Well the item below has been published before and is old but it is good to reflect upon revealing facts.
When society, a group, a corporation wants to promote someone they find a way. This is 'affirmative action' at work and to the youth of our country that's how it's done so suck it up and drink some tea because you are going to be paying the bill for a very long time and not enjoying many benefits.
Hope you enjoy the ride as your new found poverty is re-distributed. (See 1 below.)
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Comments from a well connected and informed friend regarding my prior memo. (See 2 below.)
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I recently sent out a clever Uncle Sam Theatre ditty posted on You Tube: (http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=LO2eh6f5Go0 .
This is the comment I got back from a tennis friend who is quite Far Left. Far too many 'privileged' go to Ivy League Schools, take themselves too seriously and proceed to lose their sense of humor if they ever had any.
I went to an Ivy League School for my undergraduate degree. Entered as a Southern Liberal and came out a somewhat Southern Conservative. Wharton prepared me to think rationally about economics and the impact Far Left zany economic theory has on real world conditions. Consequently, I became even more Conservative as I aged.
My response to my friend's comment was: 'the unwashed tea party masses understand the You Tube ditty - must not be for Hahvahd elitists.'
Many years ago Art Buchwald, I believe, wrote a funny book about President George Bush entitled: " Lighten Up George."
These are very serious times, we live in a dangerous world made more so by leaders who have lost both their sense of humor as well as their ability to reason. They are too ideologically inclines and when they do think 'outside the box' their ideas box us in even more so to potentially greater problems.
I submit Obama and Palin's recent tete a tete regarding nuclear bombs and rest my case accordingly.
Palin is good at getting under Obama's thin skin and Obama is even better at falling for it and displaying his usual petty childishness.
(See 3 and 3a below.)
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Obama's new foreign policy tack towards radicals: change words, massage rhetoric and hopefully the problem will become beheaded. (See 4 below.)
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Obama's health care prescription did not work for Stupak, will not work for the nation but in the words of that great American Naval Captain - John Paul Wright 'G-- Damn America - Full Speed Ahead.'
Pelosi helped pushed Stupak over the edge but winning one for The Party is a reward in and of itself so don't 'stew' you have now joined a 'pack' of others who, no doubt, will also die for Pelosi.
No doubt there is a cushy Ambassadorship or some other Czar perk just waiting for the asking.(See 5 below.)
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Lets hear it for and from Dana Rohrabacher. (See 6 below.)
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Robert Smith is ticked! (See 7 below.)
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A new 'game change.' (See 8 below.)
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Are the hijackers of 'social justice' actually 'evil doers?' You decide.
As for myself, I have always been suspicious of those who parade under the banner of 'do gooders.' Save me from them oh G--! (See 9 below.)
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Come April 18 to May 21, my wife and I are going to take an extended trip so for those addicted to my memos you will have three weeks to dry out. For those overhwlemed by my constancy you will have a well earned reprieve.
For all, I hope you stay abreast of events and upon my return tell me what happened because when I vacation I forget the world around me.
Dick
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1)Subject: FW: REPLACING MICHELLE
At the top right hand corner of page 17 of the New York Post, January
24, 2009, was a column entitled, "Replacing Michelle" in the National Review, The Week.
Here it is, as it appeared, below:
"Some employees are simply irreplaceable. Take Michelle Obama: The
University of Chicago Medical center hired her in 2002 to run 'programs
for community relations, neighborhood outreach, volunteer recruitment,
staff diversity and minority contracting'.
In 2005 the hospital raised her salary from $120,000 to $317,000 -
nearly twice what her husband made as a Senator.
Her husband, Barak Obama, had just become a U.S Senator. He requested a
$1 million earmark for the UC Medical Center, in fact. Way to network, Michelle!
Now that Mrs. Obama has resigned, the hospital says her position will
remain unfilled. How can that be, if the work she did was vital enough to be worth $317,000 ?
Let me add that Michelle's position was a part time, 20 hour a week
job."
My thoughts: How did this bit of quid pro quo corruption escape the
sharp reporters that dug through Sarah Palin's garbage and kindergarten
files?
For every action, there is an equal and opposite government program.
Recession is when your neighbor loses his job.
Depression is when you lose your job.
Recovery is when Obama loses his job!
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2)"Without reading the articles- most of which I have read or will read today- I have several comments.
I told .... ... a few minutes ago that I believe that the move to delegitimize Israel is well under way in this administration(duh) and that this meeting was an ambush for Bibi- and the quid pro quo from the Muslim world(can I use that word in any way offensive any more?????) is to demand that Israel turn in it's nukes to make the Middle East the trial baloon for the Obama strategy of making the world nuclear free- noble and soooooo naive as a three year old would figure out it is a non-starter.
