All the President’s Funny Money
by Michelle Malkin

Ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching. President Obama’s perpetual campaign cash-o-matic machine kicks into high gear again this week as the celebrity-in-chief heads to Hollywood for several high-priced fundraisers. But while the Democrats’ 2012 re-election team stuffs its hands into every liberal deep pocket in sight, questions about the Obama 2008 campaign finance operation still fester.

Last week, the laggard watchdogs at the Federal Election Commission announced an audit of the Obama 2008 campaign committee — which raised a record-setting $750 million. White House flacks are downplaying the probe as a “routine review.”

But there’s nothing routine about the nearly $3 million Obama has spent on legal expenses to address federal campaign finance irregularities and inquiries. Roll Call reports that Obama’s campaign legal fees have exceeded all other House and presidential campaign committees, including members of Congress under ethics investigations.

There’s nothing routine about the whopping $6 million that Team Obama has refunded to individual donors since Obama took office.

And there’s nothing routine about the 26 warning letters to Obama for America totaling “more than 1,500 pages of questions and data that outlined compliance concerns — including the longest one ever sent to a presidential candidate,” according to Roll Call.

Among the Obama 2008 campaign committee’s shadiest transactions that have gone unpunished:

– Foreign funny money. Federal election law bans foreign nationals from contributing to American candidates. But during 2008, the Obama campaign was forced to return an illegal foreign donation worth $31,100 made by two brothers in the Gaza Strip, and even mainstream news outlets reported that candidate Obama’s money-handlers had routinely failed to verify citizenship by checking donors’ passports. As the Associated Press reported at the time: “One donor, Tom Sanderson of Canada, made clear his $500 contribution came from a foreign source. He included a note that said, ‘I am not an American citizen!’ Obama’s campaign took the money anyway…”

Another illegal foreign donor, Australian Richard Watters, contributed $1,000, “entering a fake U.S. passport number — a random jumble of numbers and letters” onto the Obama donation website. “He said he also checked a box stating that he was an American living overseas, ‘because I could see it wasn’t going anywhere if I didn’t do that.’”

Obama raked in at least $2 million in overseas donations.

– Online donor credit-card fraud. Weeks before the 2008 presidential election, investigative journalist Ken Timmerman blew the whistle on rampant phony straw contributors slipping through the Obama donation site. Just one example: “Mr. Good Will” from Austin, Texas. Mr. Good Will listed his employer as “Loving” and his profession as “You.” Timmerman’s analysis of 1.4 million individual donations to the Obama campaign discovered “1,000 separate entries for Mr. Good Will, most of them for $25. In total, Mr. Good Will gave $17,375. Following this and subsequent FEC requests, campaign records show that 330 contributions from Mr. Good Will were credited back to a credit card. But the most recent report, filed on Sept. 20, showed a net cumulative balance of $8,950 — still well over the $4,600 limit.”

Subsequent digging by conservative bloggers found that the Obama campaign’s donor website appeared to intentionally disable security protocols and facilitate illegal donations with bogus names, shell addresses and untraceable credit cards. Among Obama’s online “donors”: Bart Simpson, Family Guy, Daffy Duck, King Kong, O.J. Simpson, Mr. Doodad Pro, John Galt, Della Ware, Crazy Eight and Adolfe Hitler.

– Social justice funny money. In 2008, the Obama campaign wrote checks totaling more than $800,000 to a nonprofit offshoot of ACORN called Citizens Services Inc. The campaign claimed the money went to nonpartisan get-out-the-vote services. But receipts showed the funds paid for polling, advance work and event staging supplied by a nonprofit that supposedly does simple canvassing work on behalf of low-income people. The FEC allowed Obama to wave his magic wand and amend the records to change political expenses into non-political ones. As a Republican National Committee staffer commented at the time: “For a candidate who claims to be practicing ‘new’ politics, his FEC reports look an awful lot like the ‘old-style’ Chicago politics of yesterday.”

On a related front, ACORN whistleblower Anita MonCrief filed an FEC complaint last year over illegal coordination between ACORN and the Obama campaign. MonCrief publicly released Obama donor lists supplied to ACORN affiliate Project Vote, which were allegedly used to target maxed-out presidential donors. The scheme involved converting the expenditures by Project Vote, ACORN and ACORN-affiliated entities to illegal, excessive corporate contributions to the Obama presidential campaign, in violation of federal law.

Nothing to see here, move along? The only “routine” business as usual being conducted here is Chicago-style self-exemption business as usual: Rules are for fools. Let the crooked cash flow in.

While Obama Seeks New Ideas, His Bureaucracy Stifles Them
by Byron York

Nearly a year ago, Utah Gov. Gary Herbert and his healthcare policy team came up with a simple way to save the state’s Medicaid program a lot of money. Why not have Medicaid recipients and applicants handle their paperwork online? Using e-mail and a special website rather than paper, Herbert calculated, would save Utah about $6.3 million a year. “It seemed like a no-brainer to us,” says the governor.

The problem was, going paperless required a rules waiver from the Department of Health and Human Services. And that’s where the idea ran into a brick wall.

“We tried for eight months to get the waiver,” says Herbert. HHS delayed and delayed and delayed — and then finally said no. “The denial we got back from the secretary of HHS was by e-mail, of all things,” Herbert says, pausing a second for the listener to take it in. “The irony is rich.”

It might seem odd that a governor would need to become personally involved in the question of whether his state can use e-mail to deal with Medicaid recipients, but that’s what happened next. Still determined to go paperless — “I know in Washington it’s chump change, but for Utah, $6.3 million is real money” — Herbert traveled to the Nation’s Capital to meet Cindy Mann, director of HHS’ Center for Medicaid and State Operations. Mann and her staff were receptive, but then, a few weeks later, lower levels of HHS again held up the no-paper plan.

The bureaucratic runaround was on Herbert’s mind when he joined other governors in the White House State Dining Room in late February to hear President Obama pledge to help states burdened by skyrocketing healthcare costs.

Obama told the governors that he is always open to new ideas to improve the system. “I don’t believe that any single party has a monopoly on good ideas,” the president said. “And I will go to bat for whatever works, no matter who or where it comes from.”

After the event, Herbert approached Obama. “I said, ‘You know, we’ve been trying to get this waiver and go paperless,’” Herbert recounts. “He said, ‘That’s a great idea.’ And I said, ‘I think so, too, but we can’t seem to get HHS to give us the ability to do it.’”

At that moment, Obama spotted HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius nearby. “Kathleen, Kathleen — come over here,” he said, according to Herbert. When Sebelius came over, Obama explained what Herbert was trying to do.

A few hours later, Herbert received a handwritten note from the HHS secretary. “Just learned that we have worked with your staff, we have a draft agreement and we should have a formal agreement later today,” Sebelius wrote. Utah had finally won permission to go paperless.

Herbert is pleased, but a little baffled at why getting an ordinary waiver was so hard. “I appreciate the fact that they’ve come around after eight months, but does it take a governor having to talk to the president of the United States to make a simple cost-saving change?” he asks. “And the bigger question is why in heaven’s name do states have to ask for permission anyway?”

Herbert and other governors fear bigger problems ahead. New mandates in the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, will cost Utah $1.2 billion over the next decade, an increase Herbert calls unsustainable.

He’s still frustrated that Congress and the Obama administration didn’t pay much attention to governors during the Obamacare debate. “We were never even invited to the table,” he says. And he’s not impressed by the president’s promise to allow states to opt out of Obamacare, as long as they meet the administration’s requirements for coverage. “He’s saying, you can have flexibility, as long as you do it our way,” says Herbert.

But Herbert is happy the new Republican leadership of the House is paying more attention to the states. During his visit to Washington, Herbert, along with Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, urging that Congress allow the states more leeway in paying for health care. “Real healthcare reform will arise from the states, not be imposed by the federal government,” Herbert told the committee.

That seems unlikely, as long as it takes presidential intervention for the smallest improvements in the system. But Herbert is still hoping for the best.

Chicago on the Potomac
by Michelle Malkin

No matter how you rearrange President Obama’s inner circle, it still looks, smells and tastes like a rotten Chicago deep-dish pizza.

