Loads of campaign cash make Big Green a Democratic powerhouse

Mark Tapscott: Loads of campaign cash make Big Green a Democratic powerhouse UPDATED! Washington Examiner By: Mark Tapscott

Officials of a dozen top Big Green environmental groups contributed more than $14.5 million to congressional and presidential candidates in 2008 and through the second quarter of 2010 with 96 percent of the total going to Democrats, according to an Examiner analysis of federal campaign data.

The data was compiled from the Federal Election Commission and included only donations by individuals who listed one of the 12 groups as their employer or listed themselves as an officer or director of one or more of the groups. This analysis does not include contributions by individuals who did not list an employer.

The groups included the Audubon Society, Clean Water Action, Defenders of Wildlife, the Environmental Defense Action Fund, Friends of the Earth, League of Conservation Voters, Natural Resources Defense Council, Nature Conservancy, Ocean Champions, Sierra Club, the Trust for Public Land and the Wilderness Society.

The dozen included in the Examiner analysis either have political action committees or are otherwise highly visible players on the national political scene. There are more than 26,000 environmental groups across the country, including 8,078 nonprofit organizations with enough income to require them to file IRS Form 990 annual tax returns.

Six of the dozen collectively received more than $160 million in federal grants and contracts, according to their 2008 or 2007 IRS tax returns, with the Nature Conservancy's $110.6 million being the highest, followed by the Trust for Public Land ($28 million), Audubon Society ($17.5 million), the Environmental Defense Fund (parent of the EDF Action Fund) with $3.6 million, Natural Resources Defense Council ($358,072) and Defenders of Wildlife ($205,021).

Employees of these six receiving federal dollars gave nearly $6.6 million to Democratic candidates in the 2008-2010 period covered and $313,348 to Republicans. Two of the six have PACs.

Employees of the six groups with no recorded federal grants or contracts gave slightly more to Democrats at $6.7 million, slightly less to Republicans at $214,175 and $11,810 to candidates of other parties. Five of these six have PACs.

President Obama was the biggest recipient by far of contributions with a total of more than $2.4 million. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was Obama's main 2008 primary rival, got $86,500.

Other notable Democrats received large amounts, including Sen. Barbara Boxer of California ($130,766), Sen. Al Franken of Minnesota ($114,701), Rep. Donna Edwards of Maryland ($109.302) and Rep. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico ($247,674).

Obama's biggest groups of environmental supporters came from the Sierra Club ($917,965) and Defenders of Wildlife ($905,375).

Big Green environmental groups are also among the most active sources of independent expenditures, either for Democrats or against Republicans. Defenders of Wildlife, for example, spent nearly $1.3 million in a successful 2008 effort to deny Republican Rep. Marilyn Musgrave of Colorado a fourth term.

The group also spent more than $637,000 in 2008 against GOP presidential nominee Sen. John McCain and $166,620 for Obama and $188,535 for Heinrich.

Independent expenditures by the Sierra Club in 2008 were mostly to oppose McCain ($454,948) and to elect Obama ($421,092).

Democratic campaign committees also received substantial contributions from employees, officers and directors of Big Green environmental groups. Natural Resources Defense Council individuals, for example, gave $352,400 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, $249,750 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and $237,665 to the Democratic National Committee's DNC Services Committee.

Employees of the environmental groups were especially focused on Alaska politics, with a total of $373,322 being contributed to Alaska Conservation Voters, which supported Sen. Mark Begich, D-Alaska, who defeated incumbent Republican Sen. Ted Stevens following the latter's indictment on corruption charges for which he was subsequently exonerated.

Employees of the League of Conservative Voters contributed $264,606 of the $373,322 total given to Begich.

Among the scarce Republican recipients, only former Maryland Rep. Wayne Gilcrest received more than token amounts, with $22,277 coming from employees of Defenders of Wildlife.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/Loads-of-campaign-cash-make-Big-Green-a-Democratic-powerhouse-1023166-103889313.html

See the above linked article for the related pieces:

Tuesday

•The cash-filled campaign powerhouse

•Emanuel’s pot of green gold is called Exelon

•How Wendy Van Asselt and her friends made 26 million acres disappear

•Don’t get hit on the campaign trail by this environmental wrecking ball

•Who you know — or oppose — is key to getting federal payola

•Big Green: How much do they make?

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/Loads-of-campaign-cash-make-Big-Green-a-Democratic-powerhouse-1023166-103889313.html#ixzz11W8KSiIC

Two rallies: litter, care for the people's capitol shows much

A Tale Of Two Rallies, Conservative VS Liberal Who Trashed The Mall And The Country

Posted by Ken Taylor

August 28, 2010, hundreds of thousands of conservative Americans descended on Washington DC to participate in a rally to honor America hosted by talk show personality Glenn Beck. The rally began at the Lincoln Memorial and stretched past the WWII Memorial to the Washington Monument. Speakers talked of a united American which stands firm on the precepts of God and our Constitution never once lashing out at any political party or politician but calling for a return to strong conservative values and morals.

October 2, 2010, slightly over ten thousand liberals many of which proudly chanting their love of Socialism descended on Washington DC. This rally too began at the Lincoln Memorial and went only as far as the reflection pool directly across from the Memorial. The rally was sponsored by several Labor Unions and liberal cause groups many of which bused participants to Washington for the Rally. Speakers lashed out at the Republican Party and various conservative politicians especially Sarah Palin. Blaming all the woes of the country on the right and calling those who do not agree with them too stupid to vote.

Both rallies consisted of people who are angered at what is happening in America today. The Beck rally channeled that anger in a positive message seeking to united Americans toward restoring values and morals that follow those instilled in America by our Founders who like those at the rally sought guidance from God as they embraced the freedom they sought for both they and their children.

The Union sponsored rally channeled that anger toward the right and anyone else who disagreed with their ideals and any direction which seeks to prevent this country from sliding into their vision of a socialist utopia where government controls America and Americans. But what was said during the rally was not as revealing as what was left behind after the rallies as to how our Nation will evolve under the influence of those who participated in either rally.

After the Glenn Beck rally with hundred of thousands of people in attendance around the Mall area of Washington eating, drinking and generally camping out for an entire day, once the rally was completed with the exception of specified areas where trash was designated to be left for pick up, the Mall was left spotless. In fact so spotless that one could not tell that a rally had taken place. Even the designated trash pick up areas were tidy with trash stacked neatly in containers or bags for easy disposal.

Contrast this with the after math of the rally held by the left on October 2. Not only was the trash not placed in containers or stacked neatly for disposal, but the entire Mall area was trashed including locations where no one was standing during the rally. Sacred Memorials like the WWII Memorial were left looking like a garbage dump. The area around the Lincoln Memorial resembled a trash pile.

Signs and leaflets were strewn everywhere. Bottles and uneaten food were tossed wherever participants has stood or walked. Food wrappers were blowing in the breeze looking for a place to cling for some poor soul to have to pick up by hand in order to throw it away. It will take days and thousands of dollars to clean up the mess left behind. After the Beck rally those who carried the trash away completed their clean up task shortly after the rally finished.

