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.

Obama’s Teachable Truthiness Moment
By Michelle Malkin

President Obama blames Republicans for the collapse of his latest government jobs bill. But in the end, he has only his tall tale-telling tongue to blame.

After hyping the TARP, Obamacare, Stimulus I and EduJobs spending behemoths as economic saviors, Obama just couldn’t help overselling his half-trillion-dollar American Jobs Act. The teachable moment of “truthiness” for this taxpayer-subsidized scam came last week when Obama made an unwitting Boston teacher the botched poster child for his campaign.

“Hundreds of thousands of teachers and firefighters and police officers have been laid off because of state budget cuts. This jobs bill has funding to put a lot of those men and women back to work. It has funding to prevent a lot more from losing their job,” the Pinocchio of Pennsylvania Avenue told reporters during his East Room press conference in Washington, D.C., last Thursday.

For example, Obama spelled out: “I had a chance to meet a young man named Robert Baroz. He’s got two decades of teaching experience. He’s got a master’s degree. He’s got an outstanding track record of helping his students make huge gains in reading and writing. In the last few years, he’s received three pink slips because of budget cuts.”

Going in for the heartstring-tugging kill, Obama lamented: “Why wouldn’t we want to pass a bill that puts somebody like Robert back in the classroom teaching our kids?”

Well, for one thing, Obama never “met” Baroz. They were in the same place at one point for a jobs bill rally at the Rose Garden in September. But the two never shook hands, never took photos, never spoke and never communicated with each other in any way that might be even remotely construed as “meeting.”

Which would help explain why Obama got the most basic fact about his sob story wrong: Baroz doesn’t need Obama’s jobs bill to “put him back in the classroom teaching our kids” — because he already has a job. As the Boston Herald reported, Baroz “works as a literacy and data coach at the Curley K-8 School in Jamaica Plain, analyzing MCAS data and applying it to teachers’ everyday lessons.”

Let me spell that out again for the reading comprehension-challenged: Baroz doesn’t need Obama to redistribute other people’s money to get him a job. He already has one.

White House press secretary and former Time magazine journalist Jay Carney attempted to gloss over Obama’s crystal-clear whopper about having met Baroz and his transparent insinuation that the teacher would benefit from passage of the bill:

“The president — as you know, he was in a group of people that were — I think he was this close to the president as you are to me. And the president knows his story. … I mean, it’s just indisputable — as we found out again this morning — that all around the country, teachers are being laid off. The president has a plan to solve, OK, or to address that problem. … So I think the principle is just indisputable, as Mr. Baroz himself makes clear.”

How would Carney have reported on such narrative-stretching spin when he was covering the Bush administration for Time magazine?

Obama’s tall teacher tale is of a piece with the rest of his economic stimulus fables — from the Ohio bridge he stood in front of that wouldn’t see any jobs act money until 2015, if ever, to the thousands of promised construction jobs that would only go to a sliver of union-exclusive projects, to the pie-in-the-sky green jobs funding for weatherization projects that have mostly benefited Obama cronies.

All the little lies serve the larger Obama fraud of endless Keynesian intervention as a “cure.” It’s a deception even Senate Democrats refused to whitewash: “If spending money would solve our problems and crisis in America, we wouldn’t have a problem right now because we sure did our share of spending money in the last few years,” West Virginia Senate Democrat Joe Manchin said last month in casting doubt on the doomed Obama jobs bill. “It’s just common sense to me. If some of the recommendations that are out there hadn’t worked in the past, why would we do them over again?”

For his part, as an Obama true believer, the teacher Robert Baroz is excusing his hero’s fabrications because they serve a supposedly higher truth: “To me, the question he posed to the people was a rhetorical question. The emphasis was on ‘like Robert.’ It’s people who are like me, highly qualified, and are not working. That’s the spirit of it.”

Egad. If Baroz uses the same logic in his “literacy and data” coaching methods in the Boston schools, perhaps students would be better off without him.

Our White House Bully Problem
By Michelle Malkin

Spin, baby, spin. Throughout his frenetic jobs tour across the West this week, President Obama tried to seize the narrative. Republicans, he told champagne-sipping, tea party-trashing Hollywood moguls and tech titans, are intolerant bigots, know-nothings and thugs. They’ve made his hair “grayer” and left him “all dinged up.”

But who’s battering whom? Since Day One, Obama has been the Chicago bully in victim’s clothing. The mask is wearing thin.

On Tuesday, Detroit News reporter Daniel Howes reported that White House officials leaned on Ford Motor Company to yank a popular TV and Internet ad critical of competitors who took federal bailout money. According to Howes, “Ford pulled the ad after individuals inside the White House” questioned the firm’s CEO Alan Mulally (who had earlier supported the bailout despite his company’s refusal to participate). Howes concluded: “You’re not allowed, in Obama’s America, to disparage the Auto bailout, or — indirectly — Obama. Especially during the election cycle.”

Both Ford and the White House officially deny any political pressure received or applied. But White House press flack Dan Pfeiffer refused to answer when I asked him whether anyone at the White House had ever contacted anyone at Ford to complain about the bailout ad. Ford’s social media director told me he personally “had no knowledge” of any contacts. While he disputed the gist of Howes’ report, the Ford official would not call for a correction or retraction.

Chris McDaniel, the real-life Ford customer who starred in the offending ad, told BigGovernment.com editor Larry O’Connor that he was exasperated when he heard about the Ford fiasco: “Now we have the federal government butting their nose into this TV ad. Another example of them getting involved in things they have no business getting involved in. Where is the free speech of American citizens?”

He better watch out for the Obama campaign’s official snitch brigade at AttackWatch.com. After a curious hiatus, the online speech monitors are up and running again. Coincidentally enough, the site (run by several George Soros-trained operatives) targeted conservative auto bailout critics just two weeks ago.

A left-wing Washington Post writer immediately scoffed at concerns about the administration’s heavy hand because the Ford fiasco “is being denied by the parties on both sides.” Must be nice to mainline White House talking points for a living. For the rest of us, reality intrudes.

This is the administration that threatened health insurers for candidly tying Obamacare mandates to rising premiums.