Ready for the latest topping on this moldy old pie? It’s a possible chief of staff slot for Wall Street banker/lawyer/wheeler-dealer William Daley, brother of outgoing Chicago mayor/machine politics mastermind Richard M. Daley (also the former boss of White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett and first lady Michelle Obama), whose retirement paved the way for former Obama chief of staff and Chicago mayoral candidate Rahm Emanuel. Phew.

The White House is reportedly looking to manufacture a “pro-business” aura with Bill Daley, who holds a “corporate responsibility” executive office at J.P. Morgan and once headed the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — the latter, a left-wing hate object and Obama punching bag leading up to the midterms.

But the Beltway-based Chamber of Commerce is too often a fair-weather statist lobbying organization. It supported the TARP all-purpose bailout, the auto bailout and the bottomless, pork-filled stimulus package, all of which have forcibly redistributed money from taxpayers and small businesses to politically connected special interests (including Daley’s J.P. Morgan, which was most recently swept up in a massive pay-to-play bond scheme in Alabama).

Daley has about as much real experience creating jobs as Da Boss now sitting at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave — which is to say, less than a thimble full. (It’s a New Year. I’m being generous.) In 2009, the head of Chicago’s sanitation department implicated Daley in a hiring corruption scheme tied to his brother’s mayoral administration. The official was convicted; Daley shrugged off the federal probe. “Even if it happened — and I’m not saying it did — things were different. There was nothing illegal about that stuff.”

Instead of distancing himself from the favor-trading Wall Street fat cats who have earned the ire of both anti-bailout tea party activists and anti-corporate liberals, Obama remains wedded, embedded and indebted to the worst kind.

Daley has served on the board of government-sponsored financial behemoth Fannie Mae since 1993. Like the Richard Daley machine in Chicago, Fannie Mae in Washington has served as an industrial-sized patronage factory — sharing profits with political allies, spreading taxpayer funds to ethnic groups, and doling out jobs to left-wing academics, Washington has-beens and back-scratching buddies. Like Daley. And close Obama adviser Jim Johnson, the Fannie Mae exec who got sweetheart loans from shady subprime lender Countrywide.

While they raked in six-figure salaries, Fannie Mae and government-sponsored sibling Freddie Mac engaged in Enron-style accounting, plunged into debt and helped usher in the subprime housing meltdown through reckless lending practices.

Bill Clinton, the man who appointed Daley to the Fannie Mae board, also appointed Emanuel to the Freddie Mac board of directors at a time when its oversight manager called the quasi-governmental agency “so pliant” that it enabled rampant book-cooking. Freddie Mac’s stock skyrocketed; its CEOs helped themselves to massive bonuses. Emanuel’s hometown paper, the Chicago Tribune, exposed how Emanuel’s “profitable stint” during this corruption-plagued period entailed almost no work:

The board met no more than six times a year. Unlike most fellow directors, Emanuel was not assigned to any of the board’s working committees, according to company proxy statements. Immediately upon joining the board, Emanuel and other new directors qualified for $380,000 in stock and options plus a $20,000 annual fee, records indicate.

On Emanuel’s watch, executives told the board of a plan to use accounting tricks to mislead shareholders about outsize profits the government-chartered firm was then reaping from risky investments. The goal was to push earnings onto the books in future years, ensuring that Freddie Mac would appear profitable on paper for years to come and helping maximize annual bonuses for company brass.

And now the torch may be passed in an endless Windy City circle, from Daley to Emanuel, from Emanuel to Daley, with Obama. ‘Round and ’round it goes in Chicago on the Potomac. Remember: When Crony State corruptocrats brag about “job creation,” the only jobs they’ve ever created are each other’s.

Charlie Rangel Is a Symptom of a Bigger Problem
by Star Parker

Charlie Rangel, convicted of eleven ethics violations – the most ever found against any member of Congress – was resoundingly re-elected, getting 80% of his district’s vote.

After 40 years representing these folks, you can’t conclude he was an unknown commodity. Granted, the conviction occurred after the election, but the charges were well publicized.

Has Charlie Rangel’s leadership produced life so grand in Harlem that flagrant and persistent unethical behavior by their Congressman means nothing to its residents?

The national poverty rate is around 14%. In the 15th district of New York, Charlie Rangel’s district, it’s 24.3%. The child poverty rate is 30.9%.

Whatever it is that Harlem voters find so attractive about Mr. Rangel, it’s hard to conclude that quality of life is something they feel they owe to him.

But let’s think about this in a broader context.

Charlie Rangel is a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus.

There are now 41 House members who belong to the Caucus. In the most recent elections, 37 of them ran as incumbents and all regained their seats handily. The four seats that were vacated were easily captured by new black Democrats.

That’s a 100% return rate. These Black Caucus Democrats recaptured their seats getting an average 75% of their district’s vote.

In a year when 62 Democrats were defeated – a 25% reduction in the bloc of 252 Democrats in the current Congress – the reduction of the bloc of 41 black Democrats was zero.

The average poverty rate in the districts of Congressional Black Caucus members is 20.3% – six points higher than the national average. The average child poverty rate in these districts is 28.8%.

So, as in Charlie Rangel’s case, it’s hard to conclude that these Black Caucus Democrats are being sent back to Washington by large voting margins, year after year, because they are delivering such fine lives to their constituents.

A problem here is that elections in Black Caucus districts are not exactly what might be described as free and open.

About three quarters of these districts are Majority Minority districts, hard wired to guarantee election of blacks. The remaining districts are also gerrymandered through various schemes flowing from collusion of political parties and state legislatures.

The initial provision of the Voting Rights Act, passed in 1965, to deal with voting problems was structured to counter schemes going on in the South – literacy tests, etc – rigged to keep blacks from registering and voting.

But by the 1970’s, this provision morphed into district gerrymandering. What was initially meant to protect the voting rights of blacks evolved into provisions to guarantee the election of blacks.

The result of this overall process is a bloc of politically manipulated districts which, coupled with other institutional biases protecting incumbents, virtually guarantees the election of black Democrats.

You might say that rigged elections might be justified if it meant better lives for black constituents.

But given that these districts are largely characterized by persistent poverty and some of the worst public schools in the country, this is a conclusion that’s hard to reach.

Earlier this year, the New York Times profiled the prodigious money raising prowess and dubious ethics of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. The Times editorialized, “Of all the money machines shaving ethical corners, few rival the Congressional Black Caucus…..the caucus spends far more on gala entertainments and golf outings than on the scholarships that billboard its charity drives.”

Political markets are like commercial markets. The absence of competition results in shoddy products.

When we send American soldiers into harm’s way abroad to fight for free elections, perhaps we should spend more time considering the quality of our own democracy at home.

The Final Nail in the Democrats’ Coffin
by Larry Kudlow

On the eve of the midterm elections, a third-quarter GDP report showing a meager 2 percent growth rate is the final nail in the Obama Democrats’ political coffin.

The economic nails slowly have been hammered into that coffin all summer and fall. A spate of subpar economic statistics has shown the failure of the fiscal-stimulus spending program. And myriad tax and regulatory threats produced by new government policies have created a massive uncertainty overhang and a dismal jobs outlook. American businesses have gone on an investment-capital and hiring strike.

For a White House that bet the ranch on a massive government pump-priming plan, it has all turned out to be a complete failure. The scheduled economic recovery has simply not occurred.

And that’s why a Republican Tea Party tsunami lies just over the horizon. That tidal wave could be even greater than current polling suggests.

It should have been recovery summer, according to the president and his followers. But it is now officially a recovery slump. The entire command-and-control economic philosophy of the Obama Democrats has proven to be a big bust. And they’ll pay a very big price for this.

In fact, the last two GDP reports have averaged less than 2 percent growth, something that qualifies as a growth recession, not a recovery.

Even worse, the GDP deflator — the broadest inflation measure — came in at 2.2 percent in the third quarter, following a 2 percent reading in the second quarter. That means inflation is rising faster than real output. Stagflation.

The Bernanke Fed should take notice of this on the eve of its quantitative-easing pump-priming exercise, expected to be announced the day after the election. We are actually experiencing a mini version of stagflationary growth recession.

The spending, taxing, and regulating policies of the Democratic Congress and administration have blocked growth, putting the Fed in a position to provide even more money to chase fewer goods. But in classic Milton Friedman terms, even though the economy is mired in stagnation, that’s still an inflationary prescription.

