Box-checking Obama in a Liberal Cocoon
By Michael Barone

It’s unusual when a reporter sympathetic to a politician writes a story that makes his subject look bad. But Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker has now done this twice.

The first time was in an article last April on Obama’s foreign policy in which he quoted a “top aide” (National Security Adviser Tom Donilon? It sounds like him) saying that the president was “leading from behind” on Libya. Not what most Americans expect their presidents to do.

Now, in an article based on leaked White House memos marked up by Obama, Lizza has done it again.

Contrarian liberal blogger Mickey Kaus sums it up: “The president’s decision-making method — at least as described in this piece — seems to consist of mainly checking boxes on memos his aides have written for him.”

A $60 billion cut in the stimulus package? “OK.” Use the reconciliation process to pass the health care bill? A checkmark in the box labeled “yes.”

Include medical malpractice reform in the health care bill? The man who as an Illinois legislator often voted “present” writes, “We should explore it.”

According to Lizza, Obama prefers getting information and making decisions by staying up late and reading memos rather than meeting with people — a temperament that’s a liability because face time with the president is one of his major sources of political capital.

Lizza’s reporting undercuts the stated thesis of his article: that Obama sought to bring bipartisan governance to Washington, but was foiled by Republicans’ partisan intransigence.

Evidence that Obama ever seriously considered Republican approaches is minimal in the New Yorker article. The alternatives Lizza describes Obama as considering are for even more spending and government control, such as a much bigger stimulus package.

He mentions just in passing that Obama “had decided to pursue health care reform” as well as the stimulus package — a choice that inevitably made bipartisanship harder to achieve.

At one point Lizza does quote Obama writing on a memo, “Have we looked at any of the other GOP recommendations (e.g., Paul Ryan’s) to see if they make any sense?” Another president might have looked at Ryan’s proposals himself or might even have called him on the phone.

George W. Bush, in contrast, worked with Democrats — and sometimes even talked with them — on his education plan, his tax cuts and the Iraq War resolution. He even tried, unsuccessfully, to negotiate with them on Social Security.

And on Obama’s failure to reach a “go big” budget agreement with House Speaker John Boehner last summer, Lizza presents only the White House talking point: “conservative colleagues rebelled, and Boehner withdrew.” He doesn’t mention Republican claims that Obama upped the ante, demanding more tax increases.

Lizza’s White House sources apparently didn’t leak any memos about some of Obama’s more recent actions, but his article provides a jumping off place for understanding them.

As in Chicago, Obama seems to live in a cocoon in which Republicans are largely absent, offscreen actors that no one pays any attention to.

His personal interactions are limited to his liberal Democratic staff — and to the rich liberals he meets at his frequent fundraising events. He has held more of these than George W. Bush, who in turn held more than Bill Clinton.

Two decisions in particular seem tilted toward rich liberals. One was the disapproval of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada, even after it survived two environmental impact statements.

Obama says he wants more jobs and to reduce American dependence on oil from unfriendly foreign sources. The pipeline would do both, and is endorsed by labor unions. But Robert Redford doesn’t like Canadian tar sands oil. Case closed.

The other astonishing decision was the decree requiring Catholic hospitals and charities’ health insurance policies to include coverage for abortion and birth control. Here Obama was spitting in the eyes of millions of Americans and threatening the existence of charitable programs that help millions of people of all faiths.

Catholic bishops responded predictably by requiring priests to read letters opposing the policy. Who’s on the other side? The designer-clad ladies Obama encounters at every fundraiser. They want to impose their views on abortion on everyone else.

Obama fundraising seems to be lagging behind its $1 billion goal, and Democrats fear Republicans are closing the fundraising gap. So Obama seems to be concentrating on meeting the demands of rich liberals he spends so much time with.

Obama’s Failing CBO Report Card on Jobs, Debt and Weakening Economic Growth
By Donald Lambro

The Congressional Budget Office gave us a forecast preview Wednesday of the frightening fiscal catastrophe that threatens to engulf the government in a sea of debt.

The CBO report by Congress’s nonpartisan budgeteers reads like one of those disaster movies in which America is under attack by an alien enemy that destroys everything in its path.

But this isn’t science fiction. It’s happening now and it is going to make Europe’s financial crisis look like an empty piggy bank.

CBO said that under President Obama’s out-of-control spending policies, we are running up another $1 trillion-plus budget deficit.

Our monster $15.2 trillion national debt will become a $21.6 trillion debt in 10 years. Medicare’s hospital insurance trust fund will be virtually emptied by 2022, two years earlier than President Obama predicted last year.

Social Security’s disability trust fund will run out of cash in five years, and the Medicaid health care program for the poor will explode under a crush of applicants as a result of a massive expansion under Obamacare.

Medcaid enrollment is now expected to skyrocket from 67 million people in 2011 to about 95 million in 2022.

CBOs economic forecasts, which to a large degree will determine whether Obama is re-elected to a second term, are even gloomier.

December’s ballyhooed 8.5 percent unemployment rate — which some of Obama’s liberal supporters dismissed as “a statistical fluke” — will climb to nearly 9 percent in the last three months of this year and rise to 9.2 percent in the first three months of next year.

Forget all the sugarcoating the nightly news shows are giving Obama’s dismal economic score card. CBO director Douglas W. Elmendorf doesn’t mince words about the looming disaster that awaits us.

“We have not had a period of such persistently high unemployment since the [Great] Depression,” he said.

CBO threw cold water on those rosy growth scenarios that the Commerce Department joyously crowed last week when it reported the economy grew at a 2.8 percent rate in last year’s fourth quarter.

Instead, CBO said that if there is no change in current law, economic growth, i.e. the gross domestic product, would slow down to an even weaker 2 percent rate this year and then to a feebler 1.1 percent next year.

Any GDP rate at around 1 percent or lower would mean that the economy has virtually stopped growing and would be teetering on the edge of another recession.

As a result of the spending policies put in place by the president since 2009, federal expenditures have exploded, and along with it, the deficits and debt.

CBO says the government this year will have to borrow nearly one- third of every dollar it spends. Obama’s 2012 budget will spend about $3.6 trillion, but tax revenue from a still very weak economy will be $2.5 trillion.

When Obama came into office, he said he would cut the deficit in half. But as he enters the fourth year of his troubled presidency, his dismal fiscal record on budget deficits is unprecedented: $1.4 trillion in 2009, $1.3 trillion in 2010 and $1.3 trillion in 2011, followed by an estimated 2012 deficit that will again be over a trillion dollars.

President Bush’s budget deficit, by way of comparison, was $458 billion in 2008 as the economy plunged into a recession. It was a manageable $161.5 billion in 2007 after seven years in office.

At the beginning of 2008, Bush’s last year in office, the government’s national debt was $9.3 trillion. Over the past three years of his presidency, Obama has added $4 trillion to the debt, with another $1 trillion in red ink still to come before next January.

Record deficits, record debt, and a prolonged four years of weak economic growth and high unemployment is not much of an agenda to run on this year.

The White House, however, is still living in a dream world of its own, claiming that the president’s economic policies are working.

“I know that the economic policies that this president has put into place, working with Congress and then, when necessary, without Congress, have had the effect of reversing the most dramatic negative trend in employment since the Great Depression,” said presidential spokesman Jay Carney this week.

In fact, the national unemployment rate when Obama took office in January, 2009 was 7.6 percent, up from 7.2 percent the month before. It has not only risen to well over 9 percent under his presidency, CBO now says that it will resume rising in the year to come.

Obama’s class warfare answer to the government’s looming deficits and debt, is to raise taxes on over-taxed Americans, nearly half of whom say they are struggling in his economy.

The White House and Democrats in Congress are still eyeing the Bush tax cuts that are due to expire at the end of this year. That will put more revenue into the Treasury, but it would also further undermine economic expansion, such as it is, which would weaken long term growth and reduce revenues.

The only answer to the fiscal catastrophe that faces us is to apply the brakes on spending and boost economic growth by keeping taxes low.

Instead of talking about taxing the rich, who are paying most of the income taxes now, Obama should call for tax reforms to lower the rates by eliminating many needless tax breaks, income exemptions and corporate welfare.

The plan to do that is in his own deficit-cutting commission report which he shelved without reading.

The un-Obama
By Victor Davis Hanson

Barack Obama’s favorability in the polls falls when he is himself — overexposed, hard left in his press conferences, and boastful about legislative achievements like Obamacare and a stimulus of more than $1 trillion.

Then a strange thing happened. Obama largely went quiet. Often he was out of sight, vacationing in Hawaii or golfing. It was almost as if he learned that the less he was seen or heard, the more Americans liked the idea of Obama as president rather the reality of his constant “Make no mistake about it” and “Let me be perfectly clear” sermonizing.

Obama has now edged ahead of his potential Republican Party rivals in the polls. He waited for the noisy Republicans to grab national attention in the debates and primaries before moving hard left to firm up his base. So while the nation was amused, repelled and bored by the constant back-and-forth over Mitt Romney’s moneymaking and Newt Gingrich’s marriages and off-the-cuff philosophizing, President Obama matter-of-factly canceled the vital Keystone pipeline project.

He even more quietly prepared to ask Congress to raise the debt ceiling to over $16 trillion to accommodate his fourth consecutive reckless trillion-dollar-plus annual deficit — while planning to slash the defense budget in the next decade. Did anyone notice that he made controversial “recess” appointments — which as a senator he had opposed — when most thought Congress was not really in recess?