This is the administration that pummeled companies such as Deere, Caterpillar, Verizon and AT&T for speaking out about the cost implications and financial burdens of Obamacare — and then cheered from the sidelines while Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman attempted to haul the firms up for a congressional witch-hunt inquisition.

This is the administration that has seized Gibson Guitars’ instruments and has threatened whistleblowers who exposed bloody corruption and incompetence behind the Operation Fast and Furious gun-walking racket.

And lest they need a reminder, this is an administration that has clamped down on mainstream media reporters, too.

The Pleasanton (CA) Weekly was bullied by the White House press shop over a benign article that irked the administration because it made Michelle Obama look snooty.

The San Francisco Chronicle was punished by the White House because a print pool reporter used a cellphone to record video of protesters at an Obama Bay Area fundraiser.

A WFAA-TV Texas reporter was dressed down by the president for having the audacity to interrupt.

The Boston Herald was spanked by the White House for running a front-page op-ed by GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

The White House denied any pressure in all those cases, too.

Before his campaign finance-grubbing swing ended, Obama met the pop singer Lady Gaga. She lobbied him to combat bullying across America. It was a little like Red Riding Hood lobbying the Big Bad Wolf to promote vegetarianism.

All the President’s High-Paid “Engagers”
By Michelle Malkin

First rule of Obama transparency: If it’s a holiday, it’s time for a White House document dump. Over the Independence Day weekend, the administration released its 2011 annual report to Congress on White House staff salaries. While economic data for the rest of America remains bleak, the financial outlook for Obama flacks looks rosier than the president’s complexion after his latest round of golf.

In total, President Obama’s 454 employees at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. will rake in $37 million. That’s up $4 million from the income of George W. Bush’s staff in 2008, back when the unemployment rate was three points lower, the federal government workforce was 12 percent smaller and the massive deficit was still measured in hundreds of billions, not trillions. One in three of Obama’s employees makes more than $100,000 a year.

Of particular interest to me are the high-paid Obama aides assigned to the apparently vital task of “engagement” — that is, politicking, pandering and partisan cajoling — on the taxpayers’ dime.

I found at least 17 staffers listed in the report with titles referencing the “Office of Public Engagement” (OPE) or “online engagement” (otherwise known as liberal blog hand-holding and crisis management). These “engagers” are among the top earners in the White House. Fourteen of the 17 earn $50,000 or more. Chicago crony Valerie Jarrett, the White House senior adviser who oversees OPE, receives a salary of $172,200 a year. Michael Strautmanis, deputy assistant to the president and counselor to the senior adviser for strategic engagement, earns $150,000. Nathanael Tamarin, a special assistant to the president for public engagement, makes $96,900 a year.

The director of OPE, Jon Carson, pulls in $153,000 annually. Carson’s deputy, Brian Bond, boasts a $93,840 yearly salary. OPE deputy directors Greg Nelson and Anne Filipic earn $92,000.

What, exactly, are all these minions paid to do? OPE describes itself as “allow(ing) the views of the ordinary American citizen to be more readily heard within the administration” and coordinating “events that bring members of the administration in contact with members of the public.”

In reality, it’s another publicly subsidized Obama spin operation by a different name.

The murky office of public engagement was refashioned by Jarrett from the former Office of Public Liaison to do things like push the costly failed 2016 Olympics bid by her old friend and employer former Chicago Mayor Richard Daley.

It’s also the office that was entangled in the rabidly partisan effort to push the progressive agenda through the taxpayer-supported National Endowment of the Arts. As I’ve noted before, conservative film producer and BigHollywood.com contributor Patrick Courrielche first blew the whistle in 2009 when the NEA and OPE gathered 75 artists, musicians, writers and poets on a conference call to exhort them to create propaganda art supporting Obama’s domestic policy agenda. The engagement operatives plied “counter-narratives” to the arts community to combat GOP health care critics and anti-illegal alien amnesty activists.

Actor Kalpen Modi, an “associate director of public engagement,” has been dispatched to various “youth roundtables” and Soros confabs on Obama’s behalf.

More recently, the well-compensated “engagers” have been busy organizing town hall cheerleading sections for Obama across the country and online to bolster his base, galvanize “community leaders” and appease the commander in chief’s left flank. On Wednesday, in an effort to “double down” on their “online engagement efforts,” as an administration aide told The New York Times, Obama will participate in a “Twitter Town Hall.”

As always, however, this administration’s problem is that it hears but doesn’t listen. It makes lavishly funded gestures toward engagement while remaining divorced from economic and political reality. The core failure of Team Obama is not a failure to communicate, but a failure to comprehend.

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.

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.

Dude, Where’s My Obamacare Waiver?
by Michelle Malkin

More than one million Americans have escaped the clutches of the Democrats’ destructive federal health care law. Lucky them. Their employers and labor representatives wisely applied for Obamacare waivers earlier this fall and got out while the getting was good. Now, it’s time for Congress to create a permanent escape hatch for the rest of us. Repeal is the ultimate waiver.

As you’ll recall, President Obama promised repeatedly that if Americans liked their health insurance plan, they could keep it. “Nobody is talking about taking that away from you,” the cajoler-in-chief assured. What he failed to communicate to low-wage and part-time workers across the country is that they could keep their plans — only if their companies begged hard enough for exemptions from Obamacare’s private insurance-killing regulations.

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services website, at least 111 waivers have now been granted to companies, unions and other organizations of all sizes who offer affordable health insurance or prescription drug coverage with limited benefits. Obamacare architects sought to eliminate those low-cost plans under the guise of controlling insurer spending on executive salaries and marketing.

It’s all about control. If central planners can’t dictate what health benefits qualify as “good,” what plans qualify as “affordable” and how health care dollars are best spent, then nobody can. The ultimate goal, of course: precipitating a massive shift from private to government insurance.

McDonald’s, Olive Garden, Red Lobster and Jack in the Box are among the large, headline-garnering employers who received the temporary waivers. But perhaps the most politically noteworthy beneficiaries of the HHS waiver program: Big Labor.

