Did you just see the post below how 40% of top Obama donors were given positions within the administration? Well in the name of “hiring for merit” if you worked for the Bush administration you are locked out of civil service.
There is establishing proper civil service rules for merit and then there is Chicago style use and selective enforcement of such policies.
Most of these policies go back one or two years, but five …wow. It just kills me how bureaucrats can make the most outrageous of policies sound so reasonable.
Bush fired six “serve at the pleasure of the president” US Attorneys and the elite media and the Democrats had a cow and pretended like it was a criminal act. Of course when Bill Clinton fired ALL of them in a single stroke they said it was perfectly justified.
I believe we must hold ourselves and the government to a higher standard, one that honors and supports the President’s strong commitment to a Government that is transparent and open. OPM’s responsibility to uphold the merit system is not limited to Presidential election years nor to competitive service appointments. That is why I am instituting a change in OPM policy with respect to hiring political appointees for civil service jobs.
Beginning January 1, 2010, agencies must seek prior approval from OPM before they can appoint a current or recent political appointee to a competitive or non-political excepted service position at any level under the provisions of title 5, United States Code. OPM will review these proposed appointments to ensure they comply with merit system principles and applicable civil service laws. I have delegated decisionmaking authority over these matters to career Senior Executives at OPM to avoid any hint of political influence.
In no case may an agency make an appointment of the type described below without written authorization from OPM:
The appointment of a current political Schedule A or Schedule C Executive Branch employee or a former political Schedule A or Schedule C Executive Branch employee who held the position within the last five years to a competitive or non-political excepted service position under title 5 of the U.S. Code.
The appointment of a current Non-career SES Executive Branch employee or a former Non-career SES Executive Branch employee who held the position within the last five years to a competitive or non-political excepted service position under title 5 of the U.S. Code.
Less than nine months into his four-year term of office, President Barack Obama’s record is already one of abandoned promises, sidelined issues and lack of action.
1.PROMISE BROKEN. Mr Obama said he would “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”. But the “sunlight before signing” promise has already fallen by the wayside with Mr Obama signing three major bills without public scrutiny.
2.PROMISE BROKEN. Mr Obama repeatedly said he would negotiate health care reform in televised sessions broadcast on C-SPAN, the public service network. Instead, he his approach has been no different from his predecessors, holding talks behind closed doors at the White House and Congress.
3.PROMISE BROKEN. Mr Obama solemnly pledged that “no political appointees in an Obama-Biden administration will be permitted to work on regulations or contracts directly and substantially related to their prior employer for two years”. In practice, Mr Obama has granted several waivers to this rule, allowing lobbyists to serve in the top reaches of his administration.
4.PROMISE BROKEN. Mr Obama said he would end income tax for the elderly making less than $50,000 per year, thereby eliminating taxes for seven million of them. This has not been part of his economic stimulus bill, his first budget outline or any legislation proposed by the White House.
5.PROMISE STALLED. On taking office, Mr Obama announced with great fanfare that the Guantanamo Bay prison camp would be closed within a year of his inauguration on January 20th. Defence officials now concede that this self-imposed deadline will not be met.
6.PROMISE SIDELINED. Mr Obama promised to end the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy that prohibits openly gay personnel from serving in the United States armed forces. Despite reiterating the pledge this weekend, Mr Obama shows no signs of taking concrete action on the issue.
7.PROMISE BROKEN. Mr Obama said that in 2009 and 2010 “existing businesses will receive a $3,000 refundable tax credit for each additional full-time employee hired”. Democrats on Capitol Hill opposed this and Mr Obama has quietly abandoned the proposal, omitting it from his list of requirements for draft legislation.
8.PROMISE BROKEN. During the campaign, Mr Obama promised that “as President I will recognise the Armenian genocide” carried out by the Ottoman Empire after 1915. Once in office, he travelled to Turkey and made no mention of genocide. In a statement in April on the memorial day for the genocide he spoke of the “heavy weight” of history and the “terrible events ” of the period but failed the use the g-word.
9.PROMISE SIDELINED. As a candidate, Mr Obama highlighted his support for abortion rights, stating he would back this up “by passing the Freedom of Choice Act as president”. At a press conference marking his first 100 days, Mr Obama said this was “not my highest legislative priority” and that it was important to “focus on those areas that we can agree on”.
10. PROMISE SIDELINED. Mr Obama promised to end warrantless wiretaps on the domestic communications of Americans and to “update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to provide greater oversight and accountability”. So far, he has taken no action.
“Your doing a good job Brownie.” Those are the words spoken by President Bush to the soon after to be doomed FEMA Director Michael Brown. Democrats including Barack Obama chastised the Administration for appointing cronies to government positions. Obama promised to appoint professionals based on merit. As we can see this was just another lie.
WASHINGTON — More than 40% of President Obama’s top-level fundraisers have secured posts in his administration, from key executive branch jobs to diplomatic postings in countries such as France, Spain and the Bahamas, a USA TODAY analysis finds.
Twenty of the 47 fundraisers that Obama’s campaign identified as collecting more than $500,000 have been named to government positions, the analysis found.
Overall, about 600 individuals and couples raised money from their friends, family members and business associates to help fund Obama’s presidential campaign. USA TODAY’s analysis found that 54 have been named to government positions, ranging from Cabinet and White House posts to advisory roles, such as serving on the economic recovery board charged with helping guide the country out of recession.
Nearly a year after he was elected on a pledge to change business-as-usual in Washington, Obama also has taken a cue from his predecessors and appointed fundraisers to coveted ambassadorships, drawing protests from groups representing career diplomats. A separate analysis by the American Foreign Service Association, the diplomats’ union, found that more than half of the ambassadors named by Obama so far are political appointees, said Susan Johnson, president of the association. An appointment is considered political if it does not go to a career diplomat in the State Department.
That’s a rate higher than any president in more than four decades, the group’s data show, although that could change as the White House fills more openings. Traditionally about 30% of top diplomatic jobs go to political appointees, and roughly 70% to veteran State Department employees. Ambassadors earn $153,200 to $162,900 annually.
The list of donors who got jobs:
RAISED MORE THAN $500,0000
Nicole Avant Ambassador to the Bahamas
Matthew Barzun Ambassador to Sweden
Don Beyer Ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein
Jeff Bleich Ambassador to Australia**
Richard Danzig Member, Defense Policy Board
William Eacho Ambassador to Austria
Julius Genachowski Chairman of Federal Communications Commission
Donald Gips Ambassador to South Africa
Howard Gutman Ambassador to Belgium
Scott Harris General Counsel, Department of Energy
William Kennard Ambassador to the European Union**
Bruce Oreck Ambassador to Finland
Spencer Overton Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General
Thomas Perrelli Associate Attorney General
Abigail Pollack Member, Commission to Study the Potential Creation of a National Museum of the American Latino
Charles Rivkin Ambassador to France and Monaco
John Roos Ambassador of Japan
Francisco Sanchez Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade
Alan Solomont Ambassador to Spain and Andorra**
Cynthia Stroum Ambassador to Luxembourg**
RAISED BETWEEN $200,000 and $500,000
A. Marisa Chun Deputy associate attorney general
Gregory Craig White House counsel
Norman Eisen Special counsel to the president for ethics and government reform
Michael Froman Deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs
Mark Gallogly Member, Economic Recovery Advisory Board
Max Holtzman Senior adviser to the Agriculture secretary
James Hudson Director, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development
Jeh Johnson General counsel, Department of Defense
Samuel Kaplan Ambassador to Morocco
Nicole Lamb-Hale Deputy general counsel, Commerce Department
Andres Lopez Member, Commission to Study the Potential Creation of a National Museum of the American Latino
Cindy Moelis Director, Commission on White House Fellows
William Orrick Counselor to the assistant attorney general
John Phillips Chairman, Commission on White House Fellows
In the previous installment of just how ignorant are people, Steven Crowder went to the number one public university in the country, Berkeley California, to ask a few simple questions and was able to find almost no one who could answer them.
Crowder got complaints saying that going to Berkeley wasn’t fair because California people are spacey. So Crowder went to New York to do the same experiment. The following are the results…
The best interview you may ever see on how to help bring down health care costs and get people covered, and believe it or not it was on MSNBC. The anchor here finally asked the right questions; questions that aren’t partisan gotchas but questions that are designed to look out for the folks.
The host asks a key question in the interview; why is it that we are subject to the limits our employers, the state or the union bosses put on us when it comes to picking our own health care plan? He hit the nail on the head. The time for letting someone else have so much control over our own health care choices needs to come to an end. It is time to move away from the state, union, employer based insurance to a consortium based series of health care pools that people can buy into.
The new 219 page GOP health care bill is the first step to move in that direction by incentivizing the creation of health care pools across state lines which are now prohibited by the government. The bill also creates and provides incentives for the states to create a guaranteed high risk pool for people with pre-existing conditions.
The GOP alternative removes the government barrier to buying health insurance across state lines, lets you have more choice as to the pools that you can buy into, has bogus lawsuit reform and more. The summary of the bill can be found HERE and you can examine the full text of the bill HERE.
The CBO says that this new 219 page GOP alternative bill will lower premiums by 10%, lower the deficit by 68 billion and help more people get insurance. This bill is not the “be all end all” in health insurance reform, but it is a very smart, incremental first step. Most importantly it doesn’t do any damage.
The current 2000 page Pelosi health bill has the legal mandate word “shall” in it 3,425 times. It doesn’t take a genius to see that such a bill does not expand flexibility in making your health care choices.
Obama special advisor Valerie Jerrett said on a talk show that the GOP is driving moderates like Dede Scozzafava out of the party….oh and she seemed sooooo concerned (sarcasm). This is the talking point that you hear repeated by the Democratic leadership and the elite media over and over and over again.
So this begs the question is Dede Scozzafava a moderate?
Let us examine her two claims to fame.
1 – She got the support of some union leadership because she supports a policy called “card check”
2 – She is the recipient of the Margaret Sanger Award.
Card check is a very simple proposal that the unions have been fighting to get enacted into law. It strips employees of the right to a secret ballot in workplace elections and subjects them to pressure from union thugs coercing, threatening or worse into signing a card for union membership as was the case here in Indiana (LINK).
Is there anything moderate about stripping people of basic freedoms and subjecting them to coercion and violence? There are only two ways to describe such a policy and be academically honest about it. Such a policy is undemocratic and evil. I use the word evil and not a word like unfair because evil is the right word to use. Unfair is when a soda machine steals your change; this goes way, way beyond that.
Margaret Sanger was a eugenics enthusiast (LINK) who believed that those who are born should be centrally planned. Sanger believed that blacks were inferior and that society would be served by seeing to it that as many black babies were destroyed in abortion mills as possible. It is not a coincidence that so many Planned Parenthood mills are located in or near minority inner city areas. If one were to swap out “blacks” for “Jews” in such an ideal who would it remind you of?
This is the key question and answer that everyone but the Republican Party Leadership was able to understand; there is nothing even remotely close to moderate about such positions. It is true that the Republican Party is and should be a “big tent ” party, but never forget there is a tent and such views should not only be rejected by the GOP but by good people everywhere. Some may claim that gleefully accepting an award with Sanger’s name is in no way an endorsement of Sanger’s views; perhaps no more than accepting a “Joseph Goebbels Award for Excellence in Political Communications” would be. Anyone with more than a residue of humanity and good sense would find such an award to be repulsive at best. Rudy Giuliani, who like many in the GOP believe that abortion should be legal in some circumstances, would find such an award offered to him to be insulting.
So the foolish GOP leadership spent almost a million dollars on Dede Scozzafava, who pulled off her GOP face mask the day after Halloween and endorsed the Democrat, which was utterly predictable by everyone but the GOP leadership.
If one were to wonder why so many rank and file voters are more hesitant to donate to the GOP, all they need to do is take a look at how nearly a million dollars of their hard earned money was wasted.
ATTENTION GOP LEADERSHIP
This should be a big wake up call. The Republican’s best spokesmen like Newt Gingrich can no longer rail on about how the Democratic leadership has abandoned its former principles and is now in a relentless pursuit of power to only abandon principle when it means pursuing power by supporting the NT 23 picked candidate even though she holds views that are truly repulsive to most Americans. Gingrich’s stated view on this race is too convenient and the voters are now wise to it.
The party machine and the party exists to advance a cause, but what is important is the cause, not the mechanism. When the GOP forgets this simple truth they lose elections and deserve to.