On top of all that, the depreciating-dollar policies of the Fed have led to a boom in commodity prices, including food and energy — things ordinary Americans pay for in the course of their typical week.

When the economy came in at 5 percent in the last quarter of 2009, and at 3.7 percent in early 2001, it looked like a recovery scenario. This, of course, followed the Fed’s massive $2 trillion stimulus plan and the more than $1 trillion fiscal stimulus. But those sugar highs quickly evaporated as growth slowed to 2.7 percent in the spring and 2 percent in the summer.

Meanwhile, a stubbornly high unemployment rate of 9.6 percent was supposed to have dropped to 8 percent last year and 7 percent by the end of this year, according to the president’s Council of Economic Advisers. But it didn’t. The so-called stimulus failed to stimulate.

Actually, unemployment is much worse for regular workaday folks. Counting marginal part-time workers and discouraged workers, unemployment is 17.3 percent. And this year, while the president promised 1.5 million new jobs, nonfarm payrolls have grown by only 613,000, and actually have fallen over the past four months.

The trouble with the whole Obama mindset is the notion that government can run the economy. That idea has failed. It is business that runs the economy, including entrepreneurs and risk-takers. Yet the animal spirits have been stifled, while the producers have been laughed at, mocked, and insulted.

The Obama class-warfare campaign against business and investment has created a wall of worry and a refusal to invest in the future. The incentive model of growth, where it must pay more after tax and regulatory costs to work, produce, and invest, has been discarded by Obama’s extreme left-liberal Keynesianism. Predictably, higher costs — including the cost of Obamacare, probably the single-greatest barrier to growth and jobs — have forced the most productive factors in the economy to hole up and virtually shut down.

But the whole Tea Party movement of free-market populism represents an attempt to re-oxygenate the economy by unclogging the blood vessels of entrepreneurship with a major rollback of spending, taxing, and regulating. This Tea Party philosophy is derided daily by the Democrats, but it represents a bull’s-eye in terms of creating future economic growth.

Fortunately, the Republican party has returned to this Reaganesque message. This is the single most-important theme in the GOP comeback.

Call Me Madam Joe from RightChange on Vimeo.

Four Causes that Will Lead to a Democratic Election Nightmare
by Fred Barnes

The four causes of what’s likely to be a landslide defeat for Democrats in the midterm election are now locked in place. All that’s left for Democrats in the final three weeks of the campaign is to trash Republicans, stir their base to vote, and pray.

The last cause of the Democratic downslide to be cooked in the election cake was the economy. The Labor Department last week reported the jobs picture for September: 95,000 jobs lost and the unemployment rate mired at 9.6 percent.

These gloomy numbers are important because there won’t be another jobs report until after November 2. So any hope by Democrats for a dramatic uptick in employment – or even a small increase – before Election Day is gone. They’re stuck with the ultimate albatross in politics – a bad economy.

Two of the other causes – liberal overreach and disappointment with President Obama – began to surface last year. By early 2010, they had become overriding issues in the campaign. Now they’re such a drag that Democratic candidates would rather not talk about them.

Liberal overreach is an old problem for Democrats when they take control of both the White House and Capitol Hill, as they did in 2008. Their no-holds-barred pursuit of a liberal agenda tends to turn off the electorate, a majority of whom fit into the center-right category. A midterm backlash occurred in 1966 and 1994, and to a lesser extent in 1978.

This year, the $862 billion stimulus, the cap-and-trade climate bill (passed by the House), health care, a thicket of new regulations, and unchecked spending constitute the overreach. The trillion dollar deficits and a projected tripling of the national debt have made matters still worse for Democrats.

And the bursting of the Obama balloon has created a critical mass of voters who swooned over Obama when he was a candidate but have been deeply disappointed by his performance as president. Many are independents who have flipped and become likely Republican voters this year.

Obama’s promise to end polarization in Washington, pursue bipartisanship, and change the way business is done in the nation’s capital had appealed to these voters. His failure to deliver on any of the three has added fuel to their migration to Republicans.

The fourth cause is one Democrats couldn’t do anything about – or not much anyway. That’s the historical tendency of the party that doesn’t hold the White House to gain in the first midterm election after a new president is inaugurated. There have only been two exceptions, 1934 and 2002.

At one point, Democrats thought they might escape the midterm curse or at least mitigate its impact. When the economic recovery proved to be painfully weak and both Obama and his policies lost favor, that dream died. What’s ahead now for Democrats is a nightmare.

Obama’s Tiresome Tolerance Lectures
by David Limbaugh

Why did President Obama choose tolerance as the subject of his speech at the Pentagon ostensibly to commemorate the victims of 9/11? Why is it that he insists on making this the overarching point at such events rather than, say, express our deep regret for the lost lives of the murdered Americans and repeat our national resolve to “bring to justice” those behind the massacre?

Then again, we are talking about President Obama here, the man who also believes the primary lesson we should learn from the Islamists’ beheading of journalist Daniel Pearl is that the freedom of press is alive and well. Speechless here.

Obama’s the guy who, instead of somberly lamenting the killing of 12 soldiers and a security guard by U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan at Fort Hood, began his remarks with a detached “shout-out” to Dr. Joe Medicine Crow, leaving the world to wonder just how warm the blood flowing through his veins is.

But it’s not Obama’s curiously bloodless behavior and strange disconnectedness (as British journalist Toby Harnden put it) that most concerns me about his Pentagon speech and the others. It’s his reflexive instinct to lecture Americans, when they’re not the ones who need lecturing.

His first reaction, for example, when Americans protested the building of the ostentatious mosque at ground zero was to assume Americans were being intolerant and bigoted. He came out strongly in favor of the mosque and the importance of religious tolerance. He later pretended he was talking about the Muslims’ and Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s First Amendment rights, but no one was suggesting they didn’t have the right to build.

You will note that when Pastor Terry Jones threatened to burn the Quran, Obama didn’t come out stumping for his First Amendment rights, not that I think he should have done so here, either, but it certainly reveals a double standard in his thinking.

He and Defense Secretary Robert Gates thought they had to personally contact Jones to dissuade him from engaging in his gratuitously provocative act, but they didn’t similarly feel the need to contact Rauf to dissuade him of his grossly insensitive act.

You would think that if Obama wanted to lecture someone on the need for tolerance, it would be the imam, who can’t possibly believe that his plan to build a mosque on the very sacred grounds of 9/11 is a bridge-building overture — as opposed to the obviously in-your-face statement that it is. But Obama remains silent.

Why does he constantly have to remind the Muslim world that we are not at war with Islam, but only al-Qaida, when we have never indicated otherwise?

If he truly wants to make a point about tolerance, especially religious tolerance, don’t you think he owes us a better handle on reality? Is it not the United States that permits virtually unfettered religious liberty for Muslims, as well as all other religious people — except for the persistent discrimination against Christians? Is America not the home of some 2,000 mosques? Has Obama even considered pointing his finger at the Muslim world, asking them why they are so uniformly intolerant in their countries? Why they don’t permit churches? Why they don’t permit Muslims to convert to Christianity? Why they commit so much violence against Christians and Jews?

America is the most tolerant society in the history of the world, so Obama’s constant apologies to the contrary while ignoring the truly intolerant societies are increasingly offensive.

Besides, contrary to what Obama and many of his fellow liberals believe, so-called tolerance is not the highest virtue, especially when it gets in the way of truth and national security. The fact that his administration willfully ignored the radical, jihadist behavior of Fort Hood shooter Hasan might well have enabled his murders. The administration’s willful cover-up of his jihadist motivations after the fact may well enable future jihadists.

While leftists are congratulating themselves on their moral superiority in mouthing tolerance, more people’s lives are at risk as a result of their refusal to consider radical Islam a motive in many murderous attacks, which is hardly the same thing as categorically indicting the entire Muslim religion — as Obama implies.

Surely it should be obvious to Obama and his ilk by now that Islamists don’t attack us because of our alleged “intolerance.” They don’t even respect tolerance. They don’t aspire to it. They reject it. And they reject us — and will continue to, regardless of how nice and “tolerant” we are.