The Service Employees Benefit Fund, which insures a total of 12,000 SEIU health care workers in upstate New York, secured its Obamacare exemption in October. The Local 25 SEIU Welfare Fund in Chicago also nabbed a waiver for 31,000 of its enrollees. SEIU, of course, was one of Obamacare’s loudest and biggest spending proponents. The waivers come on top of the massive sweetheart deal that SEIU and other unions cut with the Obama administration to exempt them from the health care mandate’s onerous “Cadillac tax” on high-cost health care plans until 2018. _

Other unions who won protection from Obamacare:

– United Food and Commercial Workers Allied Trade Health and Welfare Trust Fund

– International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Union No. 915

– Asbestos Workers Local 53 Welfare Fund

– Employees Security Fund

– Plumbers and Pipefitters Local 123 Welfare Fund

– United Food and Commercial Workers Local 227

– United Food and Commercial Workers Local 455 (Maximus)

– United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1262

– Musicians Health Fund Local 802

– Hospitality Benefit Fund Local 17

– Transport Workers Union

– United Federation of Teachers Welfare Fund

– International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (AFL-CIO)

– Plus two organizations that appear to be chapters of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA)

Several of these labor organizations did not respond to requests for comment about their waivers. But Jay Blumenthal, financial vice president of the Local 802 Musicians Health Fund in New York, did explain to me: “We got grandfathered in” (his description for getting a pass) because “things were moving so fast” and “we need time now to prepare for the law.” In other words: Policy cramdowns first, political fixes later. A supporter of Obamacare, Blumenthal told me he “sees no irony, no,” in unions supporting the very health care “reform” from which they are now seeking relief.

Chris Rodriguez, director of human resources at Fowler Packing Company in California’s San Joaquin Valley, sees things a little differently. Fowler pursued an HHS waiver because their low-wage agricultural workers would have lost the basic coverage his company has voluntarily offered for years. “We take care of our employees, and we warned (health care officials that) if they imposed this, large numbers of workers would lose access to affordable coverage,” he told me. Rodriguez said he’s grateful the firm won a waiver, but he did not lose sight of the fact that the very policies passed to increase health insurance access are having the opposite effect: “That’s our government at work.”

Indeed, some prominent government officials who lobbied hardest for Obamacare are now also joining waiver-mania — including liberal Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden, who has been pushing for an individual mandate exemption for his state of Oregon, and Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska, who is pushing to waive Obamacare’s burdensome 1099 reporting requirements of small businesses.

Fearful of retribution by HHS Secretary and chief inquisitor Kathleen Sebelius, who has threatened companies speaking out about Obamacare’s perverse consequences, many business owners who obtained waivers refused to talk to me on the record. One said tersely: “We did what we had to do to survive.”

A new House GOP majority now has the chance to protect the rest of America from this regulatory monstrosity. We want out.

The White House War on Jobs
by Michelle Malkin

The “Summer of Recovery” is looking more and more like the Beltway Chainsaw Massacre for America’s workers. As President Obama lolls on Martha’s Vineyard with his well-heeled Chicago pals, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll shows that 72 percent of people are very worried about joblessness and 67 percent are very concerned about massive government spending.

After a nearly $1 trillion fiscal stimulus and several multibillion-dollar corporate and union bailouts, unemployment remains stuck near 10 percent nationwide; jobless claims rose again last week. One shudders to think how many more jobs will be on the chopping block after the vacationing president finishes “recharging his batteries.”

The blame avoidance industry, of course, never takes a break. Capitol Hill Democrats blame George W. Bush. President Obama blames inaction by the, er, Democrat-controlled Congress. On Tuesday, Vice President Joe Biden derided GOP Leader John Boehner’s speech on the Obama job-killing machine as a return to the past. Biden sneered about the “good old days” when Republicans held the majority in Washington. But laid-off, unemployed and endangered Americans in the health care sector, the auto industry, and the oil, mining, gas, and fishing industries are no doubt wondering: What’s wrong with returning to the days when we had jobs and steady paychecks?

These are not the wealthy fat cats and Big Business titans Democrats love to demonize.

They’re employees of companies like Assurant Health, which announced last week that it would slash 130 jobs at its offices in Milwaukee and Plymouth, Minn., to prepare for costly Obamacare mandates.

They’re employees of medical device firms in Massachusetts, where officials say they’ll be forced to cut back on operational costs and jobs thanks to a little-noticed Obamacare tax on their products that goes into effect in 2013.

They’re employees of restaurants like White Castle and International House of Pancakes, whose executives say they will be forced into layoffs and premium hikes to cope with the federal law’s $3,000-per-employee penalty on companies whose workers pay more than 9.5 percent of household income in premiums for company-provided insurance.

They’re mom-and-pop enterprises across the country that must now deal with Obamacare’s onerous Section 9006 tax-filing mandate. It requires them to file 1099 forms with the IRS for every vendor from whom they purchase $600 or more in goods. Nebraska GOP Sen. Mike Johanns calls it one of many “job-crushing provisions” that will bury small business in paperwork and legal costs.

They’re the estimated 23,000 workers in the deepwater drilling industry whom the White House deliberately wrote off in pursuit of its junk science-based drilling moratorium.

They’re the estimated tens of thousands of workers employed by car dealers that were shut down by Obama’s auto czars at a time, as the TARP inspector general pointed out last month, “when the country was experiencing the worst economic downturn in generations and the government was asking its taxpayers to support a $787 billion stimulus package designed primarily to preserve jobs… — all based on a theory and without sufficient consideration of the decisions’ broader economic impact.”

They’re employees of Utah oil and gas companies whose leases have been pulled without cause by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. The Interior Department’s own Inspector General rejected Salazar’s explanation that the Bush administration had rushed the leases through. The Deseret News reports that “rescinding these leases has likely cost the state millions already. Officials in Uintah county estimate the county lost 3,000 jobs in 2009, and Duchesne lost 1,000 jobs.”

They’re employees of commercial and recreational fishing businesses in New England, who have organized a flotilla on Martha’s Vineyard on Thursday to protest the Obama administration’s restrictive environmental policies and stealth regulatory ocean grab.

The White House has invested mightily in creating a propaganda infrastructure to tout its “jobs saved or created.” Taxpayers need a full, transparent accounting of how many jobs Team Obama has destroyed. Call it Wreckovery.gov.