There is one more lesson the GOP leadership needs to learn. Republicans must stop accepting Democrat and elite media premises about elections and policy; in fact, they should aggressively rebuke them. The NY23 GOP leadership believed that if they hand picked a “Democrat lite” candidate that they could not lose; after all, the Democrats, the elite media types like David Frum tell them to do just that. Any political strategist who examines recent history knows that this so called “conventional wisdom” wrong.
When President George H. W. Bush agreed with Democrats in signing a tax increase that resulted in a short recession it cost him the election. At the time of the signing Democrats praised the Republican president, only to have Bill Clinton’s campaign call out Bush for breaking his “read my lips” pledge and campaign to the right of him on key issues. Clinton campaigned to the right of Bob Dole as well.
Look at the strategy that former DCCC chair Rahm Emanuel used in the 2006 and 2008 congressional elections. Emanuel put together a list of “blue dog” Democrats who ran as pro-life, pro-gun and anti-illegal immigration candidates. As Democrats they campaigned to the right and swept the congress.
John McCain is the poster child “moderate republican”. Barack Obama ran as a pro-gun Democrat who couched his rhetoric in “Reaganspeak” and lambasted President Bush for not standing up to the growth of the federal government.
Of course the Democrats have governed to the far left and are working to grow government, spending and taxes at a furious pace. Where are the endless comments from the elite media about how the Democrats have driven traditionalist proven winners out of their party such as Joe Lieberman and Zell Miller? Where are the comments from the elite media calling Dede Scozzafava out as a traitor to the party when she endorsed the Democrat? Silence.
Republicans win big when there is a clear difference between the Democrat and the Republican so long as the Republicans stick to their principles and the Democrat leadership knows it. When will the Republican leadership figure it out?
The biggest news here is the lack of transparency going on with the current process and of course all the new taxes the Democrats promised they wouldn’t levy…
In violation of the spirit of the process the bills are being merged behind closed doors with the Republicans being locked out. Remember when Obama promised transparency and how the hearings and such on the health care bill would all be on C-Span and not behind closed doors??
Just a reminder, here are Obama’s seven lies in under two minutes.
Below you will read about how what are called “Cadillac Plans” will be taxed at 40%. The bill also requires that those with pre-existing conditions and the sick cannot be turned down. It also mandates that there be limits on the differences in premiums between the old and young, healthy and sick. This will make the costs of premium go way up especially for the young. The young will choose to pay the tax penalty rather than get the insurance. But no worries, when you get sick go buy the insurance and when your better drop it.
The end result? Premiums will go up in cost and become considered Cadillac plans over time. Most good plans that are as good or better than the public option will be considered “Cadillac Plans” over time. using price forces to send you into the public option, which is the goal.
This will also make an adversarial relation ship between the doctor and the patient. The doctor will have budget schedules to meet and you will need the best care possible. One cannot serve two gods. perhaps this is why presidential advisors have said that the Hippocratic oath is taken too seriously and is a part of the problem.
This brings us back to the death panels again. Dick Morris believes that the final versions of the bill will have the same cost/benefit analysis called QARY (Quality Adjusted Remaining Years). So if you are 95 and need a pacemaker , well odds are you wont live much longer so the cost divided out over your QARY is too high so the answer is no. I know a nice married couple in their late 80’s who are in better physical shape than I am and very active. This is exactly why doctors and individuals need to make these choices and not a cost benefit analysis. And before it is said in the comments, death panels does not mean that they will decide who gets the plug pulled, rather it decides who gets the plug plugged in in the first place.
The Senate majority’s contempt for the American people rears its ugly head again. The Senate Finance Committee just voted down a GOP amendment requiring that Obamacare legislation be available online 72 hours before the panel votes. Instead, the Democrats offered to make “conceptual language” available.
Dems lied, transparency died:
WASHINGTON — Senate Finance Committee Democrats have rejected a GOP amendment that would have required a health overhaul bill to be available online for 72 hours before the committee votes.
Republicans argued that transparency is an Obama administration goal. They also noted that their constituents are demanding that they read bills before voting.
Democrats said it was a delay tactic that could have postponed a vote for weeks.
Democrat leaders legislating in special deals for their states
Oct. 20 (Bloomberg) — Nevada would get help with its Medicaid bills. The elderly in Florida and New York would receive additional Medicare benefits. And workers in so-called high-risk professions such as firefighting and construction would get a break on a new insurance tax.
Those are provisions that Senate Democrats, including Majority Leader Harry Reid, put in an $829 billion health-care bill to shield constituents from measures intended to pay for the biggest overhaul of the medical system in four decades.
The result is the new policies may be unevenly administered, with some U.S. states getting preferential treatment, a possibility that has given Republican lawmakers ammunition to attack the legislation.
“It’s going to hurt the bill and raise the level of cynicism about Washington politics,” said Senator Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican. “The provisions ought to be applied to all of the states.”
The number of special provisions is likely to grow as the full Senate begins debating the measure in coming weeks. Because Democrats are unlikely to win many Republican votes, individual lawmakers will have leverage to demand changes to satisfy parochial interests.
Baucus Senate Health Bill Costs Skyrocket Over Time
Remember when health-care reform was supposed to make life better for the middle class? That dream began to unravel this past summer when Congress proposed a bill that failed to include any competition-based reforms that would actually bend the curve of health-care costs. It fell apart completely when Democrats began papering over the gaping holes their plan would rip in the federal budget.
As it now stands, the plan proposed by Democrats and the Obama administration would not only fail to reduce the cost burden on middle-class families, it would make that burden significantly worse.
Consider the bill put forward by the Senate Finance Committee. From a budgetary perspective, it is straightforward. The bill creates a new health entitlement program that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates will grow over the longer term at a rate of 8% annually, which is much faster than the growth rate of the economy or tax revenues. This is the same growth rate as the House bill that Sen. Kent Conrad (D., N.D.) deep-sixed by asking the CBO to tell the truth about its impact on health-care costs.
To avoid the fate of the House bill and achieve a veneer of fiscal sensibility, the Senate did three things: It omitted inconvenient truths, it promised that future Congresses will make tough choices to slow entitlement spending, and it dropped the hammer on the middle class.
One inconvenient truth is the fact that Congress will not allow doctors to suffer a 24% cut in their Medicare reimbursements. Senate Democrats chose to ignore this reality and rely on the promise of a cut to make their bill add up. Taking note of this fact pushes the total cost of the bill well over $1 trillion and destroys any pretense of budget balance.
It is beyond fantastic to promise that future Congresses, for 10 straight years, will allow planned cuts in reimbursements to hospitals, other providers, and Medicare Advantage (thereby reducing the benefits of 25% of seniors in Medicare). The 1997 Balanced Budget Act pursued this strategy and successive Congresses steadily unwound its provisions. The very fact that this Congress is pursuing an expensive new entitlement belies the notion that members would be willing to cut existing ones.
Most astounding of all is what this Congress is willing to do to struggling middle-class families. The bill would impose nearly $400 billion in new taxes and fees. Nearly 90% of that burden will be shouldered by those making $200,000 or less.
It might not appear that way at first, because the dollars are collected via a 40% tax on sales by insurers of “Cadillac” policies, fees on health insurers, drug companies and device manufacturers, and an assortment of odds and ends.
But the economics are clear. These costs will be passed on to consumers by either directly raising insurance premiums, or by fueling higher health-care costs that inevitably lead to higher premiums. Consumers will pay the excise tax on high-cost plans. The Joint Committee on Taxation indicates that 87% of the burden would fall on Americans making less than $200,000, and more than half on those earning under $100,000.
Industry fees are even worse because Democrats chose to make these fees nondeductible. This means that insurance companies will have to raise premiums significantly just to break even. American families will bear a burden even greater than the $130 billion in fees that the bill intends to collect. According to my analysis, premiums will rise by as much as $200 billion over the next 10 years—and 90% will again fall on the middle class.
Senate Democrats are also erecting new barriers to middle-class ascent. A family of four making $54,000 would pay $4,800 for health insurance, with the remainder coming from subsidies. If they work harder and raise their income to $66,000, their cost of insurance rises by $2,800. In other words, earning another $12,000 raises their bill by $2,800—a marginal tax rate of 23%. Double-digit increases in effective tax rates will have detrimental effects on the incentives of millions of Americans.
Lieberman Says Baucus Health Bill Will Raise Prices and Taxes by $400 Billion:
Pricewaterhouse Coopers Report Baucus Bill will cause premiums to rise by $1700 per family by 2013.
You can examine the report yourself HERE. Fox News Analysis did an analysis with a GOP Senator
Clinton Advisor Dick Morris on What the Obama-care Bills Mean for You
Morris gives more details about the high price of Obama-care HERE and HERE.
Were Saved! Mew House Health Bill Only Costs $900 Billion and Will be Deficit Neutral for 10 Years….
House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Tuesday new estimates showed a healthcare overhaul drafted by Democrats would reduce the U.S. budget deficit over 10 years and cost less than $900 billion.
The preliminary estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office moved Democratic leaders closer to finishing a merger of three separate healthcare reform bills into one for debate on the House floor.
Ok now how did they do it….. well this is the part where the proposal gets a lot less popular.
They do it by starting the new taxes now, cutting Medicare now, reducing the rates at which doctors are reimbursed now and kicking in the “reform” five years from now so that the new government expense for the program wont fully kick in for five years.
Those of you who are old enough to remember the 1970’s know what price controls do. They limit supply and choice. Oil lines, brown outs and rolling power outages in California etc. When you can’t make sufficient profit to cover costs, growth, and unexpected economic shocks would you produce more of it?
The $871 billion estimate — well under the $900 billion limit set by President Obama — is the latest of several versions scored by congressional budget analysts, according to a Democratic aide, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss private talks. The measure would include a government-run insurance plan that pays providers at rates tied to Medicare, the aide added. That so-called “robust” public option is preferred by liberals because it would save the government money and could force private insurers to lower their own reimbursement rates, driving down the cost of health care overall. (Thats price controls which result in long wait lines and reduced quality – Editor]
But the idea is opposed by many conservative Democrats from rural areas, where Medicare rates are well below the national average. A new insurance plan that paid such low rates would be devastating to their communities financially, these Democrats say. Instead, they argue that any public plan should negotiate rates directly with providers, as private plans do.
Ed Morrissey at Hotair.com has a nice detailed explanation HERE Patientpowernow.com produced the following videos:
They produced this video criticizing Oregon State run health care and yes this is what Oregon did.
Canadians Speak Out On Health Care
This is from the Mackinac Center who has more video’s and details.
242 Patients Died of Malnutrition in British Health Service Hospitals in 2007
PRISONERS HAVE A BETTER DIET THAN NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE HOSPITAL PATIENTS, SCIENTISTS WARN
Patients in Great Britain’s government-run National Health Service (NHS) hospitals are far more likely to go hungry than criminals in jail, scientists warn.
They say frail and elderly patients do not get the help they need with meals, and nobody checks whether they get enough to eat. Despite years of Government promises to tackle poor hospital nutrition, food still arrives cold, and patients often miss out because meal times clash with tests and operations. Meanwhile, prisoners are enjoying carbohydrate-rich, low-fat foods which in many cases are better than they would have been eating on the outside.
The Daily Mail has been highlighting the scandal of old people not being fed properly in hospital as part of its Dignity for the Elderly campaign. Hospital meals are often taken away untouched, because they are either unappetizing or are placed out of patients’ reach:
The latest figures show 242 patients died of malnutrition in NHS hospitals in 2007 — the highest toll in a decade.
More than 8,000 left hospital under-nourished — double the figure when Labor came to power.
The NHS throws away 11million meals every year, and many nurses say they are too busy to help the frail eat.
Earlier this year the Mail revealed that some hospitals spend less on meals than the average prison:
Ten hospitals spent less on breakfast, lunch and an evening meal than the £2.12 (about U.S.$3.54) a day allocated for food by the prison service; one spent just £1 (about U.S.$1.67).
Although most hospitals do spend more than £2.12 (about U.S.$3.45), prisoners end up better nourished than patients, say experts from Bournemouth University.
After studying the food offered to inmates and across the NHS, they found patients face more barriers in getting good nutrition.
Liberal Democrat health spokesman Norman Lamb said: “It’s incredible that so many hospitals are failing to serve healthy meals. If prisons can serve good food then so can hospitals.”
Obama Administration Violating Hatch Act by using Tax Dollars to Politic for ObamaCare
And yes it’s illegal. In short the Department of Health and Human Services Web Site has a section on the right hand side of the page to sign up to support and lobby Congress ObamaCare. Of course there is only one option, to support it.Senator Grassley fired off a letter to HHS letting them know that it is illegal. Ed Morrissey at Hotair has more details. This administration seems to be politicizing most everything. Afghanistan, the CIA, FCC etc.