Both rallies claimed they had the better direction for America. Both rallies came to DC with people who believed what they expressed during the rallies. But one left behind a disaster for workers to clean up showing no respect for our Nations Capitol, the Memorials that honor those who sacrificed in service to our Nation or the poor workers whose job it was to clean up the mess. Not once did they concern themselves with the massive cost to clean up after their rally which comes from tax payer funds.

Whatever anyone thinks about the substance of either rally, whether one agrees or disagrees with what was said, who said it and how it was expressed, what was left behind gives the best example of how our Nation will fare as a result of the influence and ideals of those who participated. If people have no respect for their surroundings while marching for their cause how can they be expected to respect the traditions of freedom and the principles of our Founders without trashing the country as they trashed the Mall.

Those who participated in the rally on October 2 left behind a trashed environment. In like manner those who have and do govern with the socialist ideals expressed by the rally participants have trashed our Nation and left and are leaving behind a mess that generations will be forced to clean up. Rally participants showed no respect or concern for the poor sanitation workers who will spend days cleaning up their mess. Those who govern on the ideals expressed during the October rally use tax payer and borrowed money for reckless spending without respect or concern for the hard work of Americans who pay the burdensome taxes and whose children will be saddled with the debt.

They trashed the Mall and they have and are trashing America. A march which made its way around the base of the Washington Monument chanted love for Socialism in complete dishonor and disrespect for the man and the ideals of the person who the Monument was built to honor, George Washington. Our greatest President who fought for and sacrificed to insure that all Americans then and those who would follow would not have to face the tyranny of a government that took God given freedoms from its citizens. Yet those who chanted in the shadow of the Monument spit in the face of what Washington fought for as they celebrated socialist tyranny.

Those who rallied with Glenn Beck talked of and are seeking a productive and free future for America and Americans following the principles of our Founders and our Constitution. Those who rallied on October 2 seek a destructive and enslaved path for America and Americans. As they showed no respect for the Mall in trashing it they have no respect for our Founding and Constitutional principles of freedom, liberty and a government that leaves Americans to prosper of their own accord without government interference or oppression.

What was left behind on the Mall gives a telling insight to our future if those who govern today are left to do so and allowed to continue the destructive path they have legislated and promoted under the leadership of the current Congress and President. Our task for the future and freedom of America cannot be more clear. The elimination of those who are seeking to trash and destroy our Republic by voting them out of office and replacing them with those who respect our Founding principles and believe in Constitutional values and precepts. If not then our nation faces a future much like the Mall after the October rally our Nation will be trashed if left in their hands.

Ken Taylor The Liberal Lie, The Conservative Truth

http://www.redstate.com/ken_taylor/2010/10/03/a-tale-of-two-rallies-conservative-vs-liberal-who-trashed-the-mall-and-the-country/

How to Save California: Outlaw Public Employee Unions

How to Save California: Outlaw Public Employee Unions

How to Save California: Outlaw Public Employee Unions John Yoo

Like everyone else in California, I'm dismayed at the state of the state. The massive budget deficit, high taxes and runaway government spending, spreading unemployment, a hostile business climate, and unfunded future pensions are ruining a state that has every natural gift and advantage in resources, both human and natural. Everyone seems to agree that the way the state government works has a lot to do with these problems, but no one is sure how to fix it. I even taught a seminar last semester on reforming the California constitution to explore solutions (more on that another time).

Earlier this week, I was lucky to go to the annual dinner of the Lincoln Club of northern California, which is made up of Republican leaders in the San Francisco area. The Club was awarding its lifetime achievement award to Pete Wilson, the last governor who made state government work (and a proud alum of my law school) -- believe it or not, but when Wilson left office, the state had a budget surplus. Ricochet's very own Peter Robinson interviewed Wilson on how to save California. It was an amazing night: Wilson displayed an encyclopedic command of the policy challenges facing the state.

The one change that he said could restore the state's fortunes wasn't lowering taxes, cutting spending, or eliminating excessive regulations -- though these were all important. He said there was a deeper root cause: the power of the public employees unions. According to Wilson, public employee unions trigger a destructive dynamic. Public employee unions take money from their members and use them for partisan political purposes. They pressure government officials to cut them sweetheart deals, especially through things like job protections and pensions, that don't show up on the bottom line for years. They create a larger and larger interest group that demands more government spending and higher taxes, which drives out private entrepreneurship and swells their ranks even more. Reduce the power of the public employee unions, and you lower the size of government, reduce the costs of the state, and fix the looming pension problem.

So here's my idea, and it applies beyond California. There is no constitutional right for public employees to form a union and to use their dues to pressure the government for more spending and benefits. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote while a state judge, a policeman "may have the right to talk politics but he has no constitutional right to be a policeman." Unions only have this right because state government has granted it to them. So how about a one sentence ballot initiative, to amend the California constitution, that simply says that public employees cannot form unions -- and why not do this state by state.


http://ricochet.com/conversations/How-to-Save-California-Outlaw-Public-Employee-Unions

"One Nation" rally: many open socialists, communists--at home

See the comparative crowd photos: http://www.verumserum.com/

Pajamas Media » How the Environmental Movement Became Just Another Washington Power Bloc

Pajamas Media » How the Environmental Movement Became Just Another Washington Power Bloc Part 1:

How the Environmental Movement Became Just Another Washington Power Bloc

Posted By Charlie Martin On September 27, 2010
Starting today, the Washington Examiner is publishing a five-part special report [1] in association with Pajamas Media on “Big Green”: the alliance of the Democratic Party, environmental groups, and activists in the progressive movement. It’s not just a band of flannel-shirted environmentalists any longer; it’s become a big-money, major player in Washington power politics and American elections.


In this first of our five-part series in coordination with the Examiner, we consider how the consensus for environmental regulation in the ’60s became a source of political power and big money when it was taken up as a cause by the ruling class.

Starting today, the Washington Examiner is running a special report [1] on “Big Green”: the alliance of progressive activists, environmental groups like the Sierra Club, and the Democratic Party that has become perhaps the most powerful single lobby in Washington today.

It was, to some extent, a “stealth” campaign. “Conservationists” had been around for a hundred years, and the original Environmental Protection Agency was, after all, pushed through by Richard Nixon. Partly because of events like the Cuyahoga River fire [2] in Cleveland in 1969, there was a general agreement in the 1960s that pollution of the air and water had become too obnoxious and that something had to be done.

The environmental movement quickly got involved with the New Left, becoming a sort of side-show for anti-war demonstrations while pollution became one of the litany of evils of what had been traditional American life. Along with real issues like river and lake pollution, there had been Paul Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb, published in 1968; the Club of Rome’s book The Limits to Growth, in 1972; and a succession of other doomsday scenarios in the popular press.

What started as a largely bipartisan issue in the 60s began to transform into a more distinctly partisan issue in the 70s. Looking back, what was happening was a natural agreement of interests: in all of these groups, there was the general assumption that the various evils of humanity could only be remedied by government action, led by the enlightened. This meant that government must become stronger, have more power, and broaden its authority to deal with these new problems.