The Left’s Special Interest Human Shields
by Michelle Malkin

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi deserves a swift rap on the knuckles for hiding underneath the desk of the American schoolteacher. In a cynical ploy to evade accountability for the Democrats’ continued fiscal recklessness, Pelosi accused opponents of the $26 billion public employee union bailout bill of “demeaning” teachers — and nurses, police officers and firefighters. Pelosi took great offense at Republican leaders who called out the Big Labor special interests pushing the emergency summer rescue. But if they walk, talk, spend and lobby like special interests, let’s call them what they are.

I have nothing against public school teachers. My mother was one. My children are taught by some of the best in the nation. And over the years, I’ve reported on valiant battles between rank-and-file educators in government schools and their fat, bloated union leaders who’ve transformed their professional organizations into wholly owned Democratic subsidiaries. My opposition to the so-called “Edujobs” bill (more accurately: the BigGovJobs bill) stems not from meanness, but from compassion for millions of dues-paying school employees being used as special interest human shields.

According to the Washington, D.C.-based Labor Union Report, the National Education Association in 2009 “raked in a whopping $355,334,165 in ‘dues and agency fees’ from (mostly) teachers around the country.” It spent close to $11 million more than it took in — $50 million of which union leaders poured into “political activities and lobbying” for exclusively left-wing and Democratic partisan causes and candidates.

Its primary mission? No, not educational excellence. Not “the children.” Political self-preservation. The “Edujobs” bill will essentially redistribute tax dollars to teachers unions to the tune of $36 million for the National Education Association and $14 million for the American Federation of Teachers, according to the Grand Rapids (Mich.) Press. School officials said they have no idea what strings would be attached to the money, whether state legislatures would approve the cash as part of special supplemental budgets, how long the money would last, and how they would pay for stop-gap measures while waiting for the taxpayer funds to flow.

As for the “emergency” invoked by Pelosi at the behest of Big Labor, as Republican critics point out, states and the feds still have more than $30 billion in unspent stimulus funds sitting in government coffers. And school districts are already in the midst of rehiring school workers laid off earlier this year — absent the latest “Edujobs” initiative.

Last July, the National Education Association’s retiring top lawyer, Bob Chanin, speaking at the NEA’s annual meeting in July, made the union’s true interests transparent:

“Despite what some among us would like to believe it is not because of our creative ideas. It is not because of the merit of our positions. It is not because we care about children and it is not because we have a vision of a great public school for every child. NEA and its affiliates are effective advocates because we have power.

“And we have power because there are more than 3.2 million people who are willing to pay us hundreds of millions of dollars in dues each year, because they believe that we are the unions that can most effectively represent them, the unions that can protect their rights and advance their interests as education employees. …

“This is not to say that the concern of NEA and its affiliates with closing achievement gaps, reducing dropout rates, improving teacher quality and the like are unimportant or inappropriate. To the contrary. These are the goals that guide the work we do. But they need not and must not be achieved at the expense of due process, employee rights and collective bargaining. That simply is too high a price to pay.”

Left-wing radical Saul Alinsky taught his education acolytes well. Teacher organizers, he counseled, must commit to a “singleness of purpose.” No, not serving children’s needs, but serving the “ability to build a power base.” If that isn’t the dictionary definition of “special interest,” what is?

Assimilation and the Founding Fathers
by Michelle Malkin

In his immigration speech on Thursday, President Obama heralded America as a “nation of immigrants” defined not by blood or birth, but by “fidelity to the shared values that we all hold so dear.” If only it were so. Left-wing academics and activists spurned assimilation as a common goal long ago. Their fidelity lies with bilingualism (a euphemism for native language maintenance over English-first instruction), identity politics, ethnic militancy and a borderless continent.

Obama blames “politics” for the intractable immigration debate. Whose politics? The amnesty mob has taken to ambushing congressional offices this week to scream at lawmakers to choose “reform” (giving a blanket path to citizenship to millions of illegal aliens) or “racism” (their description of any and every legislative measure to stiffen sanctions for and deter the acts of border-jumping, visa-overstaying and deportation-evading).

Is there no middle ground for all sides to agree that clearing naturalization application backlogs should take priority over expanding illegal alien benefits, or that tracking and deporting violent illegal alien criminals should take precedence over handing out driver’s licenses to illegal aliens, or that streamlining the employee citizenship verification process for businesses (E-verify) and fixing outdated visa tracking databases should come before indiscriminately expanding temporary visa and guest worker programs?

Must every response to even the most modest of immigration enforcement measures be “RAAAAACIST”?

Further, as I’ve noted many times over the years when debating both Democrats and Republicans who fall back on empty phrases to justify putting the amnesty cart before the enforcement horse, we are not a “nation of immigrants.” This is both a factual error and a warm-and-fuzzy non sequitur. Eighty-five percent of the residents currently in the United States were born here. Yes, we are almost all descendants of immigrants. But we are not a “nation of immigrants.” (And the politically correct president certainly wouldn’t argue that Native American Indians, Native Alaskans, Native Hawaiians and descendants of black slaves “immigrated” here in any common sense of the word, would he?)

Even if we were a “nation of immigrants,” it does not explain why we should be against sensible immigration control. The Founding Fathers were emphatically insistent on protecting the country against indiscriminate mass immigration. They insisted on assimilation as a pre-condition, not an afterthought. Historian John Fonte assembled their wisdom, and it bears repeating this Independence Day weekend:

George Washington, in a letter to John Adams, stated that immigrants should be absorbed into American life so that “by an intermixture with our people, they, or their descendants, get assimilated to our customs, measures, laws: in a word soon become one people.”

In a 1790 speech to Congress on the naturalization of immigrants, James Madison stated that America should welcome the immigrant who could assimilate, but exclude the immigrant who could not readily “incorporate himself into our society.”

Alexander Hamilton wrote in 1802: “The safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common national sentiment; on a uniformity of principles and habits; on the exemption of the citizens from foreign bias and prejudice; and on that love of country which will almost invariably be found to be closely connected with birth, education and family.”