Not a surprise. So now it seems that when Obama gave up missile defense in Eastern Europe [1,2] with the stated goal of helping to get Russia on board he got nothing for it except his pals at GE getting some new contracts in Russia. Was it worth throwing Eastern Europe under the bus?
MOSCOW, Oct 14 (NYT): Denting President Obama’s hopes for a powerful ally in his campaign to press Iran on its nuclear programme, Russia’s foreign minister said Tuesday that threatening Tehran now with harsh new sanctions would be “counterproductive.”
The minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, said after meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton here that diplomacy should be given a chance to work, particularly after a meeting in Geneva this month in which the Iranian government said it would allow United Nations inspectors to visit its clandestine nuclear enrichment site near the holy city of Qum.
“At the current stage, all forces should be thrown at supporting the negotiating process,” he said. “Threats, sanctions and threats of pressure in the current situation, we are convinced, would be counterproductive.”
Mr. Lavrov’s resistance was striking given that, just three weeks before, President Dmitri A. Medvedev said that “in some cases, sanctions are inevitable.” American officials had hailed that statement as a sign that Russia was finally coming around to the Obama administration’s view that Iran is best handled with diplomacy backed by a credible threat of sanctions.
It also came after the Obama administration announced that it would retool a European missile defense system fiercely opposed by Russia. That move was thought to have paid dividends for the White House when Mr. Medvedev appeared to throw his support behind Mr. Obama on Iran, though American officials say the Russian president was also likely to have been reacting to the disclosure of the secret nuclear site near Qum.
This will influence China to resist sanctions as well at the UN who also has commercial interests in Iran.
So now it has come to this, if Israel doesn’t stop Iran, no one will. Would Obama order Americans to fire in Israeli forces should they strike? Would American pilots dare to obey such an order? I wouldn’t.
German Ship Caught in Iranian Arms Smuggling
This is not a surprise. The French, Germans, Chinese and Russians were smuggling illegal weapons to Saddam’s Iraq for years and our soldiers found the direct evidence it. And we wonder why we have to clean up so many messes in Europe’s back yard….
An “embarrassing affair,” is how one German diplomat described it. The official could also have added: potentially damaging to trans-Atlantic relations.
In an operation reported on by SPIEGEL over the weekend, US soldiers entered the freighter Hansa India in the Gulf of Suez at the beginning of October and discovered seven containers full of 7.62 millimeter ammunition suitable for Kalashnikov rifles. An eighth container was full of cartridges suitable for the manufacture of additional rounds. The incident is particularly awkward for Berlin as the Hansa India is registered to the Hamburg-based shipping company Leonhardt & Blumberg.
Investigators suspect that the arms were part of an Iranian shipment bound for either the Syrian army or for Hezbollah, the militant Islamist group. US officials have pointed out that the delivery is in violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1747, which prohibits arms shipments either into or out of Iran.
According to Leonhardt & Blumberg, the 243-meter-long (297-foot-long) ship has for years been under charter to the state-owned shipping company Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines. Two US warships halted the Hansa India after receiving a tip-off from intelligence services.
Liz Cheney Launches New Think Tank to Lead Opposition to Obama Foreign Policy
While Sarah Palin has become the main voice of GOP opposition to the far left policies of the Democratic leadership, Liz Cheney has taken the leading role in opposing administration foreign policy and national security policy.
I am an admirer of Liz Cheney, she is very smart, informed, tough, and very lovely. Palin/Cheney dream ticket?
The mission of Keep America Safe is to provide information for concerned Americans about critical national security issues. Keep America Safe seeks to influence public policy by encouraging dialogue between American citizens and their elected representatives in order to produce legislation and executive action that enhances the national security of the United States.
The United States remains a nation at war. We face a growing threat from rogue regimes that seek or have already obtained nuclear weapons. America’s interests are challenged by an authoritarian China, a resurgent Russia, and dictators in our own hemisphere who ally themselves with our adversaries. Amidst the great challenges to America’s security and prosperity, the current administration too often seems uncertain, wishful, irresolute, and unwilling to stand up for America, our allies and our interests.
Since 9/11, the United States Government, through our armed forces and our intelligence and law enforcement professionals, has succeeded in preventing any further attacks on the American homeland. This is a major achievement. By turning away from the policies that have kept us safe, by treating terrorism as a law enforcement matter, giving foreign terrorists the same rights as American citizens, launching investigations of CIA agents, cutting defense spending, breaking faith with our allies and attempting to appease our adversaries, the current administration is weakening the nation, and making it more difficult for us to defend our security and our interests.
Keep America Safe believes the United States can only defeat our adversaries and defend our interests from a position of strength. We know that America has, for 233 years, been an unparalleled force for good in the world, that our fighting forces are the best the world has ever known, and that the world is a safer place when America is trusted by our allies and feared and respected by our enemies. Keep America Safe will make the case for an unapologetic approach to fighting terrorism around the world, for victory in the wars this country fights, for democracy and human rights, and for a strong American military that is needed in the dangerous world in which we live.
Here is their introductory video:
President’s can multi-task so the complaining about the trips and golf I think was a bit cheesy, but the rest of it is spot on. Obama certainly has reneged ion his word when it comes to Afghanistan. HERE is Keep America Safe’s youtube channel.
Here is Liz Cheney talking with Sean Hannity. Sean is a little too partisan for my tastes, but Liz is in top form:
By the way the Pew Research Center polled and discovered that most Americans support the use of force to prevent Iran from getting nukes LINK.
Liz Cheney Dismantles far CNN activist/reporter Anderson Cooper:
Jack Abramoff. Remember him? The former Republican lobbyist who was sentenced to five years for unlawful campaign fundraising and influence peddling crimes. The elite media had him on the TV and front pages for months. The New York Times published 235 stories on Jack Abramoff and of course it was a page 1 story from the beginning.
So here we have Norman Hsu, ….well lets have Associated Press tell the story:
NEW YORK – Former Democratic fundraiser Norman Hsu was sentenced Tuesday to more than 24 years in prison by a judge who accused him of funding his fraud by manipulating the political process in a way that “strikes at the very core of our democracy.”
U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero sentenced the 58-year-old Hsu, who raised money for Hillary Rodham Clinton and others, to 20 years in prison for his guilty plea to fraud charges and another four years and four months in prison for his conviction at trial for breaking campaign finance laws.
In a lengthy criticism of Hsu’s fraud, the judge said the former fundraiser used political contributions to win respect and impress investors as he committed campaign finance fraud.
“Mr. Hsu’s disgraceful use of political campaigns to perpetuate his Ponzi schemes, as well as his acts of campaign finance fraud, strikes at the very core of our democracy,” Marrero said.
The judge said Hsu stole more than $50 million from hundreds of investors in a 10-year Ponzi scheme by winning their confidence with his pristine reputation and friendly nature, a two-faced quality the judge noted was common among certain white collar criminals.
Norman Hsu with Hillary
The government said at trial that Hsu used clients of his fraudulent investment business, including actors and other political novices, as straw donors to make thousands of dollars in campaign donations. The scheme bypassed rules limiting what any individual or group can donate.
During the May trial, prosecutors played a voicemail recording of Clinton, then a senator, effusively praising Hsu for his support.
“I’ve never seen anybody who has been more loyal and more effective and really just having greater success supporting someone than you,” she told him. “Everywhere I go, you’re there. If you’re not, you’re sending people to be part of my events. You know, we’re going to win this campaign, Norman, because you single-handedly are going to make that happen.”
Hmm…. so why hasn’t anyone heard of this guy? I went on Google and what did I discover? Well a 50 million dollar scandal at the highest levels of government should be big page 1 news right? After all, Abramoff only got got five years in prison and Hsu got 24. Oh I almost forgot, these are Democrats so thats ‘different’. The New York Times published all of 19 stories on Norman Hsu, none of which indicate that they were on page 1.
So I decided to do some searching on the other big fundraising scandals since 1990. Maria Hsia, another name you likely never heard, who was funneling bundled checks of illegal money of which the reported source was the Chinese Government and other Chinese interests to the Democrats, saw 22 stories in the New York Times and even managed a single page 1 mention upon her conviction.
Of course the two biggest names in illegal fundraising from Chinese interests to the Democrats are John Huang and Charlie Yah Lin Trie. Once again, unless you listened to the few talk hosts who covered this story like Quinn & Rose these are names you have likely never heard of. They raised funds for Democrats and Governor Clinton and on into his presidency. The group operated for nearly a decade.
The story was made more egregious by the fact that there were a number of policy changes that happened from Interior to Commerce that benefited the Chinese/Indonesian group including Trie and Huang. Huang was even named a Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Commerce Department. While plead down to just a few counts, Huang and Trie’s group raised over a million dollars for the DNC and the Clinton Legal Defense Fund alone. The New York Times published 97 articles on Huang and 50 on Trie.
For more details on the depth of this corruption the Senate Report on this scandal is published HERE and published a short bio on Maria Hsia HERE.
This is a valuable lesson about what stories the elite media gives a prominent position and which ones they do not. It is one of the most effective ways they assert their own ideological bias.
Here is most the news I wanted to talk about in the last three weeks while I have been sick. Of course this resulted in falling behind on school work which didn’t help either. Keep checking back as News Roundup Part II is on the way. – Editor
ACORN has asked an “Independent Panel” to do an investigation of the organization.
Well ok come to find out it is not so independent after all.
In a press release, ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis says, that as “a result of the indefensible action of a handful of our employees,” the group will immediately stop accepting anyone into ACORN office for service programs, will conduct in-service training of staff, and begin an audit “to review all of the systems and processes called into question by the videos,” to be conducted by the group’s Independent Advisory Council.
The Council includes many prominent Democrats, including the man who helped President Obama Transition Team, John Podesta, President and CEO of the Center for American Progress; former Maryland Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend; Andrew Stern, International President of the Service Employees International Union; and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros.
Hotair.com’s new blogger Karl has a few interesting details:
Cisneros, whoworked regularly with ACORNas HUD Secretary, would laterplead guilty to lying to the FBIto cover up a political embarrassment.Perfect choice. Townsend is so inependent that she called the stories of ACORN’s frequent involvement in voter fraud a“desperate smokescreen maneuver”masking an extensive coast-to-coast GOP push to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters in 2008.No bias there. Stern heads SEIU, which hasa very cozy relationship with ACORN. How cozy? ACORN controls or significantly dominates several SEIU chapters. And Stern hand-picked ACORN’s Wade Rathke to direct SEIU’s nationwide organizing projects.He could not be more independent. And Podesta runs the Soros-funded Center for American Progress, which has beencoordinating the public defense of ACORN this summer.He might be even more independent than Andy Stern.
Results from a national Sacred Heart University survey released today reveal that many news consumers believe the media played a significant role in electing President Barack Obama and that the media continue to promote his presidency.
“A large majority, 89.3 percent, suggested the national media played a very or somewhat strong role in helping to elect President Obama,” according to a summary of the findings. “Just 10.0 percent suggested the national media played little or no role. Further, 69.9 percent agreed the national news media are intent on promoting the Obama presidency while 26.5 percent disagreed. Some, 3.6 percent, were unsure.”
And 86.6 percent said they believe the news media try to influence public opinion and that they have their own public policy and political positions. This compares to 87.6 percent in 2008 and 70.3 percent in 2003.
The survey, the third Sacred Heart survey of its kind, was conducted from Sept. 8-11. I am still seeking demographic information about the people who took the survey, which has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percent at the 95 percent confidence level.
Of those surveyed, 70.4 percent said they believe the national news media are not responsive to “consumer preferences and market desires.”
Congressional Research Service: Obama Wrong, Honduras Correct to Remove Zelaya
Another shocker and it is just like we told you HERE and HERE. The CRS Report is HERE.
The legal arguments made in the report, which was prepared by Senior Foreign Law Specialist Norma Gutierrez, are quite intricate and based in Honduran law. But the bottom line is this:
The Honduran Congress appears to have acted properly in deposing President Manuel Zelaya. Unlike in the United States, the Honduran Congress has the last word when it comes to interpreting the Constitution. Although there is no provision in Honduras’s Constitution for impeachment as such, the body does have powers to disapprove of the president’s official acts, and to replace him in the event that he is incapable of performing his duties. Most importantly, the Congress also has the authority to interpret exactly what that means.