Obama now rarely talks about his supposed signature achievements, whether the huge deficit “priming” or the unpopular Obamacare. Republicans have only controlled the House of Representatives for the past year, yet Obama now blasts them for stopping what he in theory wanted to do as president. In contrast, he hardly praises the Democrats who controlled both houses of Congress for twice that time and enacted all that he wished. How strange to keep silent about successes only to broadcast failed what-ifs.

President Obama now campaigns on events that happened despite, not because of, him. His Cabinet has cut federal oil leases by 40 percent, subsidized money-losing and now bankrupt green companies, and in the past openly wished that gas and electricity prices would skyrocket to make alternative energy cost-competitive. But recently he bragged that we are pumping more oil than ever. Natural gas is suddenly no longer an earth-warming pollutant but welcomed in vast abundance.

Left unmentioned was the cause of this unexpected energy bounty: The economic stagnation between 2009 and 2012 has curbed energy demand, while private entrepreneurs have used new fracking and horizontal drilling technology on largely private lands to revolutionize the production of fossil fuels. Again, Obama seems to take credit for things that occurred over his opposition — as if to say, “You will like what they didn’t let me do.” In the fine tradition of American politics, the successes of others are Obama’s; Obama’s failures are the failures of others.

Both as a candidate and early in his term, Obama blasted all the Bush-Cheney antiterrorism protocols as either unnecessary or illegal. Iraq was a “dumb” war, and he declared the surge a failure.

But as president, Obama expanded these intelligence measures, and used a beefed-up military to kill Osama bin Laden and go after al-Qaeda captains. He followed the Bush-Petraeus timetable of withdrawal in Iraq and praised our successful nation-building there.

One could almost infer that Obama is now happy that he did not fulfill his earlier promises to close Guantanamo, end renditions and tribunals, prune back the Patriot Act, and get out of Iraq by March 2009. George W. Bush is still to be blamed for the present stagnating economy, as he is never to be praised for crafting the security measures vital for our current successes.

This year, Obama will run not so much on what he really did in 2009 and 2010, but more on what he wanted to do, but was stopped from doing, in 2011 and 2012. The president will tell his base that he really wished to go green in a big way while telling Middle America that lots of oilmen went ahead on their own to find new gas and oil. For his liberal supporters, Obama really did want to end the antiterrorism protocols, and for the rest of America he really did find those same protocols necessary to kill Islamic terrorists.

The message is clear: If voters do not see or hear the new un-Obama too often, if his left-wing legislative agenda is sidetracked, and if the private sector can ignore him, then voters may still sort of like the idea of him back as president.

Obama’s Racial Politics
By Walter E. Williams

There’s been a heap of criticism placed upon President Barack Obama’s domestic policies that have promoted government intrusion and prolonged our fiscal crisis and his foreign policies that have emboldened our enemies. Any criticism of Obama pales in comparison with what might be said about the American people who voted him in to the nation’s highest office.

Obama’s presidency represents the first time in our history that a person could have been elected to that office who had long-standing close associations with people who hate our nation. I’m speaking of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s pastor for 20 years, who preached that blacks should sing not “God Bless America,” but “God damn America.” Then there’s William Ayers, now professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago but formerly a member of the Weather Underground, an anti-U.S. group that bombed the Pentagon, U.S. Capitol and other government buildings. Although Ayers was never convicted of any crime, he told a New York Times reporter, in the wake of the September 2001 terrorist attack, “I don’t regret setting bombs. … I feel we didn’t do enough.” Obama has served on a foundation board, appeared on panels, and even held campaign events in Ayers’ home, joined by Ayers’ former-fugitive wife, Bernardine Dohrn. Bill Ayers’ close association with Obama is reflected by his admission that he helped write Obama’s memoirs, “Dreams from My Father.”

Many Americans thought that with Obama’s presidency, we were moving to a “post-racial society.” Little can be further from the truth. Victor Davis Hanson, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, in a National Review (1/18/2012) article titled “Obama’s Racial Politics,” says that Obama’s message about race and his charges of racial bigotry are “usually coded and subtle.” Criticizing Republicans, before a Mexican-American audience, Obama said that he ran for office because “America should be a place where you can always make it if you try — a place where every child, no matter what they look like (or) where they come from, should have a chance to succeed.” If you don’t get it, “no matter what they look like” is code for nonwhite. Hanson says that Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, has “found race a convenient refuge from criticism — most recently accusing his congressional auditors of racism, for their grilling him over government sales of firearms to Mexican cartel hitmen.”

Obama’s racial politics are aided and abetted by a dishonest news media. When Republican candidate Texas Gov. Rick Perry referred to “a big black cloud that hangs over America, that debt that is so monstrous,” he was dishonestly accused of racism by MSNBC’s Ed Schultz, who said, “That black cloud Perry is talking about is President Barack Obama.” Schultz omitted the second half of Perry’s quote. Chris Matthews referred to Perry’s vision of federalism as “Bull Connor with a smile.”

The media have help from black congressmen in stirring up racial dissent. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., said white presidents must be “pushed a great deal more” to address black unemployment than would a black president. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, said that argument over the debt ceiling is proof of racial animosity toward Obama. Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., said that Republicans are trying to deny blacks the vote. Rep. Andre Carson, D-Ind., said the tea party wishes to lynch blacks and hang them from trees. Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., said Perry’s job creation in Texas is “one stage away from slavery.”

All of this places a heavy burden on people who care about our nation. We must ensure that the 2012 elections are the most open and honest elections in U.S. history. Should Obama lose, I wouldn’t put it past leftists, progressives, the news media and their race-hustling allies, as well as the president, to fan the fires of hate and dissension by charging that racists somehow stole the election, thereby giving support and excuses for the kind of violence and lawlessness that we’ve witnessed in flash mobs and Occupy Wall Street riots.

Newt: Florida “The Very Beginning” of a “Long Process”
By Guy Benson

Sinking in the polls ahead of Tuesday’s Florida primary election, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich adopted an optimistic tone during remarks to supporters at a Fort Myers rally late Monday. Gingrich cited an unspecified poll showing that the race is “now tied,” telling the crowd that with their help, he “absolutely can win” the state. In a stump speech filled with harsh criticisms of both Gov. Mitt Romney and President Obama, Gingrich also hinted that he was prepared to wage a lengthy nomination fight, calling the Florida contest the “very beginning of this process.”

As the Republican candidate for president criss-crossed the Sunshine State in eleventh hour campaigning, Gingrich was peddling a two-pronged message: First, that President Obama must be defeated in November, and second, that he is the only “Reagan conservative” in the race capable of defeating the incumbent. “I don’t see how a Massachusetts liberal will do better than the moderates we ran in 1996 in 2008,” Gingrich said, comparing Romney unfavorably to unsuccessful Republican nominees Bob Dole and John McCain. The only way to prevent Romney from attaining the party’s nod “is to vote for me,” he argued – an indirect swipe at fellow remaining candidates Sen. Rick Santorum and Rep. Ron Paul.

Gingrich repeatedly took direct aim at the frontrunner Romney, calling his rival’s character into question and accusing the former Massachusetts governor’s attack ads “pathetic” and “profoundly false.” The former House Speaker sought to frame Tuesday’s election as a struggle between a “grassroots populist conservative” – himself – and “the [Washington] establishment,” which he suggested includes members of both political parties. To boost his own grassroots credibility, Gingrich cited recent comments from Gov. Sarah Palin, and touted the endorsement of her husband, Todd. He also had enlisted the help of two “special guests” at the Fort Myers gathering, former presidential candidate Herman Cain, and Michael Reagan, the former president’s youngest son.

Cain electrified the crowd of approximately 400 Lee Country residents, joking that the reason he hadn’t endorsed Gingrich sooner was because “I was running against him.” The former Godfather’s Pizza CEO told the audience that he had nine reasons he decided to formally back his former opponent – an allusion to the much-discussed “9-9-9” tax reform proposal at the center of his erstwhile campaign. Cain said Gingrich is the only remaining candidate who has expressed a commitment to “throwing out the current tax code.” He also urged Florida voters to ignore the “gutter politics” of personal sniping, an apparent condemnation of Romney’s tactics.

Michael Reagan introduced the candidate, acting as an authoritative messenger of the central theme that Gingrich can lay an authentic and credible claim to the Reagan legacy. “We need a Reagan conservative, not a Rockefeller Republican,” the former president’s son said, referring to the moderate former New York governor who challenged Barry Goldwater for the GOP nomination in 1964. In the past, Gingrich has stated that he backed Rockefeller in that race, though his campaign is now trying to attach the label to Romney. “After the [1994 Republican revolution], conservatives were thanking Newt – what happened?” Reagan asked rhetorically.

Organizers said they were expecting up to 1,200 supporters to attend the late afternoon event, although only about one-third that many turned out. Many shouted in agreement and waved blue and white placards during Gingrich’s criticisms of Romney, and cheered loudly as the candidate tore into the incumbent president. “This is the biggest election of your lifetime,” Gingrich said. “We don’t need someone to manage [America’s] decay. I’m not a manager. I’m a leader.”

The South Carolina winner asserted that Obama and Romney occupy different wings of the same establishment, and that elite monied interests are bankrolling their respective campaigns. “We’re being outspent almost four-to-one [in Florida],” he said of the Romney campaign and various outside groups. He alleged that some of Romney’s funding comes from taxpayer bailout money “recycled” by Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs, and promised a “thorough audit” to determine “where the money went,” if elected.

