsibility and constitutionally limited government in Washington.

Note that two of the top-five priorities of the tea partiers mention the Constitution.

Filling out the Contract, the bottom-five planks are end runaway government spending; defund, repeal and replace government-run health care; pass an all-of-the-above energy policy; stop the pork; and stop the tax hikes.

What's so significant to me about this tea-party Contract From America is the strong emphasis on constitutional limits and restraints on legislation, spending, taxing and government control of the economy. Undoubtedly, the emphasis is there because no one trusts Washington.

As I read this Contract, tea partiers are reminding all of us of the need for the Constitution to protect our freedoms. They're calling for a renewal of constitutional values, including -- first and foremost -- a return to constitutional limits on government. The tea partiers who responded to this poll are demanding a rebirth of the consent of the governed. The government works for us, we don't work for it.

All this makes me think of President Reagan, who never quite succeeded in gaining a constitutional amendment for a balanced budget, or for limits on spending, or for a two-thirds congressional majority for any new tax hikes. But throughout his presidency, and for many years before, the Gipper argued for constitutional limits on government, especially government spending.

And now this message is being echoed perfectly in the tea-party Contract From America. In effect, it picks up where Reagan left off.

The tea partiers, whom I call free-market populists, desire a return to Reaganism. In particular, their demands for a balanced budget (third plank), for restoring fiscal responsibility (fifth plank), for ending massive government spending (sixth plank), and for stopping the pork (ninth plank) all underscore the populist revolt against runaway government spending, and therefore runaway government power.

There are mentions in the Contract of tax reform and stopping tax hikes. But it is pretty clear to everyone nowadays that the massive run-up in spending of recent years will inevitably result in an equally massive tax-hike movement -- that is, unless the spending is strictly curbed and reduced.

Yet the tea partiers don't trust Congress to do this, so they want to bring in constitutional restraint...

Harking back to the Founders' principles of constitutional limits to government is a very powerful message. It's a message of freedom, especially economic freedom. The tea partiers have delivered an extremely accurate diagnostic of what ails America right now: Government is growing too fast, too much, too expensively and in too many places -- and in the process it is crowding out our cherished economic freedom.

It's as though the tea partiers are saying this great country will never fulfill its long-run potential to prosper, create jobs and lead the world unless constitutional limits to government are restored.

Now, as the tea partiers rally across the country, the big question is only this: Will the political class get it?

Brain Food
Source: PIG News Wire [04/09/10]

Thomas Sowell shines a bright light on ‘Race and Politics’.
‘Few combinations are more poisonous than race and politics. That combination has torn whole nations apart and led to the slaughters of millions in countries around the world.

You might think we would have learned a lesson from that and stay away from injecting race into political issues. Yet playing the race card has become an increasingly common response to growing public anger at the policies of the Obama administration and the way those policies have been imposed.

When the triumphant Democrats made their widely televised walk up Capitol Hill after passing the health care bill, led by a smirking and strutting Nancy Pelosi, holding her oversized gavel, some of the crowd of citizens expressed their anger. According to some Democrats, these expressions of anger included racial slurs directed at black members of Congress.

This is a serious charge-- and one deserving of some serious evidence. But, despite all the media recording devices on the scene, not to mention recording devices among the crowd gathered there, nobody can come up with a single recorded sound to back up that incendiary charge. Worse yet, some people have claimed that even doubting the charge suggests that you are a racist.

Among the people who are likely to be most disappointed with the Obama administration are those who thought it would usher in a post-racial society. That they wished for such a society is a credit to their values. But that they actually expected a move in that direction suggests that they ignored both Barack Obama's history and the heavy vested interest that too many people have in race hustling.

This is just one of many areas in which this country is likely to pay a very high price for the fact that too many voters paid attention to Obama's rhetoric while ignoring his actual track record.

However soothing the Obama rhetoric, and however lofty his statements about being a uniter rather than a divider-- both racially and in terms of bipartisanship-- everything in his past fairly shouts the opposite, but only to those who follow facts.

Has he been allied with uniters or dividers in the past? Do Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers and Father Pfleger sound like uniters?...’

‘...The question is whether you want equal treatment or you want payback. Cycles of revenge and counter-revenge have been at the heart of racial and ethnic strife throughout history, in countries around the world. It is a history written in blood. It is history we don't need to repeat in the United States of America...’

Quotes of the Week
Source: PIG News Wire [04/09/10]

Rudy Guiliani takes dead aim at Messiah Barry’s ‘please don’t hit me’ nuclear posture as espoused in the new nukes treaty (START II) with those harmless fuzzballs, the Ruskies:

“A nuclear-free world has been a 60-year dream of the left, just like socialized healthcare,” Giuliani said during a recent interview with National Review Online. “This new policy, like Obama’s government-run health program, is a big step in that direction.”

The United States should not be downgrading its nuclear capabilities at a time when the nuclear threat from Iran and North Korea is increasing, Giuliani said. “President Obama thinks we can all hold hands, sing songs and have peace symbols,” Giuliani said. “North Korea and Iran are not singing along with the president.”

The former mayor and presidential candidate believes Obama fails to understand how to negotiate from a place of strength, and his desire to prevent Israel from using a military option against Iran along with his decision to back down with the Russians on missile defense show this in his opinion.

“The president doesn’t understand the concept of leverage,” said Giuliani, who was an associate attorney general in the Reagan administration. “Leverage means the other guy has to be afraid of you. I worked for a president, Ronald Reagan, who understood that brilliantly, and that’s how we won the Cold War. You need to appear to be unpredictable.

Reagan’s “State Department understood that you need to create pressure, to create something they’re afraid of. Tell me where Obama has done that.”

Instead of taking steps to guarantee national security, the Obama administration has “taken many steps backward” on a number of national security issues, Giuliani said. “Beyond nuclear policy, this is still an administration in a state of confusion about how to deal with terrorism. They’re out of control. And they have shown an inability to make tough decisions,” Giuliani said.

“It’s not inconsequential how the president dithers over so many issues, yet when it comes to dealing with Israel, one of our strongest allies, he doesn’t show much ambiguity. With Israel, he has been extremely hostile. His treatment of the Israeli prime minister [during his recent Washington visit] was shocking.” (News Max)

Required Reading
Source: PIG News Wire [04/02/10]

Writing in National Review, Jim Geraghty published a ‘Complete List of Obama Statement Expiration Dates’. We won’t give you all of them, since it’s a very LONG list, but here’s a generous, to a fault, helping, of Barry’s B. S.

HEALTH CARE MANDATES

STATEMENT: “We've got a philosophical difference, which we've debated repeatedly, and that is that Senator Clinton believes the only way to achieve universal health care is to force everybody to purchase it. And my belief is, the reason that people don't have it is not because they don't want it but because they can't afford it.” Barack Obama, speaking at a Democratic presidential debate, February 21, 2008.

EXPIRATION DATE: On March 23, 2010, Obama signed the individual mandate into law.

HEALTH CARE NEGOTIATIONS ON C-SPAN

STATEMENT: “These negotiations will be on C-SPAN, and so the public will be part of the conversation and will see the decisions that are being made.” January 20, 2008, and seven other times.

EXPIRATION DATE: Throughout the summer, fall, and winter of 2009 and 2010; when John McCain asked about it during the health care summit February 26, Obama dismissed the issue by declaring, “the campaign is over, John.”

RAISING TAXES

STATEMENT: “No family making less than $250,000 will see any form of tax increase.” (multiple times on the campaign trail)

EXPIRATION DATE: Broken multiple times, including the raised taxes on tobacco, a new tax on indoor tanning salons, but most prominently on February 11, 2010: “President Barack Obama said he is “agnostic” about raising taxes on households making less than $250,000 as part of a broad effort to rein in the budget deficit.”

RECESS APPOINTMENTS

STATEMENT: Then-Senator Obama declared that a recess appointment is “damaged goods” and has “less credibility” than a normal appointment. August 25, 2005.

EXPIRATION DATE: March 27, 2010: “If, in the interest of scoring political points, Republicans in the Senate refuse to exercise that responsibility, I must act in the interest of the American people and exercise my authority to fill these positions on an interim basis.”

BORDER SECURITY

STATEMENT: “We need tougher border security, and a renewed focus on busting up gangs and traffickers crossing our border. . . . That begins at home, with comprehensive immigration reform. That means securing our border and passing tough employer enforcement laws.” then-candidate Obama, discussing the need for border security, speaking in Miami on May 23, 2008:

EXPIRATION DATE: March 17, 2010: The Obama administration halted new work on a "virtual fence" on the U.S.-Mexican border, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced Tuesday, diverting $50 million in planned economic stimulus funds for the project to other purposes.

GUANTANAMO BAY

STATEMENT: Executive Order stating, "The detention facilities at Guantánamo for individuals covered by this order shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than one year from the date of this order." January 22, 2009.

EXPIRATION DATE: November 19, 2009: "Guantánamo, we had a specific deadline that was missed."

MILITARY TRIBUNALS

STATEMENT: “Somebody like Khalid Sheik Mohammad is gonna get basically, a full military trial with all the bells and whistles.” September 27, 2006

EXPIRATION DATE: Ongoing. “President Obama is planning to insert himself into the debate about where to try the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, three administration officials said Thursday, signaling a recognition that the administration had mishandled the process and triggered a political backlash. Obama initially had asked Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to choose the site of the trial in an effort to maintain an independent Justice Department. But the White House has been taken aback by the intense criticism from political opponents and local officials of Holder's decision to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in a civilian courtroom in New York.”

RECOVERY.GOV

STATEMENT: “We will launch a sweeping effort to root out waste, inefficiency, and unnecessary spending in our government, and every American will be able to see how and where we spend taxpayer dollars by going to a new website called recovery.gov.” – President Obama, January 28, 2009

EXPIRATION DATE: “More than two months after some of the funds were released, [Recovery.gov] offers little detail on where the money is going… The government [spent] $84 million on a website that doesn't have a search function, when its purpose is to ‘root out waste, inefficiency, and unnecessary spending in our government.’” April 2, 2009

Eighteen from his first 100 days:

1. "As President I will recognize the Armenian Genocide."

2. "I will make sure that we renegotiate [NAFTA]."

3. Opposed a Colombian Free Trade Agreement because advocates ignore that "labor leaders have been targeted for assassination on a fairly consistent basis."

4. "Now, what I’ve done throughout this campaign is to propose a net spending cut."

5. "If we see money being misspent, we're going to put a stop to it, and we will call it out and we will publicize it."

6. "Yesterday, Jim, the head of Caterpillar, said that if Congress passes our plan, this company will be able to rehire some of the folks who were just laid off."

7. "I want to go line by line through every item in the Federal budget and eliminate programs that don't work, and make sure that those that do work work better and cheaper."

8. "[My plan] will not help speculators who took risky bets on a rising market and bought homes not to live in but to sell."

9. "Instead of allowing lobbyists to slip big corporate tax breaks into bills during the dead of night, we will make sure every single tax break and earmark is available to every American online."