It’s the Economy, Dems
by Donald Lambro

The economy is tanking. Economists say it has slowed to a near comatose 1.5 percent growth rate, unemployment claims were at a nine-month high and jobs are scarce, yet President Obama is focusing on corporate campaign donations.

While the economy is the clear overriding issue in the midterm elections, threatening to topple Democrats from power in Congress, Obama was devoting his weekly radio address last Saturday to an issue far from the real concerns of workers, families and employers struggling to survive.

If anyone is looking for signs Obama is completely disconnected from the failing economy, his radio address blaming Republicans for blocking his legislation to place restrictions on corporate campaign donations delivered that in spades.

With polls showing Obama’s job approval rating slipping to 43 percent last week because of the economy, Democratic strategists grumble privately that the White House has a “tin ear.” Republicans said Obama’s focus on campaign politics instead of policies to get the economy growing again showed how much he wanted to change the subject in this year’s elections.

“Americans want us to focus on jobs, but by focusing on an election bill, Democrats are sending a clear message to the American people that their jobs aren’t as important as the jobs of embattled Democrat politicians,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in response to Obama’s remarks.

But the Obama administration remained in deep denial about the declining health of the U.S. economy, insisting that it was “moving in the right direction,” dubbing it the “Recovery Summer” and declaring that economic growth was “growing at a good clip.”

A few weeks ago, Vice President Joe Biden predicted the creation of between 250,000 to 500,000 jobs was just around the corner.

But as the summer draws to a close, and with the elections a little more than two months away, those jobs are nowhere to be seen. If anything, the economy’s health was worsening, and this administration didn’t seem to have a viable plan to pull the country out of its economic decline.

Among recent developments:

– Last week the government reported that more American workers had filed for jobless benefits than at anytime since last November. Unemployment-benefit claims rose by 12,000 to 500,000 for the third straight weekly increase — the first time claims had hit the half-million mark in nine months.

– While the official unemployment rate stood at 9.5 percent in July, the real jobless rate is much higher than that. Factor in the 1.2 million unemployed who have given up looking for work and have dropped out of the labor force, plus those who want full-time work but can only find part-time jobs, and the national unemployment rate is 16.5 percent.

– The housing industry has sunk into a deeper slump, with nearly half of homeowners who enrolled in Obama’s mortgage relief plan dropping out — raising fears that foreclosures may increase in the second half of the year.

– Other troubling signs point to growing economic desperation in the workforce. Longterm unemployed Americans are forced to apply earlier than they planned for Social Security benefits in an attempt to make ends meet. And a record number of workers are withdrawing funds from their 401(k) retirement accounts to pay their household bills and put food on the table.

Meantime, the Obama administration is planning to slam the U.S. economy with the largest tax increase in American history by letting President Bush’s 2001 and 2003 top income tax rate cuts expire at the end of this year.

Beleagured businesses, both large and small, have been saying all year that this will deeply hurt the economy, risk-taking investors and job creation, but the White House and Democratic leaders are stubbornly determined to go ahead with their big-spending tax-hike plan.

It isn’t just the business community saying higher taxes will weaken the economy: the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office is saing it, too.

A CBO analysis released last week said permanently extending the Bush tax cuts would give the country a “considerable” economic boost over the next few years.

“Under that… scenario, economic growth would be stronger next year; unemployment would be lower next year,” said CBO director Douglas Elmendorf, who was appointed to his post by Democratic leaders in Congress.

Moreover, “under current law, both the waning of (Obama’s) fiscal stimulus and the scheduled increases in taxes will temporarily subtract from growth, especially in 2011,” CBO added.

Notably, a growing number of Democratic candidates are also urging Obama and their party to keep the lower tax rates in place, saying it would be the height of economic folly to raise income taxes on the people who create jobs at a time when the economy is in a steep decline.

Some of the don’t-raise-taxes Democrats are Senate candidates in critical battleground contests, including Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan, Rep. Brad Ellsworth of Indiana and Rep. Charlie Melancon of Louisiana.

When Ronald Reagan cut tax rates across the board in the 1981-82 recession, the economy surged into a spectacular recovery, with quarterly rate increases of between 4 percent and 9.3 percent over the next several years.

There’s a message there somewhere for the stubborn Obama Democrats to consider.

Dismantling America
by Thomas Sowell

“We the people” are the familiar opening words of the Constitution of the United States– the framework for a self-governing people, free from the arbitrary edicts of rulers. It was the blueprint for America, and the success of America made that blueprint something that other nations sought to follow.

At the time when it was written, however, the Constitution was a radical departure from the autocratic governments of the 18th century. Since it was something so new and different, the reasons for the Constitution’s provisions were spelled out in “The Federalist,” a book written by three of the writers of the Constitution, as a sort of instruction guide to a new product.

The Constitution was not only a challenge to the despotic governments of its time, it has been a continuing challenge– to this day– to all those who think that ordinary people should be ruled by their betters, whether an elite of blood, or of books or of whatever else gives people a puffed-up sense of importance.

While the kings of old have faded into the mists of history, the principle of the divine rights of kings to impose whatever they wish on the masses lives on today in the rampaging presumptions of those who consider themselves anointed to impose their notions on others.

The Constitution of the United States is the biggest single obstacle to the carrying out of such rampaging presumptions, so it is not surprising that those with such presumptions have led the way in denigrating, undermining and evading the Constitution.

While various political leaders have, over the centuries, done things that violated either the spirit or the letter of the Constitution, few dared to openly say that the Constitution was wrong and that what they wanted was right.

It was the Progressives of a hundred years ago who began saying that the Constitution needed to be subordinated to whatever they chose to call “the needs of the times.” Nor were they content to say that the Constitution needed more Amendments, for that would have meant that the much disdained masses would have something to say about whether, or what kind, of Amendments were needed.

The agenda then, as now, has been for our betters to decide among themselves which Constitutional safeguards against arbitrary government power should be disregarded, in the name of meeting “the needs of the times”– as they choose to define those needs.

The first open attack on the Constitution by a President of the United States was made by our only president with a Ph.D., Woodrow Wilson. Virtually all the arguments as to why judges should not take the Constitution as meaning what its words plainly say, but “interpret” it to mean whatever it ought to mean, in order to meet “the needs of the times,” were made by Woodrow Wilson.

It is no coincidence that those who imagine themselves so much wiser and nobler than the rest of us should be in the forefront of those who seek to erode Constitutional restrictions on the arbitrary powers of government. How can our betters impose their superior wisdom and virtue on us, when the Constitution gets in the way at every turn, with all its provisions to safeguard a system based on a self-governing people?

To get their way, the elites must erode or dismantle the Constitution, bit by bit, in one way or another. What that means is that they must dismantle America. This has been going on piecemeal over the years but now we have an administration in Washington that circumvents the Constitution wholesale, with its laws passed so fast that the public cannot know what is in them, its appointment of “czars” wielding greater power than Cabinet members, without having to be exposed to pubic scrutiny by going through the confirmation process prescribed by the Constitution for Cabinet members.

Now there is leaked news of plans to change the immigration laws by administrative fiat, rather than Congressional legislation, presumably because Congress might be unduly influenced by those pesky voters– with their Constitutional rights– who have shown clearly that they do not want amnesty and open borders, despite however much our betters do. If the Obama administration gets away with this, and can add a few million illegals to the voting rolls in time for the 2012 elections, that can mean reelection, and with it a continuing and accelerating dismantling of America.

(Even a Few) Words Matter
by Victor Davis Hanson

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was ecstatic after the Munich Conference of 1938. He bragged that he had coaxed Adolf Hitler into stopping further aggression after the Nazis gobbled up much of Czechoslovakia.

Arriving home, Chamberlain proudly displayed Hitler’s signature on the Munich Agreement, exclaiming to adoring crowds, “I believe it is peace for our time. … And now I recommend you to go home and sleep quietly in your beds.”

But after listening to Chamberlain’s nice nonsense, Hitler remarked to his generals about a week later, “Our enemies are little worms, I saw them at Munich.” War followed in about a year.

Sometimes deterrence against aggression is lost with just a few unfortunate words or a relatively minor gesture.

Secretary of State Dean Acheson gave a comprehensive address to the National Press Club in early 1950. Either intentionally or by accident, he mentioned that South Korea was beyond the American defense perimeter. Communist North Korea, and later China, agreed. War broke out six months later.