On Paul Ryan- he is in my opinion one of the brightest lightbulbs in the Rep. party- and I agree with you he should be listened to. I believe the brightest one is Newt- but he needs to, at least for now,- be the voice and not the leader(unfortunately)
On Romney- you are spot on- my only hope is that Obama does not give the entire store away including Israel before his term ends. I do not discount him in '12- He is creating a class warfare environment- where the only way to keep what he and the Dems have worked so hard for - over 50% of the country that pay no taxes- is to keep him and his veto pen to insure that health care will not be repealed. A very compelling argument to those who don't pay anything anyway- and like unions are looking for more benefits, less work and less productivity- never taking into account that this country has to play in a world economy.
I think Romney could only get the nomination if he early on(now- admitted he was wrong)- and if he does he knows it is a dangerous decision- so he walks the tight rope- over the grand canyon- and most likely he is going the way of Rudy and others who believe they can have it both ways. People actually are looking for change- the kind the Gipper gave them- simple direct answers to questions- and responses like-"we win- they loose"- now figure out how to make it happen.
Fear is a great motivator- and if Americans aren't fearful now- God help us. Except for the most liberal- I will say that many of my liberal acquaintances are starting to wake up - albeit slower then I would like- but almost all now say they would have voted for McCain except for the lousy choice of Sarah Palin.(that's BS but everybody needs an excuse rather then saying I screwed up and what am I going to do to change it). Truth be told it was a bold- last ditch effort by a true hero (and lousy speaker) who's advisors had told him that he would loose with any of the candidates he was thinking of, specifically Lieberman first or Pawlenty second.
After the economic meltdown, even Ronald Reagan could not have won- because as Carvelle said "it's the economy stupid".
You are very involved, and your speaker series is quite honestly the envy of any community and your community is very lucky to have you. (not trying to swell your head- it is just the truth)."
"...Failure is not an option with a President who is more anti-Israel then Jimmy Carter ever could have been while he was president(or even now). He is down right scary- and while I believe Israel can take care of itself and has- if Iran gets a nuke- it is a game changer for the entire region and I believe an existential threat to Israel's very existence..."
"... At the end of the day- Bibi will have to make the most difficult decision anyone has made since the inception of the State- risk it all now and go it alone- or insure being destroyed later. I don't envy him- and I think he is hoping against hope- as am I, that we can mobilize the Senate and Congress to level the playing field. I am not optimistic but I can't see any other moves on the chess board at this time. Even crippling sanctions were problematic- but at least had a chance of creating an environment for regime change. This guy is going to talk tough and carry no stick."
All the best,
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3)"Rather simplistic. as one who won a poetry prize at Harvard judged by Robert Lowell, I prefer a little more imagination and subtlety."
3a)Sarah Palin Fires Back at Obama, Mocks His "Experience" on Nuclear Issues
By Brian Montopoli
In a high profile address before thousands of conservative activists at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference Friday, Sarah Palin attacked the Obama administration for its energy policy, mocked the media and liberals for suggesting she is inciting violence and hit back at the president's criticism of her knowledge on nuclear issues.
Mr. Obama said in an interview Friday that he was unconcerned with Palin's attacks on his decision to announce that in most cases the United States will not use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear country.
"Last I checked, Sarah Palin's not much of an expert on nuclear issues," he said.
Palin shot back in her comments Friday, mocking the president for "the vast nuclear experience that he acquired as a community organizer." She said that his alleged experience had not helped him make progress in the issue with Iran and North Korea.
Palin was greeted with overwhelming enthusiasm by the delegates here, who entered the hall to find Alaskan caribou jerky waiting on their seats. Hundreds of flashbulbs went off when Palin came onstage, and standing ovations and chants of "Sarah, Sarah, Sarah" broke out throughout her remarks.
Palin, a potential 2012 GOP presidential candidate, said the Obama doctrine involved "coddling enemies and alienating allies," attacking the administration for its handling of Israel, Iran and North Korea. She criticized the administration for its "yes we can spread the wealth around" attitude and said its programs, which she said took money from future generations, involved what "a lot of us" consider "stealing."
She suggested alternatives to the Obama administration's "Yes we can" slogan, among them "repeal and replace," in reference to the health care bill, and "don't retreat, reload," which prompted a standing ovation.
Palin said "don't retreat, reload," was "not a call for violence," despite what Democrats and members of the media have suggested. She said the media is "so desperate to discredit the people's movement, the tea party movement" that they make up such claims.
Later, after saying the word "shoot," she quipped, "I said shoot, I'm sorry," prompting laughter from the crowd.
Palin said that too many in Washington see money as free, referencing the stimulus package passed by the Obama administration. She quoted Bill Clinton's comment about then-candidate Obama during the presidential campaign, stating in a deep voice, "If this ain't the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen."
On energy policy, she said "the left has waged a multi-front war on conventional resources." Palin dismissed the president's decision to open up some offshore areas for drilling, saying, "they banned more offshore drilling than they allowed." She said the administration had purposely built a delay into opening the areas "to give environmentalists more time to sue."