Gingrich assailed Obama’s recent decision to block an oil pipeline project from Canada to the Gulf Coast, which would have created thousands of American jobs. It’s “a disaster,” he said, calling the move “self-destructive” and designed to appease the president’s “Left-wing environmental extremist friends in San Francisco.” The Republican hopeful pledged to fast track the Keystone XL project, as well as to move swiftly to roll back much of Obama’s agenda through legislative repeal and executive orders. “By the time [Obama] lands in Chicago [after losing], we will have repealed about 40 percent of his government,” Gingrich promised, to applause.

Florida’s polls close at 7:00 pm Eastern on Tuesday night. The winner of the state’s closed primary will control all 50 of Florida’s delegates.

Obama’s Misstatements on the Union
By David Limbaugh

Only a president long shielded from criticism and accountability could make the kind of State of the Union speech President Obama did Tuesday night. It’s hard to know where to begin, given his repetition of tired ideas from his previous SOTUs, his taking credit for successful policies he resisted and omitting failed ones he promoted, his numerous misrepresentations on issues big and small, and his glaring refusal to address the main issues that threaten the nation.

Let me touch on just a few highlights in this brief space.

Excessive spending is the primary threat to our nation’s and Americans’ financial future, yet Obama glossed over it and distorted his record.

He said, “We’ve already agreed to more than $2 trillion in cuts and savings. But we need to do more.” But everyone knows he’s had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the cutting table. His unrelenting passion is spending. Even The Washington Post said, “Obama does not mention that Republicans forced him to accept $2 trillion in budget cuts during the debt-ceiling impasse.”

Obama said, “I’m prepared to make more reforms that rein in the long-term costs of Medicare and Medicaid and strengthen Social Security, so long as those programs remain a guarantee of security for seniors.” Well, that’s mighty magnanimous of him, but why is he so grudging about it? As president, he should be singularly focused on entitlement reform. Yet he has obstructed and demagogued such reforms. His condition that the “programs remain a guarantee of security for seniors” is completely dishonest, because Paul Ryan’s plan did just that and he rejected it while ridiculing and demonizing Ryan.

Obama said, again, that to avoid Warren Buffett’s secretary’s paying a higher tax rate than her boss, we should adopt the “Buffett rule,” prescribing that “if you make more than $1 million a year, you should not pay less than 30 percent in taxes.” The Heritage Foundation tells us that according to Congressional Budget Office data, the top 1 percent of income earners already pay 30 percent of their income in all federal taxes. In addition, when wealthy people pay a lower effective income tax rate, it’s a result either of lawful deductions (often charitable) or of capital gains and dividends on property they’ve acquired with money that has already been taxed. Also, before the wealthy realize many of these gains, the businesses that produce these gains have already paid a corporate income tax rate of 35 percent (the highest in the world). This means that Buffett, on much of this income, pays an effective rate of 50 percent (35 percent corporate plus 15 percent capital gains). Indeed, 99.4 percent of millionaires and billionaires pay far more in taxes in actual and relative terms than middle- and low-income earners, and for Obama to suggest otherwise is not only deeply deceitful but also damaging — because of the class envy he constantly stokes — to the social fabric of this country.

Obama said he wants to lure American companies home yet has steadfastly refused, notwithstanding his SOTU rhetoric, to agree to rectify the primary reasons they leave: punitive corporate income tax rates and onerous regulations.

Obama suggested that he is not only a pioneer in clean energy but also bullish on domestic energy. His record on the former is disgraceful, and both his claim and record on the latter are insulting. He has wasted billions of taxpayer dollars on quixotic green-energy programs with Solyndra and its cousins, spending $5 million for every single “renewable energy” job he has created. He has defiantly refused to take responsibility and is continuing to pursue more. He has waged war on domestic coal, natural gas and oil. He not only imposed a punitive moratorium on offshore drilling in the Gulf but also lawlessly reinstituted another one after federal district and appellate courts shot down his initial moratorium. When he lifted this revised moratorium, drilling remained in limbo because of the administrative obstacles his administration had imposed on drilling permits. His actions caused devastating losses to the Gulf economy and jobs, which rippled throughout the nation’s economy. Most recently, to placate his environmental extremist base, he blocked the job-producing Keystone XL pipeline for no legitimate reason.

Obama threatened to withhold federal subsidies to colleges unless they hold tuition costs down without recognizing that one of the main reasons they’ve skyrocketed is the profligate subsidies he continues to increase.

He railed against bailouts after having established a record as President Bailout. He blamed banks again for causing the housing crisis and economic meltdown by making loans to people who couldn’t afford them, without admitting that government, mainly his party, was the primary culprit.

He said he’d established the closest military cooperation with Israel in history, but he has bullied that nation for three years, and our relationship has rarely been more strained.

Believe me, I could go on.

Obama’s Game Plan: Do Nothing
By Debra J. Saunders

Toward the end of his State of the Union speech, President Barack Obama observed that Washington politicians should learn from the example of the U.S. military: “When you’re marching into battle, you look out for the person next to you, or the mission fails.”

Obama recalled the successful Navy SEAL mission that, under his watch, took out Osama bin Laden and observed, “The mission only succeeded because every member of that unit trusted each other — because you can’t charge up those stairs, into darkness and danger, unless you know that there’s someone behind you, watching your back.”

At first blush, it seemed like a stirring call to action. But when you look at the speech as a whole — and in context — it was a sad admission. Obama constantly carps about his lack of support from the Republican-led House. I think the president has decided that he cannot succeed in the face of political opposition. So he is not charging up those stairs.

Unless Washington walks in lock step behind Obama, he’s not going to try to get anything done.

Consider the White House decision on the Keystone XL pipeline. Last week, the administration announced that the president denied the project because of “a rushed and arbitrary deadline” of Feb. 21 embedded in a two-month extension of the 2011 payroll tax holiday. “I’m disappointed that Republicans in Congress forced this decision,” the president lamented.

Obama also lauded the military toward the beginning of his address. “They focus on the mission at hand. They work together,” he noted. “Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example.”

I can imagine it, but what I see is a president who nixed a shovel-ready job-rich pipeline project that had been under review since 2008 and had passed State Department vetting twice — without exhausting every effort to approve the pipeline or extend the deadline.

Ryan Lizza wrote an illuminating piece on Obama’s “post-post-partisan presidency” in the current New Yorker. As Lizza reported, in 2004 and 2008 Obama framed himself as a Democrat who was above hyper-partisanship. Yet a year into his presidency, a Gallup poll showed Obama to be “the most polarizing first-year president in history — that is, the difference between Democratic approval of him and Republican disapproval was the highest ever recorded.”

Lizza wrongly, I think, concludes: “At this political juncture, there appears to be only one real model of effective governance in Washington: political dominance, in which a president with large majorities in Congress can push through an ambitious agenda.”

Last month, deputy press secretary Josh Earnest told Politico that extending the two-month payroll tax holiday “is essentially the last must-do item of business” the president has with Congress. After that, “in terms of the president’s relationship with Congress in 2012 … the president is no longer tied to Washington, D.C.”

In other words, Obama can govern only if Democrats control both houses of Congress. Until then, he has taken his marbles and gone home. As Steve Jobs said — when describing his dealings with Obama to biographer Walter Isaacson — “the president is very smart. But he kept explaining to us reasons why things can’t get done.”

Obama vs. Catholics
By Brent Bozell

The Brian Williams MSNBC debate in Florida was not only dreadfully boring — I never thought I could ever long for commercials — it was pathetic. Freed of the fear of triggering an avalanche of applause against loaded questions, Williams and his co-moderators couldn’t bring themselves to utter one single question asking the Republican candidates to respond to Obama’s mistakes. For almost two hours, not one Obama failure was cited. Apparently, his record is spotless.

Instead, the candidates (especially Rick Santorum) were thrown four questions surrounding the 2005 legal battle in Florida over pulling the feeding tube of Terri Schiavo, which pushed all the liberal media hot buttons about “far right” religious conservatives throwing their religion around where it didn’t belong. This isn’t breaking news. But like the ABC debate fixated on contraception, it’s evidence that liberal networks are focused on their agenda, not on the voters’ concerns.

Let’s reverse the conversation. How do these same reporters deal with the outrageous left-wing extreme on social issues? They don’t.

Take the order promulgated by Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services on Friday to require virtually all employers to offer insurance coverage of sterilization, abortifacients and contraceptives without deductibles or co-pays in their employee plans by Aug. 1. Churches are exempt, but not religiously inspired hospitals, schools and other charities that hire outside their faith tradition.

“The government should not force Americans to act as if pregnancy is a disease to be prevented at all costs,” insisted Archbishop (and Cardinal-designate) Timothy Dolan of New York, head of the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops. “Historically, this represents a challenge and a compromise of our religious liberty.”

That’s putting it mildly. What it means is that the Catholic Church is faced with closing down its hospitals, universities and charities — or committing mortal sin.

Amazingly, the major media found nothing historic about this. ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC all ignored it. NPR covered it on Friday night — with a positive tone. The headline on their website was “Administration Stands Firm On Birth Control Coverage.” The Washington Post editorialized that Team Obama had made a mistake, but Brian Williams can’t seem to acknowledge that Obama has ever made a mistake, even when Obama boasts of his travels to 57 states.

So at what point do our country’s television networks notice that Team Obama has an ideological agenda against faith-based charitable organizations, most especially the Catholic Church? Across the country, Democrats have been pushing Catholic social workers out of government cooperation. In Massachusetts, the District of Columbia and most recently in Illinois, Democrats have insisted on forcing Catholic Charities to quit its long-time assistance in providing adoption and foster-care services because they refused to place children with homosexual couples.

