By David Limbaugh

The more we read about Obama’s health care scheme and his handling of it the more obvious his arrogance and contempt for the people become.

This is stunning behavior, really, for any administration (and his party), but especially one that holds itself out as a servant of the people and a model of transparency.

Just consider headlines from the past few days: “Obama Reneges on Health Care Transparency: As a Candidate, President Obama Promised to Put Health Care Reform Negotiations on C-SPAN,” “White House REFUSES To Discuss Broken C-Span Promise,” “Dems Will Bypass Conference Committee To Get Health Care Passed,” “Sources: Obama, Dems to sidestep GOP on health care,” “Hatch: Healthcare bill ‘rich’ for challenges on constitutionality,” “AP sources: Obama OKs taxing high-end health plans,” “Obama Pushes for Quick Health Care Deal,” “Conference Committee Bypassed,” “House Will Vote on Pro-Abortion Senate Bill” and — get this one — “Pelosi: ‘There Has Never Been a More Open Process.’”

Seriously, who do these people think they are? No wonder they always assumed the worst of former President George W. Bush and then accused him of sinister motives he never had and actions he never committed. As I’ve noted before, they were projecting. They knew how they would behave if in power. Now, once again, they’re proving it.

Think about it. Obama promised at least eight times — memorialized in video recordings — that he would air health care debates and negotiations on C-SPAN for all to see. If you watch the videos, you’ll notice that he was even wearing that smug, self-righteous look as he made his deceitful pledge, as if to say: “When I take over, we are finally going to return power to the people. We’ll be open and transparent. We won’t behave as Washington politicians are used to behaving. We’re better than that. We’re morally superior.”

But now, his highness is not only not going to air the negotiations on television; he and his party are making sure to negotiate behind closed doors, period. Even the Republicans — you know, that other political party — will not be invited or permitted to participate in the discussions.

It gets worse. When pressed to respond to the open-and-shut claim that he deceived the people in promising a transparent process, he simply says — through his disgraceful surrogates — that he isn’t going to be bothered to discuss it. He doesn’t have to explain himself. He’s the messiah. Who are we to doubt — much less question — him?

Keep in mind, folks, that this is a bill the public has clearly indicated it does not want passed. Americans are not ready for socialized medicine. But Obama and his party don’t care. They are forcing it down our throats as quickly as they can, unilaterally — to borrow their favorite term to criticize President Bush’s foreign policy.

The White House is also being completely dismissive — another term Obama is fond of using, to describe the United States before he ascended to the throne — concerning legitimate questions about the constitutionality of Obamacare.

Consider this: No fewer than 13 state attorneys general signed a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, expressing their “grave concern” over the constitutionality of one provision of the bill. This provision would cause the federal government to grant special favors to Nebraska (subsidizing its Medicaid costs) pursuant to the Democrats’ bribe to secure Sen. Ben Nelson’s support. (I might note that the attorneys general could have asserted quite a few other constitutional challenges, such as the bill’s unlawful mandate that people be forced to buy health insurance and the utter lack of constitutional authority for the federal government to legislate in this area at all.)

How did the White House respond when asked about this letter?

Well, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, after admitting he hadn’t even read the letter, said, “I do not believe that anybody has legitimate constitutional concerns about the legislation.”

That settles it then. Chief Justice Gibbs has spoken. Also, when asked whether Obama supported the provision giving special treatment to Nebraska, he glibly said, “He’s a supporter of the Senate bill, so I don’t know what that will lead you to conclude.” How’s that for a little sarcasm chaser to top off your shot of corruption?

Even Nancy Pelosi, a piece of work in her own right, is no longer vouching for the integrity of her Fearless Leader. When asked about Obama’s broken campaign pledge to air health care negotiations on C-SPAN, she quipped, “Really? There are a number of things he was for on the campaign trail.”

A question for you lingering Obama supporters: How is his “man of the people” facade looking to you now? 

Via The Washington Examiner

By Hugh Hewitt

President Obama’s year of blunders is ending with the worst failure yet by the president and his team: An Islamist terrorist penetrated the United States and came very close to perpetrating the greatest mass-casualty attack within the U.S. since 9/11.

The president’s first year in office has been marked by a string of pratfalls.

President Obama’s massive stimulus didn’t.

His hasty takeover of GM didn’t restore confidence in the brand or faith in the company’s executive team or future.

Obamacare has failed to persuade even 40 percent of the American people of its merits and depends upon the enthusiasm of such brilliant lights as Barbara Boxer, Al Franken and Bernie Sanders to pass.

The president’s rhetoric about restraining spending has been washed away in a flood of red ink far vaster than all that has gone before it. And despite this profligate hemorrhaging of money the country doesn’t have, unemployment is in the double digits and key industries like home building remain moribund.

His repeated appeals to the radical mullahs of Iran have not only failed to initiate any sort of constructive engagement, but a year into his “new diplomacy” the radical Islamists atop the power structure in Tehran are mowing down dissidents in the streets.