"Let's drill, baby, drill, not stall, baby, stall," said Palin.
She said the president had opened up drilling in certain areas to help win support for his energy policy, but that he is "not going to find bipartisanship down there."
Palin argued that the president is "trying to play both sides against the middle" and is pushing a policy that will "destroy jobs and impose a new national tax on energy on all of us."
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4)What the Euphemisms Tell Us
By Mona Charen
In the latest installment of politically correct, not to say Orwellian, language emanating from the Obama administration, the term "rogue states" has been sidelined in favor of "outliers." The switch was unveiled as part of the just released Nuclear Posture Review. States like North Korea and Iran, labeled "rogue" by the Bush administration, will no longer labor under that punitive adjective.
This is telling. While the administration insists that the full spectrum of new initiatives -- from the New Start treaty to the Nuclear Posture Review to the Nuclear Security Summit -- are aimed at containing the world's two most provocative nations, Iran and North Korea, the stream of euphemisms they've insisted upon sends the opposite message.
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Rogue isn't even a particularly harsh word. When applied to individuals, it is frequently paired with "lovable." Regarding elephants, it suggests an animal that is out of control, but not necessarily vicious. Still, it was too severe for the Obama administration.
Outlier has no negative connotations at all. The American Heritage Dictionary defines it as "One whose domicile is distant from his or her place of business." The Macintosh computer dictionary adds a secondary connotation of exclusion from a group. So to employ the label "outliers" for nations that are, by any civilized measure, criminal is pusillanimous. No doubt the leadership in Iran has also noticed that an administration that softens its words has also modified its proposed sanctions. Whereas once Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke of "crippling" sanctions, she has now climbed down to "sanctions that bite." Can annoying sanctions be far behind?
The administration does not like to use hurtful words to our enemies. Our friends are another matter. Compare the treatment Great Britain, Honduras, and Israel have received with the walking on eggshells approach to our foes. Early on, the administration jettisoned the term "Global War on Terror" in favor of a catch phrase only a bureaucrat could have coined -- "overseas contingency operations." The word "terrorism" was similarly airbrushed from official language. Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano prefers the term "man-caused disasters" because "it demonstrates that we want to move away from the politics of fear ..." A more anodyne term has now surfaced from a number of officials -- "countering violent extremism."
The detainees in Guantanamo, too, have had a name change. They will no longer be called "enemy combatants." The new name hasn't been chosen yet, though cynics might just use "former clients of Obama Justice Department lawyers."
While they were reclassifying Iran and North Korea, the Obama administration, with spine of purest Jell-O, let it be known that the revised National Security Strategy will eschew references to "Islamic extremism," "jihad," "Islamic radicalism" and other such terms. "Do you want to think about the U.S. as the nation that fights terrorism or the nation you want to do business with?" asked National Security Council staffer Pradeep Ramamurthy, who runs the Obama administration's Global Engagement Directorate. It's apparently acceptable to use the term "fights terrorism" when you're retreating from it. (Speaking of language, this is not the first administration to appoint "czars," but it may be the first to create "directorates." Doesn't anyone at the White House get a chill down his spine at the word, which is part of the title of the GRU, the KGB's sister agency? Guess not.)
These euphemisms betray a weak-mindedness about foreign policy the likes of which we have not seen since Jimmy Carter warned us about our "inordinate fear of communism." This attention to softening our image arises from the leftist conviction that strife and trouble in the world are the result of U.S. bullying and bravado, or can at least be diminished by American meekness. This is such an ingrained worldview that nothing as mundane as experience can shake it. Thus we have the spectacle of Barack Obama, repeatedly rebuffed in the most graphic terms by Iran's ruling gangsters, nevertheless persisting in seeking engagement.
The New Start Treaty is of a piece with this foreign policy of polite feebleness. No one imagines that a war between Russia and the U.S. is likely (not that arms treaties prevent wars, but that's another matter). Yet the showy signing ceremony is meant to set a good example to rogue, oops, outlier nations. As the teenagers used to say, "As if."
The president did issue a couple of warning words to Iran as he clinked glasses with Medvedev. But they cannot obscure the larger message of his first year -- U.S. self-assertion, self-defense, and sovereignty have been morally wrong, and he is changing all that.
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The former Alaska governor, reading from prepared remarks, deemed the Environmental Protection Agency the "economic punishment agency" for claiming a role to regulate carbon emissions. She said the Obama administration's nuclear policy was " a lot of smoke and mirrors" because it was difficult to actually build a nuclear facility.
Palin also said global warming skeptics were "a little bit vindicated" by revelations that "there was some snake oil science" going on in climate change research, deeming the situation "Goregate."
She added that while activists may be down, there is nothing wrong "that a good old-fashioned election can't fix."
"Today the grand old party has its eyes wide open," Palin said. "We're getting back to our grand old roots."