The environmental movement was quickly co-opted.

There is a natural progression in these things. It began as a mostly grassroots effort organized into non-profit groups, with dues and boards and presidents. The dues were used, as with any interest group, to lobby the government, either in Congress or in executive branch agencies like the EPA. The environmental movement began to develop a constituency, and that constituency was increasingly identified with groups like the Sierra Club. As those groups grew, they became big businesses themselves, although organized and run as non-profits.

People hear “non-profit” and tend to think of ragtag operations run on a shoestring by selfless activists; the large, well-known ones are major corporations with multimillion dollar budgets, and people who operate multimillion dollar companies tend to have nice salaries and nice offices.

Increasingly, being an environmental activist, at least in the upper reaches, is becoming a well-paid, high-visibility job.

What these activist groups have to “sell” is their ability to get things done in Washington, which means their ability to get access to politicians. Environmental groups could offer this through access to their membership and by encouraging their members to support the politicians who were friendly to their issues. Voting power meant re-election for the politicians, re-election meant moving up the seniority ladder, and seniority meant exercising power — which made the politicians more attractive to the environmental groups. What’s more, for every elected politician, there are dozens of staff positions, committee staff, and dozens of staff positions within the non-profit groups.

Quickly, there arose an “environmental activism industry” — thousands of people whose livelihoods depended on environmental activism. The environmental activism industry, in turn, depended on one thing: the government’s power to effect change in the environmentalists’ favored direction.

Now, forty years later, we see the results. As the Examiner pieces today show, the environmental movement has become a billion-dollar industry, providing thousands of people with jobs, all devoted to managing — and, in general, to increasing — the government’s power.

There is “green power” — but it’s big government political power. There are “green jobs” — but they are for the politically connected people who direct and wield the political power.

And there are the rest of us, who wonder how such a worthy endeavor became just another power bloc.

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/how-the-environmental-movement-became-just-another-washington-power-bloc/

HERE'S THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER PART 1: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/special-editorial-reports/Examiner-Special-Report---Big-Green-Environmentalists-arent-really-about-clean-air-and-water-103848559.html

Sarah Palin on Obamacare’s Semi-Anniversary

Sarah Palin on Obamacare’s Semi-Anniversary - By Daniel Foster - The Corner - National Review Online By Daniel Foster

Sarah Palin has just posted what amounts to a really good — and rhetorically effective — primer on the reality of Obamacare. It’s in the service of her “Take back the 20” campaign, “focusing on 20 congressional districts that John McCain and I carried in 2008 which are or were represented by members of Congress who voted in favor of Obamacare.”

From Palin’s Facebook page, Obamacare’s greatest hits:

Lies, Damned Lies – Obamacare 6 Months Later; It’s Time to Take Back the 20!

[. . .]

Remember when the president said, “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor”? Not true. In Texas alone a record number of doctors are leaving the Medicare system because of the cuts in reimbursements forced on them by Obamacare! The president of the Texas Medical Association, Dr. Susan Bailey, warns that “the Medicare system is beginning to implode.”

Remember the Obama administration’s promise that Obamacare would cut a typical family’s premium “by up to $2500 a year”? Not true. In fact, fueled by reports that insurers expect premiums to rise by as much as 25 percent as a result of Obamacare, Senate Democrats are contemplating the introduction of price controls.

Remember when the president said in his address to Congress that “no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions”? That turned out to be yet another one of those “You lie!” moments. We found out that Obamacare-mandated high risk insurance pools set up in states like Pennsylvania and New Mexico will fund abortions after all.

Remember the promise that Obamacare would “strengthen small businesses”? Not true either. The net result of Obamacare is that small businesses will face higher health care costs, new Medicare taxes, and higher regulation compliance costs, while the much-hyped health care tax credit for small businesses turns out to be almost impossible to obtain.

Remember the president’s promise that his bill would ensure “everyone [has] some basic security”? False again. Besides the great uncertainly that Obamacare hampers businesses with, companies now find it is actually cheaper to pay the $2000 per employee fine imposed by Obamacare than to keep insuring their workforce. This leaves millions of American workers at risk of losing their employer-provided health insurance.

And remember when the Obama administration said they would not be “rationing care” in the future? That ol’ “death panels” thing I wrote about last year? That was before Obamacare was passed. Once it passed, they admitted there was going to be rationing after all. There has to be. The reality of Obamacare is that it enshrines what the New York Times called “The Power of No” – the government’s power to say no to your request for treatment of the people you love. The fact that the president used a recess appointment to push through the nomination of Dr. Donald Berwick as head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services tells you all you need to know about this administration’s intentions. After all, Berwick is the man who said, “The decision is not whether we will ration care – the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.”

Palin also uses the opportunity to clarify, and expand on, her unfairly-infamous “death panel” comment:

By the way, when the administration was talking about that independent board that has the statutory power to decide which categories of treatment are worthy of funding based on efficiency calculations (that, again, sounded to me like a panel of faceless bureaucrats making life and death decisions about your loved ones – which, again, is what I referred to as a “death panel”), it was another opportunity for Americans to hear the truth about Obamacare’s intentions.

So, yes, those rationing “death panels” are there, and so are the tax increases that the president also promised were “absolutely not” in his bill.

Later, on the “most ridiculous promise of all,” that the bill would “bend the cost curve”:

Yes, rationing is a part of the new system, and yes, Obamacare does raise taxes. But because the new government managed system is so incredibly complicated and expensive to run, health care spending will actually rise instead of fall. Don’t believe me? Then take a look at the Congressional Budget Office’s admittance that the CBO’s original estimate of the total costs of the bill were off by around $115 billion. Its new estimate is now above $1 trillion, and even that may be way too low. A more realistic figure calculated by the Pacific Research Institute puts the number at $2.5 to $3 trillion over the next 10 years! This is probably what President Obama was referring to when he admitted recently that he had known all along that “at the margins” his proposals were going to drive up costs. Give us a break! Only in this administration would they refer to a $3 trillion spending increase as “marginal.” Next time he comes to us with another one of his harebrained proposals for a budget-busting federal power grab, let’s make sure we remember the president’s admission that he was lying all along when he told us his health care plan was going to cut costs. He is increasing costs. He admits it now. Period.

Good stuff. Well — bad stuff. But you know what I meant.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/247580/sarah-palin-obamacares-semi-anniversary-daniel-foster

Tea Party movement is saying: ENOUGH!

Enough - Rich Lowry - National Review Online

The tea party seeks to stop the seemingly inevitable growth of the welfare state.

William Voegeli wrote a book about the ever-growing welfare state in the United States and throughout the Western world titled “Never Enough.” In the tea party, we hear the countervailing cry, “Enough!”

Everywhere it’s been established, the welfare state has proven itself perpetually self-aggrandizing. Voegeli writes, “The American trend from 1940 to 2007 — steady growth of both the economy and the portion of the economy devoted to the welfare state — is evident in 12 other modern, prosperous democracies from 1980 to 2003.”