And now at least one foreign-born terrorist has breached American security — despite a specific warning given by the terrorist’s father to American officials six months ago — only weeks after the worst act of a domestic Islamist terror since the war began.

The president is abandoning Iraq, and his dithering on Afghanistan has started a necessary surge but attached an expiration date to it.

Perhaps the close call over the approach to Detroit will wake up the responsible members of the president’s party, and perhaps they will ask for a meeting in which they can lay out the obvious truths:

The president should spend more time and effort helping the CIA stop terrorists abroad than pursuing investigations into CIA personnel who have kept us safe in the past.

The president should stop spending so much time and effort to remove terrorists from Gitmo and to arranging their trial in New York and their imprisonment in Illinois and spend much more time arranging for more terrorists to spend more time in Gitmo’s secure confines.

The president should spend less time in Copenhagen seeking Olympic games and global warming fame and more time at home demanding more vigilance from his woeful Homeland Security staff.

And the president should spend more time encouraging and consulting with our allies like Great Britain and Israel than pleading with our enemies in Iran and North Korea for breakthroughs that will not come.

2009 is the worst year for a president since 1978, which began with Jimmy Carter standing by paralyzed as the Ayatollah Khomeini seized power in Iran and ended as Jimmy Carter stood paralyzed as the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.

The tale of this president’s and his team’s incompetence must have come completely into focus even for the MSM when Homeland Security Chief Janet Napolitano declared to CNN’s Candy Crowley that the attack on Detroit that failed to kill hundreds only because of the incompetence of the terrorist and the courage of a foreign filmmaker demonstrated that “the system worked.”

This must strike even the president’s network cheerleaders as Orwellian. And chilling.

Obama has proved himself remarkably skilled for the role of celebrity talking head and woefully ill-prepared for the job of leader of the free world and defender of American security. He campaigned as the opposite of George W. Bush and he has delivered, as the attack on Detroit demonstrates.

The country cannot afford two years in a row of such incompetence and close calls. Let us hope that senior statesmen in the president’s party summon the courage to demand the changes in staff and policies that halt this accelerating parade of fiascos.

And let’s hope they begin with the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, where change must come soon, before less incompetent terrorists make their way into the airspace above America’s great cities.



By Walter Williams

Detroit’s (predominantly black) public schools are the worst in the nation and it takes some doing to be worse than Washington, D.C. Only 3 percent of Detroit’s fourth-graders scored proficient on the most recent National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) test, sometimes called “The Nation’s Report Card.” Twenty-eight percent scored basic and 69 percent below basic. “Below basic” is the NAEP category when students are unable to demonstrate even partial mastery of knowledge and skills fundamental for proficient work at their grade level. It’s the same story for Detroit’s eighth-graders. Four percent scored proficient, 18 percent basic and 77 percent below basic.

Michael Casserly, executive director of the D.C.-based Council on Great City Schools, in an article appearing in Crain’s Detroit Business, (12/8/09) titled, “Detroit’s Public Schools Post Worst Scores on Record in National Assessment,” said, “There is no jurisdiction of any kind, at any level, at any time in the 30-year history of NAEP that has ever registered such low numbers.” The academic performance of black students in other large cities such as Philadelphia, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles is not much better than Detroit and Washington.

What’s to be done about this tragic state of black education? The education establishment and politicians tell us that we need to spend more for higher teacher pay and smaller class size. The fact of business is higher teacher salaries and smaller class sizes mean little or nothing in terms of academic achievement. Washington, D.C., for example spends over $15,000 per student, has class sizes smaller than the nation’s average, and with an average annual salary of $61,195, its teachers are the most highly paid in the nation.

What about role models? Standard psychobabble asserts a positive relationship between the race of teachers and administrators and student performance. That’s nonsense. Black academic performance is the worst in the very cities where large percentages of teachers and administrators are black, and often the school superintendent is black, the mayor is black, most of the city council is black and very often the chief of police is black.

Black people have accepted hare-brained ideas that have made large percentages of black youngsters virtually useless in an increasingly technological economy. This destruction will continue until the day comes when black people are willing to turn their backs on liberals and the education establishment’s agenda and confront issues that are both embarrassing and uncomfortable. To a lesser extent, this also applies to whites because the educational performance of many white kids is nothing to write home about; it’s just not the disaster that black education is.

Many black students are alien and hostile to the education process. They have parents with little interest in their education. These students not only sabotage the education process, but make schools unsafe as well. These students should not be permitted to destroy the education chances of others. They should be removed or those students who want to learn should be provided with a mechanism to go to another school.

Another issue deemed too delicate to discuss is the overall quality of people teaching our children. Students who have chosen education as their major have the lowest SAT scores of any other major. Students who have an education degree earn lower scores than any other major on graduate school admission tests such as the GRE, MCAT or LSAT. Schools of education, either graduate or undergraduate, represent the academic slums of most any university. They are home to the least able students and professors. Schools of education should be shut down.