10. "We can no longer accept a process that doles out earmarks based on a member of Congress's seniority, rather than the merit of the project."

11. "If your family earns less than $250,000 a year, you will not see your taxes increased a single dime. I repeat: not one single dime."

12. "Barack Obama and Joe Biden believe the United States has to be frank with the Chinese about such failings and will press them to respect human rights."

13. "We must take out Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants if we have them in our sights."

14. "Lobbyists won’t work in my White House!"

15. "The real gamble in this election is playing the same Washington game with the same Washington players and expecting a different result."

16. "I'll make oil companies like Exxon pay a tax on their windfall profits, and we'll use the money to help families pay for their skyrocketing energy costs and other bills."

17. "Obama will not sign any non-emergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House website for five days." Obama is 1-for-11 on this promise so far.

18. A special one on the 100th day, "the first thing I'd do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act. That's the first thing I'd do."

Quote of the Week
Source: PIG News Wire [04/02/10]

"The Constitution does not authorize the Congress to regulate the state governments. Nevertheless, in this piece of legislation, the Congress has told the state governments that they must modify their regulation of certain areas of healthcare, they must surrender their regulation of other areas of healthcare, and they must spend state taxpayer-generated dollars in a way that the Congress wants it done."

"That's called commandeering the legislature. That's the Congress taking away the discretion of the legislature with respect to regulation, and spending taxpayer dollars. That's prohibited in a couple of Supreme Court cases. So on that argument, the attorneys general have a pretty strong case and I think they will prevail."
– Andrew J. Napolitano

Recommended Reading
Source: PIG News Wire [03/26/10]

Writing in American Thinker, Matt Patterson unleashed a eulogy for the recently deceased American Republic.

In November 2008, Americans elected a socialist as their president. In March 2010, they woke up stunned to find themselves living in a socialist country.

Health insurers -- once private companies -- are now organs of the federal government. Every citizen is a ward of the state, which can now compel you to have insurance, punish you if you don't; determine if your insurance is acceptable, punish you if it isn't. Thousands of new federal bureaucrats will soon spill from the D.C. Beltway and flood the country, scrutinizing our finances to verify compliance with this new law.

A government that grants itself this kind of power over us can conceivably do anything to us. For our own good, of course. Such a country is in no meaningful sense "free."

And this is only the beginning. Liberals are salivating in contemplation of all the fanciful window trimmings that can in the future be hung from this legislative framework. Public option will soon appear as prelude to single payer, as was the intent all along. Soon, Americans won't even have the illusion of a choice -- the government will move from subsidizer to provider, and it will be the only game in town.

So what's next? Some look to the states as possible saviors. Please. The states long ago surrendered their sovereignty, and they are now junkies on federal monies, which they need for schools, roads, Medicaid, and much else. If the citizens are now wards of the federal government, then the states long since preceded them in that sorry servitude.

The individual? What are we going to do, not pay the taxes to support this beast? Oh, they'll take that from you before you ever get your check; we gave them that power to them long ago, remember. March on Washington, en masse? Lot of good that's done thus far.

The Republicans? Assuming the GOP can take back both houses of Congress and the White House in the next couple of elections (by no means a sure thing), can you name one gigantic entitlement enacted by liberals that Republicans have successfully repealed? Or even made serious effort to repeal? Ever? Anyone?

The Courts? Sure, maybe Obamacare will work its way through the courts, and maybe the Supreme Court will finally take up the case (there is no guarantee of that, remember), and maybe the Court will not have tilted left by then, and maybe the Justices will declare it unconstitutional. Then what? Who will enforce this decision? Obamacare is already unconstitutional on its face, and yet it is the law of the land. Do you think the Democrats will say, "Oh, all-right, never mind," and cheerfully strike it from the books after their successful five-decades-long crusade?

And even if a court challenge is eventually successful, how much of the bureaucracy will by then already be in place, how many of the thousands of new regulations already in effect, how much of the billions in new taxes and fines collected, how many jobs killed, how many middle class families addicted to the entitlement?

There's a reason why Democrats were desperate to ram this through at any cost -- once enacted, such things are all but perpetual. Former freedom-loving peoples begin to tell themselves that it's really not so bad. Sure, government is forcing you to eat state-approved gruel, but hey, at least they hold the spoon, and they even pour a little sugar on top when you're good.

The worst part of watching the proceedings unfold on Sunday was the endless stream of commentators and pundits calmly discussing this bill as if it were just one more piece of bad legislation that we will have to live under. In fact, what has transpired is nothing less than an overthrow of the old Constitutional order.

In 1776, the American Republic boldly announced its birth with the Declaration of Independence. In 2010, it quietly expired with a declaration of dependence -- on government, on entitlement, and on the Democratic party.

PIG-Worthy Prose
Source: PIG News Wire [03/19/10]

Writing in American Thinker, Janice Shaw Crouse exposes the tyranny underlying the Demoncrats’ DeathCare.

What we're seeing in Washington, D.C. is not "politics as usual" with the arm twisting and "horse-trading" that is typical in getting a bill passed; instead, it is ideological warfare. What Obama, Reid, and Pelosi are doing is not legislating; it is an act of tyranny -- overturning all the rules and principles of government in a representative democracy. Attempting to pass the Senate version of ObamaCare in the House under the ironically named "Slaughter Rule" (to circumvent the objections of the Stupak coalition to taxpayer funding of abortion) is an exercise in raw power akin to the many acts of judicial tyranny the American public has endured over the last forty years from judges who have little regard for the Constitution.

Apparently Obama, Reid, and Pelosi aren't worried about losing control of Congress in 2010 or even the presidency in 2012, because their higher goal is to irrevocably institutionalize their ideology. Once government control of health care is established, their leftist principles will be implemented by an unelected bureaucracy that rules without accountability to the general public, whether or not the Democratic Party is the majority in Congress or holds the presidency.

Obama, Reid, and Pelosi have learned nothing from history; they are as blind to their own tyranny as were King George and the British Parliament. They show no comprehension of the moral outrage that will ignite in this country if they ram through ObamaCare, a bill that requires taxpayer funding for abortion, usurps an individual's right to choose her own personal health care options, and saddles the nation with a growing flood of debt which will drown our children and grandchildren.

Last Friday morning, you could see workers beginning to set up barricades around the Capitol in preparation for the demonstrations they expect in response to the Democrats' autocratic actions. They mistakenly think that the Tea Party protests are temporary flareups that mere barricades can contain, but their legislative and executive tyranny is unleashing emotions that have the potential to rival the antislavery movement of the Civil War era and the Civil Rights protests of the 1960s. Having abandoned those transcendent moral principles upon which this nation was founded for a false ideology of their own imagining, these people have no understanding of the righteous fury that will build in this nation when her citizens see their government sanction morally reprehensible acts.

Writing in American Thinker, Hal Licino asks the pertinent question: Why Does Socialism Always Fail?

‘...Why does socialism always fail? Socialism is incompatible with the most basal and rudimentary principles of human behavior. Just like an animal has to be trained to perform a particular behavior through positive reinforcement, humans will generally not perform any act of labor unless there is acceptable incentivization. Incentives are central to a free market system: indeed the entire essence of the free market economy is to provide an elegantly interconnected infrastructure of incentives to drive and direct the socio-economic framework of the nation.

These incentives are based upon the essential human drive to possess. Under the free market economic model, individuals are enabled and empowered to gain tangible value from the fruit of their labor, and be able to build lasting security through wealth. One of the major keystones of this security is to be seen in the right to privately hold property. Permanent shelter is a fundamental human desire, and many individuals in a free market system have stated that the happiest day of their lives, after their wedding or birth of their children, is the day they burned their mortgage and thus owned their homes free and clear.

There are many other forms of value, whether it is the ability to possess entertainment, sports, leisure, professional, or convenience accessories, or to be able to invest wisely in order to ensure that children are secure while retirement comes early and is comfortable. The free market system is based this inalienable right to possess within a lattice of market-set pricing and profit-and-loss accounting. It is impossible to understate the importance of these incentives and their unparalleled power to shape the economy of a nation.

Incentives under socialism are virtually non existent. When you have a nation where all property is owned by the government there is no way for the common person to build security in any way. Individuals soon recognize that they are serfs of the state, and since they are subject to the whims of the politburo of the day, have no possibility for self determination. The only way to pull yourself out of the mire is to attempt to become one of the handful of Party authorities, who are able to live in the luxurious decadence of the top capitalists...’

‘...Socialist centrally planned economies invariably fail due to their inherent and integral failure to encourage, develop, and nurture the essential potential of its people by lack of incentivization. Socialism is a failure because it suppresses the human spirit. Why else have so many thousands of people lost their lives in attempts to clandestinely escape their socialistic bondage and reach nations which embrace free market economies? In comparison, how many people have willingly left free market economies to move to socialist countries?

By its inability to foster, promote and develop the potential of people through incentives, centrally planned economies deprive the human spirit of ambition, aspiration, enterprise, determination and industry. What happens to the aspiration of a human being when there is essentially no reason to do anything? Nothing gets done.

Thus lies the core flaw of collectivist economies: When you inform a laborer that it is essentially irrelevant whether they produce one wicket a day or a hundred, and that it is also irrelevant whether those wickets are quality crafted or thrown together, as they will live in the same government owned apartment, shop at the same meagre stores, and be stuck in the same droning, monotonous job for the rest of their lives... their productivity falls steadily until almost nothing is produced. Multiply that effect by virtually every laborer in the nation, and you soon see why socialist economies are marked by long queues outside stores when the word gets out that they have soap, or bread, or eggs that day. Nobody is producing anything, thus nobody sells anything, thus there is nothing to buy...’

Quotes of the Week
Source: PIG News Wire [03/19/10]

John C. Calhoun
The necessary result, then, of the unequal fiscal action of the government is, to divide the community into two great classes; one consisting of those who, in reality, pay the taxes, and, of course, bear exclusively the burthen of supporting the government; and the other, of those who are the recipients of their proceeds, through disbursements, and who are, in fact, supported by the government; or, in fewer words, to divide it into taxpayers and tax-consumers.

But the effect of this is to place them in antagonistic relations in reference to the fiscal action of the government and the entire course of policy therewith connected. For the greater the taxes and disbursements, the greater the gain of the one and the loss of the other -- and vice versa. Consequently, the more the policy of the government is calculated to increase taxes and disbursements, the more it will be favored by the one and opposed by the other.

Walter Williams
True rights, such as those in our Constitution, or those considered to be natural or human rights, exist simultaneously among people. That means exercise of a right by one person does not diminish those held by another. In other words, my rights to speech or travel impose no obligations on another except those of non-interference. If we apply ideas behind rights to health care to my rights to speech or travel, my free speech rights would require government-imposed obligations on others to provide me with an auditorium, television studio or radio station. My right to travel freely would require government-imposed obligations on others to provide me with airfare and hotel accommodations.