Hamilton further warned that “The United States have already felt the evils of incorporating a large number of foreigners into their national mass; by promoting in different classes different predilections in favor of particular foreign nations, and antipathies against others, it has served very much to divide the community and to distract our councils. It has been often likely to compromise the interests of our own country in favor of another. The permanent effect of such a policy will be, that in times of great public danger there will be always a numerous body of men, of whom there may be just grounds of distrust; the suspicion alone will weaken the strength of the nation, but their force may be actually employed in assisting an invader.”

The survival of the American republic, Hamilton maintained, depends upon “the preservation of a national spirit and a national character.” “To admit foreigners indiscriminately to the rights of citizens the moment they put foot in our country would be nothing less than to admit the Grecian horse into the citadel of our liberty and sovereignty.”

As pro-amnesty extremists moan that “we didn’t cross the borders, the borders crossed us” and illegal alien marchers haul foreign flags above Old Glory, President Obama pretends that the “common national sentiment” our Founding Fathers embraced still binds us all together. Many of us still have faith in a strong, sovereign America — the unhyphenated, the law-abiding, the gratitude-filled sons and daughters and grandchildren of legal immigrants for whom such distinctions still matter. But it’s no thanks to the assimilation saboteurs who put “one world” over “one nation under God.”

Look Who’s Behind the White House/Sestak Stonewall
by Michelle Malkin

After three months of zipped lips and feigned ignorance, the Obama White House is finally taking real heat over Pennsylvania Democratic Rep. Joe Sestak’s consistent claims that the administration offered him a job to drop his Senate bid. Now it’s time to redirect the spotlight where it belongs: on the top counsel behind the Washington stonewall, Bob “The Silencer” Bauer.

On Sunday, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs glibly asserted that “lawyers in the White House and others have looked into conversations that were had with Congressman Sestak. And nothing inappropriate happened.” With whom were these conversations had? Gibbs won’t say. Neither will Attorney General Eric Holder, who dismissed “hypotheticals” when questioned about Sestak’s allegations last week on Capitol Hill by GOP Rep. Darrell Issa of California. Holder is simply taking his cue from the commander-in-chief’s personal lawyer and Democratic Party legal boss.

You see, on March 10, Issa also sent a letter to Bauer, the White House counsel to the president, requesting specifics: Did White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel contact Sestak? Did White House Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina (whom another Democrat, U.S. Senate candidate Andrew Romanoff, has accused of offering a cabinet position in exchange for his withdrawal)? How about the White House Office of Political Affairs? Any other individuals? What position(s) was/were offered in exchange for Sestak’s withdrawal? And what, if any, steps did Bauer take to investigate possible criminal activity?

Bauer’s answers? Zip. Nada. Zilch. While the veteran attorney ducked under a table with the president, Gibbs stalled publicly as long as he could — deferring inquiries about the allegations one week by claiming he had been “on the road” and had “not had a chance to delve into this,” and then admitting the next week that he had “not made any progress on that,” refusing the week after that to deny or admit the scheme, and then urging reporters to drop it because “whatever happened is in the past.”

But the laws governing such public corruption are still on the books. And unlike Gibbs, the U.S. code governing bribery, graft and conflicts of interest is rather straightforward: “Whoever solicits or receives … any … thing of value, in consideration of the promise of support or use of influence in obtaining for any person any appointive office or place under the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.”

Bauer is intimately familiar with electoral law, Barack Obama, ethics violations and government job-trading allegations. And he’s an old hand at keeping critics and inquisitors at bay.

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

As I’ve reported previously, it was Bauer who lobbied the Justice Department unsuccessfully in 2008 to pursue a criminal probe of American Issues Project (AIP), an independent group that sought to run an ad spotlighting Obama’s ties to Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers. It was Bauer who attempted to sic the Justice Department on AIP funder Harold Simmons and who sought his prosecution for funding the ad. And it was Bauer who tried to bully television stations across the country to compel them to pull the spot. All on Obama’s behalf.

More significantly, Bauer has served as Obama’s personal attorney, navigating the corrupted waters of former Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s pay-for-play scandals in Illinois. Bauer accompanied Obama to an interview with federal investigators in Chicago. And he’s got his hands full fighting Blago’s motion to subpoena Obama in the Senate-seat-for-sale trial — a subpoena that included references to a secret phone call between Obama and Blagojevich; an allegation that Emanuel floated his own suggested replacement for Obama’s seat; an allegation that Obama told a “certain labor union official” that he would support (now-White House senior adviser) Valerie Jarrett to fill his old seat; and a bombshell allegation that Obama might have lied about conversations with convicted briber and fraudster Tony Rezko.

With not one, not two, but three Democrats (Sestak, Romanoff and Blagojevich) all implicating the agent of Hope and Change in dirty backroom schemes, “Trust Us” ain’t gonna cut it. Neither will “Shut Up and Go Away.” What did Bob “The Silencer” Bauer know, when did he know it, and how long does the Most Transparent Administration Ever plan to play dodgeball with the public?

The U.S. Department of Blame America First
by Michelle Malkin

Back in 1984, when the late Jeane J. Kirkpatrick gave her famous “Blame America First” speech to the Republican National Convention, liberals at least waited for something bad to happen before blaming America.

Today, Obama Democrats have now mastered the treacherous art of the pre-emptive global apology. Foggy Bottom is crammed with so many “human rights” zealots embarrassed by the country they serve that the State Department mission statement should be replaced with a condolence card.

Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Michael Posner is probably not the first Obama State Department official to badmouth America in front of foreign delegations. He was just dumb enough to get caught.

Last week, the former head agitator at the transnationalist outfit Human Rights First trashed our country’s human rights record to Chinese government officials.

Posner is an unrepentant open-borders radical who has long fought immigration enforcement and vociferously opposed post-Sept. 11 counterterrorism measures to detain enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay. He was active in supporting the establishment of the International Criminal Court, an American sovereignty-undermining tribunal that would trump U.S. judicial authority over war crimes and “crimes of humanity.”

And New Yorkers may recall that he joined with Human Rights First board member Tom Goldstein, far-left billionaire George Soros and other American self-loathers in the failed effort to turn the Sept. 11 Ground Zero Memorial into a national guilt complex to showcase how George W. Bush-era counterterrorism policies were curtailing civil liberties.