Well before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, and sent aid to communist rebels in Central America, President Jimmy Carter announced that America had lost its “inordinate fear of communism.”

In 1981, Britain, as a goodwill gesture in the growing Falkland Islands dispute, promised to withdraw a tiny warship from the islands. But to the Argentine dictatorship, that reset-button diplomacy was seen as appeasement. It convinced them that the United Kingdom was no longer the nation of Admiral Nelson, the Duke of Wellington and Winston Churchill. So Argentina invaded the Falklands.

Why, after a horrendous war with Iran, would Saddam Hussein have risked another one with Kuwait? Perhaps because he believed that the United States would not stop him. That was a logical inference when American ambassador April Glaspie told him, “We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait … the Kuwait issue is not associated with America.”

Saddam invaded a little over a week later.

These examples could be expanded and serve as warnings. In the last 18 months, the Obama administration has made a number of seemingly insignificant remarks and gestures — many well-intended and reasoned — that might be interpreted as a new U.S. indifference to aggression.

Consider the number of apologies Obama has issued to various states that suggest we, not others, are the problem.

To Turkey, Obama said we had often been at fault, and added remorse for slavery and our treatment of Native Americans.

To Russia, he emphasized a need for an American diplomatic reset button.

To the Japanese, he touched on the brutal way America ended World War II.

To the world at large, Obama apologized for Guantanamo Bay, the war on terror, and some activities of the CIA.

To Latin America, he rued our past insensitive diplomacy.

To the G-20, he lamented America’s prior rude behavior.

To the Muslim world, he confessed to wrong policies and past mistakes.

To Europe, he apologized for our occasionally strained relations.

To the United Nations, he said he felt bad about America’s unilateral behavior.

In addition, Obama has bowed to Saudi autocrats and Chinese dictators. In morally equivalent fashion, an Obama subordinate brought up to human-rights violator China the new Arizona immigration law. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggested that we would be neutral in a new and growing Falklands Island dispute. And America has put Israel on notice that the old close relationship is changing.

Turkey is growing increasingly anti-American. A newly aggressive Russia is beaming that we have caved on a number of contentious issues.

The Japanese are distancing themselves from America. British, French and German leaders are increasingly wary of the United States. The Mexican president criticizes Arizona from the White House lawn.

War is now more, not less, likely in the Middle East. In Latin America, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela are as hostile to the U.S. as ever. Brazil is now seeking to assert new authority contrary to U.S. policies.

The lesson?

Even little words and gestures still matter in high-stakes international relations. Bad actors look hard for even the smallest sign that they might get away with aggression without consequences.

A deferential and apologetic President Obama may think he is making those abroad like us –and he may be right in some cases. But if history is any guide, aggressive powers are paying close attention to these seemingly insignificant signs Soon, they may turn their wild ideas into concrete aggression — once they convince themselves that America neither wants to nor is able to stop them.

The Left Loses Its Way by Abandoning ‘Third Way’
by Michael Barone

Left parties are in trouble in the Anglosphere. Here in America, Democrats are doing worse in the polls than at any time in the last 50 years. In Britain, the Labor Party is on the brink of finishing third, behind both Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, in the election next Thursday.

All of which raises the question: What happened to the “third way” center-left movement that once seemed to sweep all before it?

Only a dozen years ago, in 1998, President Bill Clinton enjoyed 70 percent job approval. Prime Minister Tony Blair was basking in adulation in his first full year in office.

Clinton “third way” New Democrats and Blair’s “New Labor” party seemed to have a bright and long future ahead. Clinton’s designated successor, Al Gore, despite some ham-handed campaigning, came out ahead in the popular vote in 2000 and lost the presidency by only some hundreds of votes in Florida. With Blair at its head, Labor won unprecedented re-election victories in 2001 and 2005.

Now, less than a generation later, both New Democrats and New Labour seem defunct.

Both parties have moved well to the left. Barack Obama and Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown, head governments that are running budget deficits of 10 percent of gross domestic product. Both are promoting higher taxes and expansion of government programs.

The financial crisis is one reason for the large deficits. But it is undeniable that to varying extents both Obama and Brown have pursued more statist policies than their predecessors did a dozen years ago.

And it is undeniable, too, that both are in trouble with the voters.

In these circumstances, it is surprising that the pundit class is not chiding Obama and Brown for abandoning the politically successful policies of Clinton and Blair. The same pundit class is always ready to chide American Republicans and British Conservatives for not pursuing the courses that Rockefeller Republicans and pre-Thatcher “wet” Conservatives pursued with some political success a much longer time ago.

Rocky and the wets supported a continuing expansion of government and maintaining the power of labor unions. But a British party last won an election on that platform in 1974, 36 years ago, and no American president has been elected on such a platform between 1964 and 2008. And with Democrats plunging in the polls, Obama’s election is beginning to look like an exception that proves the rule.

Americans may have voted for “hope and change,” but not in the form of the 2009 stimulus package and the 2010 health care bill.

Looking back in history, the Rockefeller Republicans chose their course because they believed their party could not beat New Deal Democrats except by moving some distance toward their philosophy. And in particular, they believed they could not beat Democrats in New York, which in the first half of the 20th century was both the nation’s largest state and one of the politically most marginal.

But by the early 1960s, New York was no longer the nation’s largest state and was safely Democratic. And by the early 1970s, Americans were no longer voting for big government. The Rockefeller strategy was rendered obsolete.

It’s not clear that the Clinton New Democratic strategy is similarly obsolete. Clinton calculated that Democrats could not win except by making inroads in the South and by making big gains in the suburbs. That’s how he won twice, and Obama improved on his leads in the suburbs and carried three Southern states with Northern-accented suburbs (Virginia, North Carolina and Florida).

But Obama ran well behind in eight Southern-accented and Mountain states that Clinton carried in 1992. And polling now shows Democrats weaker than Obama was in 2008 virtually everywhere except in university towns and the affluent precincts of metro New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Similarly, in Britain polling has shown Brown’s Labor party holding its traditional redoubts in declining industrial towns but getting shellacked in the affluent suburbs where Tony Blair’s New Labor thrived.

The left parties have reacted to their unpopularity by playing the race card. Democrats have tried to portray tea partiers as racist, and Brown called a lifelong Labor voter who questioned his policies a “bigoted woman.”

Blaming the voters is the last resort of a party in trouble. Old Labor and the Obama Democrats may not yet be finished. But they’re not doing as well as their “third way” predecessors.

Defining the conservative versus liberal divide
by Star Parker

Now that President Obama is getting ready to make his second Supreme Court nomination, the usual banter is taking place about the court and judicial philosophy.

The Supreme Court, of course, profoundly influences the character of our country.

Although, for instance, many look back on the policies of Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal programs as the beginning of the real growth of the American welfare state, it is really key Supreme Court decisions during that time that enabled all of this. Court decisions changing the interpretation of “general welfare”, interstate commerce, and the authority of the federal government to tax changed the game and opened a new era of big government.

At the beginning of the 1930’s, the federal government’s take of national GDP was a little over ten percent. By the mid-1940’s it was over twenty percent, and the trend has been only upward since.

Although much of the discussion about judicial philosophy contrasts how conservative and liberal judges relate to the constitution, I think the real key to conservative and liberal divergence is the world view these judges already have when they sit down to interpret the constitution.

The statement of vision defining American values appears in the Declaration of Independence. Understanding that vision is where I think the most fundamental conservative versus liberal divide exists.

Consider how President Obama relates to the Constitution, as he wrote in his book The Audacity of Hope – “Implicit in its structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth….”

Our president is a moral relativist. So we may expect that he doesn’t take very seriously the idea, as state in the Declaration of Independence, that there are absolutes. That we have God given rights that precede government and that the job of government is to secure them.

Rather than seeing government’s job as securing our rights, the liberal sees it to invent them. The politician – or the empathetic judge – defines what is moral and just.

There’s a lot of speculation about what is driving the tea party movement and why, as reflected in the latest survey by the Pew Research Foundation, Americans’ trust in government is at an all time low.

I think most fundamentally it’s discomfort with this moral relativism that is driving the pervasive unrest.