The Supreme Court was legally entitled to ask the military to arrest Zelaya. The high court, which is the constitutional venue for trials of the president and other high-ranking officials, also recognized the Congress’s ouster of Zelaya when it referred his case back down to a lower court afterward, on the grounds that he was “no longer a high-ranking government official.”
The military did not act properly in forcibly expatriating Zelaya. According to the CRS report and other news stories, Honduran authorities are investigating their decision, which the military justified at the time as a means of preventing bloodshed. In fact, Zelaya should have been given a trial, and if convicted of seeking reelection, he would have lost his citizenship. But he is still a citizen now, and the Constitution forbids the expatriation of Honduran citizens by their government.
The proper line of succession was followed after Zelaya’s ouster. Because there was no Vice President in office when Zelaya was removed (he had resigned to run for president), Micheletti was the proper successor, as he had been president of the Congress.
“The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service concluded the removal of former President Zelaya was Constitutional, and we must respect that,” Rep. Aaron Schock said today. “It’s unconscionable the administration would attempt to force Honduras to violate its own Constitution by cutting of foreign aid.”
By the way Zelaya’s thugs trashed part of the capital of Honduras, but since the elite media is in the tank for Obama there was zero coverage of it. Gateway Pundit has the DETAILS.
Our ambassador is the only person I met there who thinks there was a ‘coup.’ Let’s release the State Department legal analysis.
In the last three months, much has been made of a supposed military “coup” that whisked former Honduran President Manuel Zelaya from power and the supposed chaos it has created.
After visiting Tegucigalpa last week and meeting with a cross section of leaders from Honduras’s government, business community, and civil society, I can report there is no chaos there. There is, however, chaos to spare in the Obama administration’s policy toward our poor and loyal allies in Honduras.
That policy was set in a snap decision the day Mr. Zelaya was removed from office, without a full assessment of either the facts or reliable legal analysis of the constitutional provisions at issue. Three months later, it remains in force, despite mounting evidence of its moral and legal incoherence.
While in Honduras, I spoke to dozens of Hondurans, from nonpartisan members of civil society to former Zelaya political allies, from Supreme Court judges to presidential candidates and even personal friends of Mr. Zelaya. Each relayed stories of a man changed and corrupted by power. The evidence of Mr. Zelaya’s abuses of presidential power—and his illegal attempts to rewrite the Honduran Constitution, a la Hugo Chávez—is not only overwhelming but uncontroverted.
As all strong democracies do after cleansing themselves of usurpers, Honduras has moved on.
The presidential election is on schedule for Nov. 29. Under Honduras’s one-term-limit, Mr. Zelaya could not have sought re-election anyway. Current President Roberto Micheletti—who was installed after Mr. Zelaya’s removal, per the Honduran Constitution—is not on the ballot either. The presidential candidates were nominated in primary elections almost a year ago, and all of them—including Mr. Zelaya’s former vice president—expect the elections to be free, fair and transparent, as has every Honduran election for a generation.
Indeed, the desire to move beyond the Zelaya era was almost universal in our meetings. Almost.
In a day packed with meetings, we met only one person in Honduras who opposed Mr. Zelaya’s ouster, who wishes his return, and who mystifyingly rejects the legitimacy of the November elections: U.S. Ambassador Hugo Llorens.
When I asked Ambassador Llorens why the U.S. government insists on labeling what appears to the entire country to be the constitutional removal of Mr. Zelaya a “coup,” he urged me to read the legal opinion drafted by the State Department’s top lawyer, Harold Koh. As it happens, I have asked to see Mr. Koh’s report before and since my trip, but all requests to publicly disclose it have been denied.
On the other hand, the only thorough examination of the facts to date—conducted by a senior analyst at the Law Library of Congress—confirms the legality and constitutionality of Mr. Zelaya’s ouster. (It’s on the Internet here .)
Unlike the Obama administration’s snap decision after June 28, the Law Library report is grounded in the facts of the case and the intricacies of Honduran constitutional law. So persuasive is the report that after its release, the New Republic’s James Kirchick concluded in an Oct. 3 article that President Obama’s hastily decided Honduras policy is now “a mistake in search of a rationale.”
Police association contractor charged with snooping on ‘Joe the Plumber’
Now lets have the government have all of our medical records and tax records tied together with Obamacare….
A former contractor for the Ohio Association of Chiefs of Police has been charged with rummaging through state computers to retrieve confidential information about “Joe the Plumber.”
Brett A. Gerke, 52, of 2329 Woodcreek Place on the Far North Side, is charged with attempted unauthorized use of property.
The Toledo-area resident was popularized as “Joe the Plumber” by Republican John McCain in a presidential debate the night before with Democrat Barack Obama.
Gerke was project manager in the development of the Ohio Local Law Enforcement Information Sharing Network, working on the project between 2004 and 2008 as a contractor for the police chiefs’ association.
Gerke used a test account and password he received to work on the project to search for information on Wurzelbacher and others, authorities say.
He was working as a contractor for the Ohio Department of Insurance at the time of the computer checks. Gerke’s lawyer, Joseph Scott of Columbus, would not comment on the case.
The Dispatch revealed several questionable checks of state computer systems for confidential information about Wurzelbacher after the presidential debate.
Helen Jones-Kelley, then director of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, authorized several computer checks on Wurzelbacher that the state inspector general concluded had no legal purpose.
Jones-Kelley, who was suspended by Gov. Ted Strickland after The Dispatch also revealed that she used her state e-mail account to raise campaign funds for Obama, later resigned. Two of her top aides also lost their jobs.
Government Blew Up GI Bill Program for Veterans Too
It’s not just cash for Clunkers, Medicare, Social Security, etc etc…
The U.S. government failed to send promised college tuition checks to tens of thousands of veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars before they returned to school this fall, even after being warned that it was inadequately staffed for the job.
The Veterans Affairs Department blamed a backlog of claims filed for GI Bill education benefits that has left veterans who counted on the money for tuition and books scrambling to make ends meet.
Veterans like American University student John Kamin, who received a letter Wednesday from the Army. He was hoping it contained news that his overdue GI Bill college tuition money would soon arrive. Instead, the Iraq war veteran was informed that he may be called back into active duty.
“It felt like salt in the wound,” said the 24-year-old from New York City. He is depleting his savings account and borrowing money from his parents to make up for thousands of dollars the government promised him to complete his political science degree.
“That was really disheartening,” Mr. Kamin said.
He isn’t alone. Out of more than 277,000 veterans who have filed for the college tuition benefits this semester, more than 200,000 claims have been processed and approved, but fewer than 11 percent of the veterans have received the funding, according to the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA).
The late-payments episode is the latest in a string of embarrassing cases of VA failures for the nation’s veterans.
Earlier this year, it was discovered that three VA medical centers failed to properly sterilize endoscopes, exposing 10,000 patients to infections including the HIV virus.
Last month, the agency sent letters to 600 veterans erroneously telling them they had been diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease.
Last year, the VA was embroiled in numerous scandals involving tests and medical experiments on veterans in which officials failed to follow certain standards.
For Obama American Decline is a Deliberate Choice
Charles Krauthammer’s brilliance on display once again. By the way he has a medical degree, degrees in political science and economics and is a board certified psychiatrist.
This is yet another of a very long list of sexist attacks against Sarah Palin from the elite media and the far left.
The news-Miner published an apology to Gov. Palin for calling her a broad HERE. Hotair.com rightly asks, “but an explanation of how editors signed off on the caption is also in order — and someone should be out looking for a new job”.
Journalism is it used to be is dead. Now you get more truth from some of the partisan press and at least they are honest enough to tell you that they have a point of view. We here at IUSB have an agenda to, to focus upon and highlight exactly what the elite media culture does not. Only that way can you be more fully informed.
The Power and Importance of New Media
CBS forged documents against president Bush, Monica Lewinski, Kathleeen Willey, Juanita Broaderick, Van Jones, ACORN , whats really in that House health care bill anyways; most of the big stories of our time are not broke by the elite media. They are broken by talk radio, blogs, Matt Drudge, and Fox News.
On Meet the Press this past Sunday, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman railed against internet news sources, referring to them as an “open sewer of untreated, unfiltered information.” He continued to mock new media, suggesting that the American public is incapable of deciphering between facts, fiction and opinion, when he said that modems should have a warning label from the surgeon general that reads “judgment not included.” What Mr. Friedman cannot understand is that web-based information sources like blogs, wikis and vlogs (video blogs) are the new beat reporters and investigative journalists of our time.
~snip
In a June 18, 2009, article in Forbes magazine, pollster John Zogby noted that over twice as many Americans trust internet news sources more than television, newspapers and radio. That poll came just eighteen months after a Harris Poll showed that 54 percent of Americans, in general, do not trust the press.
Veteran journalists such as Mr. Friedman want you to distrust new media. But it’s clear that the American people no longer trust the old press corps. Mainstream media’s complete disregard for the Van Jones controversy has highlighted the need for a new breed of watchdog – citizen’s journalists, as well as internet based professional news organizations that can bring back the investigative journalism prowess and objectivity that is lacking in the traditional Fourth Estate.
By the way, he is wrong about the “wikis”. Wikis claim to be public information but the truth is that ideological zealots, PR pros and law firms have managed to get in as “official” editors in the wiki’s to act as “watch dogs”. Wiki’s have become nothing but PR nonsense much of which is just plain inaccurate, but we know AT means well.
ACORN Took Tax and Charity $$$ for Poor and Transfered it to Themselves, Political Allies.
Documents released by a Senate Republican on Thursday show that leaders of the ACORN community organizing network transferred several million dollars in charitable and government money meant for the poor to arms of the group that have political and sometimes profit-making missions.
ACORN’s tax-exempt groups and allied organizations [~snip] used more than half their charitable and public money in 2006 to pay other ACORN affiliates, according to an analysis by the tax staff of Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa).
On Thursday, Grassley called the transactions a “big shell game” and said ACORN donors may be surprised by how the liberal group known for helping the poor obtain housing and health care was spending their money. He urged the Internal Revenue Service to take a closer look.
According to the Grassley report, charities “are being used to raise monies which are then funneled to other charities or to other organizations for purposes other than what the donor may have intended. . . . Dollars raised for charitable [purposes] appear to be used for impermissible lobbing and political activity.”
Fearful that they’re losing ground on immigration and health care, a group of House Democrats is pushing back and arguing that any health care bill should extend to all legal immigrants and allow illegal immigrants some access.
The Democrats, trying to stiffen their party’s spines on the contentious issue, say it’s unfair to bar illegal immigrants from paying their own way in a government-sponsored exchange. Legal immigrants, they say, regardless of how long they’ve been in the United States, should be able to get government-subsidized health care if they meet the other eligibility requirements.
State of Michigan to Mom: Stop Babysitting Neighbors Kids
IRVING TOWNSHIP, Mich. – Each day before the school bus comes to pick up the neighborhood’s children, Lisa Snyder did a favor for three of her fellow moms, welcoming their children into her home for about an hour before they left for school.
Regulators who oversee child care, however, don’t see it as charity. Days after the start of the new school year, Snyder received a letter from the Michigan Department of Human Services warning her that if she continued, she’d be violating a law aimed at the operators of unlicensed day care centers.
“I was freaked out. I was blown away,” she said. “I got on the phone immediately, called my husband, then I called all the girls” — that is, the mothers whose kids she watches — “every one of them.”
Snyder’s predicament has led to a debate in Michigan about whether a law that says no one may care for unrelated children in their home for more than four weeks each calendar year unless they are licensed day-care providers needs to be changed. It also has irked parents who say they depend on such friendly offers to help them balance work and family.
On Tuesday, agency Director Ismael Ahmed said good neighbors should be allowed to help each other ensure their children are safe. Gov. Jennifer Granholm instructed Ahmed to work with the state Legislature to change the law, he said.
Of course the problem is that a nameless, faceless, idiot bureaucrat had to sign off on this action. This is yet another example of how extremists, idiots and others who have no place wielding any power at all are attracted to government and education jobs.
One day after the Herald reported some surprised Bay State inmates – including murderers and rapists – were cashing in $250 stimulus checks, federal officials revealed the same behind-bars bonus was mailed to nearly 4,000 cons nationwide.
A federal watchdog is now probing how the cons were cut the checks. The same cash also may have been sent to fugitive felons, people kicked out of the country and even individuals now deceased.
All we heard from the far left during the Iraq war while they were notr just questioning it anc challenging the policy, but were actively undermining and investing in our defeat all we heard from them is “Are You Challenging My Patriotism!” and “Oh if I merely disagree with you I am Unamerican” and such rhetoric with one design. To silence their critics.