How militant is their bigotry? Consider: The Catholic providers offered to refer them to other agencies (as they had been doing for unmarried couples), but Gov. Pat Quinn’s government drew a line in the sand, comparing gays to the black civil rights struggle. “Separate but equal was not a sufficient solution on other civil rights issues in the past either,” government spokesman Kendall Marlowe told The New York Times. “The child welfare system that Catholic Charities helped build is now strong enough to survive their departure.”

The Conference of Catholic Bishops lost a federal contract to aid survivors of sex trafficking because Obama’s HHS bureaucrats objected that contraceptive and abortion referrals would not be provided. Steven Wagner reported for National Review that senior officials at HHS, up to and including persons in the office of Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, “overrode career staff to give federal funds to two organizations deemed by the professionals to be unqualified.”

Despite this open war on religious liberty, the networks haven’t moved a muscle, even after Newt Gingrich denounced their anti-religion bias in a Jan. 7 debate in New Hampshire.

“You don’t hear the opposite question asked: Should the Catholic Church be forced to close its adoption services in Massachusetts because it won’t accept gay couples? Which is exactly what the state has done,” Gingrich declared. “Should the Catholic Church be driven out of providing charitable services in the District of Columbia because it won’t give in to secular bigotry? Should the Catholic Church find itself discriminated against by the Obama administration on key delivery of services because of the bias and the bigotry of the administration?”

As Gingrich argued, the accusation of intolerance flows both ways. But Brian Williams and the other major-media “moderators” would rather shave their blow-dried heads than make Obama look bad at a Republican debate.

South Carolina Message
By Thomas Sowell

Just days before the South Carolina primary, polls showed Mitt Romney leading Newt Gingrich. Then came the debates and the question about Gingrich’s private life, which brought a devastating response from the former Speaker of the House — and a standing ovation from the audience.

Apparently the television audience felt the same way, judging by the huge turnaround in the support for Gingrich. The stunning victory in South Carolina brought Newt’s candidacy back to life.

But the message from South Carolina was about more than a reaction to how Gingrich dealt with a cheap shot question from the media. Nor was it simply the Republican voters’ response to Newt’s mastery as a debater.

The more fundamental message is that the Republican primary voters do not want Mitt Romney, even if the Republican establishment does — and it is just a question of which particular conservative alternative the voters prefer.

The successive boomlets for Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and Herman Cain showed the Republican voter’s constant search for somebody — anybody — as an alternative to Romney. The splintering of the conservative vote among numerous conservative candidates allowed Romney to be the “front-runner,” but he never ran far enough in front to get a majority.

Mitt Romney’s supposed “electability” — his acceptability to moderates and independents — has been his biggest selling point. Moreover, he is just the kind of candidate that the Republican establishment has preferred for years: a nice, bland, moderate who offends nobody.

This is the kind of candidate that is supposed to be the key to victory, no matter how many such candidates have gone down to defeat. If the bland and inoffensive moderate was in fact the key to victory, Dewey would have won a landslide victory over Truman in 1948, and John McCain would have beaten Barack Obama in 2008.

Whomever the Republicans choose as their candidate is going to have to run against both Barack Obama and the pro-Obama media. Newt Gingrich has shown that he can do that. Romney? Not so much. Mitt Romney’s fumbling when trying to answer the simple question of whether he would or would not release his income tax records is the kind of indecisiveness that is not going to cut it in a nationally televised debate with President Obama.

Gingrich is not just a guy who is fast and feisty on his feet. He has a depth of understanding of what issues are crucial, experience in how to deal with them and — almost equally important — experience in how to shoot down the petty, irrelevant and “gotcha” distractions of the media.

Does Gingrich have negative qualities? More than most. Wild statements, alienation of colleagues, reckless gambits. His use of the rhetoric of the left in attacking Bain Capital was a recent faux pas, though one that he quickly backed away from.

But if we are serious — and there has seldom, if ever, been a time in the history of this nation when it was more necessary to be serious — then we cannot simply add up talking points for or against a candidate. What matters is how that candidate stands on issues that can make or break the future of this country.

Polls show the public as a whole with more negative attitudes toward Gingrich than toward Romney. But negative opinions, like other opinions, are not set in stone.

If the election campaign changes the opinions of a significant minority of the anti-Gingrich voters — when the alternative is Obama — it will not matter how much the remainder may hate Newt.

Is this a gamble? The painful reality is that everyone in this year’s field of Republican candidates is a gamble. And re-electing Barack Obama is an even bigger gamble.

Whichever candidate the Republican voters finally choose from this year’s field, they are bound to have reservations, if not fears. Gingrich’s worst could be worse than Romney’s worst, both as a candidate and as a president. But Gingrich’s best is much better than Romney’s best.

Sometimes caution can be carried to the point where it is dangerous. When the Super Bowl is on the line, you don’t go with the quarterback who is least likely to throw an interception. You go with the one most likely to throw a touchdown pass.

A Few Words in Defense of Negative Campaigning
By Michael Barone

Those who take a certain pleasure in denouncing the evils negative political advertising should have spent the last week in South Carolina. They could have plunked down in front of TV sets, especially during morning, early evening and late evening news programs, and by adroit use of the remote control seen one negative spot after another.

They could have watched again and again the Ron Paul campaign’s stinging denunciation of Newt Gingrich for, among other things, taking $1.6 million from Freddie Mac.

They could have seen a similar assault on Gingrich from the pro-Romney Restore Our Future super PAC (by the way, how do you restore something which by definition doesn’t yet exist?).

They could have taken delight in the Rick Santorum campaign’s ad highlighting similarities between Mitt Romney’s record on issues and that of Barack Obama, or in Paul’s stinging ad denouncing Santorum as a “big government conservative.”

All of these ads, you may notice, targeted the three candidates who, coming out of Iowa and New Hampshire, were considered by themselves and others as having some chance of winning the nomination: Romney, Gingrich and Santorum. Left largely unattacked were Paul, who confesses he has no chance to win, and Rick Perry, who withdrew Thursday morning.

There is a near-unanimous sentiment among the high-minded that negative advertising is a bad thing. It pollutes the air even more than carbon dioxide. It breeds cynicism about politics and government. It is somehow unfair.

In response, let me say a few words in praise of negative ads.

First, elections are an adversary business, zero-sum games in which only one candidate can win and all the others must lose. Sometimes it’s smart for competitors to concede points to their opponents. But it’s irrational to expect one side to sing consistent praises of the other.

In second-grade elections, it may be considered bragging to vote for yourself. But it is silly to expect adults to behave this way.

It is especially foolish to expect that candidates who seem headed to win elections should escape criticism on television. Every candidate has weak points and makes mistakes. It’s not dirty pool for opponents to point them out.

Second, it is said that negative ads can be inaccurate and unfair. Well, yes — but so can positive ads. An inaccurate or unfair ad invites refutation and rebuttal, by opponents or in the media, and can boomerang against the attacker. So candidates have an incentive to make attacks that can be sustained.

Sometimes voters respond negatively even to fair attacks. That’s why in multicandidate races, an attack by candidate A on candidate B can hurt A as well as B, and end up helping candidate C or D.

That’s why many campaigns hesitate before attacking. And it also gives them a motive to make attacks that can be sustained because they are accurate and fair.

Third, advertising is not always decisive. Other things can matter more. The barrage of negative ads against Gingrich hurt him in Iowa and New Hampshire, but in South Carolina (which has not yet voted as I write) it did not prevent him from overtaking first Santorum and drawing even with Romney in the polls. Debate performances trumped attack spots.

Behind the disdain of the high-minded for negative campaign spots is a fear that they will erode Americans’ faith in politics and government. These folks like to cite polls showing Americans once had great confidence in institutions and that now they lack it.

But polls have been showing lack of faith in institutions going back to the late 1960s. The only time when pollsters found high levels of confidence was when the questions were first asked in the 1950s. That was during the two decades when American institutions — big government, big business, big labor — enjoyed enormous prestige after they led the nation to victory in World War II and presided over the unexpected growth and prosperity of the postwar era.

I strongly suspect that if you could go farther back in history and ask those same questions, you would find that during much of our history, most Americans were grousing about politicians and complaining about government. Mark Twain and Will Rogers made good livings doing so.

In any case, negative campaigning will persist. Those who enjoy wallowing in negative ads should fly to Florida, find a TV and keep clicking the remote control.

The Emperor Barack
By Michael Reagan

Much like one of his predecessors, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Barack Obama has all but declared war on the United States Supreme Court.

It will be remembered that in 1937 FDR was angry over the high court’s refusal to put a stamp of approval on much of his New Deal agenda, and sought to bend the court to his will by adding new members to the existing court membership.

Contemptuously calling the court’s members a collection of “nine old men,” FDR sought to “pack” the high court with up to six additional members more likely to do his bidding. The proposal lost steam and, thankfully, failed.

Mr. Obama has not gone quite that far — yet. But he’s getting close. Like most U.S. presidents who chafe under the high court’s authority to rule on the constitutionality of aspects of their agendas, Obama is unhappy with the court’s failure to recognize the divinity of his proposals, if not that of his personhood.

Too bad. As we are often reminded, “Into each life some rain must fall.”

Thanks to the high court, Mr. Obama has been much in need of an umbrella of late. The president’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was correctly overruled in a case involving religious freedom. The court clearly stated that the First Amendment protects churches in their decisions regarding workers with religious duties, a “ministerial exception” to employment-discrimination laws. This exception had already been supported by lower courts and many states.