The whole unique idea of American government – the idea of human liberty – was that there are absolute truths and that individual citizens can and must be protected from arbitrary rulers – whether it is a king or a political class with arbitrary powers.

President Obama said the other day regarding the kind of court nominee he will seek, “…I want somebody who is going to be interpreting our Constitution in a way that takes into account individual rights…”

What in the world can this possibly mean from our president who has just signed into law a health care bill which will force every single American citizen to buy a government defined health care insurance policy? A health care bill that opens the door to unprecedented government control over how private individuals manage their health care and the most private decisions they make over their own lives.

Or what can it possibly mean coming from our president who opposed the Supreme Court’s decision a few years ago banning partial birth abortion – which is pure and simple torture and murder of a live infant?

The real differences over liberal and conservative judges is most fundamentally about the world in which Americans will live. Whether we live and will live in a nation in which there are absolute truths or one in which we are at the hands of political arbitrariness in which our lives and property are up for grabs.

Our country is being governed today by those with the latter view of the world and, fortunately, more and more Americans are deeply concerned.

The Limits of Power
by Thomas Sowell

When I first began to study the history of slavery around the world, many years ago, one of the oddities that puzzled me was the practice of paying certain slaves, which existed in ancient Rome and in America’s antebellum South, among other places.

In both places, slave owners or their overseers whipped slaves to force them to work, and in neither place was whipping a slave literally to death likely to bring any serious consequences.

There could hardly be a greater power of one human being over another than the arbitrary power of life and death. Why then was it necessary to pay certain slaves? At the very least, it suggested that there were limits to what could be accomplished by power.

Most slaves performing most tasks were of course not paid, but were simply forced to work by the threat of punishment. That was sufficient for galley slaves or plantation slaves. But there were various kinds of work where that was not sufficient.

Tasks involving judgment or talents were different because no one can know how much judgment or talent someone else has. In short, knowledge is an inherent constraint on power. Payment can bring forth the knowledge or talent by giving those who have it an incentive to reveal it and to develop it.

Payment can vary in amount and in kind. Some slaves, especially eunuchs in the days of the Ottoman Empire, could amass both wealth and power. One reason they could be trusted in positions of power was that they had no incentive to betray the existing rulers and try to establish their own dynasties, which would obviously have been physically impossible for them.

At more mundane levels, such tasks as diving operations in the Carolina swamps required a level of discretion and skill far in excess of that required to pick cotton in the South or cut sugar cane in the tropics. Slaves doing this kind of work had financial incentives and were treated far better. So were slaves working in Virginia’s tobacco factories.

The point of all this is that when even slaves had to be paid to get certain kinds of work done, this shows the limits of what can be accomplished by power alone. Yet so much of what is said and done by those who rely on the power of government to direct ever more sweeping areas of our life seem to have no sense of the limits of what can be accomplished that way.

Even the totalitarian governments of the 20th century eventually learned the hard way the limits of what could be accomplished by power alone. China still has a totalitarian government today but, after the death of Mao, the Chinese government began to loosen its controls on some parts of the economy, in order to reap the economic benefits of freer markets.

As those benefits became clear in higher rates of economic growth and rising standards of living, more government controls were loosened. But, just as market principles were applied to only certain kinds of slavery, so freedom in China has been allowed in economic activities to a far greater extent than in other realms of the country’s life, where tight control from the top down remains the norm.

Ironically, the United States is moving in the direction of the kind of economy that China has been forced to move away from. China once had complete government control of medical care, but eventually gave it up as the disaster that it was.

The current leadership in Washington operates as if they can just set arbitrary goals, whether “affordable housing” or “universal health care” or anything else — and not concern themselves with the repercussions — since they have the power to simply force individuals, businesses, doctors or anyone else to knuckle under and follow their dictates.

Friedrich Hayek called this mindset “the road to serfdom.” But, even under serfdom and slavery, experience forced those with power to recognize the limits of their power. What this administration — and especially the President — does not have is experience.

Barack Obama had no experience running even the most modest business, and personally paying the consequences of his mistakes, before becoming President of the United States. He can believe that his heady new power is the answer to all things.

Tea Partiers Fight Obama’s Culture of Dependence
by Michael Barone

“Do you realize,” CNN’s Susan Roesgen asked a man at the April 15, 2009, tea party in Chicago, “that you’re eligible for a $400 credit?” When the man refused to drop his “drop socialism” sign, she went on, “Did you know that the state of Lincoln gets 50 billion out of the stimulus?”

Roesgen is no longer with CNN, and CNN has only about half as many viewers as it did last year. But her questions are revealing. They help us understand that the issue on which our politics has become centered — the Obama Democrats’ vast expansion of the size and scope of government — is really not just about economics. It is really a battle about culture, a battle between the culture of dependence and the culture of independence.

Probably unknowingly, Roesgen was reflecting the mid-century sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld’s dictum that politics is about who gets how much when. If some guy is getting $400, shouldn’t he just shut up and collect the money? Shouldn’t he be happy that his state government, headed recently by Rod Blagojevich, was getting an extra $50 billion?

But public policy also helps determine the kind of society we are. The Obama Democrats see a society in which ordinary people cannot fend for themselves, where they need to have their incomes supplemented, their health care insurance regulated and guaranteed, their relationships with their employers governed by union leaders. Highly educated mandarins can make better decisions for them than they can make themselves. That is the culture of dependence.

The tea partiers see things differently. They’re not looking for lower taxes — half of tea party supporters, a New York Times survey found, think their taxes are fair. Nor are they financially secure — half say someone in their household may lose their job in the next year. Two-thirds say the recession has caused some hardship in their lives.

But they recognize, correctly, that the Obama Democrats are trying to permanently enlarge government and increase citizens’ dependence on it. And, invoking the language of the Founding Fathers, they believe that this will destroy the culture of independence which has enabled Americans over the past two centuries to make this the most productive and prosperous — and the most charitably generous — nation in the world.

Seeing our political divisions as a battle between the culture of dependence and the culture of independence helps to make sense of the divisions seen in the 2008 election. Barack Obama carried voters with incomes under $50,000 and those with incomes over $200,000, and lost those with incomes in between. He won large margins from those who never graduated from high school and from those with graduate school degrees, and barely exceeded 50 percent among those in between.

The top-and-bottom Obama coalition was in effect a coalition of those dependent on government transfers and benefits and those in what David Brooks calls “the educated class,” who administer or believe that their kind of people administer those transactions. They are the natural constituency for the culture of dependence.

Interestingly, in the Massachusetts special Senate election, the purported beneficiaries of the culture of dependence — low-income and low-education voters — did not turn out in large numbers. In contrast, the administrators of that culture — affluent secular professionals, public employees, university personnel — were the one group that turned out in force and voted for the hapless Democratic candidate.

The in-between people on the income and education ladders, it turns out, are a constituency for the culture of independence. Smart conservatives like David Frum, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam argued in 2009 books that modest-income conservative voters have had stagnant incomes over the last decade and that Republicans should offer them compensatory tax breaks.

That seemed to make sense in the wake of the 2008 election. But it’s been undercut by developments since. As Susan Roesgen discovered, tea party supporters are not in the mood to be bought off with $400 tax credits. They have a longer time horizon and can see where the Obama Democrats are trying to take us.

Paul Lazarsfeld saw politics as just a matter of dollars and cents. The tea party movement reminds us of what the Founders taught — that it has a moral dimension, as well. They risked all in the cause of the culture of independence. The polling evidence suggests that most Americans don’t want to leave that behind.

Artificial Stupidity
by Thomas Sowell

A woman with a petition went among the crowds attending a state fair, asking people to sign her petition demanding the banning of dihydroxymonoxide. She said it was in our lakes and streams, and now it was in our sweat and urine and tears.

She collected hundreds of signatures to ban dihydroxymonoxide — a fancy chemical name for water. A couple of comedians were behind this ploy. But there is nothing funny about its implications. It is one of the grim and dangerous signs of our times.

This little episode revealed how conditioned we have become, responding like Pavlov’s dog when we hear a certain sound– in this case, the sound of some politically correct crusade.

People are all born ignorant but they are not born stupid. Much of the stupidity we see today is induced by our educational system, from the elementary schools to the universities. In a high-tech age that has seen the creation of artificial intelligence by computers, we are also seeing the creation of artificial stupidity by people who call themselves educators.