In short, Posner views our homeland security policies as unforgivable sins of discrimination. And he couldn’t wait to let China know it.

From Posner’s press briefing on Friday:

Q: Did the recently passed Arizona immigration law come up? And if so, did they bring it up? Or did you bring it up?

MR. POSNER: We brought it up early and often. It was mentioned in the first session and as a troubling trend in our society, and an indication that we have to deal with issues of discrimination or potential discrimination. And these are issues very much being debated in our own society.

The Arizona law is indeed being “debated in our own society” — mostly by a parade of willful ignoramuses from Homeland Security Department Secretary Janet Napolitano to Attorney General Eric Holder to State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley, who have all gone on television to attack the Arizona law and then admit they have yet to read the legislation.

At least all the know-nothings in Washington who voted to cram the health care and stimulus bills down our throats without reading them had a semblance of an excuse. Those mammoth packages were thousands of pages long. The Arizona law is a mere 10 pages.

The betrayal of America’s interests by the Obama State Department cannot be understated. Posner proactively brought up the Arizona law “early and often” as an issue of “discrimination or potential discrimination” to smear his own countrymen in front of one of the world’s leading repressive regimes — so repressive, in fact, that Posner’s own boss, Hillary Clinton, once demanded that former President Bush boycott the ChiComs over their miserable human rights record. Posner had nothing publicly to say at the briefing about China’s own draconian immigration enforcement measures, let alone how it treats its own citizen political dissidents.

But this extreme moral equivalence is par for the course. Remember: The State Department’s legal adviser is former Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh, who believes that America is such a flagrant violator of international law that it belongs in an “axis of disobedience” with totalitarian regimes like North Korea and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq — and that U.S. Supreme Court rulings should “tip more decisively toward a transnationalist jurisprudence.”

And remember: One of President Obama’s closest foreign policy advisers is Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Harvard law professor and State Department transition team leader Samantha Power, who pooh-poohs the threat of nuclear Iran and praises Obama’s commitment to “crossing boundaries” and “talk to dictators,” as the New Statesman reported.

Then there’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who is busy coddling another government that has been bashing Arizona’s law while unapologetically policing its own southern border and kicking out illegal immigrants without a shred of due process: Mexico.

Instead of voicing concern about endangered American citizens, Clinton fretted about the political well-being of Mexican President Felipe Calderon: “We don’t want to make his life any harder,” Clinton said. I guarantee you he won’t show any of the same concern when he comes to Washington on Thursday to beg for more U.S. aid while attacking America as a racist, fascist country.

Foggy Bottom isn’t just stuck on stupid. It’s stuck on American self-sabotage.

John S. McCain, Will You Please Go Now?
by Michelle Malkin

I need a Dramamine to cover GOP Sen. John McCain’s re-election bid. With his desperate lurch to the right, he’s inducing more motion sickness than a Disney Land teacup. McCain’s campaign represents the same self-serving political cynicism that American voters have grown tired of stomaching from the current White House. We need choices, not carbon copies.

After decades of embracing the liberal media moniker “maverick” for his frequent derision of the conservative wing of the Republican Party, McCain has now abandoned the label. He told Newsweek magazine earlier this month: “I never considered myself a maverick.” But countless YouTube videos show McCain and vice-presidential running mate Sarah Palin invoking the “m” word. Here’s a typical bit of self-puffery from a McCain stump speech on Oct.14, 2008:

“It’s well known that I have not been elected Miss Congeniality in the United States Senate, nor with the administration. I have opposed the president on spending, on climate change, on torture of prisoner, on … on Guantanamo Bay. On a … on the way that the Iraq War was conducted. I have a long record, and the American people know me very well, and that is independent and a maverick of the Senate, and I’m happy to say that I’ve got a partner that’s a good maverick along with me now.”

With veteran tough-on-illegal-immigration GOP challenger J.D. Hayworth (whom I support) just five points behind McCain in the latest Rasmussen poll, Not-Maverick has now abandoned (or rather re-abandoned) his notoriously long-held open borders stance. Just a few short years ago, Not-Maverick was attacking Rush Limbaugh as a “nativist” for opposing the Bush-Kennedy-McCain amnesty plan. When GOP Sen. Jeff Sessions introduced an amendment to bar illegal aliens from receiving the earned income tax credit, McCain likened it to Jim Crow laws.

Sessions: “…I do not believe we should award people who have entered our country illegally, submitted a false Social Security number, worked illegally… I do not believe we should reward them with $29 billion of the taxpayers’ money. That is a lot of money.”

McCain: “What’s next — are we going to say work-authorized immigrants are going to have to ride in the back of the bus?”

When Democratic Sen. Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico called for a cap on the number of visas for legal permanent residents at 650,000, McCain called it un-American and accused Bingaman of “discriminating” against poor foreigners (never mind that the McCain-Kennedy amnesty bill itself had a visa cap of 290,000). Like the true progressive he is, McCain never lets the facts get in the way of playing the race card. Unless it’s an election year, that is.

When McCain’s friend GOP Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma put forth an amendment to “require the enforcement of existing border security and immigration laws and congressional approval before amnesty can be granted,” McCain refused to take a position and sat out the vote. The amendment failed 42-54.

Just how beholden and deferential were McCain and his illegal alien shamnesty Republican twin Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina to Teddy Kennedy? During floor debate on an amendment that would have required illegal aliens who get legal status to have a minimum level of health insurance, the Washington Times reported, the pair scurried over to check with Kennedy before voting to ensure their votes all matched. The amendment went down.

Actions speak louder than the pro-enforcement, strong-borders rhetoric McCain adopted for his failed 2008 presidential run — and which he has now resurrected to save his seat in his border violence-plagued state of Arizona.

More words you can’t believe in: In a fundraising e-mail sent out this week, McCain pledged that he’s “determined to return to the Senate to continue fighting against the massive expansion of government under President Obama.” Yet, to this day, McCain refuses to admit his own individual responsibility for supporting the pre-socialization of the economy started under George W. Bush and continued under Obama. McCain has never admitted he was wrong about his support of the $700 billion all-purpose, earmark-stuffed TARP bailout; the $25 billion auto bailout; the first $85 billion AIG bailout; and his proposed $300 billion mortgage entitlement bailout (which dwarfed Obama’s plan).