Yet another issue is the academic fraud committed by teachers and administrators. After all, what is it when a student is granted a diploma certifying a 12th grade level of achievement when in fact he can’t perform at the sixth- or seventh-grade level?

Prospects for improvement in black education are not likely given the cozy relationship between black politicians, civil rights organizations and teacher unions.

By Michelle Malkin

President Obama’s hometown cronies lost their bid to bring the 2016 Olympic Games to the Windy City. But this week they got a consolation prize: the Gitmolympics. On Tuesday, the White House went public with its official plans to purchase the Thomson Correctional Facility from financially strapped Illinois to house Guantanamo Bay detainees. The War on Terror meets the Chicago Way.

Political boosters of the Illinois budget bailout masquerading as a national security program can’t wait to roll out the jihadi welcome mat. Unions representing federal prison workers also cheered the move. Leading the lobbying delegation for the new Gitmo-in-the-heartland located a few hours west of Chicago: Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, last seen on the international stage in 2005 likening American interrogators and military staff at Guantanamo Bay to Nazis, Soviet gulag operators and genocidal maniac Pol Pot.

And co-chairing the bid to bring suspected jihadis to American soil: beleaguered Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn (D), who is salivating at the prospect of an estimated $1 billion injection into the local economy over four years. (Never mind that the jobs predictions from the Council of Economic Advisers use the same fuzzy math methods that gave us bogus porkulus numbers.)

Sensibly, the people of Illinois who will have to live with this raw deal aren’t waving their pompoms. A Rasmussen poll shows that 51 percent of voters in the state oppose the transfer of suspected terrorists from the Cuban detention facility to their backyard — including 70 percent of Republicans, 37 percent of Democrats and 57 percent of independents.

Left-wing advocates of closing Gitmo accuse these Americans of “NIMBYism” and groundless fear. But can you blame anyone who watched the Crashergate debacle at the White House or the Scare Force One debacle in New York City for choking on disbelief when Team Obama promises airtight safety, security and competence?

Moreover, Illinois is already suffering its own severe prison-overcrowding crisis — which Quinn has alleviated by secretly releasing more than 850 inmates, including violent offenders, since September, according to the Associated Press.

GOP gubernatorial candidate Dan Proft pointed out that “the state’s 28 current prisons are 32 percent over capacity. Why not alleviate the overcrowding and bring the Thomson prison online” for existing criminals instead of importing them from abroad? Kirk Dillard, another Republican candidate, blasted Quinn’s fiscal desperation: “I think al-Qaida needs to stay in Cuba. It shows how pathetic the state of Illinois’ finances are, where we have to stand with our hat in hand and have the federal government give us money to open a penitentiary that the Democrats have let sit vacant for years.”

Obama officials stress that the prison would house Gitmo detainees separately from federal inmates, and that the two would be “managed separately” with “no opportunity to interact” between them. Which entirely misses the point that Gitmo detainees’ lawyers and translators have been the primary security concerns — not just other inmates:

— Last month, jihadist-enabling lawyer Lynne Stewart was finally ordered to jail after her conviction in 2005 for aiding and abetting imprisoned blind Egyptian sheik Omar Abdel Rahman by smuggling coded messages of violence to terrorist followers abroad — in violation of an explicit pledge to abide by her client’s court-ordered isolation.

— Earlier this summer, the Justice Department launched an inquiry into photographs of undercover CIA officials and other intelligence personnel taken by ACLU-sponsored researchers assisting the defense team of Guantanamo Bay detainees. The pictures of covert American CIA officers — “in some cases surreptitiously taken outside their homes,” according to the Washington Post — were shown to jihadi suspects tied to the 9/11 attacks in order to identify the interrogators.

— As investigative journalist Paul Sperry reported recently, a number of Arabic and Pashtu interpreters who served at Gitmo are “under active investigation for omitting valuable intelligence from their translations of detainee interrogations, among other security breaches.”

The corruptocratic Attorney General Eric Holder is, of course, in no position to raise any principle objections to the Gitmo-in-the-heartland plans. Remember: He served as senior partner with Covington and Burling — the prestigious Washington, D.C., law firm that represents 17 Yemenis currently held at Gitmo. And top attorneys at his Justice Department have had to recuse themselves numerous times over their conflicts of interest in Gitmo-related cases. Holder has failed to provide a full recusal list of all the Gitmo detainee cases from which current Justice Department political appointees have had to recuse themselves.

Meanwhile, Team Obama is now championing the very same indefinite detention powers for detainees deemed untriable that it condemned the Bush administration for exercising — and for which it targeted Gitmo for closure in the first place. Give the White House a gold medal for costly incoherence and reckless redundance.