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5)Casualty of ObamaCare: Bart Stupak retires due to low levels of public support for health-care reform
By JOHN FUND
Bart Stupak, the co-chair of the House Pro-Life Caucus, played a pivotal role in the passage of ObamaCare last month when he announced his last-minute support for the measure. Pro-life groups that had previously supported him accused him of betrayal, claiming he accepted a watered-down compromise that allows federal funds to be used for abortions.
While Mr. Stupak has expressed frustration at the anger directed against him, the political calculus of his district probably played a more important role in his decision today to retire. He faced a primary opponent from his party's left as well as other political headaches. Just last night, buses from the Tea Party Express movement rolled into Mr. Stupak's district for the first of four rallies -- presumably they will now be taking something akin to a victory lap. Their previous stop had been in Nevada for a series of rallies against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
The Upper Peninsula of Michigan is a culturally conservative area that viewed most aspects of the health care bill with suspicion. In 2000 and 2004, the district went easily for George W. Bush, and Barack Obama barely managed 50% of the vote there in 2008. Mr. Stupak is known to have taken a private poll of his district since his health care vote, and his retirement announcement is a likely indication that he feared he might lose to a Republican challenger this fall.
Whatever political bounce Democrats thought they would get from passing health care isn't showing up in national polls. In districts like Mr. Stupak's health care appears to be a distinct liability.
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6)Dana Rohrabacher's War
By Daniel Schulman
In the '80s he took up arms with Afghanistan's mujahideen. Now the California Republican is fighting against Obama's surge.
In 1988, shortly after winning his first term in Congress, Dana Rohrabacher dabbled briefly in another vocation—freedom fighter. With Afghanistan's anti-Soviet insurgency a cause célèbre for conservatives, he traveled to the front lines. Sporting a thick beard and traditional Afghan attire, the congressman-elect joined up with a rebel infantry unit whose mission included laying siege to a Soviet position.
When I met Rohrabacher recently at his Capitol Hill office—adorned with mementos of his Afghan adventures, including a tapestry of the legendary mujahideen commander Ahmad Shah Massoud—I asked if he'd joined the battle. "Let's put it this way," he said, a glimmer in his eye. "I didn't carry a gun—most of the time."
It's the kind of adventure that has earned the Orange County Republican, who's 62, a reputation as "colorful," or, as some put it, "bat-shit crazy." He's a banjo-playing, folk-singing, arch-conservative surfer, who—at a time when other politicians insisted they'd never inhaled—publicly proclaimed he'd done "everything but drink the bong water." An outspoken climate change skeptic, Rohrabacher once joked that "dinosaur flatulence" may have caused a prehistoric episode of global warming. For almost two years, he ran a quixotic congressional investigation (pdf) into the Oklahoma City bombing, dispatching staff as far as the Philippines to prove that Terry Nichols had ties to Ramzi Yousef, one of the planners of the first World Trade Center bombing. At a cringe-worthy hearing last fall, he lambasted an Iraqi politician over the "type of bloodlust" that "exists in your society."
But though Rohrabacher often comes across as God's gift to liberal bloggers, on Afghanistan he is recognized as a genuine congressional expert—and he's staked out a position closer to the Hill's most liberal Democrats than to his fellow Republicans. He opposes Obama's surge, warns that the troop escalation will only strengthen the Taliban's hand, and worries about history repeating itself: "The American Army is playing the role of the Russian army," he laments.
Rohrabacher's Afghanistan history dates back to his days as a speechwriter and presidential adviser in the Reagan White House, where he helped shape the Reagan Doctrine—the policy of arming resistance movements to undermine Soviet influence, with the mujahideen serving as Exhibit A. "I'd be there with guys in full Afghan garb in the executive dining room of the White House," he recalls. Michael Scheuer, the former chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit, says Rohrabacher was one of the few lawmakers who were "interested in Afghanistan to an extent that surpassed how many dead Soviets there were."
In the years after the Soviets fled Afghanistan in 1989, Rohrabacher says, his "passion" was to bring back the country's exiled king, Muhammad Zahir Shah, the only figure he believed could unite Afghans. Instead, by 1996, the Taliban had captured Kabul, and Rohrabacher began actively working to undermine them. At one point he hitched a ride in a UN supply plane to the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif with the aim of organizing a coalition of anti-Taliban warlords such as Massoud and the Uzbek militia commander Abdul Rashid Dostum. "I was flying all over the world," he says. "And I was on my own. You know, I was a real freelancer on that one."
Indeed, the congressman "was seen as having his own foreign policy," says Marvin Weinbaum, a former Afghanistan and Pakistan analyst at the State Department and now a scholar at the Middle East Institute. "He saw all sorts of nefarious plots that we were hatching with the Taliban. He was certainly out to discredit the [Clinton] State Department." Following a 2001 meeting with the Taliban's foreign minister in Qatar, US critics accused Rohrabacher of breaching the Logan Act, which prohibits American citizens from making unofficial diplomatic overtures.