Our friend and blogging partner at Poligazette Michael van der Galien has a very good post titled “Leftists Demonize Critics” which is certainlty worth taking the time to read.
UPDATE – More leftist invective:
Included is a tny sample of the recent invective from the far left:
Bill Press, syndicated columnist and former CNN host: “There’s only one thing left: to rename the party for what it really stands for. It’s no longer the Republican Party; it’s the Hate America Party.”
Eugene Robinson, Washington Post columnist: “Why, oh why, do conservatives hate America so?…As Republican leaders — except RNC Chairman Michael Steele — are beginning to realize, “I’m With the Taliban Against America” is not likely to be a winning slogan.”
CNN Headline News host Joy Behar: Guest Richard Belzer: “We see, you know, they`re cheering when we don`t get the Olympics and – and demeaning the Nobel Prize…Joy Behar: Right, which is so un-American.
MSNBC’s host Ed Schultz: “This attack on President Obama trying to get the Olympics is about the most un-American thing I think I’ve ever seen.”
Radio host Cynthia Hardy on MSNBC’s Hardball: “So [with the case of Rep. Joe Wilson] what you get is this blatant disregard for the office of the presidency, which is extremely un-American.”
MSNBC’s host Ed Schultz: “Rush must have been popping a few too many pills that particular day. Turning a hopeful message about the resiliency of Americans into a partisan attack. That’s un-American ‘Psycho Talk,’ which is par for the course.”
Blogger Steve Clemons, appearing on MSNBC: “Jesse Helms of North Carolina was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for many years. And many of these folks that have come into their own today, particularly in the Bush administration, were essentially tutored by Helms to bring, you know, somewhat of a ‘Fortress America’ attitude to the comments, which are, I think, quite unpatriotic.”
CNN Headline News host Joy Behar: “Now why don`t you figure that this is a little unpatriotic for [Palin] to go to Hong Kong and badmouth the president of the United States? At the very least it’s disrespectful.”
Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter, appearing on MSNBC: “But they’re trying to delegitimize him in any way they can, be as disrespectful, not just to him but to the office as they can. And to my mind, to be actually, what I would call unpatriotic in their approach.”
MSNBC host Keith Olbermann: “How are Democrats, anything but at best — I`ll use this combination — irresponsible at worst, unpatriotic for giving that party more say than utterly necessary than what they have already in many amendments of this bill in health care reform.”
Here at IUSB Vision we have a category called “Palin Truth Squad“. You can see that we reported that the McCain campaign communications machine became more incompetent after the Palin announcement. It seems that Palin’s book is going to give us at least some of the details.
Later we reported that many of the McCain staffers were “David Frum” types like Steve Schmidt, that had previously overtly slandered religious conservatives and others in the Reagan wing of the party (LINK). Such people are mortified by Palin and by people such as Glenn Beck, John Gibson, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and even Brit Hume. This explains why McCain’s communications machine deliberately kept Palin away from Fox News and these other venues. They gave her a few moments with Carl Cameron at Fox, or perhaps she only did this after she went rogue, but at that time it was too little too late.
What McCain Campaign staffers did was let their emotional hostility of the Reagan wing of the party blind them to a clear asset that could have helped Palin to introduce herself to the country in a venue that would give her the opportunity to define herself clearly.
Palin should have been given interviews with Limbaugh and Hannity first, then Greta, Beck, John Gibson and then O’Reilly, Hume and Wallace so that Palin would have had the opportunity to define herself first and hone her interview skills with progressively tougher interviews in tougher venues.
To send a person who is new and undefined on the national stage to Charles Gibson and Katie Couric who set out with clear intent to destroy her (LINK2, 3, 4) with much tougher gotcha questions than those two ever asked Edwards, Obama or Biden (LINK) was foolish because since those were her first interviews, it would be by those interviews that people would have their first impression of her. As a result the McCain Campaign forfeited its opportunity to define its own Vice Presidential nominee.
If Palin had done the interviews I mentioned first and then did ABC and CBS she would have been ready, but more importantly the American people would already have had a solid first impression and definition of Sarah Palin in mind which would have put her in a much better position for a hostile interview. The result would have been ABC and CBS looking like they were playing a mean spirited gotcha game to get her and those interviews would have ended up helping her with cross pressured voters with a few smart commercials taking shots at ABC and CBS.
This is not just communications 101 folks, this is communications for dummies.
The clincher? Research now shows that cross pressured voters and independents watch Fox News. They might not always agree with Fox but they do watch it so the McCain Campaign stayed away from the audience that the campaign needed to reach the most.
The Wall Street Journal has the first tidbits from Sarah Palin’s new book, Going Rogue:
Ms. Vincent didn’t reveal any details about the book, but did acknowledge it will describe Ms. Palin’s frustration over her treatment by the staffers she inherited from the McCain campaign after her surprise pick as the GOP vice presidential nominee last year. Ms. Palin was booked on grueling interviews with hostile reporters while talk-show hosts such as Glenn Beck couldn’t even get through to her aides. Mr. Beck tells me he was stunned when he picked up the phone one day just before the election to discover Sarah Palin was on the other end of the line. “She explained that she had been blocked from reaching her audience, so she was now ‘going rogue’ and booking her own interviews,” Mr. Beck told me. “I was thrilled she had burst out of the cage they’d built for her and we were finally talking.”
What is Palin to do next?
Sarah Palin should keep building foreign policy credibility with these overseas conferences and when the time comes she needs to start re-introducing herself to the Republican base and then to the American people.
The simple truth is that a sizable chunk of the base is dismissive of her because they were overwhelmed by the elite media and SNL slander that went almost unrefuted because Palin was kept away from non-elite media venues.
Sarah Palin should come up with a phrase or an idea that sets her apart from other Republicans rhetorically and make it hers. For example: referring to the GOP as “The Party of Lincoln”, “What happened to the Party of Lincoln” or “Its time to bring back the Party of Lincoln”. It doesn’t have to be Lincoln (obviously) but it has to be something that distinguishes her from the Romney Brand and the Huckabee Brand that inspires trust.
Talk about real principles or virtues with some good foreign policy and macroeconomic details (avoid the word values because that word has baggage). Get practice in these venues and then move to moderately tougher ones. Since independents watch Fox Palin can kill two birds with one stone with a smart communications strategy. When the time comes to face the hostile NBC or ABC interview, Palin should go in bold, prepared and with one goal, WIN. She doesn’t have to be horribly tough but don’t etiquette herself out of the election like McCain did in the debates.
David Horowitz is a former marxist radical and turned conservative civil rights activist. He has written so many books that I have lost count. David Horowitz is a man who knows where the “bodies are buried” as it were and knows how leftist organizations help each other launder tax and charity money for political purposes. Horowitz has a site where he tracks the organizations and the people who run them on his site called “Discover the Networks”.
[Editor's Note - for the "if you oppose leftist policy you must be a racist" crowd. David Horowitz marched with Dr. Martin Luther King and faced the dogs and fire hoses when standing up for equal rights under the law wasn't considered cool.]
Horowitz has partnered with Beck and together they have proved to be the most effective at exposing the most extreme (and I mean really far out extreme that even leaves most partisan democrats scratching their heads) elements of the administration.
The pattern with Beck has been the following; Beck announces that he has learned something new, it could be Van Jones or ACORN or Tides Foundation, he is ridiculed by the elite media and the left as a nutty conspiracy theorist, then Beck is proved correct and Van Jones resigns or the Senate pulls ACORN’s funding etc and the circle starts all over again.
Rarely do we quote an entire article, but in this case we made a rare exception for the following reasons:
1. This information is SO important and so educational that it merits bringing it all to you IU South Bend readers and the nearly 40,000 others who come to us for news analysis.
2. You will notice that the text is filled with links to evidence/information that you can check and see for yourself. It really shows off the degree of intelligence gathering that has been done by the Horowitz organization.
3. If one were to read this article and its associated links the education conferred would be better than two semesters of political science classes.
Poligazette Editor Michael van der Galien comments at Hotair.com:
John convinced me today that Beck should not merely be tolerated by conservatives but publicly celebrated.
Although there is more in John’s post – much more even – the main point can be summarized in one short sentence: without Beck, the Obama administration would not have had to deal with any controversies.
Without Beck the far left would not have been exposed.
Many would undoubtedly have liked it to be different but the FrontPageMag editor is right. Beck is the only national figure willing to take on the extreme left and to prove that Obama has ties to them and may even be one of them.
That’s it; it is time for conservatives to stop criticizing Beck and to give him credit for helping the conservative movement take on the most progressive individuals ever to be in charge of the most powerful country on earth.
John Perazzo posted this awesome piece at David Horiwitz’ blog site and it is taking the blogosphere by storm:
In recent weeks, Glenn Beck has elevated political/news television to an entirely new level. Without fealty to any particular party, he is shining a light into the dark corners of a political cesspool that has been hidden for too long. He is taking the esoteric and making it accessible; taking the complex and making it simple. The result: Millions of Americans are waking up and beginning to understand, often for the first time, exactly what the left is all about. At the David Horowitz Freedom Center, we’re honored that one of the most vital resources from which Beck draws information that is presented on his program is our online encyclopedia of the left at www.DiscoverTheNetworks.org. It was our hope that by putting the networks, funders and covert agendas of the left up on the Web, we would awaken Americans to the internal threat to their freedoms from the legions of what is misnamed the “progressive” left. (In fact they are reactionaries and closet totalitarians who want to re-run the discredited socialist scripts of the past.) Since we launched DiscoverTheNetworks in February 2005, more than 20 million people have visited the site. But Glenn Beck is reaching over half that number of Americans every single day.
A thorough researcher who does plenty of homework in preparation for his program, Beck has perhaps done more than any other broadcaster to make Americans keenly aware of so many vital facts that few others in the media have ever even mentioned. For instance, he has stressed the immense significance of Saul Alinsky, the late godfather of radical “community organizing” — and probably the single most formative tactical influence on Barack Obama during his years as a political neophyte.
Beck also has done a magnificent job of bringing to light the vitally important, though not widely understood, Cloward-Piven strategy — a key tactic of the left.
First proposed in 1966 and named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, this strategy seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands. Though undertaken ostensibly to protect the “rights” of the “poor” and the “working-class,” the strategy’s ultimate objective is to thrust society into a political and financial crisis that will cause people to lose all faith in the existing system (capitalism), and to follow the lead of a self-assured, charismatic “community organizer” to a socialist alternative. Again, DiscoverTheNetworks has proved to be a vital resource for Beck; no source, anywhere, has laid bare the principles of Cloward-Piven with greater clarity than DiscoverTheNetworks.
[IUSB Vision Editor's Note: I have taken the time to examine some of Francis Fox Piven's lectures and writings. It was rather disturbing to explore the mind of one who I can only describe and genuinely evil. Piven takes leftist hate and envy to a level higher than I am used to experiencing among leftist academics.]
Cloward-Piven, of course, dovetails seamlessly with ACORN, an Alinskyite organization with a long history of attempting to stress American institutions to their breaking point. In its early days, ACORN members invaded welfare offices across the United States — often violently — bullying social workers and loudly demanding every last cent to which the law ostensibly “entitled” them – all in an effort to overwhelm the welfare system and spark an economic crisis. More recently, ACORN’s malign ambitions have focused on trying to overwhelm our electoral system by means of a voter-fraud campaign of unprecedented magnitude. And, on yet another front, ACORN worked long and hard, and with much success, to help bring about the collapse of the housing market — by aggressively pushing banks to extend credit to undercapitalized, high-risk borrowers in low-income, mostly-minority areas. Beck and DiscoverTheNetworks have been pointing this out for a long time.
Through it all, DiscoverTheNetworks has been a vital resource upon which Beck has drawn. His recognition of the value of the information in DiscoverTheNetworks, coupled with his unwavering commitment to truth – wherever it may lead – will go a long way toward waking up the American people to the corrosive agendas of the left.
Former U.S. vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, criticized for her lack of foreign policy experience, emerged in Asia on Wednesday to share her views from “Main Street U.S.A” with a group of high-flying global investors.
In her first trip to the region, the former Alaska governor addressed an annual conference of investors in Hong Kong in what was billed as a wide-ranging talk about governance, economics and U.S and Asian affairs.
“I’m going to call it like I see it and I will share with you candidly a view right from Main Street, Main Street U.S.A.,” Palin told a room full of asset managers and other finance professionals, according to a video of part of the speech obtained by The Associated Press. “And how perhaps my view of Main Street … how that affects you and your business.”