Source: Obama Brings the Gitmolympics Home (http://townhall.com/columnists/MichelleMalkin/2009/12/16/obama_brings_the_gitmolympics_home?page=full&comments=true) by Michelle Malkin

By Clifford F. Thies

Hacked or possibly leaked emails appear to indicate that a lot of what passes for climate-change science is propaganda. Data appears to have been filtered, altered, or falsified, in order to deny the obvious: the earth is not continuing to warm up in accordance with climate change models; global temperature has been fluctuating for hundreds of thousands of years due to natural variation; and the earth is no warmer nowadays than it has been at several prior times in history. 

The black mark earned by alarmists during the 1970s, for predicting continued global cooling, may be replicated for global-warming alarmists. The real tragedy, however, may be that — one day — scientists will cry wolf to a public that has learned to ignore them.

By now, anybody who is serious about the possibility of global warming knows that the "hockey-stick" theory promulgated by the UN a few years ago is bunk.

This theory held that there was no meaningful variation in global temperature during the past several thousand years until recently, when capitalism began to harness industrial power. That this theory was advanced by a scientist who was a socialist might raise a question about its validity.

"Science" is not, as some people imagine, memorizing a list of facts (such as the names of the planets). Nor is the progress of science determined by laboratory experiments. This is because, at the edge of our knowledge, accepted laboratory experiments don't exist and, in certain fields, laboratory experiments might not even be possible. Rather, the progress of science is determined by free inquiry, open discussion, and transparency among those engaged in a discipline.

There should be no pretense that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is an unbiased organization. It was formed by the United Nations specifically to study "the risk of human-induced climate change." The guilty party is, thus, pre-identified and all that remains is to collect the evidence. Periodic reports of the IPCC proclaimed, ever more authoritatively, that the trend of global warming that was occurring at the time was due to human activity. The second report, in 1996, said "the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on climate change."

The third, in 2001, presented "new and stronger evidence." This report included the hockey stick and the whacky idea that the trend of rising global temperature over the prior three centuries (or, since the so-called "Little Ice Age") was due to human activity. The fourth, in 2007, which dropped the most embarrassing claims, nevertheless claimed that "most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations."

This all seemed plausible at the time because of the warming trend. But, recently, global temperatures have been moderating and, besides, as the emails show, scientists were altering the evidence all the while.

Now You See It

Below I have a chart with the history of global temperature as it was known at the time of the 2001 report. As the chart makes clear, global temperature began to recover from the Little Ice Age about three hundred years ago. Juxtaposed against the rising trend are several cycles of 30 to 40 years length, including the one I show in red, which caused a lot of alarmists during the 1970s to say that industrial activity was causing global cooling.




Now You Don't

Publishing the actual history of global temperature would question the hypothesis that human activity was causing it to rise. Or, to quote an email of one of the supposedly esteemed scientists promoting the UN climate change agenda, it would provide "fodder" for the "skeptics." So, here is the chart that they published.

When, following its publication by the UN, the hockey-stick theory was reviewed by the National Academy of Science, it was found to be "not inconsistent" with the data available at the time. This is a fancy way of saying that no more than the usual amount of subjective interpretation was involved. A scientist who is a socialist will of course tend to stop investigating when he has "proved" that capitalism, by enabling a growing population to live at increasingly higher standards of living, is actually a bad thing. Contrariwise, a scientist who is a capitalist will have the opposite tendency.

In spite of these prejudices, there is hope for progress in science because, as long as we have free inquiry, the data will eventually have its turn to speak. This kind of give-and-take goes on all the time in scientific disciplines. But hiding evidence, as we now know was being done, is academic fraud. It should cause the National Academy of Sciences to reconsider its exoneration of the errors in the hockey-stick theory.

So What Do the Data Say?

A great deal of data has been gathered since the UN began its "bum rush" on free enterprise. First, we have much more evidence of natural variation from the past, based on a wide variety of proxies for temperature. During the past few thousand years, there were two periods during which global temperature was as high or higher than it now is.

Correlating warm and cool periods with what we know about history, warmer times have been times of human flourishing, expanding economic activity, scientific progress, and cultural expression. And cooler times have been times of starvation, disease, and the collapse of civilization. If we could control global temperature, our focus would be more on avoiding global cooling than it would be on avoiding global warming.

Second, we know that, at least thus far, we really don't know much about the causes of climate change. The computer models that incorporate the greenhouse-gas theory are being massively contradicted by current readings. That is, CO2 is continuing to build up in the atmosphere, and yet global temperature is moderating rather than continuing to rise.

It might be, as the historical evidence can be interpreted as suggesting, that variation of CO2 in the atmosphere is an effect rather than a cause of global temperature, since CO2 levels appear to lag variation in global temperature. The issue is certainly deserving of continuing study.