In the fall of 2001, Rohrabacher's friend Massoud was assassinated by a pair of Al Qaeda operatives. Upon hearing the news, Rohrabacher wept in his office. Then he phoned the Bush White House in a frenzy: He believed Massoud's murder was the prelude to a major terrorist attack and requested an immediate audience with then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. He got an appointment for the next day—September 11.
In the aftermath of the attacks, Rohrabacher was in demand. In meetings with Rice, as well as Pentagon and CIA officials, he says, he argued that the Northern Alliance and a small US team should oust the Taliban—the more heavy-handed operation favored by some military leaders wouldn't work. Rohrabacher's aides, meanwhile, worked the phones with their Afghan contacts, gathering intelligence on the Taliban's movements. "I had everybody's sat-phone number," says Al Santoli, a former foreign policy aide to Rohrabacher. "I spent as much time at the Pentagon as I did in the congressional office."
Even now, Rohrabacher grins when recalling the overthrow of the Taliban. "Everything was ours," he says. "We had the total faith of the vast majority of Afghans." But, he adds, it all went sour when the administration decided to shift gears. "The turning point was when George W. Bush through his hubris decided he was going to—I can just see him saying, 'We're on a roll, let's go into Iraq.' We didn't have the ability to sustain large-scale military operations in Iraq and still rebuild Afghanistan." Still, Rohrabacher was a steadfast backer of the war during the Bush years, a stance he now considers "a mistake."
Today, Rohrabacher vows to vote against any funding for Obama's surge in Afghanistan. Instead he favors, perhaps unsurprisingly, a revival of the Reagan Doctrine. He regards the Karzai government as hopelessly corrupt and sees a decentralized power structure as the only solution. Rather than putting more American troops in harm's way, he'd prefer that the US reinvigorate and perhaps arm Afghanistan's militias (including those associated with his ex-Northern Alliance friends)—the same forces the US and international forces initially tried to dismantle. And instead of spending some $33 billion on the surge, Rohrabacher wants to allocate $5 billion for "buying the good will of local village leaders" while also embedding small US units in villages. "We have to have our people become part of the Afghan family," he says. Rohrabacher has distributed a blueprint—authored by a Special Forces major whose unit developed a close rapport with an eastern tribe—for doing just that to all of his colleagues.
As the Obama administration formulated its war strategy last fall, Rohrabacher made his case to top officials, even the president himself—to little avail. (Only Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, who in diplomatic cables expressed doubts about the surge, concurred with him over glasses of Uzbek brandy during a dinner party at his house, Rohrabacher says.) Still, some of DC's top Afghanistan experts think Rohrabacher's ideas have merit: His argument for a decentralized approach "deserves serious consideration," Paul Pillar, former national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, told me. "I would underscore that it is a totally different approach from what the administration has adopted."
As our interview drew to a close, an aide came in to announce Rohrabacher's next appointment. The visitor was a young Afghan expat, who'd been referred to him by a retired US general who figured the congressman might appreciate his insights. "Here's an Afghan for you," Rohrabacher said, striding out with a boisterous laugh. "This is typical."
Daniel Schulman is Mother Jones' Washington-based news editor.
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7)The Great Political War Obama Never Expected
By J. Robert Smith
Man proposes and God disposes. A big part of the trouble for Barack Obama and all those crackerjack leftwing strategists and the brigades of Alinsky thugketeers is that they've never gotten the hang of the second part of that old axiom. For the left, God disposes of nothing, because God is, well, nothing more than an opiate. For the rest of us who believe in God, we know otherwise. History is strewn with fine examples of man's grand designs coming athwart something -- anything -- that makes those designs not worth the paper their drawn on. By chance, does anyone know what happened to the British North American Empire?
So it is today in the United States of America. We have a president and a party (infested with a cabal of heathen leftists) whose grand design is to bloat the state and, hence, their power. But the left's smart plans have come athwart something, that something being the freedom-loving intransigence of God-fearing conservatives and many other Americans (God-fearing as well). What Barack Obama and the left have gotten is what they never expected: a political war -- perhaps one on an epic scale that will bring down the House of FDR.
Providence is no friend of hubris, and there is much foul hubris in the left's maximum leader, Barack Obama, and perhaps as much in his minions. Whether the Tower of Obama meets the same fate as the Tower of Babel depends on the outcome of the political war underway. Expect the war to be protracted and a close run thing, for, when push comes to shove, Mr. Obama and the left are choosing to govern in semi-caudillo fashion; that is, contrary to the will of the people. Utopia is being foisted on Americans for their own good.
The cocky President Obama, his chief henchman, the bullying locker-room nudist, Rahm Emanuel, and his Rasputin, a Chicago political machine consigliere named Axelrod, all misinterpreted and overestimated the results of the Democrats' ascendency in 2006 and 2008. They were buoyed by the analyses of shifts in the electorate penned by liberal pundits. America, the left believed, was ripe for a sharp turn left.