The tea party bids to stand athwart this long-standing, seemingly inexorable trend. Even Ronald Reagan, whose rhetoric and intentions were forthrightly against big government, managed only to slow the growth of welfare-state spending to a rate of 0.9 percent annually over eight years — a stupendous accomplishment in the context of its otherwise routinely robust growth.

To achieve more than this will require a massive Republican sweep in the fall, followed up by a win in 2012. It will take masterly feats of public persuasion, coupled with countless victories in budgetary hand-to-hand combat — all sustained over time. Liberal defenders of the status quo will have history, inertia, and proven scare tactics on their side. But, as Barack Obama likes to say, make no mistake: The rise of the tea party puts the fundamental direction of American government in play in a way it hasn’t been since perhaps 1981.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way after Obama’s election. The financial crisis, though, didn’t discredit the free market so much as the government policies that stoked the housing bubble and bailed out the banks and the auto companies. The much-anticipated crisis of capitalism quickly became an impending crisis of government debt, as Washington leveraged itself to the hilt in an era of painful private deleveraging.

With entitlements on an already unsustainable course, Obama added a new one in his health-care program, and sold it with every ounce of hubris and dishonesty he could muster. If tea partiers had a plant in the White House on a Leninist mission to make things worse before they can improve, they couldn’t have done much better than the Man from Hope and Change.

After a similar uprising in 1994, Bill Clinton famously triangulated. But he hadn’t done much. In his first two years, there was a modest deficit-reduction package, a free-trade agreement with Canada and Mexico, and a crime bill that paid for new cops for states and localities. He was a blissfully free man compared with Obama, who is tethered to the mast of his hideously inaptly named Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Democrats passed the bill believing two axioms of the ever-expanding welfare state: Any new program becomes popular over time and is never repealed. The first hasn’t yet proven out, and if Republicans take Congress, the second will be put to the test. Everything since the bill’s passage has served to make its reversal more likely rather than less. It continues to languish in the polls, and the embattled Democrats who still talk about it are the ones who voted against it.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi surely knew she’d lose some seats by insisting on passage of the health-care law, but she couldn’t have known she’d risk displacing the tectonic plates of American politics. If there’s going to be a U-turn in American government, the rise of the tea-party movement is its necessary precondition. In retrospect, if $1 trillion deficits and an increase in government spending from 20 percent to 25 percent of GDP didn’t bring people out into the streets, it would have been lights out for limited-government conservatism.

It’s become a trope that tea-party candidates don’t have an agenda. That’s not quite fair. “We’re in favor of a lot of things and we’re against mighty few,” Lyndon Johnson said in 1964, on the cusp of the Great Society. Take his statement and turn it on its head, and you have the thrust of the tea-party agenda. Or, in a word: Enough.

— Rich Lowry is editor of National Review. He can be reached via e-mail, comments.lowry@nationalreview.com. This column is available exclusively through King Features Syndicate. For permission to reprint or excerpt this copyrighted material, please write kfsreprint@hearstsc.com, or phone 800-708-7311, ext 246. © 2010 by King Features Syndicate.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/247169/enough-rich-lowry

Media: helping the Democratic Party’s national messaging

MSM not even trying to hide their hate for Republicans anymore  Meryl Yourish @ 1:00 pm

Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic drew this conclusion about the Tea Party candidates winning some Republican primaries over the establishment candidates:

The media is going to help the Democratic Party’s national messaging, which is that the GOP is a party full of Christine O’Donnells, a party that wants to take away your Social Security and your right to masturbate. Well, maybe not that last part, but then again, the implicit message of the party is that the GOP is about to elect a slate of hard social rightists to Congress.

When someone as widely-quoted as Ambinder is not even trying to hide the fact that the media is biased against Republicans, I think it’s time to stop pretending that the MSM is full of objective reporters writing unbiased articles.

If they’re still wondering why people are abandoning them in droves, simply send them a copy of this post. What do we really want? Honest, unbiased reporting with no hidden agenda. Failing that, we’ll take Fox News, which at least doesn’t have a liberal bias, and is, in many cases, the only network reporting objectively. Not that I think it’s truly “fair and balanced.” It leans right. Duh. But Fox is only one network. All the rest lean left. And they’re not even bothering to hide it anymore.

The media is not supposed to be the shill for the Democratic party. Someone might want to inform Marc Ambinder of that.

http://www.yourish.com/2010/09/17/12157

Gangster government stifles criticism of Obamacare

Gangster government stifles criticism of Obamacare Washington Examiner By: Michael Barone

Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius sent millions of senior Americans a brochure that is packed with blatantly false claims about Obamacare. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

"There will be zero tolerance for this type of misinformation and unjustified rate increases."

That sounds like a stern headmistress dressing down some sophomores who have been misbehaving. But it's actually from a letter sent Thursday from Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to Karen Ignagni, president of America's Health Insurance Plans -- the chief lobbyist for private health insurance companies.

Secretary Sebelius objects to claims by health insurers that they are raising premiums because of increased costs imposed by the Obamacare law passed by Congress last March.

She acknowledges that many of the law's "key protections" take effect later this month and does not deny that these impose additional costs on insurers. But she says that "according to our analysis and those of some industry and academic experts, any potential premium impact . . . will be minimal."

Well, that's reassuring. Er, except that if that's the conclusion of "some" industry and academic experts, it's presumably not the conclusion of all industry and academic experts, or the secretary would have said so.

Sebelius also argues that "any premium increases will be moderated by out-of-pocket savings resulting from the law." But she's pretty vague about the numbers -- "up to $1 billion in 2013." Anyone who watches TV ads knows that "up to" can mean zero.

As Time magazine's Karen Pickert points out, Sebelius ignores the fact that individual insurance plans cover different types of populations. So that government and "some" industry and academic experts think the new law will justify increases averaging 1 or 2 percent, they could justify much larger increases for certain plans.

Or as Ignagni, the recipient of the letter, says, "It's a basic law of economics that additional benefits incur additional costs."

But Sebelius has "zero tolerance" for that kind of thing. She promises to issue regulations to require "state or federal review of all potentially unreasonable rate increases" (which would presumably mean all rate increases).

And there's a threat. "We will also keep track of insurers with a record of unjustified rate increases: Those plans may be excluded from health insurance Exchanges in 2014."

That's a significant date, the first year in which state insurance exchanges are slated to get a monopoly on the issuance of individual health insurance policies. Sebelius is threatening to put health insurers out of business in a substantial portion of the market if they state that Obamacare is boosting their costs.

"Congress shall make no law," reads the First Amendment, "abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press."

Sebelius' approach is different: "zero tolerance" for dissent.

The threat to use government regulation to destroy or harm someone's business because they disagree with government officials is thuggery. Like the Obama administration's transfer of money from Chrysler bondholders to its political allies in the United Auto Workers, it is a form of gangster government.