Third, we know that the scaremongers associated with the IPCC cannot be trusted. As important as the planet is, we need a community of climatologists that is not precommitted to a theory or — worse yet — to a policy prescription. The UN agenda is obviously driven by the many despotic nations of the world that seek to use climate change to shake down the wealthy nations of the world, in concert with an intellectual elite that favors socialism over capitalism and with special-interest groups seeking massive government subsidies. The Kyoto Treaty, which imposes limits only on certain nations (the wealthier ones), could never work, since it will only shift industrial activity to nations without limits (the poorer ones), with no net reduction in carbon emissions.

Finally, we know that, with regard to all scarce resources, a market approach is to be preferred to a socialist approach, especially a one-world-government socialist approach.

A market approach to environmental policy would not only achieve whatever goals are set efficiently, given the technologies currently available; it will induce the discovery of new technologies, making what seems costly and maybe even impossible today achievable with increasingly higher standards of living tomorrow.

Unlike socialism, capitalism does not rely on fear. Capitalism relies on belief, belief in the inexhaustible creativity of free persons.

Clifford F. Thies is the Eldon R. Lindsay Chair of Free Enterprise at Shenandoah University in Winchester, VA. Send him mail. See Clifford F. Thies's article archives.

Source: Science or Nonscience (http://mises.org/daily/3899) by Clifford F. Thies

By Oliver North

This week, while “the most traveled President in history” was on his latest foreign adventure, and bowing to Japanese Emperor Akihito, the rest of the O-Team was been busy kowtowing to political correctness. The headlines tell the story:  

“Gates Condemns Leaks on Fort Hood Investigation,” and “Gates Says ‘Shut Up’ About Fort Hood.” 

“Attorney General Eric Holder Announces Terror Trials in New York City for 9-11-01 Plotters.” 

“Guantanamo Detainees to Illinois Prison.”

All three of these actions -- the Gates outburst; the Holder decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other 9-11-01 conspirators in Manhattan’s Federal Court; and the plan to transfer nearly 200 radical Islamic terrorists to a state prison in western Illinois have been decried as egregious examples of political correctness run amok. Actually, coming as they did while Mr. Obama was on a meaningless, ceremonial Asian junket, the “package deal for terrorists” is much worse than many imagine.   

Secretary Gates’ admonitions regarding Major Nidal Malik Hasan -- now charged by the U.S. Army of murdering 13 soldiers and wounding 29 others at Fort Hood -- have nothing to do with protecting the rights of the accused. His misplaced anger is directed at those in our military and defense and intelligence agencies who have justifiable concerns about radical Islamic militants conducting acts of terror on American soil. Inside the Obama administration, muzzling critics is now an accepted practice -- even at the Pentagon.   

The move to relocate up to 200 terrorists from the U.S. Military Detention Facility at  Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and house them in the nearly vacant Thomson Correction Center is a double-whammy for the O-Team. It assuages Leftist elites in the U.S. and Europe who have been grousing about delays in closing GITMO and serves as a multi-million dollar “stimulus” for Mr. Obama’s home state.  

Though Rep. Tom Latham, a Republican from neighboring Iowa -- directly across the Mississippi from the Thomson prison -- wants to introduce a “Keep Terrorists Out of the Midwest Act,” to prevent the move, it is already a fait accompli. Illinois Senator Richard “Dick” Durbin immediately endorsed the idea saying, “We should not let the unsupported and misplaced fears of a few stand in the way of this historic economic boost to our region.” 

Mr. Holder’s decision to move the trials of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi Bin al-Shibh, Walid bin Attash, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, and Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, from the Military Tribunal system at Guantanamo to a federal courtroom in Manhattan -- another sop to the Global Left -- has generated the greatest heat in the media and on Capitol Hill. Notably, the announcement was made the same day that Mr. Holder revealed that other accused terrorists being held at GITMO would be tried by military courts. 

Most attention has focused on whether the accused can get a fair trial, how classified information can be protected in an open court, and the possibility KSM and his cohorts might escape justice and go free. On November 18, in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Mr. Holder dismissed the criticism saying, “I’m not afraid of what Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has to say at trial – and no one else needs to be either.” Mr. Obama went even further, telling reporters covering his Asia trip, “We’ll convict this person with the evidence they’ve got, going through the system.” That statement alone will undoubtedly be used by KSM’s lawyers to prove that he cannot get a fair trial just blocks away from Ground Zero where the World Trade Center towers stood before the 9-11-01 attacks. 

Unfortunately, nearly all of the comments and commentary miss the point. The real reason why we should all be concerned about the Fort Hood massacre, moving terrorists to U.S. prisons and show trials in New York is because there are undoubtedly other Nidal Hasans here in the U.S. The media circus in New York and Illinois will go on for years -- inviting radical Islamist “sleepers” and “lone-wolves” to attack. 