Tragically for Mr. Obama and his vastly elevated ego, choirs of angels singing of the glories of his agenda cannot be heard. Despite the frantic efforts of his captive media to tune them in, the president remains a mere mortal, subject to all the slings and arrows that always target any holder of high office.

Soon the issue before the court will be Mr. Obama’s health care program, rammed through Congress despite the widespread opinion that it was, and remains, nothing short of an opening to national socialized medicine. A ruling is expected by early July.

The question is whether the Constitution’s Commerce Clause can be stretched beyond recognition to reach into everyone’s pocketbook with the Obamacare mandate. We pray that the Supreme Court will put the question to rest with an emphatic rejection.

The notorious failings of Britain’s socialized medicine have not failed to diminish the hopes and plans of our own fans of socialized everything — of a government so big and so powerful that nothing can resist its meddlesome reach.

That is a lesson Barack Hussein Obama has yet to learn. If he doesn’t learn his lesson by July, he will certainly learn it in November.

South Carolina Is Make or Break for GOP Contenders
By Matt Towery

Yes, Mitt Romney has a huge advantage in the race for the Republican nomination for president. Yes, Newt Gingrich and perhaps Rick Santorum made bad decisions by participating in the New Hampshire primary, given that Romney could outspend them in a state where most participants are hardly “conservative Republicans.” But now every candidate must compete in a real, live “red” state, where cities have real, live populations, and the cities and counties are more reflective of the other more mainstream Republican states that will come after it.

Welcome to South Carolina, a state made up of three nations. To disabuse many pundits, South Carolina is not a purely “evangelical” state. In reality, Christian fundamentalists are most heavily populated in the northwestern segment of the state. They voted heavily for their candidate, Mike Huckabee, in 2008, yet Huckabee lost to the more socially moderate John McCain that year. Yes, “evangelicals” matter — but they do not dominate South Carolina, as some pundits might think.

The real decision-makers live close to that beautiful and regal city, Charleston. The counties that surround the area make up a combination of retirees from the Midwest and retired military. They were responsible for McCain’s victory in the 2008 GOP presidential primary. Additionally, current military families live south of Columbia, the capital city of the state.

The middle of the state, which is centered on Columbia, is also very business-oriented. It usually splits between the more “establishment” Republican candidates. That means that a battle for those near Charleston and those in the upper-western part of the state really decides a GOP presidential primary battle.

So who can we immediately discount? Jon Huntsman? To use South Carolina language, “That bird won’t hunt.” He’s too moderate-to-liberal for South Carolina voters … and they are very sharp voters. As to Rick Perry, I have come to really like the guy. He seems more human than most of his competitors. But this will likely be his last stand, with money running low and no natural base in South Carolina.

Ron Paul, who in terms of political doctrine is the hero to many, will not survive the more sober and realistic South Carolina electorate. He will drop, and that will leave a solid yet undetermined percent of South Carolina Republican voters who will be ready to vote for someone who is not the “establishment candidate.”

Ultimately, this race will turn into a bloodbath. With two national debates wedged into less than two weeks of campaigning, the slightest phrase could change public sentiment. And the candidates altogether have purchased close to $8 million in advertising in this very short window. That means that South Carolina will be overwhelmed with messages — both good and bad.

It really all boils down to this: If Mitt Romney can make himself less cold, less plastic, more human, less wealthy, more caring and more genuine, he can win South Carolina and the rest of the Southern states. If not, he will face some degree of a real threat in South Carolina. And, of greater importance, he will have a hard time getting Republicans in critical swing states such as Florida, North Carolina and Virginia motivated to turn out at the numbers he needs to defeat President Obama, should Romney become the nominee.

Not that Gingrich is warm and fuzzy. In fact, surveys show that Santorum and Perry both score higher on the “likeability” scale. But at this point, that really does not matter. The presidential nomination usually goes to the individual who wants it the most. Gingrich is now acting and spending like he really wants the job. But Romney has been doing the same for four years. The real question is whether a guy who got his act together in the 11th hour can defeat a man who has been ready for years. The answer will come in a real, live big primary … South Carolina.

Obama Stops Water from Rising, but He Still Can’t Create Jobs
By Bob Beauprez

The Obama Administration would have us believe that the newest jobs data (i.e. 200,000 jobs created in December, and 8.5% unemployment) is proof that the President’s economic policies are working. His top economic adviser dutifully said the newest report proves that “it is critical that we continue the (President’s) economic policies that are helping us dig our way out of the deep hole.” Who would expect Obama’s staff economist to say anything different?

But, a little more analysis of the data proves that rather than “healing” the economy, as Obama likes to say, his policies have worsened the recession and prolonged the recovery.

As a recent Investor’s Business Daily editorial explained, over the past 30 months the size of the labor force has actually shrunk by 843,000 people – 170,000 in just the past two months. That just doesn’t happen in America. At a similar point in the Reagan recovery of the 1980s the labor force had expanded by more than 4 million workers according to IBD.

The labor force participation rate (LPR) – the percentage of people employed or looking for work of the total age eligible population – is currently just 64%. As the following chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates, that is worse by far than when Obama took office in January 2009, and it is still trending downward. In fact, the current LPR is at the lowest level in nearly 30 years. It’s disingenuous to talk of recovery when continually more people are still leaving the work force, and it is nearly impossible to increase economic output until more – not less – people are productive workers.

Simply put, millions of Americans are still so disillusioned, disappointed, and disgusted that they aren’t even trying to get a job. When adjusted for the abnormally low participation rate, “unemployment would be more like 11.5%,” according to the IBD editors.

Democrats Embrace Voter Fraud
By Lurita Doan

With a dismal record of achievement and forced to accept the bitter harvest of their failed economic and foreign policies, no one should be surprised that Team Obama and the Democrats in Congress are running scared. Nor are the Democrats’ fears irrational.

With an historical supermajority in the House and the Senate, Team Obama and Democrats pushed their pet, progressive ideas with a vengeance, spending and borrowing. Yet despite full political power and despite the trillions of dollars thrown into the maw of the Obama/Reid/Pelosi vision of utopia, our nation is left with the nastiest of all financial hangovers as a result of queasy, Democrat-initiated, shameful indulgences. Of course too, the bills, some $16 trillion dollars of them, are coming due as well.

No one in America can possibly be pleased with the sorry achievement of Team Obama, perhaps the most miserable record of failed leadership in American history. And yet, Obama and his Democrat allies that are responsible for so much of the economic pain, including the jump in the misery index, are now determined to win the next election, remain in office, and presumably spoon out even more of the wealth redistribution, job killing regulatory regimes, and anti-business policies that have gotten us into this mess.

So how do Democrats plan to get elected? They certainly cannot run on their record. Even they must know their grand, economic plans to transform the American economy have failed. They know, too, that Americans, by wide margins, believe the country is on the wrong track. So what to do?

Desperate people do desperate things, and taking a harder look at some recent Team Obama actions, it seems clear that one of the primary strategies for the election is going to be voter fraud.

In the past, ACORN was the Democrats’ trump card, empowered and encouraged to recruit fraudulent voters that would return the favors by padding votes to favorite candidates. But the ACORN sham, which had been such an obvious wholly owned subsidiary of the Democrat party, was exposed and is now (mostly) out of the voter fraud business.

With ACORN gone and unable to produce the loyal legions of fraudulent voters, there’s a good chance that Team Obama may “pull a Putin.” There are lots of different ways to rig an election and encourage voter fraud. Americans recently saw that in Russia, where Vladimir Putin’s party gained a “surprise” election win, despite the widespread, anti-Putin sentiment throughout Russia. Putin showed that voter fraud, intimidation, and slick electioneering schemes can be effective.

Already, Team Obama is putting voter fraud policies in effect to tilt the election. Eric Holder’s stance on the right of individual states within the U.S. to require voter identification is the most obvious example. Several court cases have already upheld the states’ right to require voter identification.

Furthermore, many studies have shown that requiring voter identification prevents voter fraud and is no more illegal than requiring identification to obtain Medicare or Medicaid or social security payments. Nevertheless, , Holder’s move—especially claiming that voter identification requirements are racist—is indicative of the panic that Democrats in power are feeling as the 2012 election looms and they search for ways to replace ACORN’s fraudulent voter numbers.

More recently, Team, Obama is speeding up the immigration process and rushing illegal aliens to citizenship, often ahead of those who have waited, patiently and legally, for years. A 2011 report exposed the problem wherein the immigration visa processors within DHS are, apparently, being pressured by senior officials within the agency to approve applications as quickly as possible, often ignoring issues relating to eligibility and security.

Many Americans have broad-based concerns about immigration, illegal and otherwise, and there is broad-based consensus that the current immigration system and our nation’s policies need reform urgently. But what the Obama Administration is doing is not the kind of reform Americans had in mind. This current urgency to relax immigration standards in advance of the upcoming election looks exactly like it is– a craven attempt to mine for new voters to tilt the election.

These kinds of desperation moves by Obama Administration officials are especially despicable because they seek short-term, political advantages at the expense of longer-term policies that could actually benefit the nation. For example, it is an act of economic stupidity to force foreign-born science and engineering majors from our leading universities to leave the country following graduation. These are the very technology and science professionals that we need her to spur economic growth. But, Obama is mute on the need for this sort of urgent immigration reform and, instead, now spends his time and effort on relaxing standards of the immigrants that he hopes will reward him with a vote in November. How sad is that?