For Congress to guarantee a right to health care, or any other good or service, whether a person can afford it or not, it must diminish someone else’s rights, namely their rights to their earnings. The reason is that Congress has no resources of its very own. Moreover, there is no Santa Claus, Easter Bunny or Tooth Fairy giving them those resources. The fact that government has no resources of its very own forces one to recognize that in order for government to give one American citizen a dollar, it must first, through intimidation, threats and coercion, confiscate that dollar from some other American. If one person has a right to something he did not earn, of necessity it requires that another person not have a right to something that he did earn.

To argue that people have a right that imposes obligations on another is an absurd concept. A better term for new-fangled rights to health care, decent housing and food is wishes. If we called them wishes, I would be in agreement with most other Americans for I, too, wish that everyone had adequate health care, decent housing and nutritious meals. However, if we called them human wishes, instead of human rights, there would be confusion and cognitive dissonance. The average American would cringe at the thought of government punishing one person because he refused to be pressed into making someone else’s wish come true.

None of my argument is to argue against charity. Reaching into one’s own pockets to assist his fellow man in need is praiseworthy and laudable. Reaching into someone else’s pockets to do so is despicable and deserves condemnation.

Required Reading
Source: PIG News Wire [03/12/10]

During a recent visit to the Objectivism Online site, I came across an exceptionally perceptive, well reasoned, posting in one of the discussion groups. In it, the poster, ‘Money Lover’, compares the demise of America, with the death of Ancient Greece and Rome.

"The collapse of a civilization is a drawn-out process that does not happen within one day, nor even one year. Rome had been declining for centuries before Odoacer--the first Barbarian king--took it over in 476, and that particular year brought little visible change into the lives of the inhabitants of the empire, who continued to refer to themselves as Romans. Similarly, the United States has been adopting Socialist policies ever since the passage of the first "anti-trust" act in 1890; the 2008 election is just another step down a road we have been traveling on since before Ayn Rand was born. Assigning a date to the collapse of a civilization is an exercise in abstraction: one has to choose the date of an event that symbolizes the whole centuries-long process; an event that summarizes the essence of what brought about the downfall; an event that marks a point of no return.

Dr. Peikoff recenty called Obama "the first anti-American candidate." Indeed, while there have been many un-American candidates and Presidents in the past (in fact, most of the Presidents in the 20th century can be called un-American), none of them has been as avowedly anti-American as Obama. None of them kept hearing "God damn America!" as the gospel of God during their regular Sunday visits to the institution most responsible for shaping their sense of life, their ideas of morality, and their whole implicit philosophy. None of them had the likes of Bill Ayers as their closest associates. If we give them the benefit of the doubt, we might still say about all past Presidents that they were fundamentally well-meaning individuals who honestly wanted to secure a bright future for America, but were awfully handicapped as a result of the betrayal of the nation by its nihilist intellectual establishment. Obama's choice of his friends and mentors makes it clear that securing a bright future for America is definitely not his goal.

A nation cannot elect one of its enemies as its chief executive and survive for long. If we want to find a date symbolic of America's descent into statism, I cannot think of any event in the past, nor do I think there will be any event in the future, that captures it better than the election that turned the first anti-American candidate into the first anti-American president and gave him the full support of the House as well as the Senate. November 4, 2008, is the date history ought to record as the day the first American Republic fell."

"Thus, like all abstractions, assigning a date to the fall of the original United States is much more than just an idle academic exercise. Until it becomes widely accepted that we have not been able to keep the constitutional Republic the Founders gave us, everything that happens in America will continue to be seen as an American event, and as a product of American culture, i.e. of capitalism. Only when people become aware that Washington has been taken over by an element foreign to the nation's founding spirit will they stop identifying Washington's actions with that of a capitalist government; only then will they naturally think of it as having nothing to do with the original American culture.

Many patriotic Americans will say that it is premature at this point to declare the end of the Republic. Shouldn't I at least wait to see what policies Obama actually implements (given that he has yet to fully disclose the exact nature and extent of the changes he has in store for us) before pronouncing him the Odoacer of America? But I think, if anything, one has to wonder whether November 4 of this year is too late a date to name: the United States has been much closer to a democracy than a republic for several decades now. This was not the first election in which a candidate tried to gain the support of 51 per cent of the voters by promising them a little money, to be taken from the remaining 49 per cent--and did not even find it necessary to try and explain how his plan was to be reconciled with the inalienable rights Jefferson had written about. However, it was the first election in which the candidate flatly said into the face of a member of the victimized 49 per cent that his intention was to spread their wealth around, and that he knew this will make them vote against him, but it was the other 51 per cent whose vote he was counting on."

"It is time to make it official: Washington, D.C. has fallen to the Barbarians."

American Thinker scribbler, Neil Braithwaite, draws a comparison between Messiah Barry and that legendary American showman, P. T. Barnum.

‘...While we all understand that P. T. Barnum was an exceptional entertainer and showman, his financial business philosophy was always the same -- sell the hoax. And while we may not see ourselves as "suckers" in the truest sense of the word, that's what we are if we have our doubts and still buy a ticket to see the show, and then later complain that we have somehow been taken. In capitalism, it's called "caveat emptor," which for us common folk translates to "let the buyer beware."

It becomes more obvious every day that Barack Obama has turned out to be a far greater pitchman than even P. T. Barnum could have ever imagined. President -- or should I say Pitchman -- Obama's understanding of the gullibility of humanity seems eerily similar to that of P. T. Barnum.

For starters, Obama obviously believes, as Barnum did, that "there's a sucker born every minute," and he thinks that selling his entire socialist plan for America completely depends on it. Obama's radical circus has been traveling around this great land for over a year now, with the ringmaster-in-chief telling everyone that his economic plans are working to perfection, even though the facts tell a completely different story. But the president knows that he has to convince enough suckers that his plans are actually working in order to continue his socialist agenda -- so the radical circus travels on...’

‘...President Obama's pitch for health care is a great example of how he uses P. T. Barnum's sucker strategy. With his radical circus moving from town to town, pitchman Obama shows up making outrageous claims to lure people into his health care sideshow. Standing on his soapbox, the handsome, well-dressed, fast-talking radical pitchman guarantees authenticity and satisfaction. "Step right up before it's too late, and see a universal health care system that will be the envy of the entire world," shouts the persuasive pitchman. Unfortunately, by the time many people realize they have been taken, Obama's radical circus will be long-gone.

President Obama has eclipsed P. T. Barnum's wildest dreams by pitching the biggest economic and social hoax in the history of this great nation. All that is left for this audacious ringmaster-in-chief to do is sell the hoax and implement his radical socialist plan for America...’

Recommended Reading
Source: PIG News Wire [03/05/10]

American Spectator senior editor, Quin Hillyer disects Messiah Barry’s most glaring personal flaw.

There is something way off balance in the character of Barack Obama. Something in the realm of zealotry, with a touch of megalomania, and perhaps an authoritarian impulse too. He combines Alinskyite tactics and outlook with an air of self-assumed moral superiority in a way that fails to respect the usual, small 'r' republican limits on American presidents. All presidents, of course, think at some level that they know best about policy choices. But almost none of them (Woodrow Wilson perhaps excepted) were so willing to disdain, in pursuit of such radical policy upheavals, such intense and overwhelming public opinion as has been evident in the current health takeover attempt.

Grandiose plans are one thing. Most presidents fall prey to them. It's another thing entirely, though, to refuse to accept the ordinary republican restraints on implementing grandiosities without public support, and furthermore to do so by A) bending existing rules; B) directly violating multiple personal pledges; C) ignoring constitutional limits; D) directly lying; and E) demanding that other politicians sacrifice their own political careers.

A little humility would be nice. So would a sense that he answers to the public rather than to some self-proclaimed (and self-determined) imperative of history and/or call of destiny. What Obama seems to fail to understand is that his own, overblown self-assurance and self-mythologizing is actually hampering his own goals. One need not stretch too far to observe that one of the factors adding to public opposition to Obamacare is a growing public disquietude about the lack of responsiveness, the authoritarian certitude, and the zealous near-fanaticism of the government that would run the new health-rationing system -- all character traits as embodied by the president himself.

As Obama ignores public opinion while pushing for full-fledged Obamacare in one fell swoop, and as he insists that he knows best and that the public is too ill-informed to know what is good for it, he directly -- as the very symbol of the state -- reminds the public of what they distrust about government in the first place and of why they don't want government interfering in a realm as personal as health care. These feelings are especially fierce because Obama is trying not to change something with which most Americans are dissatisfied, but instead to change (and arguably take away) a system in which some four-fifths of the public remains generally satisfied with their own personal level of care.

For most Americans, Obama doesn't seem to be giving them something they don't have, but instead to be taking away something they already value.

Worse, he and the increasingly unpopular Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are doing it while hectoring the public, insulting (at least by implication) the public by belittling the public's understanding of the issue, and treating opposition as if it is guided by evil motives rather than sincere concerns.

[Read the rest of this commentary, here: Here ]

Quotes of the Week
Source: PIG News Wire [02/26/10]

Bernie Sanders slanders rational adults who won’t drink the Globally Warmed, junk science Kool-Aid:

"It reminds me of an event that took place in this country and around the world in the late 1930s," said Sanders, perhaps the most liberal member of the Senate, during a Senate hearing Tuesday. "During that period of Nazism and fascism's growth-a real danger to this country and democratic countries around the world- there were people in this country and in the British parliament who said 'don't worry! Hitler's not real! It'll disappear!"

Lauren Ashley, Miss Beverley Hills 2010, road tests her Carrie Prejean impression for the Miss California 2010 pageant:

"The Bible says that marriage is between a man and a woman. In Leviticus it says: 'If man lies with mankind as he would lie with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. They shall surely be put to death and their blood shall be upon them.' "The Bible is pretty black and white. I feel like God himself created mankind and he loves everyone, and he has the best for everyone. If he says that having sex with someone of your same gender is going to bring death upon you, that's a pretty stern warning, and he knows more than we do about life."

Recommended Reading
Source: PIG News Wire [02/19/10]

James Lewis exposes America’s ‘Racial Socialism’.

The United States today has slipped toward race-based socialism: That's the true name for an overwhelming bias for one race above others, in employment, promotion, and educational opportunities. Our media are constantly stirring the witch's brew of racial grievances, constantly making black people feel aggrieved and white people feel accused. Our schools drive that lesson home with young and innocent kids in a totally ruthless way. Repeat that for twelve years of schooling and TV, and you have a brainwashed kid.

That is what European socialists have done with class envy for the last hundred years: whip up the poor against the middle and the rich. It's in their standard bag of tricks. The American Left has just added racial grievances to class anger and resentment, always feeding more and more power to the racial socialists to buy peace for the very grievances they have whipped up in the first place. The NAACP today practices racial socialism. So does Obama. "Racial Ssocialism" drives the Left's current assault on American values. That's why Jeremiah Wright is such a significant part of Obama's life. Wright specialized in whipping up racial anger for political purposes. Obama's career was powered by it.