But almost from the get-go, Americans wanted no decisive swing leftward. Opposition to Mr. Obama's big government hash was nearly instantaneous. Conservatives were in the vanguard of fighting the revolutionary -- perhaps more accurately, reactionary --march of the left toward heretofore unheard of liberty-depriving dominance.
So a political war came. Early on in the war, Mr. Obama expected something on the order of Sherman's famous (or infamous, depending on what side of the Mason Dixon Line you live) March to the Sea. Statism would go boldly across the rich, wide land, taking and ravaging health care, business and industry and anything else that got in the way of creating a People's Republic. Mr. Obama's band of leftwing bummers vowed to strong-arm the rich to surrender even more of their money to support benevolent government, and they brazenly lied to the middle and working classes that the citizens thereof needn't worry about the pilfering of their wallets.
Wary middle Americans weren't buying into the propaganda that Barack's band had no intention of someday, someway, picking their bones clean too. Americans, long accustomed to the wild and wooly ways of free markets, know something about assurances and offers -- they usually come with hitches. Buried deep in Mr. Obama's fatigues is a list with every taxpayer's name on it. Those many thousands of IRS agents Mr. Obama plans to add to the government payroll will be there for one reason and reason only: to better plunder the modest earnings of the country's un-rich.
Yet as the vagaries of war would have it, Mr. Obama finds himself not triumphantly marching to the sea. Instead, he's at the political equivalent of Cold Harbor -- a major Civil War battle -- having to slug it out with a determined foe. The President gained ground on health care only after tremendous losses. The façade of the unifier and centrist that Mr. Obama and his flaks threw up in the 2008 election is in tatters. A majority of voters no longer hope for the change that Obama the leftist ideologue has unveiled.
Cold Harbor was striking in that it presaged the trench warfare that would curse Europe in the first world war. And there's where both opposing forces in the war for America's future are now: fighting across trenches, locked in something of a stalemate. Liberty's soldiers have dug in deeply; they have greatly retarded the statists' advances and are making the statists pay dearly with precious political capital for each bit of sod gotten legislatively. In this war, at this moment, attrition doesn't favor the statist aggressor; it favors the freedom-loving defenders. The clock is Mr. Obama's enemy, too. The greater the President's delay, the greater the chances of sending him packing.
But, ultimately, this war will not be won in the trenches. Victory depends on a breakout. The strategy is for freedom-lovers to hold the line until November. Then sober-minded voters, moving en masse to the polls, will elect a conservative majority via the Republican Party to the U.S. House or Senate or both. Congressional majorities will then commence a new phase of the war, a war of maneuver aimed at outflanking Mr. Obama and the left.
If triumphant, if voters depose Madame Pelosi, the droll Harry Reid and their forces, Republicans, with new conservative backbone and muscle, can begin Operation Starve, Replace and Repeal. Starve Mr. Obama's wretched government health care scheme of funding. Repeal it when a Republican president assumes office in 2013. And replace the Obama monstrosity with market-oriented, consumer-empowering reforms shortly thereafter. And do the same with any other legislation that the pale reds pushed through in their brief but disruptive tenure.
"If" is a mighty big word in human events. Battlefield commanders know that war plans are good up until the first shot. Then it's up to the smarts, the wiles, the adaptability and the will of their forces to carry the fight in the face of the unexpected. Political wars and battles, just like the real things, have their ebbs and flows, their good days and bad. Nothing is a given. The expectation is all must be earned. Serendipity and the folly of one's opponents can't be counted on.
Liberty-loving Americans need to keep the fight up not just to November, but well past it. Victory comes to those who weather adversities and persevere. American patriots propose not just to secure recently imperiled liberties but to eventually restore the liberties lost to the statists over the last eight decades. Let us pray that God disposes well of the patriots' intentions.
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8)Howard Dean: The Bet's Off on Incumbency
By David Pietrusza
Liberal propagandists are very good at changing the subject, their task made all the more easy thanks to their firm grasp on both the channel and volume controls of the mainstream media remote control device.
Take for very good example, the current election cycle.
Democrats are in trouble. Big trouble. We know that. They know that.
But it is also very handy to provide excuses, excuses that will disguise the real reason for rising voter discontent.
So the story becomes not that the public is outraged with Democrats or liberals or those who rammed the stimulus or the health care/student loan nationalization bill through the Congress. It becomes that the public is dissatisfied with incumbents.
Now, that might explain Jon Corzine's loss in New Jersey, but it does not explain earth-shaking Democratic setbacks in Virginia and Massachusetts. In fact, incumbent Corzine scored a higher percentage than failed Democratic gubernatorial candidate Creigh Deeds in Virginia.
Yet, the meme continues. It's not Democrats who are in trouble. It's incumbents.