Obama is a desperate man, desperate to win an election, and desperate enough to take a shameful path to his goal. Obama cannot win on the merits of his policies, and even his once, most-fervent supporters recognize that Obama’s economic policies have failed. Expect Obama to find and push even more imaginative electioneering schemes as he takes the desperate path to “pull a Putin” and resorts to voter fraud.

Obama’s Motto
By David Limbaugh

President Obama is calling for dramatic defense cuts that could threaten our national survival while obstructing structural reforms to our entitlement programs that are essential for our national financial survival. It just doesn’t get much worse than this.

President George W. Bush attempted in good faith to reform Social Security, and Democrats savaged him. Rep. Paul Ryan proposed a comprehensive financial plan that would, as painlessly as possible, restore national fiscal sanity, and Obama and his Democrats have misrepresented the plan (saying it would end Medicare) and used class warfare and fear-mongering to kill it in the cradle.

Indeed, Republicans have repeatedly submitted and passed comprehensive and detailed budget plans to restore our financial solvency, and Senate Democrats have blocked every one of them. Meanwhile, the Democratic Senate hasn’t produced a budget in almost three years. Three years!

It is undeniable, undebatable, irrefutable, inarguable and certain that the United States is spending at a level that will destroy it. It is equally indisputable that Democrats have shown no willingness to join Americans in tackling the problem.

Every time you confront a liberal with these incontrovertible facts, his response is not: “You are simply wrong.” It is, “Bush started this.” Well, Bush did spend too much, but he was a piker compared with Obama. But it doesn’t much matter who caused it anymore, does it?

If your family is facing a serious problem, is your first instinct to blame the culprit — other than to identify it for purposes of devising a solution — or to address the problem?

If Democrats truly believe Bush spent too much, then shouldn’t they cooperate to bring spending under control rather than use Bush’s spending as an excuse to up the ante? While Bush spent too much, including on education and his prescription drug entitlement, Democrats thought he didn’t spend nearly enough on education (Ted Kennedy constantly derided Bush over it), and part of the reason Bush advanced prescription drugs was to prevent Democrats from implementing a far costlier package.

If Democrats had any concern about spending, they wouldn’t have crammed through Obamacare, which will increase the federal health care budget obscenely. If they had the slightest concern about our upside-down national balance sheet, they wouldn’t have spent $900 billion in a worthless, corrupt, ineffectual “stimulus” program and be clamoring for another one. They wouldn’t urinate federal money into dead-end green projects, such as Solyndra. They wouldn’t have desperately tried to pass a monumentally wasteful cap-and-trade bill that wouldn’t have made a dent in global temperature in a hundred years, even if you blindly accept all the superstitious nonsense the environmentalists propagate.

Seriously, people, let Democrats and Obama defenders obfuscate all they want, but have you seen the charts? Have you noticed the dramatic acceleration in spending and deficits since Obama took office? Have you seen the side-by-side comparisons of America’s financial future under the Ryan plan and Obama’s current spending trajectory? Democrats cannot make Obama’s financial path sustainable simply by blaming Bush for what happened before. We have to get about the business of cutting spending and reforming entitlements now because every year we wait, our problems are compounded and become that much more difficult to reverse.

We must come to terms with the fact that Democrats are trying not to control domestic spending — and growth-stifling tax hikes won’t substantially reduce the deficit, much less the debt. Everything they are about depends on continually increasing spending, and you see it in their every budget. The only plans that even hint at spending cuts (actually reductions in spending increases using baseline budgeting) are the unspecified ones Obama outlines in his speeches. His actual budgets show no appreciable cuts in the deficits as far as the eye can see. Why aren’t people, even Democrats, freaking out over this? I’ll never understand this.

Obama is now proposing drastic cuts in our defense budget at a time when global terrorism is on the rise and other nations — from China to Russia to Iran to North Korea, most of whom mean us harm — are aggressively increasing their defense budgets. We are sharing nuclear secrets with Russia and sending technology to China that can be used for military purposes. Our war game projections show we might lose a conventional war against China over a disputed Taiwan Strait. We have killed our F-22 Raptor, while China and Russia are ramping up their next-generation fighters.

Obama’s motto seems to be this: If spending is called for by the Constitution, bleed it dry; if the Constitution forbids it, no holds barred. Gut nation-saving defense spending; increase nation-destroying domestic spending.

When will the whole nation wake up to this madness?

Obama’s 2012 Reelection Excuse: Don’t Blame Me, Blame Congress
By Donald Lambro

President Obama and his top campaign officials have mapped out a new 2012 reelection strategy: run against an unpopular Congress.

Obama, whose job approval polls have been relentlessly stuck at around 43 percent for much of last year, thinks he can convince enough voters that Congress is the cause of all the economic ills that still plague our country.

That’s right, the man Mitt Romney has been calling “the great complainer,” “the great blamer,” “the great excuse giver,” will run on a campaign platform that his policies are blameless. Its all the fault of Congress who won’t pass his latest economic stimulus plan to borrow and spend more money and raise taxes on investors, small businesses and corporations.

Forget about those lofty promises Obama made in his 2008 campaign speeches about stopping the bickering and changing the tone in Washington. White House aides told reporters last week that he is going to “double down” on what they call an “outside strategy” — that he is fighting for the middle class against a do-nothing Congress that has become the paymaster of wealthy special interests.

It’s going to get ugly, too, because when you attack the Congress, that includes everyone in it — the Democrats who run the Senate and Republicans who control the House. What will Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi say about that?

But Obama and his aides think the best politics this year is to stay above the fray on Capitol Hill. He doesn’t exactly say this, but the implied message to his fellow Democrats — who will likely lose the Senate in November — is, “You’re on your own.”

“In terms of the president’s relationship with Congress in 2012… the president is no longer tied to Washington,” deputy press secretary Josh Earnest told the Washington Post over the holidays.

No longer tied to Washington? Does he really think he can just walk away from three years of impotent economic stimulus bills and the voters will forget what he proposed, or that it didn’t work? Or that he will be able to campaign around the country and ignore the economic and fiscal issues Congress will be dealing with over the course of the coming year?

Obama’s legislative war cry last year — “we can’t wait” — apparently has been changed to “You’re gonna have to wait until I’m reelected.”

But if he thinks he’ll be able to convince enough voters that Congress is to blame for what ails us and that he’s kept his promises, Republicans have a lethal counter-offensive strategy ready and waiting to strike back.

For months now, an army of opposition researchers at the Republican National Committee have been digging up every exuberant, exaggerated claim Obama has made in behalf of his policies. Those words are going to be thrown back at him between now and November, reminding the voters that he made over-the-top promises that remain unfulfilled. Among them:

– That his $800 billion spending stimulus bill would lift two million Americans out of poverty. In fact, the Census Bureau tells us that over six million Americans have fallen below the poverty income line during the past three years of his presidency.

– That his home foreclosure assistance program would “help between 7 and 9 million families restructure or refinance their mortgages.” Actually, his administration has spent a great deal less than it promised and helped only 2 million, at best.

– In his 2008 nomination acceptance address to the Democratic national convention, Obama said his plan to invest $80 billlion in clean technologies would create five million new jobs. So far, the money spent on the projects has produced nowhere near that jobs figure and has come under investigation for bankrolling loans sought by wealthy donors to Obama’s campaign.

Internal government documents obtained by a House oversight committee found that the program was heavily politicized, and included a fat loan to a solar panel business publicly promoted by Obama that later went bankrupt, costing taxpayers half a billion dollars. A Post investigation last month found that the program “was infused with politics at every level.”

– Appearing on the NBC Today Show in 2009, Obama said that if the economy did not recover within three years, “then there’s going to be a one-term president.”

These and other Obama remarks will be the source for a tidal wave of Republican videos on television and the Internet over the ensuing year. But none will be more ubiquitous than his claims that he’s stablized and turned the economy around since its plunge into the Great Recession.

But official government data draws a starkly different picture: A nearly 9 percent national unemployment rate; a weak economic growth rate that’s barely creeping along at a snail’s pace 1.8 percent; and millions of discouraged workers giving up and leaving the labor force because they cannot find jobs.

That’s the sober reality of the dismal Obama economy: weak capital investment, banks reluctant to lend, home values continuing to decline, college graduates unable to find jobs, and nearly a dozen states permanently stuck in double-digit unemployment.

A recent RNC ad uses Obama’s own words to indict his performance as president. An Internet spot titled “It’s Been Three Years” shows candidate Obama saying the “real question” is whether or not Americans will be better off in four years.

The ad flashes forwards to a one-on-one interview with ABC News analyst George Stephanopoulos last October in which Obama says “I don’t think they’re better off than they were four years ago.”

A 2012 Conservative Case for America’s Future
By Ken Blackwell

The United States is at a fork in the road regarding which way we will go as a people. The 2012 election could be the most important in our lifetime, and conservative leaders have reached a consensus on how to channel the energy and concerns of the American people to realize historic change this year.

The status quo will not survive the year. Our debt and spending have reached catastrophic proportions in the context of global financial difficulties and political upheaval. Consequently, by the end of 2012, America will either have taken a decisive step toward socialistic collectivism in the name of “equality” and “social justice,” where businesses and owners are punitively taxed to “pay their fair share,” or America will take a major step in the direction of returning to our Founders’ constitutional government, restoring the rule of law, federalism, free enterprise, and individual initiative and responsibility.

The American people will decide which path to take in the 2012 elections, not only in the general election on November 6 but also in the nominating process in primaries over the next several months for all major offices, including the presidency. Conservatives must act in a concerted and informed fashion in all of these contests to shape the public dialogue and thoroughly vet the candidates.