Only 12.3 percent of Americans are black, and they cannot command a majority vote. It's therefore necessary to add gender socialism, because half the population are women. If enough women can be made to feel rage against normative America, along with blacks, Hispanics, and the poor, you've got majority control of the country. You can add the wackier Greens, the ones who fall for the global warming scam, the anti-nuclear scam, and all the other anti-scientific Luddites who vote Left. The Democrats control our major cities with a coalition of those whipped-up grievance groups.

We are no longer a society run by talent, work, and opportunity. Like ancient Egypt and Sumer, we are a society where the ruling class exploits its productive workers by taxing their labor, talent, and ability to recognize and use new opportunities.

Barack H. Obama is the logical outcome of racial socialism. You can see it in his words and actions, and his very physical stance, all signaling his sense of superiority, the flip-side of feelings of inferiority he is reacting against. Obama's core support came from the Leftist alliance of grievance groups in spite of his total lack of relevant experience. Obama is objectively the least qualified person to be elected to the presidency. But the media could not say that, because it would have been non-P.C. to tell the truth.

Obama's election was a kind of guilt propitiation by the American people for the history of slavery. But that is bizarre. Living people are not responsible for what others did two hundred years ago. That is a racist idea -- it makes sense only if whites have Evil Genes -- just like traditional anti-Semitism and hatred for blacks as a race.

We are seeing the consequences right in front of our eyes today, as this administration demonstrates its incompetence and intellectual confusion about the most obvious problems we face -- the Islamist terror threat, for starters.

Recommended Reading
Source: PIG News Wire [02/12/10]

Larrey Anderson explains the "Populist Constitutionalism" which he believes is part and parcel of Tea Party patriotism.

"Populist Constitutionalism" - that's what the Tea Party is all about. Love and respect for the Constitution is driving the movement. Sharing the document, and then discussing the meaning, purpose, and the ideas of the Constitution, that is the process that is taking place as a result of this love and respect.

This discussion is what America needs right now. The Constitution (and a real federal government) is the set of principles that can unite all Americans (with the possible exception of the most radical of those on the left who want to see some kind of socialist central state.)

Social conservatives, fiscal conservatives (that might be liberal on some social issues), libertarians, and moderates can agree to disagree about issues like abortion, legalized drugs, gay marriage, etc. The Constitution teaches all of them that the resolution to these problems should be conducted on the state or community level, as opposed to the national, level.

These divergent groups agree that the federal government has, over the last several decades, stepped further and further outside of the bounds of the Constitution. Issues, including health care, cap and trade, and excessive regulation of businesses are outside of the specific powers granted to the federal government. More and more Americans are aware of this fact. And more and more Americans are sharing the promises and the premises of the Constitution with their friends and neighbors through Tea Parties being held across America. This is what I mean when I say that the Tea Party is "populist constitutionalism."

The Tea Party movement is not a one-issue (one-hit) wonder -- like prohibition. Nor is it a bunch of political zombies mesmerized by some charismatic leader like an Edwards, a Wallace, or a Perot.

The Tea Party does not need a charismatic leader. It is, essentially, an ongoing educational process -- that will be heard (one way or another) by tone deaf and constitutionally ignorant politicians. The Tea Party teaches a multitude of Americans what they are no longer (or "rarely," I suppose I should write) taught in our public schools and universities: America was, from the beginning, intended to be a grand experiment in freedom and local and state control.

Take Nevada and Utah as instances. The states border each other. Yet one state endorses legalized gambling, prostitution, and easy access to liquor. Right next door, teetotaling Utah frowns on all of these "immoral" practices.

That's the way the Founding Fathers wanted America to be. They knew that different people had different needs and values. They realized that they should be free to express those values legislatively on the state and community levels. If an American finds Nevada's laws too promiscuous (or Utah's laws too restrictive), the citizen can either work to change the laws of the particular state ... or the citizen can move across state lines.

There are, and will continue to be, arguments and dissention within the Tea Party. (The media is already noting this and eating it up.) But Americans are famous for contention and debate. No populist movement (unless it is focused on a single issue like prohibition) will be in agreement on every issue. Disputation and disagreement in the Tea Party is a sign of health and enthusiasm -- not a portent of dissolution.

Populist constitutionalism is the surest and clearest path to saving our republic. Thank God (and I mean that literally) for that dedicated woman who asked me if she had brought enough copies of the Constitution to the Tea Party gathering. I will close by answering her -- as I should have when we were standing at that table: "As far as the Constitution goes, you can never have enough copies ... and we should never stop learning as much as we can about the greatest political document ever written."

Recommended Reading
Source: PIG News Wire [02/05/10]

Senator Orrin Hatch actually gets one right, when he takes Messiah Barry to the woodshed over The One’s deliberate whoppers about the Supreme Courts recent slap-down of Campaign Finance Reform.

During his State of the Union address last week, President Barack Obama attacked the Supreme Court — with the justices sitting right in front of him — for its decision that will allow American corporations and labor unions to speak during election season. Whether or not the criticism was appropriate, it should at least have been correct. Unfortunately, this time he was flat wrong.

The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, or BCRA, bans election-related expenditures and communications by American corporations. Citizens United, a nonprofit corporation, wanted to produce and advertise a movie critical of a 2008 presidential candidate and sued to argue that BCRA's speech restrictions violated the First Amendment. On Jan. 21, 2010, the Supreme Court agreed. "If the First Amendment has any force," the court said, "it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech."

That is what the case was about. Here is what it was not about: This case had nothing to do with contributions by anyone to political campaigns. The ban on such contributions by corporations, originally enacted in 1907 as the Tillman Act, remains untouched. This case had nothing to do with campaign-related spending of any kind by foreign individuals or corporations. The ban on such spending is similarly still in place.

Federal law prohibits "foreign nationals" — such as foreign individuals, corporations or any "combination of persons" — from making either campaign contributions or other expenditures in connection with federal, state or local elections. Just in case some might remain confused, the Supreme Court actually said that its decision did "not reach the question whether government has a compelling interest in preventing foreign individuals or associations from influencing our nation's political process."

This crystal clarity renders Obama's State of the Union attack on the court completely baffling. He said that "the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections" and made possible the bankrolling of American elections by "foreign entities." That claim brought Democrats to their feet and has inflamed the Democratic political base, but the claim is patently false.

If the "century of law" that Obama mentioned refers to the 1907 Tillman Act, he is flat wrong. The case did not involve campaign contributions at all, and Citizens United did not challenge the Tillman Act. Neither Citizens United's legal briefs nor Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion even mentions it. The only reference to the Tillman Act is in Justice John Paul Stevens's dissenting opinion.

Obama was also flat wrong to say that the Citizens United decision opened the floodgates for foreign corporations to "spend without limit" and literally to bankroll American elections. The case was brought by an American, not a foreign, corporation. The court only once cited the statute banning election-related contributions or expenditures by foreigners, and it did so precisely to emphasize that its decision had nothing whatsoever to do with that statute.

It was unusual, and many think inappropriate, for a president to attack the Supreme Court in a State of the Union address. For him to do so about a recent decision, with the justices who rendered that decision in attendance, appears unprecedented.

To many, Obama seemed to be using them as props to push a political issue, a tactic that demeans the court and degrades the State of the Union address. But at the very least, if he is going to give such a lecture, he should be right about the facts, the law and the decision. This time, he was wrong on all counts.

Quote of the Week & Other Brain Food
Source: PIG News Wire [01/29/10]

Jules Crittenden paints a rhetorical bull’s-eye on blame-phobic Barry.

After that bizarre, defiant, blame-dodging, position-ditching, doubling-back, credit-grabbing performance, I’d be inclined to call Barack Obama a joke. But protocol and manners require me to call him the president of the United States, and after all, we’re stuck with him in that role for another three years, at least.

I don’t really want to go down the road the left did, with their rabid hatred and childish insults of George Bush. It’s probably too late to swear off that. I’ve tried really hard to be respectful to the office and the fact that he holds it. But I’m beginning to get the left’s visceral reaction to everything our often inarticulate, chimp-like former president did and said. The difference between the Bush and Obama cases is, that clown-like cheering section notwithstanding last night, even Obama’s own stalwarts are rejecting half of what he does and says, and feel he has betrayed them and let them down.

James Lewis points out the inherent pitfalls of electing an Affirmative Action President.

"You don't pick brain surgeons by the color of their skin. You pick them by competence only. Same thing with airplane pilots. But we have allowed the profoundly irrational liberal media to persuade the American public that we are supposed to pick a U.S. president by affirmative action. Obama was elected to universal Hosannas because he is black. It wasn't a secret. That's why the Left around the world went into ecstasies when Obama ran and got elected..."

"The vote in 2008 was even crazier than picking your brain surgeon by the color of his skin. If the knife slips in the surgeon's hand, you might die, but the nation as a whole doesn't. But if the president has a nervous breakdown in the Oval Office, the whole world is at risk. It's a mad, mad, mad idea to elect people on the basis of race or gender.

We have been so PC-whipped as a nation that Obama's election as a black man -- not as a competent black man, not as an experienced and well-qualified black man -- was celebrated by liberals and Leftists around the world. It is the victory of brain-dead ideology over common sense. The guy in the White House today is potentially the most dangerous, mentally fixated, and irresponsible demagogue we have ever known. Those wacky ideas are once again on the rise, not just in the schools and colleges, but even at the very centers of power. The election of Obama was by far the screwiest thing American voters have ever done. It throws doubt on the whole American experiment, because we have inflicted this disaster on ourselves.

The lesson of the Obama presidency is exactly the opposite of what our stuck-on-stupid media are telling us. It is that we must never, ever hire, promote, or elect somebody to a position of power and responsibility merely because of his race. Abraham Lincoln would not have been surprised. Neither would Martin Luther King, Jr. Even the editors of the New York Times choose schools for their kids not by race, but by educational competence. Somehow the American people have forgotten their common sense while Obama was rifling their wallets.

The captain is drunk in the deckhouse, and the ship of state is heading for the rocks. Our enemies are trying to take advantage of our failure to elect even sensible leadership. If you don't think al-Qaeda, Ahmadinejad, and the Russians will try to screw us royally under this perverse and incompetent leadership, just wait a month or two. The Chinese have taken the measure of this guy. So have the other jackals prowling around the small campfire of civilization. They know he's a pushover, and they will act accordingly. The only question is how badly we'll get burned."

The Left have advocated suicidal policies, and now they have found their way to power. But ultimately this is a failure of the American people, of our pathetic excuse for a media, and of the anti-American hatred that pervades the Left.

Yes, God protects orphans, widows, and the United States. But you can rely on pure dumb luck for only a little while before the ship of state comes to grief on that unforgiving iceberg.

[Read all of James Lewis’ ‘The Lesson of an Affirmative Action President’ on The American Thinker web site.]