It has happened before. In 1987 -- coincident with extraordinary media coverage -- an  Abu Nidal terror "sleeper cell" in Northern Virginia was ordered to assassinate a U.S. military officer. The terrorists -- all legally in the U.S. -- were in the employ of Libyan dictator Muammar Ghadaffi. Thankfully, the FBI detected the "hit" before it could be carried out and the officer and his family were rushed out of their home and sequestered on a military base until a full-scale U.S. government security detail could be organized to provide 24/7 protection for them at their home and wherever family members went. 

Nobody has yet asked how many judges, prosecutors, prison guards, and jurors will require such protection as a consequence of these decisions. They should. Otherwise the actions taken this week by the Obama administration won’t just be labeled as political correctness – it will be called political suicide. 

By Michelle Malkin

President Obama traveled all the way to China to praise the free flow of information. It's the only safe place he could do so without getting heckled. With a straight face, Obama lauded political dissent and told Chinese students he welcomed unfettered criticism in America. Fierce opposition, he said, made him "a better leader because it forces me to hear opinions that I don't want to hear." How do you say "You lie!" in Mandarin?

While the kowtower-in-chief's press shop feeds paeans to free speech into Obama's globetrotting teleprompter, the White House is still waging war on vocal foes at home. Obama has lectured his critics in Washington to stop talking and "get out of the way." He has stacked his carefully staged town halls with partisan stooges and campaign plants throughout the year. The president recently derided limited-government activists in the Tea Party movement with a vulgar sexual term used by left-wing cable host Anderson Cooper on CNN and the MSNBC smear merchants (just Google "teabagging" and you'll see what they mean).

There are now more muzzled watchdogs in the Obama administration than on the sidelines of the Westminster Kennel Club show.

Most recently, two EPA lawyers critical of the "fatally flawed" cap-and-trade system -- peddled by their agency, the White House and the Democratic majority -- were told by their superiors to yank a video they posted to YouTube explaining their views. Despite including a caveat that the opinions expressed were their own and not the agency's, the couple faces possible disciplinary action by the feds. While demanding the video be yanked, the EPA disingenuously claims it tolerates all dissenting views of its employees.

The clampdown follows on the heels of the Obama EPA's stifling of veteran researcher Alan Carlin's dissent. He dared to challenge the agency's reliance on outdated data to support its greenhouse gas "public endangerment" finding. Carlin's report was squelched; his office is now on the chopping block.

In China, O proclaimed himself "a big supporter of non-censorship." But his FCC "diversity" czar, Mark Lloyd, is bent on re-engineering public airwaves by redistributing free speech rights from conservative haves who earned their success to minority have-nots who demand talk radio entitlements in the name of "media justice."

And among Obama's closest advisers is a husband-and-wife duo who specializes in marginalizing and stifling the Democratic Party's most effective enemies. Just days after White House interim communications director Anita Dunn -- the administration's resident Mao cheerleader and Fox News-basher -- stepped down to take a planned role as a "consultant" behind the scenes, her husband, Robert Bauer, stepped up and shoved aside White House counsel Greg Craig.

The problem? Former Clinton lawyer Craig wasn't tough enough for Chicago-on-the-Potomac. Obama needed an intimate ally who will put hardball politics ahead of policy and the law. Bauer fits the bill.

A partner at the prestigious law firm Perkins & Coie, Bauer served as counsel to the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Obama for America. He has served as Obama's personal attorney, navigating the corrupted waters of former Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich's pay-for-play scandals in Illinois. He also served as legal counsel to the George Soros-funded 527 organization America Coming Together during the 2004 campaign.  That get-out-the-vote outfit, helmed by Patrick Gaspard (the former Service Employees International Union heavy turned Obama domestic policy chief), employed convicted felons as canvassers and committed campaign finance violations that led to a $775,000 fine by the Federal Election Commission under Bauer's watch.

During the 2008 campaign, Bauer pooh-poohed GOP complaints about voter fraud. While decrying the Republicans' "fear message," it was Bauer who was on a fear-inducing crusade -- pulling out all legal stops to silence conservative critics of Obama's ties to the radical left.

As I've noted previously, and in light of Obama's self-serving praise for political dissent abroad, I note again: It was Bauer who lobbied the Justice Department unsuccessfully last fall to pursue a criminal probe of American Issues Project (AIP), an independent group that sought to run an ad spotlighting Obama's ties to Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers.

It was Bauer and his legal goon squad who attempted to sic the DOJ on GOP donor Harold Simmons and sought his prosecution for funding the ad. In a parallel effort launched the same week as Bauer's legal efforts, a nonprofit called "Accountable America," spearheaded by a former operative of the Obama-endorsing MoveOn outfit, began trolling campaign finance databases and targeting conservative donors with "warning letters" in a thuggish attempt to depress Republican fundraising.

It was Bauer who tried to bully television stations across the country into pulling the spot. Team Obama then summoned their troops to bombard stations, many of them owned by conservative-leaning Sinclair Communications, with 93,000 e-mails to squelch the commercial.