Educational institutions created to pass on to the next generation the knowledge, experience and culture of the generations that went before them have instead been turned into indoctrination centers to promote whatever notions, fashions or ideologies happen to be in vogue among today’s intelligentsia.

Many conservatives have protested against the specifics of the things with which students are being indoctrinated. But that is not where the most lasting harm is done. Many, if not most, of the leading conservatives of our times were on the left in their youth. These have included Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan and the whole neoconservative movement.

The experiences of life can help people outgrow whatever they were indoctrinated with. What may persist, however, is the lazy habit of hearing one side of an issue and being galvanized into action without hearing the other side– and, more fundamentally, not having developed any mental skills that would enable you to systematically test one set of beliefs against another.

It was once the proud declaration of many educators that “We are here to teach you how to think, not what to think.” But far too many of our teachers and professors today are teaching their students what to think, about everything from global warming to the new trinity of “race, class and gender.”

Even if all the conclusions with which they indoctrinate their students were 100 percent correct, that would still not be equipping students with the mental skills to weigh opposing views for themselves, in order to be prepared for new and unforeseeable issues that will arise over their lifetimes, after they leave the schools and colleges.

Many of today’s “educators” not only supply students with conclusions, they promote the idea that students should spring into action because of these prepackaged conclusions– in other words, vent their feelings and go galloping off on crusades, without either a knowledge of what is said by those on the other side or the intellectual discipline to know how to analyze opposing arguments.

When we see children in elementary schools out carrying signs in demonstrations, we are seeing the kind of mindless groupthink that causes adults to sign petitions they don’t understand or– worse yet– follow leaders they don’t understand, whether to the White House, the Kremlin or Jonestown.

A philosopher once said that the most important knowledge is knowledge of one’s own ignorance. That is the knowledge that too many of our schools and colleges are failing to teach our young people.

It takes a certain amount of knowledge just to understand the extent of one’s own ignorance. But our “educators” have given assignments to children who are not yet a decade old to write letters to members of Congress, or to Presidents, spouting off on issues ranging from nuclear weapons to medical care.

Will Rogers once said that it was not ignorance that was so bad but “all the things we know that ain’t so.” But our classroom indoctrinators are getting students to think that they know after hearing only one side of an issue. It is artificial stupidity.

Nanny State Gone Wild: Defining Dependency Up
by Michelle Malkin

The greatest gifts you can give your children can’t be boxed and bowed. Consider the timeless gift of self-sufficiency — a stubborn thirst to leave the nest, make it on your own and live as a free-willed adult. It’s a concept that Big Nanny Democrats are sabotaging at every legislative turn.

Several times during the sneaky debate on the government health care takeover bill this past Sunday, Democrats hailed a provision requiring insurance plans that cover dependents to provide benefits to children up to age 26. Democratic Sens. Ben Cardin and Tom Harkin both specifically championed the unfunded mandate in their floor statements.

This manifestation of the Nanny State is especially galling given the massive levels of generational theft the Democratic majority has presided over this past year. If they truly cared about the physical and financial well-being of young Americans, they’d stop piling on expensive regulations that simply put affordable health insurance out of their reach.

I propose a new symbol for the Democrats. Out: donkey. In: a giant adult pacifier.

I can tell you what most fiscally responsible parents are thinking when they hear the feds “taking care” of everyone else’s adult “children” by confiscating their tax dollars and forcing private companies to comply: You’ve got to be kidding me. Yes, Virginia, there are still some of us left who believe our children shouldn’t depend on a government-manufactured umbilical cord as they approach their third decade on earth.

Nonetheless, there are now an estimated 20 states that have already passed legislation requiring insurers to cover adult children. The slacker mandates cover “kids” ranging in age from 24 to 31. And it’s these government health care mandates that are driving up the cost of insurance.

Health policy researcher Nathan Benefield of the Commonwealth Foundation reported that in New Jersey, Nanny State peddlers claimed the adult kiddie protection law would help 100,000 uninsured young adults. “Yet in two years, only 6 percent of that estimate has been realized. The primary reason — health insurance is still too expensive.”

Wisconsin has experienced similar results. “Whenever you insure somebody whom you didn’t insure before there’s some additional risk,” insurance expert James Mueller told the Milwaukee Sentinel Journal. Mueller points to the premium increases that have followed coverage mandates on employer-sponsored plans. “The problem with all these good ideas is there’s funding necessary,” Mueller said. In Wisconsin, not only are adult children covered, but also the children of those “children” if they live in single-parent homes.

As he rammed through this mandate and the mountain of other government regulations buried in Demcare, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid promised on Sunday: “We are reshaping the nation. That’s what we want to do.”

Indeed, this defining dependency up phenomenon is part of the larger push for single-payer-by-proxy. The other universal health care Trojan horse signed into law this year — the expansion of SCHIP (the State Children’s Health Insurance Program) — welcomed more non-”children” into the government insurance fold.

Both political parties have advocated federal waivers to use SCHIP funds for adults, including parents of Medicaid/SCHIP children, caretaker relatives, legal guardians and childless adults. According to the General Accounting Office, SCHIP-funded expenditures on adults nationwide “totaled about $674 million in 2006.” J.P. Wieske of the Council for Affordable Health Insurance notes that the bennies provide an incentive for parents to drop their private coverage in order to take advantage of free or discounted health insurance for their children. “It has become a program for the middle class at the expense of the poor.”

This is the engine that will power the Demcare architects’ most naked, radical ambitions: “Health care as an inalienable right,” as Sen. Harkin put it. How? By breeding a massive permanent culture of dependency and bottomless debt in the name of the “children” from birth through quarter-life — and beyond.

Unlike Obama, Americans Reject European Model
by Michael Barone

An interesting paradox. Last year, America elected a president who, in attitudes and policies, is closer to the elites of Western Europe than any of his predecessors. Yet in the nine months that he has been in office, ordinary Americans have been moving away from those attitudes and policies and have increasingly embraced positions that over the years have made Americans distinctive from those in other advanced Western democracies.

Barack Obama’s European tendencies aren’t not in doubt. His policies on government spending, taxation, health care and carbon emissions would all tend to bring America in line with European norms, to a far greater degree than any other president of the last 40 years and probably any president ever.

And what of America’s special place in the world? “I believe in American exceptionalism,” Obama said on one of his trips to Europe, “just as I suspect that Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” In other words, not at all. One cannot imagine Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Eisenhower or Reagan uttering such sentiments.

Obama told European Union parliamentarians in Strasbourg that he hailed “your dynamic union,” but most Americans seem to have some vestigial knowledge that over the last 60 years, America has been more dynamic — economically, culturally, politically, militarily — than our friends across the Atlantic. And when presented with public policies that would make us more like Europe, Americans have tended to recoil.

Examples abound. Despite the recession, by about 50 to 40 percent Americans continue to prefer smaller government with fewer services to larger government with more services (June ABC/Washington Post and CBS/New York Times polls). Some 80 percent want the government to sell its interest in General Motors (July Rasmussen poll).

A 58 to 35 percent majority say keep the budget deficit down even if it takes longer for the economy to recover (NBC/WSJ June). A 53 to 33 percent majority oppose more government regulation of the finance sector (Rasmussen October).

As Europeanizing policies receive more attention, they become less popular. June’s 50 to 45 percent approval of Democratic health care proposals morphs to a similar margin of disapproval in October (Rasmussen). And satisfaction with one’s own health care arrangements rises from 29 percent in 2008 and 35 percent in May 2009 to 48 percent in August (Rasmussen again).

European elites support gun control and curbs on carbon emissions almost unanimously. Americans don’t — and are moving in the other direction. Support for a handgun ban has fallen from 60 percent in 1960 and 43 percent in the early 1990s to 29 percent in May 2009 (Gallup). By a 48 to 34 percent margin, Americans believe global warming is caused by long-term planetary trends rather than human activity (Rasmussen April); in 2008 it was almost exactly the other way around.

European leaders agree with Obama’s decision to close the Guantanamo detention facility. Americans disagree by a 52 to 39 percent margin (NBC/WSJ June). Europeans accept a large role for unions. American approval for labor unions fell from 59 percent in 2008 to 48 percent in spring 2009, by far the lowest figure since Gallup began asking the question in 1936.