Palin started off her keynote — which was closed to reporters — with a light talk about the links between her state and the southern Chinese territory, then touched later on economic issues and China.
One attendee said she called on China to be a more responsible global citizen, allow greater freedoms and take a more active role in solving pressing world issues.
She also criticized the U.S. Federal Reserve’s massive intervention in the economy over the last year, arguing its actions only exacerbated the crisis, according to another attendee. She also praised the conservative economic policies of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
Earlier, she talked of Alaska’s salmon exports and complimented Hong Kong as a “beautiful city,” according to a third attendee. All three people spoke on condition of anonymity, because they did not want to be seen as speaking on behalf of their companies.
Former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin used her first trip to Asia to attack the Federal Reserve for creating asset bubbles and encouraging excessive risk-taking that hurt working-class Americans.
In a wide-ranging, 80-minute speech to fund managers in Hong Kong today, Palin spoke about issues ranging from Alaskan fishing to energy independence to U.S.-Sino ties. She repeated calls for “market-oriented” health-care reform and said governments shouldn’t regulate executive compensation.
The Fed and the government sent a message to companies that “the bigger that you are, the more problems that you get yourself into, the more likely the government is to bail you out,” Palin said in the closed door speech, according to a tape of the event given to Bloomberg News. “Of course the little guys are left out then. We’re left holding the bag, all the moms and pops all over America.”
The speech was Palin’s first major public appearance since quitting as Alaska governor on July 26, less than a year after she ran with John McCain in an unsuccessful campaign against now-President Barack Obama. People at the event said she focused on a wide range of global and domestic issues rather than her own political future.
“She was brilliant,” said a European delegate, on condition of anonymity.
“She said America was spending a lot of money and it was a temporary solution. Normal people are having to pay more and more but things don’t get better. The rich will leave the country and the poor will get poorer.”
Two US delegates left early, with one saying “it was awful, we couldn’t stand it any longer”. He declined to be identified.
This was a foreign policy and economics speech so it is the foreign reaction that counts, but it should be no surprise that the only people who had something bad to say were from the United States. One can just feel the vitriol from the American quote. Many people have such an emotional connection with Barack Obama that they cannot stand to hear any critique of him. This is something I have seen first hand. One should NEVER make an emotional attachment to a candidate or a politician ever. The emotional connection will blind you. The polls make it crystal clear that the independent/cross pressured voters have turned against Obama’s policies, but for those partisans with such a strong emotional investment it is going to take a lot more damage to get them to open their eyes fully. Even the NY Times gave her presentation a good review.
The elite media calls the people at tea parties violent and racist (LINK), yet at every known event of violence has been committed by ACORN/SEIU thugs. There was violence at several anti-war protests, at the GOP convention and at this event, the G20 summit in Pittsburgh with 60 arrested, 6 hospitalized and businesses vandalized.
Why is CNN not featuring the nuttiest sign they can find at this protest like they do at a Tea Party, why are their reporters not getting in the face of a protestor to challenge, harass, name call and mock them like they do at Tea Parties (LINK) ….where is Susan Roesgen now? [By the way, here is how Roesgen and CNN portrayed left wing protestors wielding Hitler/Bush signs - LINK]
The National Park Service confirmed that the 9/12 protest called by Glenn Beck was the largest event in DC history and there was not one arrest…not one.
For Example.
CNN reporting on Left Wing protestors:
Notice how they do not zoom in on the nuttiest sign and present it as typical. They do not get in a protestors face to challenge them, mock them, ask them a question and don’t let them answer it, they don’t call them sexual names like “tea baggers”. It’s all just hunky dory… but…
CNN reporting on Tea Parties:
So let us take a close look at the signs at the anti-war protests and ask the protestors a few questions. Since NO ONE in the elite media would do this with any fair, we rely on film maker Evan Coyne Maloney:
Yet it is the Tea Party people who are nutty, violent, racists…. yea right.
UPDATE – The B-Cast TV program does a special on CNN’s insulting coverage of the Tea Party protests and how they spun the Fox News ad – LINK.
This is a documentary about how sing alongs, peer pressure, the want of recognition, feeling of importance, and fear of humiliation was used to indoctrinate children into the Hitler Youth.
“We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set,” he said Wednesday. “We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well funded.” – B. Obama
There has also been concern about school teachers doing things like taking songs about Jesus and replacing Jesus with Obama and teaching the kids to sing them in public schools and other outrageous acts of propaganda as has been done HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE.
[Editor's Note - So what the Democrats and this professor is saying is that if Joe Biden were president the Tea Parties would not be protesting the wasteful spending, the corrupt pork earmarks for corporate lobbying clients, the porkulus bills, the broken promises, the government take over of health care and the banks etc? So I ask, was it racist when they opposed HillaryCare in 1994?
By that standard anyone who criticizes Michael Steele (a black American) the head of the Republican Party a racist. So by his own standard is the entire DNC racist and the professor below a race traitor? Yup thats it, anyone who criticizes any Republican is a racist because they just can't take it that the leader of the Republican Party is a black man. What is good for the goose is good for the gander.]
This man is a professor of law. He speaks in these brad brush strokes and avoids specifics on policy.
I would LOVE to debate this guy Lincoln/Douglas style. I also like how he says that he is not a leftist and then spouts every far left talking point right down the line including these baseless attacks on Glenn Beck. This guy was so transparent and phony that most thinking Americans could see right through this guy. Unfortunately this guy is representative of a great deal of college professors and administrators.
I also found it interesting how he portrayed what the National Park Service has called the largest DC event in US history; the 9/12 protest called by Glenn Beck. About 1.7 million people participated and he focussed in on the few nuts that showed up to attempt to mainstream themselves with any political movement. We also reported how plants from ACORN have been showing up to some Tea Party events with racist signs of high production value to attempt to get in front of a camera (LINK). No one who did any genuine reporting of the event said that those types of signs were even close to representative to the crowd.
So while the elite media and this professor show contempt (more contempt) for tea party protesters, I wonder where all these people were when left wing nuts took to the streets in droves with plenty of hate to spread around ….and yet they got glowing coverage from the elite media…. well as a reminder I have the video…. Watch each in total…especially the endings.
Or maybe they think the constant antisemitism that is so common at far left protests isn’t racist at all…..
UPDATE- Gary Bauer speaks on the issue (Via The Anchoress):
Bauer noted that when Obama was inaugurated, he had an approval rating of 75 percent. Yet, today, his approval rating is in the neighborhood of 50 percent. If racism is the explanation, Bauer wondered aloud, are we to believe that the quarter of the electorate that seems to have abandoned President Obama just discovered that he is black?
As Bauer made his argument, it was obvious that he was speaking directly to the reporters present. He went further by asking the crowd the question (and this is from memory so it may not be exact), “If a party were to run a candidate who was black, Asian, or hispanic and who was pro-life, in favor of free markets, traditional morality, and strong national defense, would you support that candidate?” The crowd erupted in massive, enthusiastic applause. Bauer joked with the crowd and the reporters present, “I can’t wait to run home and see that positive reaction from the crowd toward racial diversity played on CBS, NBC, and ABC!” Of course, the enthusiastic reaction in favor of a candidate of color who is also a conservative doesn’t fit the press narrative and the audience reaction would never be played on the news. Bauer knew that. The crowd knew that. And so did the press.
Of course the “in the tank” elite media will cover Obama on this one. Most of them didn’t cover the scandal or just reported it once so they can say that they reported it.
Now before the far left starts to object in comments let me remind you that the left and the elite media covered the Jack Abramoff story constantly. Abromoff was a corrupt lobbyist who donated money to politicians, most of whom were Republican. Most of these politicians had nothing to so with Abramoff save for just accepting political donations like most politicians do.
So let me see. Barack Obama was a community organizer for ACORN. Then he took a job training their people how to organize others. Obama came back and acted as a Lawyer and worked with ACORN to file CRA lawsuits against banks to get them to lower mortgage loan standards and make more high risk loans. Obama’s campaign than pays ACORN $800,000. The Obama Administration tells ACORN that they will be in the White House with him. ACORN and SEIU share offices and SEIU people are at the top levels of the Obama Administration. ACORN is invited to work the census and other federal tasks.
UPDATE – In this video Glenn Beck plays clips of President Obama telling how he has a long history with ACORN/SEIU and knows them well. Even if you don’t care for Beck you can still hear Obama’s own words to see for yourself.
George Stephanopoulos
Is it just me or are the ties between Obama and ACORN much closer than Abramoff and the Republicans he donated campaign funds to?
The one who at least asked a question about ACORN was George Stephanopoulos. Obama said that he didn’t know much about the scandal, which George didn’t seem to believe and is hardly believable since ACORN has always been so near and dear to Obama’s heart and life.
Only one of the five television networks that interviewed President Obama for their Sunday shows bothered to ask him about Acorn, the left-wing community organizing group whose federal funding was cut off last week by an overwhelming vote in Congress.
“Frankly, it’s not something I’ve followed closely,” Mr. Obama claimed, adding he wasn’t even aware the group had been the recipient of significant federal funding. “This is not the biggest issue facing the country. It’s not something I’m paying a lot of attention to,” he said.
Mr. Obama added that an investigation of Acorn was appropriate after an amateur hidden-camera investigation had found Acorn offices willing to abet prostitution, but he carefully declined to say whether he would approve a federal cutoff of funds to the group.
Mr. Obama took great pains to act as if he barely knew about Acorn. In fact, his association goes back almost 20 years. In 1991, he took time off from his law firm to run a voter-registration drive for Project Vote, an Acorn partner that was soon fully absorbed under the Acorn umbrella. The drive registered 135,000 voters and was considered a major factor in the upset victory of Democrat Carol Moseley Braun over incumbent Democratic Senator Alan Dixon in the 1992 Democratic Senate primary.
Mr. Obama’s success made him a hot commodity on the community organizing circuit. He became a top trainer at Acorn’s Chicago conferences. In 1995, he became Acorn’s attorney, participating in a landmark case to force the state of Illinois to implement the federal Motor Voter Law. That law’s loose voter registration requirements would later be exploited by Acorn employees in an effort to flood voter rolls with fake names.
In 1996, Mr. Obama filled out a questionnaire listing key supporters for his campaign for the Illinois Senate. He put Acorn first (it was not an alphabetical list). In the U.S. Senate, Mr. Obama became the leading critic of Voter ID laws, whose overturn was a top Acorn priority. In 2007, in a speech to Acorn’s leaders prior to their political arm’s endorsement of his presidential campaign, Mr. Obama was effusive: “I’ve been fighting alongside of Acorn on issues you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote in Illinois, Acorn was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work.”
But the Obama campaign didn’t appear eager to discuss the candidate’s ties to Acorn. Its press operation vividly denied Mr. Obama had been an Acorn trainer until the New York Times uncovered records demonstrating that he had been. The Obama campaign also gave Citizens Consulting, Inc., an Acorn subsidiary, $832,000 for get-out-the-vote activities in key primary states. In filings with the Federal Election Commission, the Obama campaign listed the payments as “staging, sound, lighting,” only correcting the filings after the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review revealed their true nature.
Given his longstanding ties with Acorn, President Obama’s protestations of ignorance or disinterest in the group’s latest scandal seem preposterous. Here’s hoping White House reporters will press the president to clarify just how much he really knows about Acorn and when he knew it.
UPDATE II – Obama doesn’t know much about ACORN any more he says…. hmm than why are so many members of the ACORN Advisory Board all over his White House LINK ?
Yes, so I imagined. While Glenn Greenwald, for example, was accusing those on the right of being “chickenhawks” for not serving in Iraq, he was never quite able to explain why he wasn’t accumulating Congressional Medals of Honor and Taliban tooth-necklaces in the war he supposedly supported, Afghanistan.
And no, this isn’t just about some seedy, nasty liberal bloggers.
It’s about our lying POS POTUS, too.
Escalation is a bad idea. The Democrats backed themselves into defending the idea of Afghanistan being The Good War because they felt they needed to prove their macho bonafides they called for withdrawal from Iraq. Nobody asked too many questions sat the time, including me. But none of us should forget that it was a political strategy, not a serious foreign policy. There have been many campaign promises “adjusted” since the election. There is no reason that the administration should feel any more bound to what they said about this than all the other committments [sic] it has blithely turned aside in the interest of “pragmatism.”
But none of us should forget that it was a political strategy, not a serious foreign policy.