To achieve these ends, top conservative leaders acting under the umbrella of the Conservative Action Project have released “A Conservative Consensus for 2012” announcing agreement on major policies. These issues span all three wings of the conservative movement: economic, social, and national security.

The Conservative Consensus speaks to economic issues of fundamental tax reform, Obamacare, overhauling regulation, and energy production. It tackles social issues of strengthening families and advocating traditional values and religious liberty. And it covers defense issues of protecting the homeland, military superiority, and national sovereignty.

This document also advocates specific issues all conservatives must regard as essential. America needs a strong Balanced Budget Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that caps federal spending. Immediate and drastic cuts to the federal budget. No corporate bailouts. The Second Amendment right to bear arms is a fundamental right, as is voting, so the ballot box must be protected from fraud and corruption. Because voting is also a citizen’s duty, reasonable conditions must be enacted to safeguard our democratic process. And none of these can succeed unless the right people are appointed as judges to our federal courts.

Achieving these goals is a tremendous challenge, and true constitutional conservatives must relentlessly pursue building a true coalition between the three wings of the conservative movement.

This means that true conservatives must not allow anyone to redefine conservatism as only about fiscal issues and the reach of government. Constitutional conservatives understand that strong families are the essential foundation for long-term economic prosperity. The demographic reality is that declining birth rates and rampant abortion creates a devastating loss of human capital that cannot sustain our entitlement systems or economic growth, and also result in millions of unfilled job positions that become a magnet for illegal immigration.

Fortunately most conservatives understand that national security is crucial to America’s success. But some wrongheaded individuals seek to silence or marginalize social issues, oblivious to the profound reality—proven throughout history—that where families crumble there is an unstoppable public outcry for government to fill the void with massive entitlements and programs. Government always grows when families fail.

Some economic leaders with libertarian or liberal beliefs fail to grasp this simple fact, and so pervert the concept of freedom to mean that individuals are free to do whatever they like, free of any concept of right-and-wrong or of personal responsibility or self-control. They willfully ignore our Founding Fathers, who believed that limited government only endures when individuals govern themselves.

Some social conservative leaders are making the same mistake. They were right to reject an unrealistic “truce” on social issues. But some are essentially calling for a truce on economic issues, supporting candidates who stand for traditional values but are not reliably conservative on limiting the size, scope, and cost of government.

While both social and economic issues are indispensable, and both move votes, the reality is that fiscal issues are moving more swing votes in this cycle than value issues. Social conservatives will overreach if they force voters to choose between the two by insisting on traditionalist candidates who are not also warriors for free markets, federalism, fundamental entitlement reform, and a strong Balanced Budget Amendment. Social conservatives must demand equal standing, not superior standing.

A perfect example where all three branches of conservatism can join forces is our national debt. America is now $15 trillion in debt, an unprecedented level exceeding 100% of our Gross Domestic Product. The only time we even approached such a proportion was the end of World War II, where we were in a global war that threatened our very survival as a nation. Instead of a temporary military emergency, our current debt is being fueled by deficits of over $1 trillion every year Barack Obama has been president.

In addition to an economic issue, this debt is a social issue. Our profligate spending is intergenerational theft, saddling each member of the next generation with over $120,000 in debt once they become taxpayers. That’s a mortgage on a house, with no house.

It is also a defense issue. The former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said our national debt is the single greatest threat to national security. We are on track to be paying $600 billion per year just in interest on the national debt, more than our entire military and security budget. This hamstrings our ability to defend our nation today while developing weapons and systems to protect us tomorrow.

Another reality is that constitutional conservatism cannot become our national policy without all three branches of government. If conservatives retake both houses of Congress it can only block bad legislation. Without a two-thirds supermajority, conservatives in Congress cannot override presidential vetoes of good legislation or undo harmful administrative regulations through the Congressional Review Act.

We need a constitutional conservative in the White House. Not all Republicans are part of the solution, and some leading Republicans are even part of the problem. America needs a president who is reliable on fiscal issues, and social issues, and defense issues. Two out of three is not enough. Ronald Reagan was all three, and only a Republican solid on all three bases can pick up President Reagan’s mantle to lead this country through the daunting challenges we face.

In our system of government, none of this will succeed without the right people serving in the federal judiciary. But judges are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate, so if the American people elect a constitutional conservative president and a Senate willing to fight for judges, there are scores of spectacular lawyers and scholars who are faithful to the original meaning of the Constitution. If we elect the right people, they can take care of the courts.

The courts are imperative for all branches of the conservative movement. In addition to abortion, same-sex marriage and religious liberty, the Supreme Court is deciding all-important economic issues like Obamacare and national security issues like Bill of Rights protections for terrorists captured by our military on foreign battlefields. All conservatives must demand that only principled originalists be nominated to the Supreme Court and lower courts.

So America faces a historic choice. And conservatives face a historic task, of making the case to the voters for how and why constitutional conservatism is the way to return our nation to strength and stability, and electing national leadership that will honestly and definitively tackle these challenges for the sake of our children and grandchildren.

Mark Steyn: Puncture the cocoon of denial
by Mark Steyn

Ring out the new, ring in the old. No, hang on, that should be the other way around, shouldn’t it? Not as far as 2011 was concerned. The year began with a tea-powered Republican caucus taking control of the House of Representatives and pledging to rein in spendaholic government. It ended with President Obama making a pro forma request for a mere $1.2 trillion increase in the debt ceiling. This will raise government debt to $16.4 trillion – a new world record! If only until he demands the next debt-ceiling increase in three months’ time.

At the end of 2011, America, like much of the rest of the Western world, has dug deeper into a cocoon of denial. Tens of millions of Americans remain unaware that this nation is broke – broker than any nation has ever been. A few days before Christmas, we sailed across the psychological Rubicon and joined the club of nations whose government debt now exceeds their total GDP. It barely raised a murmur – and those who took the trouble to address the issue noted complacently that our 100 percent debt-to-GDP ratio is a mere two-thirds of Greece’s. That’s true, but at a certain point per capita comparisons are less relevant than the sheer hard dollar sums: Greece owes a few rinky-dink billions; America owes more money than anyone has ever owed anybody ever.
Public debt has increased by 67 percent over the past three years, and too many Americans refuse even to see it as a problem. For most of us, “$16.4 trillion” has no real meaning, any more than “$17.9 trillion” or “$28.3 trillion” or “$147.8 bazillion.” It doesn’t even have much meaning for the guys spending the dough: Look into the eyes of Barack Obama or Harry Reid or Barney Frank, and you realize that, even as they’re borrowing all this money, they have no serious intention of paying any of it back. That’s to say, there is no politically plausible scenario under which the 16.4 trillion is reduced to 13.7 trillion, and then 7.9 trillion and, eventually, 173 dollars and 48 cents. At the deepest levels within our governing structures, we are committed to living beyond our means on a scale no civilization has ever done.

Our most enlightened citizens think it’s rather vulgar and boorish to obsess about debt. The urbane, educated, Western progressive would rather “save the planet,” a cause which offers the grandiose narcissism that, say, reforming Medicare lacks. So, for example, a pipeline delivering Canadian energy from Alberta to Texas is blocked by the president on no grounds whatsoever except that the very thought of it is an aesthetic affront to the moneyed Sierra Club types who infest his fundraisers. The offending energy, of course, does not simply get mothballed in the Canadian attic: The Dominion’s Prime Minister has already pointed out that they’ll sell it to the Chinese, whose Politburo lacks our exquisitely refined revulsion at economic dynamism and, indeed, seems increasingly amused by it. Pace the ecopalyptics, the planet will be just fine: Would it kill you to try saving your country, or state or municipality?

Last January, the BBC’s Brian Milligan inaugurated the New Year by driving an electric Mini from London to Edinburgh, taking advantage of the many government-subsidized charge posts en route. It took him four days, which works out to an average speed of 6 miles per hour – or longer than it would have taken on a stagecoach in the mid-19 century. This was hailed as a great triumph by the environmentalists. I mean, c’mon, what’s the hurry?

What indeed? In September, the 10th anniversary of a murderous strike at the heart of America’s most glittering city was commemorated at a building site: the Empire State Building was finished in 18 months during a depression, but in the 21st century the global superpower cannot put up two replacement skyscrapers within a decade. The 9/11 memorial museum was supposed to open on the 11th anniversary, this coming September. On Thursday, Mayor Bloomberg announced that there is “no chance of it being open on time.” No big deal. What’s one more endlessly delayed, inefficient, over-bureaucratized construction project in a sclerotic republic?

Barely had the 9/11 observances ended than America’s gilded if somewhat long-in-the-tooth youth took to the streets of Lower Manhattan to launch “Occupy Wall Street.” The young certainly should be mad about something: After all, it’s their future that got looted to bribe the present. As things stand, they’ll end their days in an impoverished, violent, disease-ridden swamp of dysfunction that would be all but unrecognizable to Americans of the mid-20th century – and, if that’s not reason to take to the streets, what is? Alas, our somnolent youth are also laboring under the misapprehension that advanced Western societies still have somebody to stick it to. The total combined wealth of the Forbes 400 richest Americans is $1.5 trillion. So, if you confiscated the lot, it would barely cover one Obama debt-ceiling increase. Nevertheless, America’s student princes’ main demand was that someone else should pick up the six-figure tab for their leisurely half-decade varsity of Social Justice studies. Lest sticking it to the Man by demanding the Man write them a large check sound insufficiently idealistic, they also wanted a trillion dollars for “ecological restoration.” Hey, why not? What difference is another lousy trill gonna make?