As the Gallup poll recently reported: "A record-low percentage of U.S. voters -- 28% -- say most members of Congress deserve to be re-elected. The previous low was 29% in October 1992. . . . Additionally, 65% of registered voters -- the highest in Gallup history, and by far the highest in any recent midterm year -- now say most members of Congress do not deserve re-election."
Yup, it's incumbents. That's the problem. No, it's not -- and even folks who say that they believe that really don't.
Case in point.
Former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean and former Bush Administration guru Karl Rove have recently taken an act out on the road, debating and joshing each other at stops along the college campus route, as did G. Gordon Liddy and Timothy Leary years ago.
The results have been illuminating but never more so than in Albany, New York on April 8, when Dean, while conceding that Democrats would indeed lose seats in the fall, went on to alibi that the problem was incumbency rather than ideology.
Some further background. For his part, Rove has recently noted that the sample congressional generic polling now favors the GOP at a much higher rate than in did in the watershed year of 1994. The GOP is now ahead by three percent. In April 1994 it still lagged by behind Democrats.
And the congressional anti-incumbency of April 2010 actually breaks down rather interestingly. Democrats, oddly enough, are not all that anti-incumbent. In fact, they're not anti-incumbent at all. They favor incumbents by a 46 percent-41 percent margin. And, again, not surprisingly, Republicans now really loathe incumbents. They want them out by an 83 percent-13 percent avalanche. But the real number of interest -- as always -- involves independents. They align themselves with Republican thinking, hankering to throw the rascals out by a huge 72 percent-25 percent factor. Look to them to be nearly as selective as Republicans in regard to which incumbents they choose to toss into the ash heap of history.
Now, back to Mr. Rove and Governor Dean.
Rove is no Pollyanna on matters electoral. He studiously refuses to yet predict a GOP majority in either house in 2011. The highest he is willing to go in Senate, at this point in time, is 49 Republican seats, with, perhaps a majority. if the party wins two out of four seats in Washington (Murray), California (Boxer), Wisconsin (Feingold), and New York (Gillibrand). He predicts, again at this point in time, only a thirty-five pick-up in the House, a figure insufficient to separate septuagenarian Nancy Pelosi from her speaker's gavel.
Yet, onstage at Albany, listening to Howard Dean's incumbency shtick, Rove finally had enough.
Before an audience of 2,500, he called Dean out on his assertion regarding congressional incumbency, daring him to put his money where his mouth is -- challenging him to a $1,000 bet (the proceeds to go to a University at Albany scholarship fund) that there would be three times as many Democratic incumbents defeated as current GOP officeholders.
Dean looked ill. His smile broadened artificially. His brow furrowed genuinely.
He wouldn't bite.
A frustrated, but still confident, Rove raised the ante.
Make it four -- four times as many, he challenged.
Still no response, beyond Dean's pasted-on grin and a waggle of his eyebrows meant to convey something or other.
"I know you're a cheapskate Howard," Rove goaded the former Vermont governor.
"Democrats are always much more careful about their money," Dean responded, merely providing Rove an opportunity to skewer him and his co-religionists.
"It's other people's money they're free with," said Rove.
Dean kept his silence because there is other people's money and there is your money -- and other people's incumbent's and your incumbents.
David Pietrusza is author of a forthcoming book on the 1948 election, is also the author of 1920: The Year of the Six Presidents.
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9)When Civil Rights Make Civil Hands Unclean
By Jed Gladstein
The advocates of "social justice" masquerade as partisans of civil rights, but they are actually practitioners of civil wrongs.
Some people in this country think they have a right to use government compulsion to overcome the free will of their fellow citizens. In the name of "social justice," they claim to have a "civil right" to health care, and they assert that their fellow citizens have a corresponding civil duty to finance that civil right. If their fellow citizens disagree, the proponents of "social justice" have no qualms about using government power to compel their fellow citizens to submit to their notion of civil rights.
As the frightening spectacle of "social justice" unfolds across our nation, thoughtful people are waking up to the fact that the civil rights movement has been hijacked by ideas that are inimical to freedom. Many are digging into the past to discover how, in the long march to emancipate slaves from physical shackles and women from legal shackles, this country turned off the road to freedom and headed down the path to tyranny. The more they dig, the clearer it becomes that there is a fundamental flaw in the thinking of the "social justice" advocates.
Of course, the notion of "social justice" is beguiling at first glance. By its very vagueness, the phrase invites people to endow it with whatever meaning they find most appealing. For a devout Moslem, social justice means Sharia -- the subjugation of all people to Islamic religious law by any means Mohammed endorsed. For cultural Marxists, social justice is publicly proclaimed to be the dispossession of the "haves" and their replacement by the "have-nots." For a contemporary American liberal, social justice is primarily a matter of using the law to redistribute material goods and social services by requiring "advantaged" citizens to forfeit their advantages so that "disadvantaged" citizens can have them (sometimes called "distributive justice").