Brain Food
Source: PIG News Wire [01/22/10]

James Lewis toe-tags the ‘L’ word: liberalism.

‘The name "liberalism" has now drifted so far from its moorings that it has turned into a lie. Anybody who uses "liberal" these days is trying to put one over on you. It's like Florida swampland peddlers talking about their "beautiful lakeshore." You can stop listening at that point, because nothing you're going to hear is true. Liberalism used to mean something. Today, it's pure Florida swampland, complete with snapping alligators.

Consider: Martha Coakley, the Democrat candidate for U.S. Senate for "Teddy Kennedy's seat" in Massachusetts, as Middlesex County D.A., kept in prison a victim of one of the worst miscarriages of justice during the witch-hunts of the 1990s against supposed Satanic child abusers based on pressured testimony by very young (and therefore unreliable) children. The case against the Admiraults was admirably exposed by the Wall Street Journal, who made it overwhelmingly clear that they were the innocent victims of a radical feminist delusional assault. But thanks to Martha Coakley's efforts, Gerald Amirault was left to rot in jail long after it was clear that he was innocent.

Coakley is not a liberal in any honest sense of that world. She is a radical, prosecutorial Leftist. That is how she made her bones in the Mass. Democrat Machine.

The l-word still has a positive flavor from the old days, when it meant tolerance, open-mindedness, and the active defense of freedom. That's how JFK used it. Barack Obama is not a liberal; he is a third-world Socialist of the really angry kind. Obama has been surrounded by enraged Leftists from childhood on, including those crucial four years of living in Indonesia right after the whole Communist Party was wiped out by the Indonesian military under General Sukarno. That's Obama's real experience of the world outside of Hawaii. Ever since then, Obama has chosen to be surrounded by anti-Western, anti-liberal Leftists. Jeremiah Wright is perfectly typical of Obama's crowd. Obama is mentally the most fixated president we've had for a century, because he has never bothered to look outside of his Hard Leftist circle. He doesn't know any normal people...sort of like the New York Times Editorial Board or the Faculty of Harvard.

A big chunk of the Left has always despised liberalism anyway. Marx and Lenin made a big thing out of sneering at soppy liberals. Those are the kinds of folks who raised and befriended Barry Soetoro. Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn were never liberals. They're maybe New Left Mao Zedong-worshipers, or some such thing...’

‘There's always been a huge amount of totalitarianism on the Left, all the way from Karl Marx onward. On the real Left, the lust for power always wins out over sucker slogans like democracy and peace. The real Left isn't against the Ruling Class; it just wants to be the new Ruling Class. Obama is the perfect example. When Lenin took over in Moscow, it was the Russian liberals who got a single bullet in the head.

Jonah Goldberg's book Liberal Fascism points out a lot of similarities between the modern Left and fascism -- they are only slightly different brands of Control-Freak Statism, alternative brands like Coke and Pepsi. I think he is right on the facts, but not on the labels. "Liberal fascism" sounds like a contradiction because the Left is no longer liberal.

That's all there is to it.

The name "liberalism" should be put in a museum of out-of-date political labels, like the Whigs and the Wobblies. If there is ever a real democratic rebellion in the Democrat Party, then maybe real liberalism will come back. But until such time, we can only wish that the l-word will Rest in Peace. The Left has killed it.’

Noting what appears to be a growing voter backlash, Victor Davis Hanson asks, ‘What’s going on’?

BUYING JOBS?
Voters are sick and tired of a terrible year of big spending and big deficits — especially the sight of Obama and his congressional allies almost daily talking breezily about spending what we do not have.

PROPHETS CAN’T MISLEAD?
No politician quite gets a pass for deception and prevarication. Obama in his narcissism thought his sonorous rhetoric made him exempt from a “read my lips” or “I didn’t have sex with that woman” moment. It didn’t.

A CESSATION OF CORRUPTION
We went from a Republican “culture of corruption” to a liberal cesspool of corruption. Sen. Chris Dodd lectures Wall Street while he gets sweetheart loans and vacation-home deals. Few could make up a story that the nation’s top tax lawmaker, House Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel, is a tax dodger, and the nation’s top tax enforcer, Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, is an even more egregious tax dodger. When the Democratic Senate leadership started buying health-care votes at $300 million a clip, our Congress became little more than the praetorian guard, auctioning off its support to any wannabe late Roman emperor. The idea of a muckraking Obama nominating Tom Daschle as his Health Secretary — the liberal populist who skips out of thousands of dollars in taxes on his free corporate limousine service — was the stuff of satire.

BUSH REALLY, REALLY, REALLY DID DO IT
No one likes a serial whiner. It has been a year now — and Obama still blames George W. Bush ad nauseam. He did it in Massachusetts again — and on the eve of the election, no less. Blaming the past for the mistakes of the present gets old quickly. And when one adds in the constant What’s the Matter With Kansas? brand of condescension about naïve yokels not knowing what’s good for them, it gets even worse.

WALL STREET POPULISTS
Elite liberals are not good class warriors. Factor in multi-millionaire Nancy Pelosi’s government mega-jet or Barack Obama’s various overseas junkets or the big Wall Street money that went into Obama’s near billion-dollar campaign coffers, and it is hard to take seriously Obama’s constant war against “them.”

ELMER GANTRY
Devotees turn on false prophets with a special vengeance. Obama is beginning to grate. His flip-the-switch-on, evangelical cadences at rallies sound more like a Harvard nerd doing blues imitations than Martin Luther King Jr.

LIKED BY ALL, RESPECTED BY NONE
Obama thought the antidote to “smoke ’em out,” “dead or alive,” and “bring ’em on” braggadocio was bowing to the Saudis, promulgating new and undiscovered great moments in Islamic history, and reaching out to Ahmadinejad as he rounded up and beat down reformers in the streets of Tehran.

It’s one thing to accuse Bush of shredding the Constitution, quite another to adopt his anti-terrorism protocols like tribunals, renditions, Predators, intercepts, and wiretaps. Somehow Obama offended his base by such duplicity, and then his opposition by his tokenism of trashing Bush, promising the architect of 9/11 a show trial a few blocks from the former World Trade Center, and using touchy-feely euphemisms to suggest we are not in a war against terrorism emanating from the radical Islamic world.

The best thing that could happen to Barack Obama is more Democratic losses in hodgepodge elections that might yank away our young transfixed Narcissus from his mesmerizing reflecting pool.

Almost immediately after Obama showed his ideological cards last spring, I suggested in the first weeks of his presidency that the bait-and-switch president would soon face a Carter/Clinton moment in which he could either press on with his polarizing ideology, damage his party for a generation, and eventually end up churlish and sneering at the electorate, who did not appreciate his exalted morality and genius — or triangulate and follow the Dick Morris/Bill Clinton model of talking and acting sort of centrist.

Who knows after Obama’s Scott Brown moment? We now may hear once again the old “no more Red State/Blue State” tropes, the stale campaign promises of presidential vetoes, claims of financial sobriety, the return of a “war on terror,” and smaller government.

We’re either down to all that — or Obama’s more principled road to perdition.

[I strongly recommend that you cyber surf to National Review Online and read the entire piece.]

Recommended Reading
Source: PIG News Wire [01/15/10]

Neal Boortz gets real about Obamanomics.

Obama's chief economic dog washer Christina Romer says, "The sense that we need to do more (to promote job creation) is overwhelming." Well, she's right. Trouble is, the Democrats have exactly the wrong idea of what they need to do.

If Barack Obama wants to do what is best for his fellow Democrats and their chances in the November elections, he will do something about unemployment and he will do something quick. While unemployment remains at 10%, the real unemployment rate is 17.3%. Obama and his team believe that the way to solve this is to spend MORE money. Just last week, Obama announced details of his "green jobs" program which include $2.3 billion in tax credits for companies that create "green jobs."

Green jobs? Now think about this for a moment. What we have here is simple central planning. Do you remember the days of the Soviet Union? Well, since I have a young listenership and readership, perhaps you don't. But I remember in the 60s and 70s when the Communist leaders in the Soviet Union and in Communist China would proudly announce their five year plans for this, that and the other thing. They have five-year plans for agriculture. They had five-year plans for housing. They had five-year plans for pretty much everything --- including jobs. The government decided where the jobs were going to be in the Soviet economy. The private sector played no role, because there was NO private sector.

Well doesn't that sound suspiciously like what The Community Organizer is doing now? We need jobs .. oh my do we need jobs. And what does Obama do? Let's see .. he has two basic choices. Let the private sector lead job creation, or lead job creation through government incentives and programs. What does he choose? Well .. there you have it. Let's put a tax credit out there for companies that create green jobs.

Now Obama comes by this honestly. Never forget that this man who, by his own admission, gravitated toward Communist student groups and Marxist professors during his formative college days. Never forget that he once referred to the private sector as "the enemy." This is a man who lives, breathes, eats and excretes government. He believes that America's greatness flows from government ... and that more government (and that means more centralized government planning) makes America that much greater.

Why has our private sector worked so well to create the highest standard of living civilization has ever seen? It was the lack, not the presence of centralized planning that brought us here. Millions of consumers leave their homes every single day with ballots (dollar bills) in their pockets. These tens of millions of consumers scatter throughout the marketplace casting ballots. They cast ballots for consumer goods and services all the way from $5 energy drinks to accounting services. Those who offer these consumer goods and services in the marketplace either adjust their offerings to meet the expectations and desires of those tens of millions of consumers, or they fail. The battle for consumer attention is going on hour after hour, day after day. Winners advance, losers either change their game plan or fall by the wayside. The economic winners expand and add jobs. The losers contract and eliminate jobs.

Now we have a president with a different idea. The consumers don't get to pick the winners and losers with their dollars. Those decisions will come from the White House .. and right now the White House chooses [ta da!] GREEN JOBS!

In the real world If the companies offering green products and services capture the attention and the ballots of the consumers .. then green jobs it is! If not, then these companies should fail and the jobs should go away. Obama wants to change these laws of the marketplace. So did Marx.

Romer is right. Something needs to be done .. and done fast. But Marxist-style central planning is not the answer.

Some basics: Where do the jobs come from? Small businesses, that's where. Small businesses - generally defined as companies that employ 499 or fewer people and who report their business income on someone's personal income tax return. These small businesses account for about 80% of all jobs, and are responsible for over 70% of all jobs being created today. You want jobs? This is where you get them; America's small businesses.

But what is Obama doing to or for America's small businesses? The National Federation of Independent Business' recently conducted a survey of small and independent business owners. Here's the finding:

A major concern is the level of uncertainty being created by government ... The "turbulence" created when Congress is in session is often debilitating, this year (2009) being one of the worst. Themes include "tax more," "tax the rich even more," "VAT taxes," higher energy costs due to Cap and Trade. Mandates and taxes for health care ... Uncertainty is the enemy of the real economy as well as financial markets."