You claimed to support a war in which American soldiers were fighting and dying, leaving friends and limbs on the battlefield, as a cynical political strategy?
You… um… voiced support of a real serious-as-death war to cadge votes out of a duped public?
We won’t forget, champ. And we won’t let you forget, either.
Again we see a leftist projecting his pathological darkness on to others. They accused Bush of fighting wars for this very reason. And now, when it’s safe to say so (they think), they concede: We supported a war for the reason we accused Bush of doing so for 8 years.
UPDATE – Michelle Malkin finds the teacher who did this to these students and the school. One has to melt with respect at Malkin’s ability to track down the details of a story.
The school is B. Bernice Young Elementary School in Burlington Township, New Jersey and the teacher is Charisse Carney-Nunes. Follow the link above to see more details!
UPDATE II – UH OH! Megyn Kelley at Fox News is now on the story. Administrators at B. Bernice Young Elementary School are hiding under their desks now. I bet they have stopped answering the phones there as this story is going viral. You heard her, its on Drudge Report so the world has seen it now.
UPDATE III – Malkin found a response from the school from a fellow blogger Exurban League HERE:
Dear Burlington Township Families:
Today we became aware of a video that was placed on the internet which has been reported in the media. The video is of a class of students singing a song about President Obama. The activity took place during Black History Month in 2009, which is recognized each February to honor the contributions of African Americans to our country. Our curriculum studies, honors and recognizes those who serve our country. The recording and distribution of the class activity were unauthorized.
If you have any further questions regarding this matter, please do not hesitate to contact me or Dr. King, Principal of B. Bernice Young School, directly.
Sincerely,
Dr. Christopher M. Manno,
Superintendent of Schools
So, a public school had an official lesson using impressionable children to praise Barack Obama. The song they used even co-opted lyrics from “Jesus Loves the Little Children” with Obama’s name inserted in place of God.
A commentor at Michelle Malkin states, “Thank goodness somebody recorded it lest this school have more clandestine political brain washing sessions for the children.”
UPDATE V – Principal of elementary school praises Obama and says that she would do it again – details HERE.
This isn’t the only one folks… we also have THESE.. HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE … Glenn Beck finds yet another video HERE.
MINI-UPDATE – Pat Dollard finds yet another school indoctrination video singing to the ‘Dear Leader’ -LINK.
MINI-UPDATE II – 9-28-2009 Yup another new indoctrination video LINK !
UPDATE IV – Hotair.com posts the following video for comparison –
UPDATE VI – Ed Morrissey from Hotair.com has a GREAT NEW POST on this issue with an update from Fox News:
Ed Morrissey:
Parents angry over Obama song at NJ elementary school in which the school and the district double down on stupid.
“There was no intention to indoctrinate children. There was no political agenda underlying the activity.”
Uh, sure, pal. Those kids wrote the lyrics about equal pay all by themselves? I know that’s a big issue among the playground set. They also just happened to replace God with “Barack Hussein Obama” in saying that people are “equal in his sight,” because that’s exactly the phraseology one would expect from a roomful of kids of the “London Bridge is falling down” age.
The administration in this community may need to go back to school themselves to learn a little common sense and strategy. The teacher who led this group retired before the video hit the Internet. How much difficulty could it cause to admit the obvious and apologize for stepping over a line with these children? They’re certainly not learning a lesson about accountability, although they do seem to have adopted the ACORN strategy of blaming people for the video’s release to the Internet rather than the fact that one of their teachers was indoctrinating kids into Obama-worship, quite literally considering the song, its lyrics, and its origins.
Talk about taking the words out of my mouth and every other parent who has a historical perspective that goes beyond breakfast. Well stated Ed.
UPDATE VII- Parents appear on FNC with Gov. Mike Huckabee and Sean Hannity:
UPDATE VIII – Factreal.com posts a history of “sing-along indoctrination” and here is a sample:
Every Administration has this problem, the onligitory kiss & tell book. Usually they are written by those with slightly disfunctional personalities who make everything about them and are filled with high school level drama.
The Paul O’Neil book was filled with inaccuracies that have been well covered or were disputed by many others who were in the White House. The Richard Clarke Bush bashing book ended up having key points that contradicted Clarke’s own on the record previous statements and testimony. I wrote about many of the contradictions myself and spelled them out in detail. Former Press Secretery Scott McLellend wrote his kiss & tell bookwhich was also shown to have its share of inaccuracies by documents and people in the White House.
While these books are the latest examples, kiss & tell books from both parties tend to be nearly equally incredible. An exception was the book written by former CIA Bin Laden Unit Commander Dr. Michael Scheuer who was hard on both the Clinton and Bush administrations with time showing the book to be at least directionally accurate.
The latest book is By Matt Latimer is quickly showing to be nothing new. Notes and testimony of those around him are showing an all too familiar pattern.
Here is Dana Perino debunking Latimer’s claim that President Bush did not even know Sarah Palin. Considering how tight Bush always was with the Republican Governor’s Association the idea that Bush didn’t even know Palin is next to impossible to believe.
When Speechwriters Kiss and Tell A man I hired was not the star he thought he was.
By WILLIAM MCGURN
When the sun rises over our capital city this morning, its denizens will awake to a truly novel tale: The aggrieved ex-staffer—wait for it!—disillusioned by Washington. The tome out today is by former Bush speechwriter Matt Latimer, who describes the White House as “less like Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing and more like The Office.” In Mr. Latimer’s hands, it reads more like “The Princess Diaries,” full of hurt feelings and high-schoolish drama.
Like all kiss and tells, “Speechless: Tales of a White House Survivor” is thick with atmospherics intended to suggest the author’s importance: a West Wing office, meetings in the Oval, rides on Air Force One, etc. Like most kiss and tells too, it’s divided between heroes (Mr. Latimer and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld) and idiots (pretty much everyone else). And like so many kiss and tells, the tale of failure, foolishness and vanity it reveals is not necessarily the one the author intends.
As the senior staffer who brought Matt to the White House, let me start by adding some perspective. In a memoir that takes us from Matt’s childhood in Michigan through all the morons and phonies he worked for in Washington, only Mr. Rumsfeld gets the full gush. Left unmentioned is that Matt is on Mr. Rumsfeld’s payroll, working on the former Defense Secretary’s memoirs. Not that Mr. Rumsfeld need fear. If this book is any guide, an employer will read how stupid Matt really thought he was only after he’s no longer being paid.
In the same way, Matt neglects to mention that personnel took away his West Wing cubby when they needed space for someone more important. Or that he spent the next few weeks knocking on every door in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, looking for a room sufficiently grand to display his large and ever-expanding collection of framed testimonials to himself.
Ditto for Air Force One. Yes, he was on it, but not because he was important. To the contrary, I put him on it because he was failing. At one point in the book, he admits that he “never felt the connection” he was supposed to feel with the president. Bringing him into the Oval and getting him on Air Force One was a (losing) attempt on my part to get the president to warm up to him. These are distasteful things to have to say publicly about someone who once worked for you. And I would have taken them to the grave had Matt not used these props and the snippets of conversation he picked up to paint a highly distorted view of some very good people during some very tough times.
Nowhere is this clearer than in his account of putting together the address to the nation the president delivered last September during the financial crisis. Matt does capture the chaotic feel that surrounds any last-minute, high-stakes, prime-time speech. In his version most everyone—the president, economics adviser Keith Hennessey, counselor Ed Gillespie, etc.—comes across as a bumbling idiot.
I was gone by then, and had my own doubts about some of the solutions proposed. But I also knew Ed and Keith to be solid free-marketeers. And I had a better appreciation for the difficulties involved when I called Ed and he recounted a Roosevelt Room meeting that had led to the president’s speech.
In that meeting, the Fed chairman and the Treasury secretary warned the president that if he didn’t intervene, the global financial system was in danger of collapsing and America of plunging into another Great Depression. Certainly the decisions should be debated. But, Matt takes the cheap route, snarking about people struggling with those decisions while never explaining what he would have done differently.
As for how conservative President Bush was, this too is a legitimate argument that will continue for years. As conservatives debate, however, surely the hurt feelings of a speechwriter ought to be weighed against a record that includes turning around the war in Iraq, standing up for our intelligence officers, supporting our allies in Eastern Europe with missile defense, cutting taxes, concluding trade agreements, appointing good judges up and down the federal bench, and standing firm on the preciousness of human life—positions that brought down the derision and mockery of elites across our country.
In fairness, it’s not all yucks. On the day Mr. Rumsfeld resigns, Matt recounts a scene in the Defense secretary’s office. “You were my star,” (emphasis in the original) he tells Matt. “And, uh, I probably never told you that.” Right there in the secretary’s office, Matt reports, “I started to cry.’”
Right there too we see Mr. Bush’s greatest failing: Never did he look into young Matthew’s moist eyes and tell him, “You are my star.” If he only had we would have a very different book.
They are calling it the Community Reinvestment Modernization Act (CMRA). The Old Community Reinvestment Act played an important role in lowering mortgage standards and creating so many of these high risk loans that broke the system. While the CRA was just one layer of a multi layered problem created by government that culminated in the largest economic collapse since the Great Depression, it was still an important layer, so naturally the far left wants to do it AGAIN.
As we have reported before and have taken a lead in reporting on, the original CRA was intended to make it illegal to stop “redlining”; the practice of not giving loans to people based on race. But CRA was used by the Clinton Justice Department to make it an affirmative action program for loans, forcing banks to give mortgages to people who had no business getting a home loan simply because it was very unlikely that they could pay the loan back. They say it was about giving loans to poor minorities, when it fact it was about getting loans to Democrat constituent groups.
The rub is, that giving out high risk loans did not do them any favors. Many thousands of people in high risk loans defaulted, they lost their homes, their credit was destroyed and mortgage securities based on those loans brought down AIG, Lehman Brothers and dozens of banks.
Of course ACORN was at the heart of this problems as they filed CRA lawsuits to force banks to make high risk loans, under the faux guise of “fighting racism”.
We reported on this activity extensively HERE and HERE.
ACORN and SEIU have already created an atroturf support group to help get it passed – LINK.
The CRMA takes the old CRA one step further and mandates that loans be given to minorities regardless of income. Is giving a home loan to anyone regardless of income a wise move?
Dems push expanded Community Reinvestment Act; deny Act’s role in mortgage meltdown; GOP cites ACORN connection
By: BYRON YORK
Chief Political Correspondent
09/16/09 4:13 PM EDT
A number of experts believe that aggressive enforcement of the 1970s-era Community Reinvestment Act contributed to the mortgage meltdown, and thus to the greater financial crisis, by requiring financial institutions to lend to unqualified borrowers. Now, the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives is responding to that situation by proposing to expand the scope and power of the Community Reinvestment Act.
This morning House Financial Services Committee chairman Rep. Barney Frank held a hearing on H.R. 1479, the “Community Reinvestment Modernization Act of 2009.” The bill’s purpose is “to close the wealth gap in the United States” by increasing “home ownership and small business ownership for low- and moderate-income borrowers and persons of color.” It would extend CRA’s strict lending requirements to non-bank institutions like credit unions, insurance companies, and mortgage lenders. It would also make CRA more explicitly race-based by requiring CRA standards to be applied to minorities, regardless of income, going beyond earlier requirements that applied solely to low- and moderate-income areas.
Republicans on the committee strongly oppose the plan. “Instead of looking to expand the number of institutions that must abide by Community Investment Act regulations,” California Rep. Ed Royce said in prepared opening remarks at today’s hearing, “I think we should reassess the role this and other government mandates played in the financial collapse and consider scaling it back.”
In private conversation, other Republicans were more emphatic. “There is clearly arguable evidence that the CRA is at the root of this financial meltdown,” says one GOP committee member. “So what do they do? They try to expand CRA.”
But Democrats, led by H.R. 1479 sponsor Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, claimed that expansion of CRA is much-needed. “Congress has passed a number of laws designed to combat redlining and eliminate housing discrimination,” Johnson said at the hearing. “Unfortunately, we all know that redlining still occurs.”
Then there is the ACORN angle. Republican critics point out that the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now has used the CRA to pressure banks to pour money into ACORN and its affiliates, allowing ACORN to facilitate loans to clearly unqualified borrowers. Now, with ACORN under fire after a series of undercover videos showing ACORN workers in Baltimore, Washington DC, New York, and California openly encouraging prostitution, tax evasion, and other crimes, Republicans on the committee are citing the CRA-ACORN connection as yet another reason the Act should not be expanded.