His latest McLame-est excuse for supporting TARP? He was “misled.” But all the warning signs and red flags about Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s incompetence and untrustworthiness were there before McCain joined the Chicken Little crowd. McCain is trying to have it all ways — refusing to admit he was wrong, blaming Paulson for duping him, and creating the illusion that he’ll be competent enough to resist the next inevitable bailout temptation when the feds hit the panic button.

Asked by a conservative constituent at a recent town hall meeting why the four-term senator deserved to be elected, McCain stammered before giving his best argument: He had more “standing” than anyone else. Entrenched incumbency is not an argument for more entrenched incumbency. Stop this ride. It’s time for McCain to get off.

All the President’s Goldman Sachs Men
by Michelle Malkin

While President Obama assails the culture of greed and recklessness practiced by the men of Goldman Sachs, his administration is infested with them. The White House can no more disown Government Sachs than Da Boss-in-chief can disown Chicago politics.

Obama is headed to Wall Street on Thursday to demand “financial regulatory reform” — just as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has filed civil suit against Goldman Sachs for mortgage-related fraud. Question the timing? Darn tootin’. There are no coincidences in the perpetually orchestrated Age of O. Everyone from disgraced former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer to analysts at the Brookings Institution and Barclays Capital to the GOP leadership and Rush Limbaugh has noted the reeking political opportunism in the air.

As the New York Post reported Tuesday, the Democratic National Committee immediately bought sponsored Internet ads on Google that direct web surfers who type in “Goldman Sachs SEC” to Obama’s fundraising site. “It’s time to hold the big banks accountable,” the money-grubbing DNC message bellows. But just like his crony capitalist predecessor George W. Bush, Obama has relied on Goldman Sachs and Wall Street power brokers to engineer massive government interventions to “rescue” failing businesses with the tax dollars of ordinary Americans.

While irony-challenged Democratic candidates like mob-linked banker Alexi Giannoulias in Illinois (who hopes to fill Obama’s old Senate seat) call on Republicans to return their fat-cat Goldman Sachs donations, the Democrats are silent on the $994,795 in Goldman Sachs campaign cash that Obama bagged. The class-warfare Dems are also mum on all the president’s Goldman Sachs men sitting in the catbird’s seat:

– Goldman Sachs partner Gary Gensler is Obama’s Commodity Futures Trading Commission head. He was confirmed despite heated congressional grilling over his role, as Reuters described it, “as a high-level Treasury official in a 2000 law that exempted the $58 trillion credit default swap market from oversight. The financial instruments have been blamed for amplifying global financial turmoil.” Gensler said he was sorry — hey, it worked for tax cheat Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner — and was quickly installed to guard the henhouse.

– Goldman Sachs kept White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel on a $3,000 monthly retainer while he worked as Clinton’s chief fundraiser, as first reported by Washington Examiner columnist Tim Carney. The financial titans threw in another $50,000 to become the Clinton primary campaign’s top funder. Emanuel received nearly $80,000 in cash from Goldman Sachs during his four terms in Congress — investments that have reaped untold rewards, as Emanuel assumed a leading role championing the trillion-dollar TARP banking bailout law.

– Former Goldman Sachs lobbyist Mark Patterson serves under Geithner as his top deputy and overseer of TARP bailout — $10 billion of which went to Goldman Sachs. Left-leaning government watchdog Melanie Sloan of the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington responded: “It makes it appear that they are saying one thing and doing another.” Paul Blumenthal of the Sunlight Foundation noted that, while at Goldman Sachs, Patterson lobbied against executive pay limits that Obama had crusaded for as senator (before, that is, his administration carved out exemptions for AIG). While Patterson agreed to recuse himself on any Goldman Sachs-related issues or related policy concerns, Blumenthal wrote, it “still creates a serious conflict for Geithner, as Treasury is being partly managed by a former Goldman lobbyist. Geithner is also placed in a tough position considering that his chief of staff is limited in the areas in which he can work (supposedly).”

– Obama’s close hometown crony, campaign finance chief and senior adviser Penny Pritzker was head of Superior Bank of Chicago, a subprime specialist that went bust in 2001, leaving more than 1,400 people stripped of their savings after bank officials falsified profit reports. Pritzker’s lawyer at O’Melveny and Myers, Tom Donilon, is now Obama’s deputy national security adviser. He earned just shy of $4 million representing her and other high-profile meltdown clients including Goldman Sachs.

– White House National Economic Council head Larry Summers reaped nearly $2.8 million in speaking fees from many of the major financial institutions and government bailout recipients he now polices, including JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs. A single speech to Goldman Sachs in April 2008 brought in $135,000. Summers has prior experience negotiating government-sponsored bailouts that benefit private concerns. In 1995, he spearheaded a $40 billion Mexican peso bailout that bypassed Congress. Summers personally leaned on the International Monetary Fund to provide nearly $18 billion for the package. Summers’ boss, then Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin, was former co-chairman of Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs — the Mexican government’s investment banking firm of choice.

Rubin continues to mentor another former employee of his with regular visits and chats — Treasury Secretary Geithner, who as head of the New York Federal Reserve pushed bailed-out insurance conglomerate AIG to cover up sweetheart deals for investment banks that benefited, you guessed it, Goldman Sachs.

As Obama harangues Wall Street to clean up its house, all the president’s Goldman Sachs men have their feet on the coffee table at his.

Alinsky’s Avenging Angels – Tea Party Saboteurs
by Michelle Malkin

One of the popular signs spotted at Tea Party protests across the country over the past year goes like this: “It doesn’t matter what this sign says. You’ll call it racism, anyway!” It’s a pithy, perfect rejoinder to the fusillade of attacks that limited-government activists have weathered from their Democratic detractors and a hostile national media. Committed Alinsky-ites never let reality get in the way of a good Tea Party-bashing narrative.