Uncertainty? Can you put yourself into the head of a small business owner? This poor man or woman is anxious to expand his business. He has dreams of growth. He's also sitting on some money right now that he could use to hire more people, expand his production or business space ... he's ready to rip. But there's a problem. That problem is Democrats. He just doesn't know what they're going to do to him. The possibilities are not encouraging:

* He knows that he is going to be nailed with a 5% tax increase when the Democrats allow the Bush tax cuts to expire.

* One version of ObamaCare calls for another 5.4% tax increase on his business profits to pay for health care.

* The Democrats want to make it easier for his workplace to be unionized.

* He's going to have to pay a penalty if he doesn't provide health insurance for his employees.

* If he does provide health insurance the premiums are sure to go up.

* The Democrats Cap and Trade program will cost him even more money.

* The Democrats want to expand the Americans with Disabilities plan and the Family Leave Act to include his company.

* The Democrats are threatening to raise both his Social Security taxes and his Medicare Taxes.

And this is the type of economic climate that will encourage you, as a small businessman, to take that chance and undergo an expansion program?

Jargon Or Gibberish?
Source: London Telegraph [01/08/10]

I’ll begin this rant with a confession. When it comes to coining new terms, and playing word games, I plead guilty as charged. I’m tempted to blame this pagan scribbler proclivity on ‘my writer’s muse’, but you’d never believe it. I like words. I like making up words. In short, I like PIGlish. So sue me.

I am what I am, when it comes to word games, but I do NOT employ my PIGlish, when I’m performing my DAY JOB. Why? Because it’s counterproductive, if you can’t make your co-workers understand what the hell you’re saying. I get that, and so do you. There are, however, some word-warping pinheads who overload their mouths with buzzwords and incomprehensible jargon. It’s true here in the Obamunist Amerika and it’s true in J.O.E. (Jolly Old England), where MBA meatheads, routinely, spew these some gibberish gems.

The London Telegraph deployed what they deem the ‘Most ridiculous pieces of business jargon and their translations’:

- We need the right pin numbers: (we need it to work)

- A lighthouse on a cloudy night: (coming up with a good/bright idea)

- I'm coming into this with an open kimono: (throwing an idea out into the open but being open to criticism)

- Let's touch base about this offline: (let's meet up face to face)

- Finger in the air figure: (just an estimate)

- I think someone needs a bite of the reality sandwich: (someone needs to think a bit more practically)

- Let's run that idea up the flagpole and see if it flies: (simply trying out an idea)

- Let's not try to build a chestnut fence to keep the sand-dunes in: (face a problem head on, rather than battling it unsuccessfully)

- Expecting the moon on a stick: (when clients have ridiculous expectations)

"I’m coming at this with an open kimono"? Wow, I would flee in abject horror if any of my day job co-workers hit me with that one - cringe, shudder, nightsweats.

Brain Food
Source: PIG News Wire [12/31/09]

Phil Orenstein, discusses the coming sea change in American politics.

The majority of Americans are honest, hardworking, conservative-leaning folks who want to believe in James Stewart's character in Frank Capra's film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Jefferson Smith, the wide-eyed, idealistic new senator launches an extensive filibuster on the Senate floor abounding with the truths and vision of our Founding Fathers. Smith ultimately triumphs over the thuggery and lies of the corrupt machine politicians ruling Washington, D.C. This scenario is depressingly similar to today's political scene in our capital, and although patriotic Americans are pessimistic, they yearn to see numerous Mr. Smiths going to Washington to reclaim the basic foundational principles of America. But where will the anticipated Mr. Smiths come from?

In answer to this question, Florida's Republican congressional candidate in the 22nd District, Lt. Col. Allen West, advises us in his January Washingtoons column to place principle over party. He writes: "The GOP has to win back 40 seats in order to remove the gavel from the hands of Nancy Pelosi." We need to win an overwhelming landslide to surmount the devious liberal ploys the Democrats will utilize, cheating and lying their way to victory. Predictably, they will be employing ACORN and Organizing for America to register twelve to fifteen million potential new voters once the amnesty bill is passed as Rahm Emmanuel sits squarely in control of the 2010 census.

In order to win a landslide, we need bold leadership and a unifying conservative message, which LTC West best exemplifies today. The Reaganesque message and the type of leadership that bring hope and pride in our country's future is the model for the GOP to embrace as we scour the landscape to find and groom our prospective Mr. Smiths.

LTC West forecasts a revolution brewing in America: the Tea Party movement. These American patriots, young and old, Republican, Democrat, conservative, Libertarian, former Obama and Hillary supporters, and reformed grassroots activists are fighting daily to take our country back. They are the unknown soldiers, ridiculed among the pissant state-run media, organizing the rallies and protests, faxing, emailing, calling and petitioning their representatives on a daily basis, up until Christmas Eve and beyond to stop the destruction of our free Republic and the enslavement of all Americans to an escalating government goliath.

The Tea Party movement is real, and out of this cauldron of dissent and true patriotism will emerge the future leaders of America. The movement is now organizing and meeting in order to select and vet candidates for township, city council, school board, state assembly, state senate, and especially Congress. In order for our public elected officials to be directly accountable to the people, a mass mobilization in support of the right candidates is on the horizon. This grassroots bulwark will eliminate these new candidates' need to be indebted to special moneyed interests and the old-school political machines.

A new Reagan revolution is brewing. It is a revolution within the ranks of the GOP, as the movement sweeps in to take control of the Republican Party. The days of the top-down old guard are over. This is a bottom-up movement of the grassroots, or what Congressman Gary Ackerman (D-NY) prefers to call the angry mobs "who commandeer the town-hall meetings." It is no longer acceptable for New York GOP bosses to reject principled Conservative Doug Hoffman and instead select a tax-and-spend Republican like Dede Scozzafava for NY's 23rd Congressional District special election. Neither is it allowable for the National Republican Senatorial Committee to dismiss Marco Rubio, the new Republican star running to take back our country in favor of Obama sycophant Governor Charlie Crist for the Florida Senate race. The new Republican rising stars will win. Borrowing the words of Thomas Paine for advice to the GOP: "Lead, follow, or get out of the way."

James Lewis muses about a Stalinism revival.

The Left is now furious to finally grasp that Obama tells a constant stream of lies, just like the Chicago hustler he really is. Conservatives have known that from day one. It wasn't hard to see, but I suppose it's just as well that the Left now gets it, too. Reality hurts, but it also educates. Indeed, Nat Hentoff, who spent a career writing for the Village Voice, now believes that "Obama may be the most dangerous and destructive president in U.S. history." Hear, hear.

Green Stalinism is what we are seeing today, but the color is purely decorative. It has nothing to do with real environmentalism; after all, eco-icon Rachel Carson got DDT outlawed on totally phony evidence, thereby saving hundreds of millions of tsetse flies in Africa at the cost of millions of African children. How is that for really evil racism? How many deadly flies would you trade for the life of a child? Maybe that's what environmentalism really comes down to, but in that case, how do you tell eco-freaks from Stalinists or Hitlerites? You shall know them by their deeds, and their deeds show no difference. The whole intention behind Fraudenhagen was to impoverish the West and to hold back the developing world from creating prosperity for its people. Even Stalin destroyed Soviet agriculture only inadvertently. These folks want to do it.

Before Green Stalinism, we had other colors -- Soviet Red and Nazi Black. We forget at our peril how close those imperialistic conspiracies came to dominating the world. If the Allied Invasion of Europe had failed in 1945 -- as Eisenhower was afraid it might -- if we had lost the Battle of the Bulge -- if Hitler and Tojo had developed the atom bomb before America did -- all of our coins would have Adolf Hitler's profile embossed on them, not Abe Lincoln's. "Aryan" racism would be celebrated, and millions more Jews would be dead -- along with blacks, Gypsies, the handicapped, Chicanos, Chinese, a great many Russians, and all the other "inferior peoples." We came within a head-breadth of that reality -- a random toss of history's coin. Human history only looks inevitable in retrospect. When you live it forward, there is no inevitability at all. Just because we lucked out in the past does not mean we will in the future.

What makes Green Stalinism more than a mob fad, and more than Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, is that it shows every sign of international collusion in fraud, data manipulation, and hundreds of billions of dollars of carbon credit bribes and payoffs. The media have been mired hopelessly in this cesspit for a long, long time. To their eternal shame, so have the scientific establishment, including the great science journals -- like Nature, which was founded by Isaac Newton, and Science, established to rival Nature in publishing first-class science. Scientific American used to be a fine, credible journal, but now it is disgusting. National Geographic used to be wonderful, but it has become poisoned beyond retrieval. Need we say anything about the unspeakable BBC, the mafia-like New York Times, and the macaca-dropping Washington Post? This is all corruption -- the deepest betrayal of the role of independent media in a democratic land.

The penalty for failure in a free market is bankruptcy, and we need a genuine market purge of the corrupt Yellow Press -- a long series of richly deserved bankruptcies to wipe out the toxic lies that have poisoned our body politic. It is a sign of our times that it was a Russian daily that first exposed the distortion of Siberian temperatures manipulated by the Fraudocrats of the CRU. It was China's Premier at Fraudenhagen who asserted his national sovereignty to protect his people from the Green fanatics. Maybe the Chinese aren't looking for another Mao Zedong, and even Putin doesn't want another Stalin. They've been there, done that, and seen the dead bodies. Thanks, but no thanks.

The British Meteorological Office now looks equally complicit in fraudulent pseudoscience, but all the lines of power lead to the Labour Government of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown over the last dozen years. NASA Goddard climastrology has been run by the dreadful James Hansen, the Trofim Lysenko of Stalinism 2.0. Even the NOAA is in over their heads, because they are the ones who were responsible for the worldwide database of surface temperatures -- and have never released the raw data to the public. It is this astonishing degree of corruption, connivance, intimidation, and collusion that turns this whole business from high farce into deadly tragedy. The halls of science are now awash in corruption. The only way to clean up the mess is via mass resignations of those responsible, and that will never happen in an Obama administration. It is another reason why we must throw the bums out and hope they hit a fire hydrant as they land.

Snacks For Synapses
Source: PIG News Wire [12/25/09]

Writing in Commentary Magazine, Peter Wehner ponders the DeathCare blowback.

1. Few Democrats understand the depth and intensity of opposition that exists toward them and their agenda, especially regarding health care. Passage of this bill will only heighten the depth and intensity of the opposition. We’re seeing a political tsunami in the making, and passage of health-care legislation would only add to its size and force.

2. This health-care bill may well be historic, but not in the way the president thinks. I’m not sure we’ve ever seen anything quite like it: passage of a mammoth piece of legislation, hugely expensive and unpopular, on a strict party-line vote taken in a rush of panic because Democrats know that the more people see of ObamaCare, the less they like it.

3. The problem isn’t simply with how substantively awful the bill is but how deeply dishonest and (legally) corrupt the whole process has been. There’s already a powerful populist, anti-Washington sentiment out there, perhaps as strong as anything we’ve seen. This will add kerosene to that raging fire.