Underneath the patchouli and pneumatic drumming, the starry-eyed young share the same cobwebbed parochial assumptions of permanence as their grandparents: we’re gayer, greener, and groovier, but other than that it’s still 1950, and we’ve got more money than anybody else on the planet, so why get hung up about a few trillion here and a few trillion there? In a mere half-century, the richest nation on Earth became the brokest nation in history, but the attitudes and assumptions of half the population and 90 percent of the ruling class remain unchanged.

Auld acquaintance can be forgot, for awhile. But eventually even the most complacent and myopic societies get re-acquainted with reality. For anyone who cares about the future of America and the broader West, the most important task in 2012 is to puncture the cocoon of denial. Instead, the governing class obsesses on trivia: Just to pluck at random from recent California legislative proposals, a ban on nonfitted sheets in motels, mandatory gay history for first-graders, car seats for children up to the age of 8. Why not up to the age of 38? Just to be on the safe side. And all this in an ever more insolvent jurisdiction that every year drives ever more of its productive class to flee its borders.

Tens of millions of Americans have yet to understand that the can no longer can be kicked down the road, because we’re all out of road. The pavement ends, and there’s just a long drop into the abyss. And, even in a state-compliant car seat, you’ll land with a bump. At this stage in a critical election cycle, we ought to be arguing about how many government departments to close, how many government programs to end, how many millions of government regulations to do away with. Instead, one party remains committed to encrusting even more barnacles to America’s rusting hulk, while the other is far too wary of harshing the electorate’s mellow.

The sooner we recognize the 20th century entitlement state is over, the sooner we can ring in something new. The longer we delay ringing out the old, the worse it will be. Happy New Year?

Perry May Still Be the Man to Take on Obama
By Emmett Tyrrell

The year 2011 has drawn to an end, and as I look back, I see several of my predictions that appear pretty sound. President Barack Obama is dead in the water and will be beaten in 2012. I have made that prediction over and again this year and I think it will be borne out.

Another observation I’ve made is that liberalism is dead. By the coming election, it will be the rare psephologist who fails to notice. Say, the occasional MSNBC political expert may still think liberalism is full of brag and bounce after the fall elections, as will the Sunday morning news know-it-alls. But after the Nov. 6 elections, with the Senate and the presidency added to the Republicans’ trophy chest, I think my observation will be commonly accepted.

The liberals of yesteryear are history. Those who call themselves liberals today are zombies, the living dead of the left. Their new taxonomic classification is crony capitalism, according to which winners are picked by the government and showered with government subsidies. Thus is gobbled up ever more of American commerce.

Alas, Obama’s early crony capitalists have a dreadful record. Consider the electric automobile or the solar power sector of the economy, companies like Solyndra — egad! The American people’s limits have been reached. Crony capitalism too is dead or at least moribund.

So was I always right in 2011? Unfortunately, not at all. Those who noticed the optimistic tone of my pronouncements regarding Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s chances for the presidency in late spring and early summer must know I was too optimistic by half. In fact, I was dead wrong. Let me be man enough to admit it.

Back then I saw Perry declaring his candidacy by the end of August, and so far, so good. I said he would be very impressive, speaking authoritatively and sonorously on all the important issues of the day to us conservatives. By January 2012, he would have swept the field. Only a well-heeled Gov. Mitt Romney would be prepared to challenge him, and perhaps the indefatigable Congressman Ron Paul. It would be a pathetic sight, with a smiling, congenial Perry proceeding to the summer Republican convention and taking the nomination.

Well, Perry did not sweep into 2012. He tripped repeatedly in the fall after a promising declaration of candidacy. He faltered in debate and had those embarrassing brain seizures in front of the cameras, where all could see. He was a solid conservative, but on some things he was too solid, and he was rarely well-informed.

Frankly, I came to the conclusion that in the summer sometime he awoke and thought he should be president, so why not make a run for it? His state was rightly being boomed as the economy that works in contrast to California, the economy that had failed, that hated business, that was an economy without a purpose. Perry had been good for Texas and could be good for America. The 2012 election was going to be about the economy, and the Governor of Texas was the man to take on Obama.

Actually, he might well be a man to take on Obama, but he has shown himself not to be prepared for the race just yet. It is said of him that in Texas, he never won a debate and never lost a race. Yet he is beyond Texas now. Today he is campaigning for the presidency, and he entered the race as though it were a lark. He has shown the capacity to learn on the campaign trail, but I am not sure the trail is long enough. We shall soon see.

The Year in Obama Scandals — and Scandal Deniers
By Michelle Malkin

With 2011 drawing to a close, it is time to account. As an early-and-often chronicler of Chicago-on-the-Potomac, I am amazed at the stubborn and clingy persistence of President Barack Obama’s snowblowers in the media. See no scandal, hear no scandal, speak no scandal.

Dartmouth College professor Brendan Nyhan asserted in May — while Operation Fast and Furious subpoenas were flying on Capitol Hill — that “one of the least remarked upon aspects of the Obama presidency has been the lack of scandals.” Conveniently, he defines scandal as a “widespread elite perception of wrongdoing.”

So as long as left-wing Ivy League scribes refuse to perceive something to be a scandal — never mind the actual suffering endured by the family of murdered Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, whose death came at the hands of a Mexican cartel thug wielding a Fast and Furious gun walked across the southern border under Attorney General Eric Holder’s watch — there is no scandal!

Self-serving much?

Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum likewise proclaimed: “Obama’s presidency has so far been almost completely free of scandal.”

This after the year kicked off in January with the departure of lying eco-radical czar Carol Browner. In backroom negotiations, she infamously bullied auto execs to “put nothing in writing, ever.” The previous fall, the White House’s own oil spill panel had singled out Browner for misleading the public about the scientific evidence for the administration’s Draconian drilling moratorium and “contributing to the perception that the government’s findings were more exact than they actually were.”

The Interior Department inspector general and federal judges likewise blasted drilling ban book-cooking by Browner and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who falsely rewrote the White House drilling ban report to doctor the Obama-appointed panel’s own overwhelming scientific objections to the job-killing edict.

In February, federal judge Martin Feldman in Louisiana excoriated the Obama Interior Department for defying his May 2010 order to lift its fraudulent ban on offshore oil and gas drilling in the Gulf. He called out the administration’s culture of contempt and “determined disregard” for the law.

This spring saw rising public anger over the preferential Obamacare waiver process (which I first reported on in September 2010). Some 2,000 lucky golden ticket winners were freed from the costly federal mandates — including a handful of fancy restaurants in Aloha Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco district, the entire state of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s Nevada, and scores of local, state and national Big Labor organizations, from the Service Employees International Union and Teamsters on down. Meanwhile, as The Hill newspaper reported last month, other not-so-lucky Republican-led states seeking waivers, such as Indiana and Louisiana, were rejected.

But it wasn’t just Republicans objecting to the president’s arbitrary Obamacare fiats. In July, congressional Democrats turned on the monstrous federal health bureaucracy known as the Independent Payment Advisory Board. The constitutionally suspect panel — freed from normal public notice, public comment and public review rules — would have unprecedented authority over health care spending and an expanding jurisdiction of private health care payment rates.

Obama’s health and human services secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, faced separate legal questions over her overseer role in a hair-raising document-shredding case when she served as governor of Kansas. In October, a district judge in the Sunflower State suspended court proceedings in a high-profile criminal case against the abortion racketeers of Planned Parenthood. Bombshell court filings showed that Kansas health officials “shredded documents related to felony charges the abortion giant faces” and failed to disclose it for six years.

That same month, Bloomberg News columnist Jonathan Alter gushed: “There is zero evidence … of corruption. Where is it?”

Alter’s declaration of the “Obama Miracle” came just weeks after the politically driven half-billion-dollar Solyndra stimulus “investment” went bankrupt, prompting an FBI raid and ongoing criminal and congressional probes of the solar company funded by top White House bundler and visitor George Kaiser.

As Solyndra and an avalanche of other ongoing green subsidy scams erupted, so did the LightSquared debacle — a federal broadband boondoggle involving billionaire hedge fund managers and Obama donors Philip Falcone and George Soros. In September, two high-ranking witnesses — William Shelton, the four-star general who heads the Air Force Space Command, and National Coordination Office for Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing Director Anthony Russo — exposed how the White House had pressured them to alter their congressional testimony and play down concerns about LightSquared’s interference threat to military communications.

The White House continues to block efforts to gain information about the Federal Communications Commission’s approval of a special waiver for the company, even as new government tests this month showed that the company’s “signals caused harmful interference to the majority of … general purpose GPS receivers.”

The Obama White House closed out the year with Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri demanding a probe of the smelly $443 million no-bid smallpox antiviral pill contract with Siga Technologies — controlled by big lefty donor Ron Perelman. Then there was the small matter of massive voter fraud in Indiana, where a Democratic official resigned amid allegations that “dozens, if not hundreds,” of signatures were faked to get Obama on the state primary ballot in 2008. And while Americans busied themselves with the holidays, White House and Democratic campaign officials were dumping more than $70,000 in contributions from another deep-pocketed contributor — scandal-plagued pal and former New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, who oversaw the collapse of MF Global.

All this — and so much more — yet erstwhile “conservative” journalist Andrew Sullivan of Newsweek/The Daily Beast scoffed, “Where are all the scandals promised by Michelle Malkin?”

There’s none so blind as those who will not see.