Gallup reports that 39 percent of Americans this year say their views have grown more conservative, while only 18 percent say they have become more liberal. No wonder Democratic pollster Peter Hart, who with Republican Bill McInturff conducts the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, said in June that Obama and the Democrats “are going to have to navigate in pretty choppy waters.”

The late political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset, who wrote a book on American exceptionalism, long noted that Americans are more individualistic and less collectivist than Western Europeans (or Canadians). The election of a president who in many ways seeks to push America in a European direction seems to have increased rather than decreased those differences.

Why? My explanation is that until November 2008, Americans did not have any reason to contemplate what a more European approach would mean in real-life terms. Now, with Obama in the White House and a heavily Democratic Congress, they do. And they mostly don’t like it.

Hence the embarrassment of liberal commentators and, it seems, the president himself when five Norwegian parliamentarians tendered him the Nobel Peace Prize. European elites are delighted with Obama’s European approach. Most American voters aren’t.

Obama’s Propaganda Campaign to Mainstream Extreme Liberalism
by David Limbaugh

A fellow conservative I highly respect told me last week that he doesn’t see how Republicans can ever regain the majority without reaching out to moderates, because, he said, only 30 percent of Americans are conservative. Let me try to clear up this growing misconception.

The issue is quite timely, considering that GOP-defecting Sen. Arlen Specter is rationalizing his self-serving move as necessitated by an increasingly intransigent conservatism in the Republican Party. He echoes the David Frum Republicans that the party is too conservative, backward-looking, stale and out of fresh ideas.

It’s true that a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll shows that only 21 percent of Americans now identify themselves as Republicans, compared with 35 percent as Democrats and 38 percent as independents. But there’s a huge difference between party identification and ideological identification.

The bipartisan Battleground Poll, as recently as Aug. 20, 2008, revealed that 60 percent of Americans identify themselves as conservative and only 36 percent as liberal.

So it’s the Republican Party that’s in trouble, not conservatism. The GOP’s shrinkage can’t be because it’s too conservative. George W. Bush, our most recent Republican president, was hardly an extreme conservative. His most outspoken critics today include wide swaths of conservatives who decried his failure to rein in federal spending and control illegal immigration, among other things.

And the GOP’s 2008 presidential candidate, John McCain, was hardly a staunch conservative, either, lest he would never have been the liberal media’s favorite Republican. McCain didn’t lose because of any extreme conservatism. Nor did Obama win because he was honest about his liberalism, which he denied every time he was confronted about it.

Even though the nation is mostly conservative and “liberal” is still a dirty word, President Obama is moving us leftward at a breakneck pace by disguising his actions through smooth rhetoric and slick salesmanship. Obama is a consummate practitioner of presenting his extreme leftist agenda as moderate and mainstream.

Obama tells us he’s a disciple of capitalism while he gobbles up big chunks of the private sector and refuses to allow them out from under his government thumb when they try to refund their TARP money. He declares an end to earmarks as he signs a bill bloated with almost 9,000 of them. He boasts of his fiscal responsibility as he schemes to quadruple the deficit. He claims he’s making America safer as he shares with terrorists our classified interrogation techniques and plans to release terrorist detainees on American soil, against the advice of his national security advisers.

With his upcoming Supreme Court pick, Obama will surely select an uncompromising liberal activist but present him or her as an objective, non-activist jurist — as another step on his mission to mainstream extreme liberalism by masking it as centrism.

In his statements about his ideal justices, Obama, as always, has spoken out of both sides of his mouth as he has attempted to re-educate the public about the proper role of the high court.

On the one hand, he says he seeks a nominee “who shares (his) respect for constitutional values on which this nation was founded and who brings a thoughtful understanding of how to apply them in our time.” On the other, he says he wants a pragmatic justice with “empathy” — one who understands “how our laws affect the daily realities of people’s lives — whether they can make a living and care for their families, whether they feel safe in their homes and welcome in their own nation.”

But a justice who respects the Constitution would not be guided by pragmatism or empathy, which are irrelevant to the appellate judge’s primary interpretive function. He would honor the court’s role as interpreter of laws and would resist the temptation to become a part of an unelected super-legislature, understanding that to do otherwise would jeopardize our liberties.

From preserved audiotapes, we know Obama’s vision for the high court. For all to hear, he lamented that the universally-recognized-as-liberal Warren court was not radical after all, because it didn’t legislate what Obama calls economic justice: massive redistributions of wealth.

It’s outrageous enough when the political branches redistribute the nation’s wealth and the court lets them get away with it. But it would be taking it to an entirely new level if the court were to start doing it on its own — a prospect that probably gives Obama goose bumps.

Obama knows that the advancement of his extremist agenda depends on his sophisticated propaganda campaign to fraudulently package extremism as mainstream and marginalize mainstream conservatism as extreme.

He will only succeed “to fundamentally change” America if the conservative majority stays silent, credulous and compliant and some of its would-be leaders keep covering for him. The upcoming Supreme Court nomination would be a good place to break this silence.

The Anti-Success Presidency
by Dick Morris and Eileen McGann

Sit in on a corporate boardroom struggling to come to grips with the new economic climate Barack Obama has created. Do we expand? Create more jobs? Launch a new product line? Step up our marketing efforts? Ratchet up production?

But, wait a minute. The bigger our company gets, the closer we come to being “too big to fail,” a “systemic risk.” The nearer we are to intrusive government oversight, limits on executive pay and regulators breathing down our necks. We better watch out. We may even get taken over. Stay small. Forget the new jobs.

An investor ponders where to put his 401(k) retirement money. Should he invest in robust, growing companies? Firms with a bright future? But, be careful, they could get so big that they get taken over by the government and you lose your entire investment. Don’t invest in firms that will fail, but stay away from those that will succeed, too.

Meanwhile, at the kitchen table, a middle-class family discusses their career moves. Should she go back to school to pursue a better job at higher pay? Should he put in overtime? Move up in the company?

Hey, wait a minute. Our combined income is just under $200,000 a year. If we go any higher, our tax bracket goes up, we start having Social Security withheld on our new income, we lose our current deductions for our mortgage, state and local taxes, and charitable donations.

Forget the promotion. Forget the new job.

Downtown, investors in a hedge fund are meeting to consider participating in the bank bailout scheme by buying toxic assets from failing institutions. We could make a killing. The investments could pan out big time. It’s a risk, but the reward could be great.

But hold on a second. If we make tens of millions, hundreds of millions, while taxpayers are having to pay for failed banks, won’t we get hit with a 90 percent tax? Won’t we get to see our pictures on the front page with the president shaking an angry finger in our faces? Yes, now he wants us to invest, to help him rescue the banks, but once we do, won’t he be on our case like he was on AIG’s?

The Japanese have a saying that, thankfully, has no English equivalent: The highest nail gets hammered down first. Obama’s perverse view of fairness threatens to create reverse incentives, militating against growth, jobs, expansion and upward mobility.

For decades, astute observers of national welfare policy warned of the perversity of the incentives that kept the poor on welfare and discouraged them from taking jobs. Employment meant that their slightly higher income would be more than offset by the loss of other benefits like food stamps, day care, rent supplements and Medicaid. Work didn’t pay.

Now Obama is applying the same crazy policies to the upper end of the economic spectrum. Upward mobility is alive and well in the United States, at least until Obama took over. A study conducted in the late 1990s examined the economic fate of those consigned to the bottom 20 percent of incomes in 1980. The analysis concluded that more than four out of five had left the bottom quintile and one in five was now in the top 20 percent!

It is true that the top quintile is getting richer while the bottom is getting poorer, but the bottom is not the same people. There is, fortunately, a constant churning at the bottom as new immigrants move in and those who used to be on the bottom begin their long, thrilling upward climb to the American dream.

But Obama does not believe in individual upward mobility. He would penalize it, tax it, regulate it, inveigh against it and disincentivize it. We will be like salmon swimming upstream to mate. We will overcome the currents, the waterfall, the rocks and the predators, and will grapple our way up the stream. Then, at the top of the waterfall, will stand Obama the Bear, waiting to scoop us up and have us for dinner. The taxman cometh.