4. Democrats have sold this bill as a miracle-worker; when people see first-hand how pernicious health-care legislation will be, abstract concerns will become concrete. That will magnify the unhappiness of the polity.

5. The collateral damage to Obama from this bill is enormous. More than any candidate in our lifetime, Obama won based on the aesthetics of politics. It wasn’t because of his record; he barely had one. And it wasn’t because of his command of policy; few people knew what his top three policy priorities were. It was based instead on the sense that he was something novel, the embodiment of a “new politics” – mature, high-minded and gracious, intellectually serious. That was the core of his speeches and his candidacy. In less than a year, that core has been devoured, most of all by this health-care process.

Mr. Obama has shown himself to be a deeply partisan and polarizing figure. (“I have never been asked to engage in a single serious negotiation on any issue, nor has any other Republican,” Senator McCain reported over the weekend.) The lack of transparency in this process has been unprecedented and bordering on criminal. The president has been deeply misleading in selling this plan. Lobbyists, a bane of Obama during the campaign, are having a field day.
President Obama may succeed in passing a terribly unpopular piece of legislation – but in the process, he has shattered his carefully cultivated image. It now consists of a thousand shards.

6. This health-care bill shouldn’t be seen in isolation. It’s part of a train of events that include the stimulus package, the omnibus spending bill (complete with some 8,500 earmarks), and a record-sized budget. In addition, as Jim Manzi points out in the new issue of National Affairs:

[Under Obama] the federal government has also intervened aggressively in both the financial and industrial sectors of the economy in order to produce specific desired outcomes for particular corporations. It has nationalized America’s largest auto company (General Motors) and intervened in the bankruptcy proceedings of the third-largest auto company (Chrysler), privileging labor unions at the expense of bondholders. It has, in effect, nationalized what was America’s largest insurance company (American International Group) and largest bank (Citigroup), and appears to have exerted extra-legal financial pressure on what was the second-largest bank (Bank of America) to get it to purchase the country’s largest securities company (Merrill Lynch). The implicit government guarantees provided to home-loan giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been called in, and the federal government is now the largest de facto lender in the residential real-estate market. The government has selected the CEOs and is setting compensation at major automotive and financial companies across the country. On top of these interventions in finance and commerce, the administration and congressional Democrats are also pursuing both a new climate and energy strategy and large-scale health-care reform. Their agenda would place the government at the center of these two huge sectors of the economy…

Together, these actions tell quite a tale. Mr. Obama has revived the worst impressions of the Democratic party – profligate and undisciplined, arrogant, lovers of big government, increasers of taxes.

Writing In the American Thinker, Wendy Lynn G explains, why she, like so many members of we the people, is pissed.

On election night, I grieved from knowing, knowing what was to come: something utterly unlike the America in which I grew up with such hope and patriotic pride. I wasn't alone in this, but at the time, I didn't know it.

From day one of Obama's presidency, the dismantling commenced. We have continued to call and write to our elected officials. "We don't want the bailouts, spending, cap-and-trade, ObamaCare," etc. On April 15, 2009, I joined thousands across the country in attending our first protest. We wanted to be heard by our representatives. We believed that in addition to reading letters and fielding calls -- if they even did that -- perhaps our visibility would finally capture their attention. Then, at a town hall, the president un-presidentially and mockingly dismissed us, saying we were "waving tea bags around" like we're just a joke! As our disapproval and disagreement with the Obama agenda has grown ever louder, we have essentially asked, "can you hear us now?!" And the answer has been further dismissal, lack of acknowledgment, and blatant media attacks utilizing the aforementioned Saul Alinksy skill set.

We're trying in every way legally and officially possible to make clear that we don't want the radical meal we're being forced to eat. We fervently do not want to "fundamentally transform" America. But there is such a huge disconnect from our world to our representatives'. It's as if we are ghosts whom they can't see or hear! When someone refuses to listen, going so far as to ignore you, don't you shout louder? Doesn't it anger you? When you're attacked and belittled because you have to shout to be heard and you're still ignored, doesn't that infuriate you? These people miss that we passionately don't want what they want. The more they refuse to hear us, the more we try to make them. We are not going away.

We're justly and increasingly angry because our reps not only refuse to hear us, but they also chastise us for wanting to be heard. How else would they expect us to react when we feel so helpless and hopeless? No matter what we want, say, or do, our government is going to force us to eat a meal we never ordered. In addition, we keep saying, "no, we don't want this," but they keep putting affirmations in our mouths and proceeding with their radical agenda anyway. We are not enjoying the governmental rape of our country. We said "no," and "no" means "no" in every language. Why doesn't this matter? Every poll reflects the president's rapidly declining approval rating -- for good reason. And still, Robert Gibbs flippantly dismisses it. How are "we the people" supposed to feel? Certainly we do not feel happy, or even just mildly upset, about being disregarded. Far-left ideologues who supposedly espouse "compassionate" causes have no compassion for how we feel, nor do they have a clue that we are an angry mob of their own creation.

PIG-Worthy Prose
Source: PIG News Wire [12/18/09]

American Thinker scribbler, Lloyd Marcus, decries the NO-NADS’ demonization of manhood.

To a certain degree, radical feminists have been successful in their quest to wimpify American men. You see it in everything from the way news stories are covered to national political issues. We are overly concerned with feelings rather than doing the right thing.

I saw a great old movie based on a true story titled, "Lifeboat". After a shipwreck, a young captain attempted to save as many survivors as possible who were crammed well over capacity in a lifeboat. The captain was forced to make extremely difficult decisions: rationing food and water, dumping the almost dead overboard. A weak leader who refused to do what needed to be done would have caused the deaths of everyone. Despite strong criticism and mutiny by some, the courageous young captain took responsibility and made painful decisions which saved the lives of most of the survivors. Upon their rescue, everyone in the lifeboat was overwhelmingly grateful to the brave captain even calling him a hero. Once safe and secure on dry land, they called him a murderer. How typical. Eagles fly alone. Where are America's great men?

America needs politicians of character and strength who will say, "No" to entitlement/redistribution programs. Such counterproductive programs become law when we are seduced by characterless politicians. These scoundrels skillfully appeal to our lower nature by playing the class envy card. Like perfect suckers we demand, "Let's get those rich S.O.Bs who have succeeded on the backs of the poor!" It is also time we say no to our Oprah-ized society where everything is about feelings and everyone is a victim.

American men have a perfect example of strength and taking a stand for what is right to emulate. Ironically, it is a woman from Alaska.

Whether in athletics, business or government, controlled, well placed and appropriate amounts of testosterone is a good thing. Boldly say no to tyranny and evil. Radical feminism is a perversion. It is not representative of the desires of most men and women.

Men should take pride and honor their maleness. This in no way diminishes women. Quite the opposite, real men are not threatened and even enjoy women with healthy self images.

So look out radical feminists, we American men are back! Wow, writing this article has me feeling pretty macho fighting an urge to pound my chest and provide meat for my family. "Honey, get dressed! I'm taking you to dinner at our favorite steak house! Afterwards, we'll rent a movie. How about, "Tarzan, KING of the Jungle?"

Lloyd Marcus (black) Unhyphenated American

Another American Thinker scribe, James Lewis, explores Messiah Barry’s Marxist roots.

‘...The word "Marxist" is now used as a kind of a sly boast in academia; I just talked with a professor who calls himself a "Marxist historian," and smiles to himself when he says it. He obviously thinks he's a hero by being a Marxist in America. But according to Marxist historians themselves Red regimes killed at least 100 million people in "crimes, terror and repression," with still more dying today in North Korea. That's not even counting the dead and wounded in wars fought by Communist regimes.

Obama's early life indicates that young Barry may have been brought up as a Red Avenger against America. We know that he talks like an anti-capitalist and an anti-Constitutionalist, and that he compulsively apologizes for American actions during the Cold War. The Cold War was not something we started; it was started by Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and other totalitarian mass murderers long before the Korean War and the Vietnam War, our two hot proxy wars in the Cold War.

What we haven't understood is how deeply Obama was indoctrinated in the war against America from childhood onward. But every intelligence agency in the world has to have it figured it out, because it's all in the public record. Leftists around the world have also known it from day one, and that includes the leading Democrats. Obama was not an unknown to Democrat Party apparatchiks. Or the media. Only the American people were kept in the dark. The media and the Democrats are still doing their Obama cover-up today, and hoping they will get away with it.

Why is Obama so deeply, emotionally opposed to America's defense of freedom and democracy in the Cold War? Because Barry Soetoro was born in 1961 and lived in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta from age six to ten, the years 1967-1971 --- right after the bloodiest civil war in Indonesian history, which took place from 1965 to 1967. The Indonesian Communist Party, the PKI, was wiped out and massacred during that civil war. There is absolutely no way a Leftwing family living in Jakarta could not have been in a constant uproar during those years, even after the massacres had died down. After all, his parents were active sympathizers if not Party Members themselves, as was his biological father...’

‘...Barry's childhood and education under the guardianship of Communist Party rep Frank Marshall Davis, followed by an endless parade of far Leftist mentors from Hawaii to Harvard and Chicago, were all shaped by the identical political narrative. Every adult he ever knew told the same story. Everybody hated the same satanic enemy: American capitalism -- also known as freedom and democracy -- the CIA, the US military; Senator Joe McCarthy, President Eisenhower, and Richard Nixon. We now know that Nixon was overthrown by the American Left using the Watergate scandal, including the Washington Post's Ben Bradlee, in close coordination with the FBI's Assistant Director Mark Felt, who was Woodward and Bernstein's Deep Throat.

The Jesuits used say "Give us a boy before he is ten and we will have him for life. That's why the Ranting Reverend Wright's Church of Marxism was such a natural place for the Obamas to go every Sunday, and to bring up their own girls. It's what they were used to; it had that old home feeling.

When kids believe that their mothers and fathers are in danger, they often imagine themselves to be the saviors -- they can get a Savior Complex. (Sound familiar?) Children in abusive families often feel that way. Barry Soetoro grew up needing to rescue his side in the Cold War -- the Red side.

Human beings who think they are world saviors are narcissists from day one, because they believe they have God-like powers. How else can you Save the Planet? How else can you "keep the seas from riiiiising," as Obama said in his acceptance speech to the Democrats? Narcissism is a standard character trait on the Left. It's one of the basic differences between ideological Leftists and conservatives. Edmund Burke, the granddaddy of Anglo-American conservatism, pointed that out in his most important book, Reflections on The Revolution in France (1791).

Conservatives are generally normal people. Ideological Leftists are ambitious World Saviors who turn out to kill a lot of people who resisted being saved by coercive force. Can you think of any American conservative who acts like Obama?

Take a kid with a savior complex and raise him with an endless slew of Leftist mentors, from Mom onwards. He is the savior child as far as they are concerned -- the Red Avenger. He will redeem them in the bitter aftermath of the defeat of Communism. Barack Obama has had substitute parents -- patrons who eased his way -- throughout his life, including Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright and Emil Jones.