With Bob "The Silencer" Bauer now working from the inside and Anita "News Commissar" Dunn working from the outside, Obama has a state media police apparatus the Chinese regime itself could love.

Michelle Malkin is the author of "Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies" (Regnery 2009).

COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS.COM

Source: Obama's Doubletalk on Political Dissent (http://www.gopusa.com/commentary/mmalkin/2009/mm_11181.shtml) by Michelle Malkin

by Susannah Kopecky

“Democracy is the road to socialism.” – Karl Marx

The concept of socialism and its path to communism reminds me of the story If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. In that delightful children’s story, the moral is that even if you give an inch, expect to give a mile. If you start accepting socialism, communism is just one cookie away.

For such a totalitarian system, socialism has been gaining quite a bit of street cred lately, thanks in no small part to emotional appeals toward a “moralistic” system of government-mandated “fairness”: limiting executive pay, demonizing the business class and rationing health care for the greater good.

Of course in all these instances the dreaded S word is never used. And those who advocate these policies will staunchly ridicule opponents who bring it up.

I can’t help but be amused when people define socialism as something that has to affect EVERYONE at once. In this estimation, somehow a socialist health care program isn’t really socialist until it’s renamed StalinCare.

Socialism can be defined as the precursor to communism, and a system which uses democracy and capitalism to eventually destroy the free thought-based systems themselves.

According to Princeton’s WordNet, socialism can also be defined as “a political theory advocating state ownership of industry” and “an economic system based on state ownership of capital.”

On Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report” on Tuesday,  alleged “conservative” English commentator and Atlantic writer Andrew Sullivan spoke to host Stephen Colbert on the issue of health care reform.

Sullivan pointed to the push for health care reform as a way to get working health insurance for “poor people” who currently do not enjoy it. “For some reason… he’s [President Obama] actually on the verge of [succeeding in] health reform,” Sullivan said. Interestingly, Sullivan pointed to the figure of five percent, which he estimates to be the actual number of Americans who would be shuffled into a public option system. To him, five percent of Americans being forced into a government-run health care system is not enough to constitute socialism, since it’s for (you guessed it) that “greater good.”

Accepting any degree of socialism means validating an inherently flawed idea. Socialism has no defined threshold value and is the means to an end, no matter how few individuals are immediately affected. Socialism simply needs an authoritarian center of control to oversee production (bureaucrats peering over the shoulders of doctors) and a way to allocate resources to citizens.

It’s time to stop accepting the argument that just a little socialism is alright, that a little bit of evil is alright. It’s time to stop giving the Maoist mice their cookies. 

Source: If You Give a Socialist Mouse a Cookie (http://newsrealblog.com/2009/11/05/if-you-give-a-socialist-mouse-a-cookie/#comment-21370) by Susannah Kopecky

By David Horowitz

This is a month in which the president of the United States has co-sponsored a UN resolution with the police state of Egypt to ban speech that defames religion; a month in which the Democratic Party has placed an amendment on a defense appropriations bill to make anti-gay speech a thought crime, and in which the White House has launched an all-out attack on the Fox News Channel because it didn’t like what Fox commentators were saying.  And instead of reacting with appropriate horror at an assault on the free press not seen since the days of Joseph McCarthy, a leading “liberal” pundit, TIME columnist Joe Klein has called Fox’s behavior “seditious” and thus helped to set the stage for making criticism of government a “hate crime.”

How deeply entrenched is this totalitarian virus in our national culture? A recent column in the Temple University press indicates that it is already an integral element of the curriculum of our schools. The column by a student named Josh Fernandez is a condemnation of the recent appearance at Temple of the Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders who is under indictment in the Netherlands for defaming Islam, specifically for a fifteen minute film he made about Islam called “Fitna” which explains why so many atrocities have been committed (and are currently being committed) in its name. Under pressure from Islamic totalitarians, Europeans are already well on their way to outlawing free speech.

Note that the Temple column was protesting the right of Wilders to speak at all and was part of a concerted effort by the Muslim Students Association (which is a notorious supporter of the Islamic jihad) and Temple leftists to stop the Wilders event. Three Temple administrators participated in this effort telling the students who sponsored the event along with the David Horowitz Freedom Center that “foreigners don’t have free speech rights in America.” Under this university pressure, the College Republicans withdrew from sponsorship of the event and the Temple student government condemned it.

Fernandez’s column begins by quoting Wilders himself: 

“I know that some of you here were very much against me speaking tonight, and to those that opposed me coming here, I would to like to quote the very famous British author George Orwell,” Wilders said in his opening, “‘If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’”

But showing that he didn’t understand a word Wilders said, and without missing a beat, Fernandez follows this quote with a perfectly Orwellian statement of his own:

“It’s not that Temple students didn’t want Wilders to exercise his right to ‘tell people what they do not want to hear,’ but they didn’t want to hear hateful rhetoric…”

Free speech – which is precisely the freedom to speak what is hateful to others – is our most sacred right. It is the foundation of all our other freedoms. The difference between a free society and a fear society, as Natan Sharansky has put it, is that in a free society you can speak your mind in public and not worry whether the government will come after you for having said it. In a sense this is the only freedom we have because without it the party in control of the state will have no opposition. It will simply outlaw the opposition as hateful. Under Stalin the hate crime was being “anti-Soviet.”