Though each of these ideas of "social justice" claims to seek a different result, they all have one thing in common. Each of them depends upon wielding socio-political power to the detriment of some people and for the benefit of other people. Of course, the meme of contemporary liberals and cultural Marxists is that socio-political power is already used in that fashion to uphold the wealthy and keep the poor downtrodden. But if that is their only justification for social justice, then the phrase is nothing more than an Orwellian masquerade for social retribution -- a verbal disguise behind which is lurking a desire to put the shoe on the other foot and perpetrate on the "haves" the very evils the proponents of social justice claim to oppose.
Yet, while revenge may motivate some of the advocates of social justice, it does not characterize all of them. For some, the concept of social justice is more ideological. It is founded on a belief that the government should supply social goods and services to the people as a matter of civil rights. That is what lies behind recent pronouncements by leading Democrats about the "right" of people to health care. Of course, such statements are made without any attempt to legitimate the assertion, as if the proposition is simply self-evident. But for anyone who understands the historical role of government in society, that kind of proposition is anything but self-evident. In fact, it is directly contrary to what should be evident to anyone who understands the historical role of government in American society.
In 1776, Thomas Jefferson was asked to reduce to writing the reasons that the thirteen English colonies decided to break away from the Mother country and chart a new course across the stormy sea of human history. The American colonists were outraged because the government of the Mother country taxed them without their consent for purposes they considered objectionable. In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson wrote:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that ... governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." [Emphasis added.]
When Jefferson penned these words, he spoke for all of the Founders of the American constitutional system of government. Thus, following publication of the Declaration of Independence, the Founders affirmed the vision of government by "the consent of the governed" in two distinct ways. First, they crafted a limited federal government that was only authorized to exercise powers expressly granted to it in the Constitution (Jefferson's "just powers"). Then, as a condition of ratifying that Constitution, they promulgated a Bill of Rights consisting of ten amendments, the last two of which provide that:
•Apart from the limited set of powers expressly granted to the federal government, all political power is retained by the states and by the American people (10th Amendment); and,
•It is the people who own all of the civil rights in America, not society in general, and not the federal government in particular (9th Amendment).
If the Constitution and Bill of Rights mean what they say, then they stand for the proposition that, unless the federal government has an express grant of authority to interfere with the civil rights owned by the American people, the government may not create, abolish or modify those rights for any reason whatsoever. Indeed, no other proposition is consistent with Article V of the Constitution, which only authorizes the federal government to propose a constitutional amendment if it wants to modify the civil rights of the American people, and explicitly requires that all such amendments must be ratified by the affirmative action of three fourths of the states before they can become the law of the land.
The advocates of "social justice" attempt to circumvent this clear limitation on the "just powers" of the federal government by arguing that Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution gives the government the authority to declare new civil rights and compel the American people to pay for them. However, Section 8 of Article I merely states that Congress can "regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states." It does not grant the federal government any power to declare, expand or diminish the civil rights owned by the American people. Thus, while the social justice advocates claim that the government has the authority under the commerce clause to tax the people against their will in order to finance a newly created "right" to health care, under the Bill of Rights it is the American people who must decide whether such a right even exists. A foundational inquiry, therefore, is whether the American people have made such a decision.
The principal advocates of "social justice" say that the American people decided the issue when they put Mr. Obama and the Pelosi Democrats in power. "The campaign is over," said Mr. Obama. "We won the election," said Nancy Pelosi. But in the constitutional scheme of things, the fact that the Democrats became the majority political party doesn't give the federal government new powers. Its powers are set forth in the Constitution, and no mere change in the political personalities who take control of the federal apparatus can expand the "just powers" of that government. Thomas Jefferson addressed this very issue in 1793, when he wrote:
"I consider the people who constitute a society or nation as the source of all authority in that nation; as free to transact their common concerns by any agents they think proper; to change these agents ... (and) that all the acts ... of the nation ... can in no wise be annulled or affected by any change in the form of the government or of the persons administering it." [Emphasis added.]
So, the election of the Democrats to power in Washington D.C. does not justify their imposing "health care" on the American people as a new civil "right" in the name of "social justice." Only the people have the constitutional authority to expand their civil rights; and, if the people want a new civil right written into the Constitution, only the people, acting through their respective state governments, have the right to put it there. That is what the "consent of the governed" means in the American constitutional system of government.
And yet, today, we find ourselves in a situation where the national government has engorged itself on powers it does not justly possess, and is now in the process of wielding those powers so oppressively that government "by the consent of the governed" has become a hollow mockery. In the name of "social justice," the government seeks to impose new "civil rights" on the American people without their consent, and it even criminalizes the people's refusal to finance those so-called rights. Surely, in the entire history of the American Republic, never have "civil rights" made civil hands so unclean.
Jed Gladstein is an attorney, author, and educator.
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