Johnson’s bill has 51 co-sponsors, including some of the most liberal members of the House, like Reps. Dennis Kucinich, John Conyers, Bobby Rush, Steve Cohen, and Barbara Lee. Given the Democrats’ tremendous numerical superiority in the House, if the majority wants to expand CRA, Republicans will be unable to stop it.
UPDATE – Byrom York gives an analysis of the CRA that is spot on and tells the same story we told when the collapse took place. Well done Byron.
Democrats on path to repeat housing disaster
By: Byron York
Chief Political Correspondent
September 22, 2009
With all the attention paid to the health care battle, ACORN, and the president’s “Full Ginsburg” appearances on five Sunday talk shows, few people noticed a hearing with an exceedingly boring title — “Proposals to Enhance the Community Reinvestment Act” — held last week in the House Financial Services Committee. But the session marked a key moment in the ongoing battle between Republicans and Democrats over what caused our current financial woes — and how we might best avoid getting into the same trouble again.
At the hearing, and in others across Capitol Hill, Democratic majorities are pressing hard to expand some of the very policies that led to the reckless home lending that in turn helped lead to the great financial meltdown. If Chairman Barney Frank and his fellow Democrats have their way, we’ll do it all again — and more.
At issue last week was H.R. 1479, the Community Reinvestment Modernization Act of 2009, sponsored by Democratic Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson. It would expand and strengthen the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, which required banks to make loans in low-income areas that many lenders had traditionally shunned.
After the meltdown, some conservatives blamed the CRA for almost solely causing the crisis by requiring banks to make risky loans to unqualified borrowers. It was an unfair charge. “CRA had at best an incremental role in the U.S. housing debacle,” says J.D. Foster, an economist at the Heritage Foundation. But CRA did help create the conditions in which disaster could occur.
The problems began in the 1990s, when Congress made it harder for lenders to do business if they had not passed the CRA “exam” — that is, if they had not met the government-imposed standards for loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers.
“From 1995 on, there was an incredible push by the Clinton and Bush administrations in every way they could — CRA, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and other ways — to increase the homeownership rate,” says Russell Roberts, a professor of economics at George Mason University. “What that did was to push up the price of housing, and that made it imaginable to lend money to people you never would have lent money to, on terms you wouldn’t have done before.”
In particular, Fannie Mae began to aggressively promote homeownership using the Community Reinvestment Act to give loans to people who couldn’t afford them. Fannie went to bankers and said, make as many CRA loans as you can; we’ll buy them and take them off your hands. “Our approach to our lenders is ‘CRA Your Way,’ ” top Fannie executive Jamie Gorelick told the Mortgage Bankers Association in 2001. “Fannie Mae will buy CRA loans from lenders’ portfolios; we’ll package them into securities; we’ll purchase CRA mortgages at the point of origination. …”
Fannie promised to buy billions and billions of dollars worth of CRA loans because it was under pressure to do so from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which in turn was under pressure from Congress, which set ambitious quotas for low- and moderate-income loans.
The policy ended in a lot of people losing their homes. Now, Johnson’s bill would ensure more of that by applying CRA’s lending requirements not just to banks but to non-bank institutions like credit unions, insurance companies, and mortgage lenders. It would also make CRA explicitly race-based by, in Johnson’s words, “requiring CRA exams to explicitly consider lending and services to minorities in addition to low- and moderate-income communities.”
Republicans on the Financial Services Committee strongly oppose the plan. “Instead of looking to expand the number of institutions that must abide by CRA regulations, I think we should reassess the role this and other government mandates played in the financial collapse and consider scaling it back,” California Rep. Ed Royce said at the hearing.
In private conversation, other Republicans were more emphatic. “There is clearly arguable evidence that the CRA is at the root of this financial meltdown,” said one GOP committee member. “So what do they do? They try to expand CRA.”
That’s an overstatement of CRA’s role in the housing mess, but it’s right about the Democratic plan. Denying that CRA, Fannie and other institutions played any role in setting the stage for disaster, they’re proposing more of what helped get us into trouble in the first place. It’s no way to fix the problem.
The left wing bias at public universities is so extrenched that Marxism is often taught as the only academic truth. While in the standard liberal arts curriculum Aristotle, Socrates, Francis bacon, Edmund Burke, Cicero, Adam Smith, Thomas Aquinas go almost completely uncovered; advocates for Marx like central control of our lives such as Karl Marx, Judith Butler, C.Wright Mills, Max Weber, and Antonio Gramsci get covered over and over again.
The bias is not that subtle either as most lessons and events start out with idea that the far left premise is true. The bias is usually not as bold and in your face as the following video, but this inceident does not surprise me at all.
Politicizing non political subjects is very common, both in the curriculum and in the text books where professors who write them often include their own social and political opinions and present them as academic truth.
I just took the required non-majors biology lab class last semester and on one of the first homework assignments included a question on a politically charged John Holdren like piece on population control from the text. Of course none of the horror stories about what would happen if we did not have global central control over the economy and human reproduction came true, but that does not stop textbooks and professors from pushing the narrative as fact. I wrote a page long essay about how those theories have been debunked by history and I attacked the appropriateness of such a political narrative in a biology class. The instructor, who was a professor candidate looking for full-time work, seemed to learn her lesson and never posed a question like that again in class. Good for her.
UPDATE V – ACORN office number five! San Diego ACORN offered to help smuggle the teen sex workers through Mexico! This video was released on the Sean Hannity Show moments ago September 16th 2009.
UPDATE IV – San Bernardino ACORN office sting. Worst yet so far – LINK.
UPDATE III – Now the New York office has been caught, same sting – LINK.
UPDATE II –
UPDATE – ACORN has a problem, they are blaming a couple of rogue employees at one office and saying that they are not representative of the organization, but after this startling revelation at the Baltimore ACORN office, it has been revealed that multiple offices engaged in illegal conduct on hidden camera. - LINK
One day after two ACORN officials in Baltimore were fired for offering to help a man and woman posing as a pimp and prostitute to engage in child prostitution and a series of tax crimes, another secretly shot videotape has surfaced that shows the same couple getting similar advice from ACORN officers in Washington.
The newly released videotape, shot on July 25, shows ACORN staffers explaining to the pair how they can hide the woman’s professed work — prostitution — and get a loan that will help them establish a brothel.
James O’Keefe, a 25-year-old independent filmmaker, posed as the pimp while visiting the ACORN office, accompanied by 20-year-old Hannah Giles, who posed as the prostitute. On a videotape provided to FOXNews.com, they are seen receiving guidance to establish the woman as the sole proprietor of a bogus company to mask the nature of her business.
“She’s not going to put on (the loan application) that she’s doing prostitution … she doesn’t have to,” the ACORN staffer says. “You don’t have to sit back and tell people what you do.”
Of course as we have stated before, the State of Hawaii says that they have seen the real birth certificate and it does exist, but Obama has made it clear that a certified copy of it is NOT to be released. I believe that he is a legal citizen because the State of Hawaii says so.
With that said, and as we have said before, this is a classic John Podesta communications strategy move. It was the White House who refused to give up all sorts of documents that other presidents have, so when people brought it up, here comes the White House Press Sec. Robert Gibbs speaking out on the “birther” issue, paste it on “all Republicans” and call them names. It is a classic straw man who the White House set up and knocked down with false spin to smear Republicans.
If any of you do not believe that political machines will go this far to sway public opinion then you need to take a few good poli-sci classes and read a few books. It was the White House and John Podesta (they admitted it) who created the strategy to target Rush Limbaugh, bring up quotes out of context to use against him and use the media to crown him the head of the Republican Party. They planned this months in advance and said so. Did you believe that Rush Limbaugh said that he hopes that Obama fails and said it for partisan political reasons only? If you fell for this then you fell into Podesta’s spin. What Limbaugh actually said (and we posted the transcripts and video to this very site) is that “if Obama wants to socialize America than I want him to fail. I hope he fails because that is what would be the best for the country.” So all if you do not believe that Obama is trying to socialize America, than you have nothing to worry about from Rush Limbaugh.
[Editor's Note: I like Camille Paglia, she is an honest liberal, not a full blown leftist, but an honest, left of center person in almost a traditional sense...OK maybe traditional is the wrong word, but it will have to do for now. I try to not miss her columns and I am kicking myself for missing this one that she wrote in November 2008. Paglia was all for Obama and hoped that he would be a center left president and not a hard left one. She didn't get her wish.
And as truly bright, refreshing and observant as Paglia is, she missed just how far left he was even though it seems that Paglia did some homework and knew Obama's record almost as well as I did. This goes to show that even a considerable intellect as Camille Paglia can be tricked up by an emotional attachment. It was clear in reading her columns that to a degree Paglia was caught up in the emotionalism of the election.
I cannot fault someone for not wanting to vote for John McCain. As great an American hero he is, his political leadership has proved to be flawed and inconsistent on too many occasions.
Ayers comes off in the film as a vapid, slightly dopey, chronic juvenile with stunted powers of ethical reasoning. The real revelation is his wife, Bernardine Dohrn (who evidently worked at the same large Chicago law firm as Michelle Obama in the mid-1990s). Of course I had heard of Dohrn — hers was one of the most notorious names of our baby-boom generation — and I knew her black-and-white police mug shot. But I had never seen footage of her speaking or interacting with others. Well, it’s pretty obvious who wears the pants in that family!
The mystery of Bernardine Dohrn: How could such a personable, attractive, well-educated young woman end up saying such things at a 1969 political rally as this (omitted in the film) about the Manson murders: “Dig it. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach. Wild!” And how could Dohrn have so ruthlessly pursued a decade-long crusade of hatred and terrorism against innocent American citizens and both private and public property?
“The Weather Underground” never searches for answers, but it does show Dohrn, then and now, as a poised, articulate woman of extremely high intelligence and surprising inwardness. The audio extra of her reading the collective’s first public communiqué (“Revolutionary violence is the only way”) is chilling. But the tumultuous footage of her 1980 surrender to federal authorities is a knockout. Mesmerized, I ran the clip six or seven times of her seated at a lawyer’s table while reading her still defiant statement. The sober scene — with Dohrn hyper-alert in a handsome turtleneck and tweedy jacket — was tailor-made for Jane Fonda in her “Klute” period, androgynous shag. Only illegalities by federal investigators prevented Dohrn from being put away on ice for a long, long time.
Given that Obama had served on a Chicago board with Ayers and approved funding of a leftist educational project sponsored by Ayers, one might think that the unrepentant Ayers-Dohrn couple might be of some interest to the national media. But no, reporters have been too busy playing mini-badminton with every random spitball about Sarah Palin, who has been subjected to an atrocious and at times delusional level of defamation merely because she has the temerity to hold pro-life views.
How dare Palin not embrace abortion as the ultimate civilized ideal of modern culture? How tacky that she speaks in a vivacious regional accent indistinguishable from that of Western Canada! How risible that she graduated from the University of Idaho and not one of those plush, pampered commodes of received opinion whose graduates, in their rush to believe the worst about her, have demonstrated that, when it comes to sifting evidence, they don’t know their asses from their elbows.
Liberal Democrats are going to wake up from their sadomasochistic, anti-Palin orgy with a very big hangover. The evil genie released during this sorry episode will not so easily go back into its bottle. A shocking level of irrational emotionalism and at times infantile rage was exposed at the heart of current Democratic ideology — contradicting Democratic core principles of compassion, tolerance and independent thought. One would have to look back to the Eisenhower 1950s for parallels to this grotesque lock-step parade of bourgeois provincialism, shallow groupthink and blind prejudice.
I like Sarah Palin, and I’ve heartily enjoyed her arrival on the national stage. As a career classroom teacher, I can see how smart she is — and quite frankly, I think the people who don’t see it are the stupid ones, wrapped in the fuzzy mummy-gauze of their own worn-out partisan dogma. So she doesn’t speak the King’s English — big whoop! There is a powerful clarity of consciousness in her eyes. She uses language with the jumps, breaks and rippling momentum of a be-bop saxophonist. I stand on what I said (as a staunch pro-choice advocate) in my last two columns — that Palin as a pro-life wife, mother and ambitious professional represents the next big shift in feminism. Pro-life women will save feminism by expanding it, particularly into the more traditional Third World.
As for the Democrats who sneered and howled that Palin was unprepared to be a vice-presidential nominee — what navel-gazing hypocrisy! What protests were raised in the party or mainstream media when John Edwards, with vastly less political experience than Palin, got John Kerry’s nod for veep four years ago? And Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, for whom I lobbied to be Obama’s pick and who was on everyone’s short list for months, has a record indistinguishable from Palin’s.