Later on in his column Fernandez writes:

“Wilders claims to make a distinction between ‘the [Muslim] people [whom he supports] and the ideology’ of Islam [which he condemns], but when he spouts hateful statements, such as ‘Western culture is far better than the Islamic culture, and we should defend it,’ he counteracts his alleged distinction.”

How quickly hate speech is redefined as standing up for the freedoms your country has, which Islamic totalitarianism denies (and which thus makes your country better.) And this in the city of Philadelphia, the birthplace of American liberty.

America’s first and most fundamental freedom is under concerted attack. The attack originates with Islamic jihadists and their liberal collaborators, but it is being supported by useful fools and the seriously confused. This series of events should be a wake-up call to all Americans. The hour is already late.

Source: The Totalitarians Among Us (http://frontpagemag.com/2009/11/02/the-totalitarians-among-us-by-david-horowitz/) by David Horowitx

“I mean, what do you think we’re doing out here in the middle of the desert?”

I set out to write about predictions, and as my thoughts fixed on differences, I began to focus on freedom. Here, in the not-so-Great State of New York, and many other states, we do not know what freedom truly is, because there are so many freedoms out there that we do not have, that we can not exercise. These powers are inalienable, they do not come from a politician, they do not come from a bureaucrat in Washington and they do not come from a judge.

There are seven states with no state income tax; Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas, Washington and Wyoming. Two others, New Hampshire and Tennessee, tax only dividend and interest income. Makes one wonder why New York State has to take 5% of my income, while New York City takes another 3%, when a government the same size of NY, the state of Florida, manages to survive without one. If I did my job in Miami, I would have an additional 8% of my money.

Surprisingly to some, Vermont has the least restrictive gun laws in the country. Known commonly as ‘Vermont Carry’, the State of Vermont does not require, nor does the State issue, gun permits. Both residents, and non residents, are allowed to carry a firearm either openly or concealed. Yes, a non-resident can carry a concealed weapon in Vermont. Many states in the west such as Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Alaska also closely follow ‘Vermont Carry’ laws. All allow a weapon to be carried openly, while a permit is required to carry concealed, though the process is just paperwork to obtain one. I was watching a new show called ‘Alaska State Troopers' and a Trooper pulled over a car for a traffic violation. He found the passenger had a loaded 9mm Glock and ½ ounce of marijuana. He was cited for the marijuana possession and given a ticket. That is correct, a State Trooper found a person in possession of marijuana with a loaded handgun, and issued him a ticket for the marijuana only.

Did you know that in Nevada a person can walk into a grocery store, at two in the morning, and buy a fifth of vodka? Yes, not only can any store sell any type of alcohol, but they can do it 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. No restrictions. Combine that with the ability to carry weapons, and no state income tax, and you have the most free state in America. In New York, I cant buy alcohol before noon on Sunday, could never get a gun permit in Brooklyn because the NYPD is the arbiter of such, and issues permits to whoever they decide, and, well, we know the tax situation. I do not think many people understand the demonstrable differences amongst the states.

Now for the predictions, though allow me a brief sidebar toward health care.

First, the definitions. Health care is what you do; it’s how you eat and how much your exercise. Medical care is just that, its medical care. Insurance is insurance, it’s not health care. The Federal Government does not have the Constitutional authority to mandate that any person buy any product. It is a clear violation of the 10th amendment, and the 9th Amendment, and I can even argue the 5th amendment (If I have to attach a piece of paper to my tax return showing I have insurance, and if I don’t I will be fined $750, when I don’t, am I not incriminating myself? Lets remember, not having insurance will be a misdemeanor under ObamaCare).

For all the morons making the ‘car insurance’ argument, let me explain it to you as if you are a five year old. The Federal Government does not make anyone buy car insurance. It is the States. Yet, the States don’t even make you buy car insurance. One must purchase car insurance if and when they register a vehicle. The State can not force anyone to buy insurance who does not register a car.

The initial purpose here was predictions so I will get to it. Bob McDonnell will win in Virgina, probably by about 8%. Chris Christie will win in NJ by 2-4%. Oh…and Harry Reid…the bell tolls for you my friend.

Justice McNamara is the pseudonym of a Thats-Right.com contributor. We will feature his work as pieces arrive. Unfortunately, but perhaps adding to the suspense, we do not know beforehand when this will happen. Comments for Justice McNamara can be directed to thatsright.95@gmail.com