"The rule of law, or the rule of men (women)?" economist Tyler Cowen asks on his marginalrevolution.com blog. As he notes, "Nowhere is it stated that these rate hikes are against the law (even if you think they should be), nor can this 'misinformation' be against the law."

According to Politico, not a single Democratic candidate for Congress has run an ad since last April that makes any positive reference to Obamacare. The First Amendment gives candidates the right to talk -- or not talk -- about any issue they want.

But that is not enough for Sebelius and the Obama administration. They want to stamp out negative speech about Obamacare. "Zero tolerance" means they are ready to use the powers of government to threaten economic harm on those who dissent.

The closing paragraph of Sebelius' letter to AHIP's Karen Ignagni gives the game away. "We worked hard to change the system to help consumers." This is a reminder that the administration alternatively collaborated with and criticized Ignagni's organization. We roughed you up a little but we eventually made a deal.

The secretary goes on: "It is my hope we can work together to stop misinformation and misleading marketing from the start." In other words, shut your members up and play team ball -- or my guys with the baseball bats and tommy guns are going to get busy. As Tyler Cowen puts it, "worse than I had been expecting."

Michael Barone,The Examiner's senior political analyst, can be contacted at mbarone@washingtonexaminer.com. His column appears Wednesday and Sunday, and his stories and blog posts appear on ExaminerPolitics.com.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/Gangster-government-stifles-criticism-of-Obamacare-811664-102642044.html

New Cybersecurity Bill Gives Obama ‘Power To Shut Down Companies’

New Cybersecurity Bill Gives Obama ‘Power To Shut Down Companies’

Businesses who don’t follow government orders would be suspended for at least 90 days with no congressional oversight

Paul Joseph Watson

An amalgamated cybersecurity bill that lawmakers hope to pass before the end of the year includes new powers which would allow President Obama to shut down not only entire areas of the Internet, but also businesses and industries that fail to comply with government orders following the declaration of a national emergency – increasing fears that the legislation will be abused as a political tool.

The draft bill is a combination of two pieces of legislation originally crafted by Senators Lieberman and Rockefeller. One of the differences between the new bill and the original Lieberman version is that the Internet “kill switch” power has been limited to 90 days without congressional oversight, rather than the original period of four months contained in the Lieberman bill.

In other words, President Obama can issue an emergency declaration that lasts 30 days and he can renew it for a further 60 days before congress can step in to oversee the powers.

The new powers would give Obama a free hand to not only shut down entire areas of the Internet and block all Internet traffic from certain countries, but under the amalgamated bill he would also have the power to completely shut down industries that don’t follow government orders, according to a Reuters summary [2] of the new bill.

“Industries, companies or portions of companies could be temporarily shut down, or be required to take other steps to address threats,” states the report, citing concerns about an “imminent threat to the U.S. electrical grid or other critical infrastructure such as the water supply or financial network.”

The only protection afforded to companies under the new laws is that they would have to be defined as “critical” in order to come under government regulation, but since the government itself would decide to what companies this label applies, it’s hardly a comforting layer of security.

“Even in the absence of an imminent threat, companies could face government scrutiny. Company employees working in cybersecurity would need appropriate skills. It also would require companies to report cyber threats to the government, and to have plans for responding to a cyber attack,” states the report.

As we have highlighted, the threat from cyber-terrorists to the U.S. power grid or water supply is minimal. [3] The perpetrators of an attack on such infrastructure would have to have direct physical access to the systems that operate these plants to cause any damage. The recent Stuxnet malware attack, for example, was introduced and spread through a physical USB device, not via the public Internet.

Any perceived threat from the public Internet to these systems is therefore completely contrived and strips bare what many fear is the real agenda behind cybersecurity – to enable the government to regulate free speech on the Internet.

Handing Obama the power to shut down certain companies or businesses is likely to heighten already existing fears that the new cybersecurity federal bureaucracy could be used as a political tool.

As we reported back in March [5], the Obama administration’s release of the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative, a government plan to “secure” (or control) the nation’s public and private sector computer networks, coincided with Democrats attempting to claim that the independent news website The Drudge Report was serving malware, an incident Senator Jim Inhofe described as a deliberate ploy “to discourage people from using Drudge”.

Senator Joe Lieberman appeared to admit that the legislation had more to do with simply protecting US infrastructure when he told CNN’s Candy Crowley [6]that the bill was intended to mimic the Communist Chinese system of Internet policing.

“Right now China, the government, can disconnect parts of its Internet in case of war and we need to have that here too,” said Lieberman.

As we have documented [7], the Chinese government does not disconnect parts of the Internet because of genuine security concerns, it habitually does so only to oppress and silence victims of government abuse and atrocities, and to strangle dissent against the state, a practice many fear is the ultimate intention of cybersecurity in the United States.

The implementation of the cybersecurity apparatus would represent another huge expansion of the federal government [8], creating an Office of Cyber Policy within the executive branch and also “A new National Center for Cybersecurity and Communications (NCCC) within the Department of Homeland Security, led by a separate director who would enforce cybersecurity policies throughout the government and the private sector.”

Lawmakers have indicated that they intend to push through the bill before the end of the year, though with Congress set to leave Friday amidst deadlock on a number of issues, cybersecurity looks like it will have to wait until mid-November, providing its opponents with extra time to point out the inherent threats the legislation poses to free speech and free enterprise.

Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com [9]. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show. Watson has been interviewed by many publications and radio shows, including Vanity Fair and Coast to Coast AM, America’s most listened to late night talk show.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/new-cybersecurity-bill-gives-obama-power-to-shut-down-companies.html

Tea parties are a new Great Awakening

Glenn Harlan Reynolds: Tea parties are a new Great Awakening Washington Examiner

By: Glenn Harlan Reynolds

This past weekend's National Tea Party Convention in Nashville, Tenn., made it clear that the Tea Party movement is part of something bigger: America's Third Great Awakening.

America's prior Great Awakenings, in the 18th and 19th centuries, were religious in nature. Unimpressed with self-serving, ossified and often corrupt religious institutions, Americans responded with a bottom-up reassertion of faith and independence.

This time, it's different. It's not America's churches and seminaries that are in trouble: It's America's politicians and parties. They've grown corrupt, venal and out-of-touch with the values, and the people, whom they're supposed to represent. So the people, once again, are reasserting themselves.

Most of the attention focused on this weekend's convention seemed to involve the keynote speaker, Sarah Palin. But the key phrase in her speech was this one: "All power is inherent in the people."

And the biggest action item that she presented the crowd with wasn't to support Sarah Palin, but to challenge incumbents in primary races. Primary battles aren't "civil war," she said. They're the kind of competition that produces strength in the end.

This seemed to resonate with what I heard from conference attendees. Over and over again, I heard from Tea Party Activists that they were planning to take over their local Republican (and, sometimes Democratic) party apparatus starting at the precinct level and shake things up.

The sense was that party politics have been run for the benefit of the party insiders and hangers-on, not for the benefit of constituents and ideals. And most of the conference, in fact, was addressed to doing something about that, with sessions on organizing, media skills and the like.