Notice that I have not said that Obama is dangerous. A lot depends on defeating ObamaCare, Cap and Trade, EPA regulation of CO2 and dozens of other mad and foolish schemes.

The American political system is resilient, but we must know the truth. I believe that "Red Avenger" is the ground truth of who Obama really is. It's not Obama's blackness that's at issue. It's his redness.

Brain Chow
Source: PIG News Wire [12/11/09]

Neal Boortz serves up a must read list of things that people believe.

It is beyond my imagination that people actually believe:

* That the Social Security taxes they pay are actually put into a trust fund ... an account with their name on it from which they will later draw their retirement benefits.

* That their employer actually "matches" what the government calls their "contribution" to their very own personal Social Security trust fund.

* That the founders of this nation actually wanted a system where the majority of people would decide what was and what was not to be ... with no provision for a firm set of laws that could not be breached by majority rule.

* That your average homeless bum on the streets would be enjoying a life of plenty if he had just been lucky like people with actual homes and jobs and stuff

* That it is the goal of schools owned, operated and staffed by the government to take our children and teach them to be self-sufficient so that they will not have to rely on government and politicians so much.

* That the Democrats are pushing for a health reform law because they are actually concerned about the quality, affordability and availability of health care in this country.

* That when the colonies got together and formed a federation to provide for a common defense and to oversee certain relationships between the governments and the people of the several states, it was intended for 95% of all governance to pack up and move to Washington DC.

* That our founding fathers contrived and envisioned a system where the federal government could seize money from the people of a state, and then promise to give that money back, but only if the state would pass some specific laws pleasing to the federal government.

* That there is a Constitutional right to vote in a federal election. (Well, I guess I can understand why so many people believe this; after all, this is what they're taught in the government schools.)

* That when the majority of voters figure out that they can use the ballot box to take property away from their fellow Americans, nothing bad will happen.

* That changes in the intensity of solar activity couldn't possibly have anything to do with the heating and cooling cycles we experience here on earth.

* That the evil rich don't, in fact, already pay much more than their "fair share" of all taxes, whatever that might be.

In a National Review commentary, Mark Steyn, paints a rhetorical bull’s-eye on Barry’s so-called leadership.

Obama’s speech is only about Afghanistan if you’re in Afghanistan. If you’re in Moscow or Tehran, Pyongyang or Caracas, it’s about America. And what it told them is that, if you’re a local strongman with regional ambitions, or a rogue state going nuclear, or a mischief-making kleptocracy dusting off old tsarist dreams, this president is not going to be pressing your reset button. Strange how an allegedly compelling speaker is unable to fake even perfunctory determination and resilience. Strange, too, how all the sophisticated nuances of post-Bush foreign-policy “realism” seem so unreal when you’re up there trying to sell them as a coherent strategy. Go back half a decade to when the administration was threatening to shove democracy down the throats of every two-bit basket case whether they want it or not. Democratizing the planet is, in a Council of Foreign Relations sense, “unrealistic,” but talking it up is a very realistic way of messing with the dictators’ heads. A pipsqueak like Boy Assad sleeps far more soundly today than he did back when he thought Bush meant it, and so did the demonstrators threatening his local enforcers in Lebanon.

As for Assad’s friends in Tehran, you wonder if they’re not now flouting “world opinion” merely to see how ever more watery and qualified the threats from Washington get.

One of the most interesting developments in recent months have been the emerging alliances of convenience between Iran and its clients, on the one hand, and the likes of Russia, North Korea, and Venezuela on the other. Some of this is simple mischief-making, but, in the vacuum of the Hopeychange, a lot of it shows a shrewd strategic calculation. A nuclear Tehran, for example, serves Moscow’s interest in promoting itself as a guarantor of Eastern European “security.” It’s one of the oldest of protection rackets: You need me to protect you from my psycho friend. For their part, the Sunni Arab dictatorships will soon face the choice of accepting de facto Persian regional hegemony or embarking on their own nuclearization. As for Israel, they’ll either be living under the ever-present threat of annihilation. Or they’ll be dead.

Whatever your view of this scenario, “stability” doesn’t seem to cover it. In his speech, the so-called “leader of the free world” all but physically recoiled from the job description. Sorry about that. Not his bag. In the more toxic presidential palaces, you would have to be awfully virtuous not to take advantage of such a man. And soon.

Synaptic Snacks
Source: PIG News Wire [12/04/09]

Writing in the nominally lefty Politico, John F. Harris spills the beans on 7 stories Messiah Barry doesn’t want told.

Here are seven storylines Obama needs to worry about:

He thinks he’s playing with Monopoly money
Economists and business leaders from across the ideological spectrum were urging the new president on last winter when he signed onto more than a trillion in stimulus spending and bank and auto bailouts during his first weeks in office. Many, though far from all, of these same people now agree that these actions helped avert an even worse financial catastrophe.

Along the way, however, it is clear Obama underestimated the political consequences that flow from the perception that he is a profligate spender. He also misjudged the anger in middle America about bailouts with weak and sporadic public explanations of why he believed they were necessary.

The flight of independents away from Democrats last summer — the trend that recently hammered Democrats in off-year elections in Virginia — coincided with what polls show was alarm among these voters about undisciplined big government and runaway spending. The likely passage of a health care reform package criticized as weak on cost-control will compound the problem.

Obama understands the political peril, and his team is signaling that he will use the 2010 State of the Union address to emphasize fiscal discipline. The political challenge, however, is an even bigger substantive challenge—since the most convincing way to project fiscal discipline would be actually to impose spending reductions that would cramp his own agenda and that of congressional Democrats.

Too much Leonard Nimoy
People used to make fun of Bill Clinton’s misty-eyed, raspy-voiced claims that, “I feel your pain.” The reality, however, is that Clinton’s dozen years as governor before becoming president really did leave him with a vivid sense of the concrete human dimensions of policy. He did not view programs as abstractions — he viewed them in terms of actual people he knew by name.

Obama, a legislator and law professor, is fluent in describing the nuances of problems. But his intellectuality has contributed to a growing critique that decisions are detached from rock-bottom principles.

Both Maureen Dowd in The New York Times and Joel Achenbach of The Washington Post have likened him to Star Trek’s Mr. Spock.

The Spock imagery has been especially strong during the extended review Obama has undertaken of Afghanistan policy. He’ll announce the results on Tuesday. The speech’s success will be judged not only on the logic of the presentation but on whether Obama communicates in a more visceral way what progress looks like and why it is worth achieving. No soldier wants to take a bullet in the name of nuance.

That’s the Chicago Way
This is a storyline that’s likely taken root more firmly in Washington than around the country. The rap is that his West Wing is dominated by brass-knuckled pols.

It does not help that many West Wing aides seem to relish an image of themselves as shrewd, brass-knuckled political types. In a Washington Post story this month, White House deputy chief of staff Jim Messina, referring to most of Obama’s team, said, “We are all campaign hacks.”

The problem is that many voters took Obama seriously in 2008 when he talked about wanting to create a more reasoned, non-partisan style of governance in Washington. When Republicans showed scant interest in cooperating with Obama at the start, the Obama West Wing gladly reverted to campaign hack mode.

The examples of Chicago-style politics include their delight in public battles with Rush Limbaugh and Fox News and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. (There was also a semi-public campaign of leaks aimed at Greg Craig, the White House counsel who fell out of favor.) In private, the Obama team cut an early deal — to the distaste of many congressional Democrats — that gave favorable terms to the pharmaceutical lobby in exchange for their backing his health care plans.

The lesson that many Washington insiders have drawn is that Obama wants to buy off the people he can and bowl over those he can’t. If that perception spreads beyond Washington this will scuff Obama’s brand as a new style of political leader.

He’s a pushover
If you are going to be known as a fighter, you might as well reap the benefits. But some of the same insider circles that are starting to view Obama as a bully are also starting to whisper that he’s a patsy.

It seems a bit contradictory, to be sure. But it’s a perception that began when Obama several times laid down lines — then let people cross them with seeming impunity. Last summer he told Democrats they better not go home for recess until a critical health care vote but they blew him off. He told the Israeli government he wanted a freeze in settlements but no one took him seriously. Even Fox News — which his aides prominently said should not be treated like a real news organization — then got interview time for its White House correspondent.

In truth, most of these episodes do not amount to much. But this unflattering storyline would take a more serious turn if Obama is seen as unable to deliver on his stern warnings in the escalating conflict with Iran over its nuclear program.

He sees America as another pleasant country on the U.N. roll call, somewhere between Albania and Zimbabwe
That line belonged to George H.W. Bush, excoriating Democrat Michael Dukakis in 1988. But it highlights a continuing reality: In presidential politics the safe ground has always been to be an American exceptionalist.

Politicians of both parties have embraced the idea that this country — because of its power and/or the hand of Providence — should be a singular force in the world. It would be hugely unwelcome for Obama if the perception took root that he is comfortable with a relative decline in U.S. influence or position in the world.

On this score, the reviews of Obama’s recent Asia trip were harsh.

His peculiar bow to the emperor of Japan was symbolic. But his lots-of-velvet, not-much-iron approach to China had substantive implications.

On the left, the budding storyline is that Obama has retreated from human rights in the name of cynical realism. On the right, it is that he is more interested in being President of the World than President of the United States, a critique that will be heard more in December as he stops in Oslo to pick up his Nobel Prize and then in Copenhagen for an international summit on curbing greenhouse gases.

President Pelosi
No figure in Barack Obama’s Washington, including Obama, has had more success in advancing his will than the speaker of the House, despite public approval ratings that hover in the range of Dick Cheney’s. With a mix of tough party discipline and shrewd vote-counting, she passed a version of the stimulus bill largely written by congressional Democrats, passed climate legislation, and passed her chamber’s version of health care reform. She and anti-war liberals in her caucus are clearly affecting the White House’s Afghanistan calculations.

The great hazard for Obama is if Republicans or journalists conclude — as some already have — that Pelosi’s achievements are more impressive than Obama’s or come at his expense.

This conclusion seems premature, especially with the final chapter of the health care drama yet to be written.

But it is clear that Obama has allowed the speaker to become more nearly an equal — and far from a subordinate — than many of his predecessors of both parties would have thought wise.

He’s in love with the man in the mirror
No one becomes president without a fair share of what the French call amour propre. Does Obama have more than his share of self-regard?

It’s a common theme of Washington buzz that Obama is over-exposed. He gives interviews on his sports obsessions to ESPN, cracks wise with Leno and Letterman, discusses his fitness with Men’s Health, discusses his marriage in a joint interview with first lady Michelle Obama for The New York Times. A photo the other day caught him leaving the White House clutching a copy of GQ featuring himself.

White House aides say making Obama widely available is the right strategy for communicating with Americans in an era of highly fragmented media.

But, as the novelty of a new president wears off, the Obama cult of personality risks coming off as mere vanity unless it is harnessed to tangible achievements.

 

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