Even the much-hyped counter-Tea-Party protest, featuring three activists from the Tennessee Tea Party Coalition, underscores this point. Despite their small numbers, they drew a large press gaggle hoping to get some negative energy going.

I watched as Knoxville Tea Party organizer Antonio Hinton -- who drew the largest crowd, perhaps because he is black, or perhaps because he's an excellent speaker -- was asked repeatedly by the press to say something negative about Sarah Palin or the National Tea Party Convention, but he called Palin "a breath of fresh air."

And he stressed that he and his cohorts -- representing a collection of several dozen Tea Party groups around Tennessee -- weren't so much there to complain about the convention as to point out that there was a lot more to the Tea Party movement than that one meeting.

They were right. The Tea Party movement is bottom-up, not top-down. Lots of Tea Party people think well of Sarah Palin, but people I've talked to, both there and at other events, aren't looking for a charismatic leader.

Accustomed to major-media treatment that strongly implied that anyone favoring small government must be some kind of fringe wacko, they're discovering that lots of people feel the way they do, and that they can wield a lot of power if they try.

In less than a year, the Tea Party movement has gone from a few spontaneous protests against Obama's stimulus bill to a nationwide phenomenon rating major-media coverage, with several political scalps on its belt.

It's fun to put on a protest rally for the first time and have it work out, but it's even more fun to elect -- or defeat -- a candidate. Or, as Tea Party activists are beginning to do, to run for office yourself.

Over the next couple of years, these multitudes of virgin political operatives are going to acquire considerably more experience and self-assurance, which means they're probably going to become considerably more effective, too. Politics may not be the same when they're done.

Examiner contributor Glenn Harlan Reynolds covered the National Tea Party Convention for PJTV.com. He blogs at InstaPundit.com.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/OpEd-Contributor/Tea-parties-are-a-new-Great-Awakening-83765152.html

You must--must--watch this to see how far public schools will go to indoctrinate kids for Islam

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7-I9Qp3d4Y

The bright morning in Reagan's America

Mourning in Obama's America

Who’s Showing Up at the Tea Party?

Who’s Showing Up at the Tea Party? - By Jack Fowler - The Corner - National Review Online By Jack Fowler

Lots of Independents. The Sam Adams Alliance has done an interesting market-research study on the growth of the tea party and the make-up and impact of the so-called “Next Wave” — the new/recent entrants to the movement. Here are the highlights:

● Tea Party momentum is building: 74.5 percent of Next Wavers said the movement is “gaining active supporters” and 66 percent indicated that the movement is “more enthusiastic.”

● There was a nearly 30-point drop among Tea Party activists in their affiliation with the Republican brand.

● There is a decrease in Republican sources of entrants to the Tea Parties and an increase in independents: 20 percent of Next Wavers were independents prior to the Tea Parties (compared with 12.6 percent of Early Adopters that were independents) and 74 percent of Next Wavers were Republicans prior, compared to 81 percent of Early Adopters.

● The longer a Tea Party activist is in the movement, the more likely they are to be optimistic about the political landscape.

● Of those who were inspired by an individual to join the Tea Party movement, 63.6 percent—the largest number—cited a friend as being instrumental in their involvement. Only 37.5 percent of Early Adopters were recruited by friends. Rather, media personalities brought the highest number into the movement.

● 89.3 percent of Tea Party activists have been active in introducing new people into the movement.

● Both Early Adopters and Next Wave activists were new to politics; 40.5 percent of Early Adopters and 43.6 percent of Next Wave activists said they were uninvolved/rarely involved with politics prior to their Tea Party involvement.

The complete study can be found here. http://www.samadamsalliance.org/research/next-wave.aspx

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/246526/who-s-showing-tea-party-jack-fowler

The public hates almost everything Congress has done | Washington Examiner

The public hates almost everything Congress has done Washington Examiner

By: Byron York

Gallup has released a new poll asking respondents to assess the major accomplishments of Congress in the last two years: the national health care bill, the stimulus, the bailout of auto companies, the bailout of major banks and financial institutions, and the financial regulatory reform bill. The pollsters found majority opposition to all those measures, with the exception of financial reform.

The numbers: Bank bailouts, 61 percent disapprove versus 37 percent approve; national health care, 56 percent disapprove versus 39 percent approve; auto bailouts, 56 percent disapprove versus 43 percent approve; stimulus, 52 percent disapprove versus 43 percent approve. Only financial reform, with 61 percent approve versus 37 percent disapprove, is a winner for the representatives and senators seeking re-election.

Although the bank bailout was passed with significant bipartisan support, the news is terrible mostly for the House and Senate Democratic leadership. It's even worse for Democrats when you single out the opinions of independents. Just 32 percent of independents approve of the bank bailouts; 35 percent approve of national health care; 38 percent approve of the stimulus; and 40 percent approve of the auto bailouts. Sixty-two percent of independents approve of financial regulatory reform.

The most partisan division is found over the national health care bill. Sixty-nine percent of Democrats approve of the bill, opposed to just 13 percent of Republicans, and 35 percent of independents, who approve.

Given the bleak news for Democrats, it's no surprise that you're seeing more and more stories like this. The current Democratic majority is a party that wants to look to the future, not events in the distant past of 2009 and 2010.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/The-public-hates-almost-everything-Congress-has-done-102761814.html

Obamacare is even worse than critics thought

Examiner Editorial: Obamacare is even worse than critics thought Washington Examiner

September 22, 2010

Much more has been revealed about Obamacare since President Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi pushed the bill on Americans six months ago. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP file)

Six months ago, President Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rammed Obamacare down the throats of an unwilling American public. Half a year removed from the unprecedented legislative chicanery and backroom dealing that characterized the bill's passage, we know much more about the bill than we did then. A few of the revelations:

» Obamacare won't decrease health care costs for the government. According to Medicare's actuary, it will increase costs. The same is likely to happen for privately funded health care.

» As written, Obamacare covers elective abortions, contrary to Obama's promise that it wouldn't. This means that tax dollars will be used to pay for a procedure millions of Americans across the political spectrum view as immoral. Supposedly, the Department of Health and Human Services will bar abortion coverage with new regulations but these will likely be tied up for years in litigation, and in the end may not survive the court challenge.

» Obamacare won't allow employees or most small businesses to keep the coverage they have and like. By Obama's estimates, as many as 69 percent of employees, 80 percent of small businesses, and 64 percent of large businesses will be forced to change coverage, probably to more expensive plans.

» Obamacare will increase insurance premiums -- in some places, it already has. Insurers, suddenly forced to cover clients' children until age 26, have little choice but to raise premiums, and they attribute to Obamacare's mandates a 1 to 9 percent increase. Obama's only method of preventing massive rate increases so far has been to threaten insurers.

» Obamacare will force seasonal employers -- especially the ski and amusement park industries -- to pay huge fines, cut hours, or lay off employees.

» Obamacare forces states to guarantee not only payment but also treatment for indigent Medicaid patients. With many doctors now refusing to take Medicaid (because they lose money doing so), cash-strapped states could be sued and ordered to increase reimbursement rates beyond their means.

» Obamacare imposes a huge nonmedical tax compliance burden on small business. It will require them to mail IRS 1099 tax forms to every vendor from whom they make purchases of more than $600 in a year, with duplicate forms going to the Internal Revenue Service. Like so much else in the 2,500-page bill, our senators and representatives were apparently unaware of this when they passed the measure.

» Obamacare allows the IRS to confiscate part or all of your tax refund if you do not purchase a qualified insurance plan. The bill funds 16,000 new IRS agents to make sure Americans stay in line.

If you wonder why so many American voters are angry, and no longer give Obama the benefit of the doubt on a variety of issues, you need look no further than Obamacare, whose birthday gift to America might just be a GOP congressional majority.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/Obamacare-is-even-worse-than-critics-thought-960772-103571664.html

The Origins of Barack Obama's Petulance

Like a Dog: The Origins of Barack Obama's Petulance

‘Like a Dog’: The Origins of Barack Obama’s Petulance By Victor Davis Hanson

I would be miffed too if I were Obama

Obama in just twenty months has developed a reputation for being petulant, unusually sensitive to the normal run-of-the-mill criticism. His latest pushback was his strangest so far: “And they’re not always happy with me. They talk about me like a dog. That’s not in my prepared remarks, it’s just — but it’s true.”

Given that Obama has previously called out talk radio critics by name — Beck, Hannity, Limbaugh — attacked everything from limb-lopping surgeons to vacationing at Las Vegas, and in condescending fashion tsk-tsked those who attend Glenn Beck rallies, rural Pennsylvanians, and his own “typical white person” grandmother who raised him, his thin-skin touchiness seems inexplicable.

Surely the most powerful man in the world knows that when you elevate talk radio critics to near-equal adversaries, then one cannot complain that they press their now high-profile serial attacks even further.

Add that his team has indulged in invective like few recent administrations — whether Obama’s own slur against the stereotyping and stupidly acting police, Eric Holder’s collective denunciation of Americans as “cowards,” Van Jones’ various hysterics (e.g., polluting and mass-murdering whites, Bush in on 9/11, etc.), Anita Dunn’s attacks against Fox News, or the generic “Bush did it” chorus.

The wonder is not that Obama is angry at criticism, but why he is so surprised in a weird “how dare they?” fashion.

Various explanations come to mind. Like the early presidential years of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, Obama has experienced a radical drop in approval ratings. His preconceived notions about the world abroad have proven shockingly therapeutic. He must be disappointed that an Ahmadinejad or Putin is not swayed by his charisma and does what he pleases, which is mostly to oppose America and its interests whenever he can. Messianic disappointment with an unappreciative lesser world can explain a lot.

Keynesian economics did not pan out. Pundits without the responsibility of governance, who advised him to borrow trillions, now abandon him for not borrowing more trillions. He must be confused why he is both being attacked by friends and yet unable to borrow his way to recovery.

Yet Obama’s petulance, I think, more likely derives from a certain surprise — leading to anger — that originates from novel and sudden demands for accountability. Quite simply, no one has dared question Obama before — much less press him for deeds to match his mellifluous words.

Did he really think he could talk his way through four years of the American presidency?

Apparently, he did, and apparently he was almost right — given that rhetoric and sophistry earned him the presidency in the first place. In what follows, I hold some empathy for Obama’s pique; you see in some sense those around him suddenly changed the rules, and what in the past had been habit and custom no longer quite applied.

An Old Story

This is an old story with a long heritage. We know Obama got into Columbia; we have no idea what he accomplished there — or whether his undergraduate transcript merited admission to Harvard Law School. Obama may have charmed his way into Harvard Law Review, but in brilliant fashion he seems to have guessed rightly that once there he would be singularly exempt from the usual requirements of quantifiable achievement.

A part-time visiting law professorship at the University of Chicago Law school rarely leads to a permanent tenure-track position, much less a tenured billet– and never without a body of published articles and books. In Obama’s case those protocols simply did not apply. He was not only offered whatever he wanted, but as Justice Kagan reminded us, Obama was courted by Harvard Law School as well.

Most candidates for state office do not sue to remove their opponents from the ballot. Obama petitioned (successfully) that most of them be disqualified in 1995. It is likewise rare for the sealed divorce records of a front-running primary rival to be mysteriously leaked, prompting a veritable uncontested nomination. But after Democratic rival Blair Hull imploded from such revelations, so did Obama’s general election Republican opponent Jack Ryan, who dropped out of the race after his divorce proceedings were eerily likewise exposed. Lightning does strike twice in the same place for the blessed Obama.

Obama had served in the Senate for about two years, when he announced his candidacy for the presidency. That too is rare, but not unprecedented; what was singular was his claim that he was a bipartisan uniter, when, in fact, he compiled the most partisan voting record among 100 senators of either party. He sponsored no major legislation; his memoirs reflected others’ interest in him, not his own record of lawmaking. His themes were winning over adherents rather signature accomplishments.

The exotic name, the mixed racial heritage, and the street cred cool, juxtaposed to the nerdy professorial sermonizing, trumped the need to author or repeal significant laws or create lasting community institutions — or to leave any footprint of achievement at either the University of Chicago, the Illinois legislature, or the U.S. Senate. Running for office or courting appointments or angling for promotions seemed divorced from worry about doing anything when such wishes were granted. Obama’s tragedy is that there is nothing left he can run for, no further adulatory confirmation for just being Obama. Performance for the first time in his life is now all that counts.

Names and images matter in America. Just as a hypothetical moderately attractive blond but empty “Pam Hill” would not earn the high profile accorded to her double-ganger Paris Hilton of similar non-achievement, so too a Barry Dunham does not catch on in the progressive political world in the manner of a Barack Obama.

Nobel Peace Prizes traditionally are awarded to those after a lifetime of activism, often after some exposure to danger, or at least a sizable body of inspirational literature. Obama simply had no such record. He is our collective Peter Sellers of Being There. To paraphrase the embarrassed awards committee, Obama was granted the prize more on his symbolic potential, rather than on the basis of anything he did. Like hundreds of other liberal elites, the Nobel committee seemed to draw more personal fulfillment and satisfaction for bequeathing the award than did Obama in receiving it.

Yes, Race Was a Factor

Throughout the Obama presidential odyssey, an enthralled media variously dubbed him a “god,” confessed to tingling sensations when he spoke, and in vicious fashion turned on any politician who tried to question Obama’s actual record of achievement — whether Hillary Clinton or Sarah Palin.

There is no need to pursue the journalistic malfeasance that allowed the president of the United States to be inaugurated without any real past scrutiny. Suffice to say that any future presidential candidate who promises to cool the planet and lower the rising seas will be laughed out of contention — even if he puts “yes, we can” into Latin on his pre-presidential seal.

Race was a factor. Here the left is correct in assessing its importance in evaluating Obama, although not quite in the way they think. At various times, a disturbing racialist trope emerged that suggested white liberals were enthralled almost solely by Obama’s mixed heritage, his diction, and comportment. Not to mention the overall sense that he was a moderate and charismatic African-American that knew precisely how to put anxious well-meaning folks like themselves at ease — and that this was simply not true of the majority of other African-American politicians, and that this in and of itself would suffice.

Promoting Obama offered blanket exemption from even the suggestion of prejudice — a sort of cheap flip of a “get out of jail free” card than ensured liberal elites could otherwise pursue their sheltered lives without guilt or worry over demands for daily interaction with most African-Americans. Elect Obama, worry not what he did — and at last live guilt-free lives in seclusion.

That is a serious charge that should not be made lightly, but the emphasis on Obama’s diction, pigment, and appearance — rather than his actual record — is not my own.

Joe Biden, for example, blurted out, “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy I mean, that’s a storybook, man.” Apparently Biden meant that the antithesis of Obama’s profile — a non-mainstream African-American, who spoke a southern patois and who did not appear bright and clean and handsome — most definitely was not to be a storybook candidate and perhaps likely to put off white liberals like Biden. (Note that Biden did not mention any particular achievement of Obama, merely the impression that he made on those like himself.)

Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was perhaps cruder even than Biden. It was reported that he had characterized Obama as a “light-skinned” African American “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” Again, Reid’s implied antithesis — a dark-skinned African American who spoke with a Negro dialect all the time — would probably offend progressives like Reid. (Note here that Harry Reid seems to have been the first serious observer to publicly describe one of Obama most off-putting characteristics — the near cynical fashion in which he turns on not slightly, but entirely, different cadences and intonations to cater to particular crowds.)

Progressive Condescension

In short, Obama seems aware that a particular cadre of influential white liberals has traditionally accorded him deference not warranted by actual achievement, but rather by his projection of a progressive persona, as crudely outlined by a Biden or Reid — and that this by now is a normal course of events rather than an aberrant experience. Hence his anger that all that has at last begun to end.

It is hard to think that an Elena Kagan, dean of Harvard Law School, would have gushed over the rather undistinguished legal record of Barack Obama, had he been either a well published but obese white Harvard Law graduate, or a conservative African-American antipode to the Biden-Reid stereotype, perhaps in the Clarence Thomas mold. After all, it was not just Obama’s appearance or skin color or cadences that so impressed Biden and Reid and won over liberal Americans, but his politics as well that earned him an exemption not accorded even to an equally professional appearing Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice.

Now What?

But enough speculation over motives for the origins of Obama’s strange and growing petulance. All that matters for the country is that the current president of the United States seems surprised that as our chief executive he is earning scrutiny not previously accorded him — and that he finds that demand for accountability both exasperating and abjectly unfair. Thus this week’s latest “like a dog” whine.

For some reason, Obama believed that those who expected after his campaign promises a real upturn in the economy, or fiscal responsibility, or inspired foreign policy would be satisfied, as they had in the past, merely with soaring rhetoric and superficial reassurance. When they were not, and voiced such displeasure, as ingrates they had supposedly reduced Obama to canine-like status.

There is no need to add that abroad an Ahmadinejad, Assad, or Putin does not care a bit for the supposed personal chemistry or ethnic profile of Obama. Whether he was “clean” or not would be an absurdity to them. We sense only that those authoritarian sorts seem so far to like the idea that Obama speaks ambiguously about his country’s past and future, and appears more comfortable in pondering alternatives than making decisions.

Given all that, it is understandable both why America is very worried about what it has wrought — and why Barack Obama is miffed and lashes out.

You would too if both accountability and criticism were novel experiences at 49.

http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/the-origins-of-barack-obamas-petulance/

Kennedy vs. Obama/media on tax cuts for growth, jobs

Big Labor’s Legacy of Violence

Big Labor’s Legacy of Violence - Michelle Malkin - National Review Online

When it comes to terrorizing workers, the head of the AFL-CIO knows whereof he speaks

To mark Labor Day 2010, President Obama will join hands with AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka in Milwaukee, and they will pose as champions of the working class. Bad move. Trumka’s organizing record is a shameful reminder of the union movement’s violent and corrupt foundations.

The new Obama/AFL-CIO power alliance — underwritten with $40 million in hard-earned worker dues — is a midterm shotgun marriage of Beltway brass knuckles and Big Labor brawn. Trumka warmed up his rhetorical muscles this past week with full-frontal attacks on former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. He indignantly accused her of “getting close to calling for violence” and suggested that her criticism of tea-party-bashing labor bosses amounted to “terrorizing” workers.

Trumka and Obama will cast Big Labor as an unassailable force for good in American history. But when it comes to terrorizing workers, Trumka knows whereof he speaks.

Meet Eddie York. He was a workingman whose story will never scroll across Obama’s teleprompter. A nonunion contractor who operated heavy equipment, York was shot to death during a strike called by the United Mine Workers 17 years ago. Workmates who tried to come to his rescue were beaten in an ensuing melee. The head of the UMW spearheading the wave of strikes at that time? Richard Trumka. Responding to concerns about violence, he shrugged to the Virginian-Pilot in September 1993: “I’m saying if you strike a match and you put your finger in it, you’re likely to get burned.” Incendiary rhetoric, anyone?

A federal jury convicted one of Trumka’s UMW captains on conspiracy and weapons charges in York’s death. According to the Washington, D.C.–based National Legal and Policy Center, which tracks Big Labor abuse, Trumka’s legal team quickly settled a $27 million wrongful death suit filed by York’s widow just days after a judge admitted evidence in the criminal trial. An investigative report by Reader’s Digest disclosed that Trumka “did not publicly discipline or reprimand a single striker present when York was killed. In fact, all eight were helped out financially by the local.”

In Illinois, Trumka told UMW members to “kick the s**t out of every last” worker who crossed his picket lines, according to the Nashville (Ill.) News. And as the National Right to Work Foundation, the leading anti-forced-unionism organization in the country, pointed out, other UMW coalfield strikes resulted in what one judge determined were “violent activities#…#organized, orchestrated and encouraged by the leadership of this union.”

Trumka washed off the figurative bloodstains and moved up the ranks. As AFL-CIO secretary, he notoriously refused to testify in a sordid 1999 embezzlement trial involving his labor-boss brethren at the Teamsters Union. No surprise. Thugs of a feather: Trumka’s violence-promoting record echoes the riotous Teamsters strikes dating back to the 1950s, when the union organized taxicab companies to target workers with gas bombs, bottles, and fists.

And now, Trumka is spearheading a Democratic get-out-the-vote campaign by far-left groups — publicized in the revolutionary-Marxist People’s World — to “energize an army of tens of thousands who will return to their neighborhoods, churches, schools and voting booths to prevent a Republican takeover of Congress in November and begin building a new permanent coalition to fight for a progressive agenda.”

Take those as literal fighting words. The bloody consequences of compulsory unionism cannot be ignored.

— Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks
& Cronies (Regnery, 2010). © 2010 Creators Syndicate, Inc

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/245597/big-labor-s-legacy-violence-michelle-malkin