The radical acolytes of Chicago’s late left-wing organizer Saul Alinsky also understand the importance of manufacturing demons. “Before men can act,” Alinsky preached, “an issue must be polarized. Men will act when they are convinced their cause is 100 percent on the side of the angels, and that the opposition are 100 percent on the side of the devil.” This explains the left’s relentless campaign to sabotage the anti-tax, anti-bailout movement from Day One.

President Obama’s community organizing allies whispered “racist,” “fascist” and “fringe” in the earliest days of the stimulus demonstrations in January and February 2009, when hundreds of first-time protesters turned out on the streets in Washington State, Colorado, Arizona and Kansas. The whispers turned to hysterical screams as hundreds became thousands and thousands became millions of peaceful marchers who gathered for the first nationwide Tax Day Tea Party. Some fringe, huh?

The latest effort to smear Tea Partiers involves self-appointed agents provocateurs who are organizing a “Crash the Tea Party” campaign to discredit the April 15 Tax Day Tea Party by making up bogus racist signs and providing false portrayals of grassroots activists to the press. An online punk, Jason Levin, is spearheading the infiltration effort to “act on behalf of the Tea Party in ways which exaggerate their least appealing qualities” and “damage the public’s opinion of them.” Never mind that public opinion polls now show that the majority of Americans stand with the core principles of fiscal responsibility espoused by Tea Party activists.

Levin may be a lone wolf operator, but he has many fellow travelers in the Democratic establishment and left-wing fever swamps. And their efforts wouldn’t be possible without friendlies in the press who have openly insulted Tea Party activists with endless vulgar sexual taunts and Taliban comparisons.

A few months ago, Craig Varoga — a Washington-based Democratic political operative and overseer of a convoluted, money-shuffling web of political action committees — launched “TheTeaPartyisOver.org” to target Republicans who supported the Tea Party movement. The site declared that it would prevent the “radical” and “dangerous” fiscal accountability agenda from “gaining legislative traction.” Varoga’s money funneling is designed to obscure the Big Labor/progressive funding of his enterprises under the umbrella of his “American Public Policy Center (APPC).”

After conservative blogs and Fox News exposed his deceptive web of grassroots groups, Varoga password-protected his website so that the Democratic plotting against Tea Party activists could be conducted out of view.

I speak from direct experience about the underhandedness of Tea Party smear merchants. On Feb. 17, 2009, at one of the country’s first tax revolt rallies in Denver, a man approached me amid a throng of bona fide anti-stimulus protesters and thrust a camera in my face. I obliged cheerfully, as I usually do after such speaking events. I later learned from the character assassins at Progress Now, a left-wing outfit that just happened to be there and just happened to snap a close-up photo of the interaction, that the man pulled out a sign at the last minute (which I didn’t see until later) sporting Obama’s name with a swastika on it. He held the sign away from me, but in direct view of the Progress Now cameraperson.

That cameraperson just happened to be a former CNN producer, whose blog post on the photo just happened to be immediately disseminated by the local press and to the hit men at the radical-left Media Matters website. The narrative was set: A conservative supporter of the nascent Tea Party movement posed for a photo with a man holding up a swastika at a protest against out-of-control spending! Ergo, the anti-stimulus protesters and the entire Tea Party membership are all racist, fascist menaces to society!

Fast-forward to April 2010. Alinsky’s avenging angels have declared open warfare on April 15. Will they be enabled again by “mainstream journalists” who have turned their Tea Party reporting assignments into search-and-destroy missions? The signs point to yes.

The Obama Way: Bluster, Bully, Bribe
by Michelle Malkin

The White House took great offense this week when conservatives suggested President Obama might be trading a judicial appointment for a wavering Democrat’s vote on his health care reform plan. “Absurd,” a miffed administration official told Politico.com. Wherever could the American people get such an impression? Let us count the ways.

On Wednesday, the very day Obama hosted 10 swing Democrats who had opposed the expansive health care takeover bill in November, the White House issued a press release trumpeting the nomination of Scott M. Matheson Jr. to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. Matheson just happens to be the brother of Democratic Rep. Jim Matheson of Utah — one of the 10 Dems invited to sip wine and nosh on calorically correct appetizers with the arm-twister-in-chief.

The seat on the 10th Circuit has been vacant for nearly a year. When one of the judges, Michael McConnell, resigned to take a lucrative post at Stanford Law School last summer, Matheson — Rhodes Scholar, law school professor and dean — let the White House know right away he wanted the job. For nearly a year, there was no action.

Liberal groups have been complaining for months about the glacial pace of Obama’s judicial nominations — a predicament they blame not solely on obstructionist Republicans, but on Obama’s own team of incompetent, indecisive foot-draggers who put the issue at the bottom of their priority list. (It’s worth noting that Utah GOP Sen. Orrin Hatch supports Matheson’s candidacy.)

As the National Law Journal pointed out at the beginning of this year, “the Obama administration has been slower than the Bush administration was in sending judicial nominations to the Senate, submitting 12 circuit nominations last year compared with 28 for Bush in 2001. The White House last named a circuit nominee on Nov. 4.”

Now, out of nowhere, comes the announcement of Matheson’s nomination — in the heat of White House vote-grubbing to salvage the Democrats’ government health care designs? To quote Dana Carvey’s old Church Lady character on “Saturday Night Live”: How conveeenient.

Let us consider the possibility, for a brief moment, that this is all merely coincidence. Is the White House so fantastically blind and tone-deaf that it failed to detect the blood-red flags and blaring alarm bells that Scott Matheson’s judicial nomination would raise coming on the very day Obama was wooing his brother? Incorrigibly corrupt or incorrigibly stupid. Take your pick.

The perception of a judgeship-for-Obamacare-vote deal is, of course, horribly unfair to Matheson, who seems more than qualified for the position. But full blame for creating that unmistakable perception lies squarely at the feet of the rank opportunists in the White House, whose timing is worse than a broken metronome.

This debacle comes on the heels of damning disclosures about other possible White House bribery. Democratic Rep. Joe Sestak in Pennsylvania admitted to veteran Philly newsman Larry Kane that Team Obama dangled a “high-ranking” position in the administration if he dropped out of the Senate race and left incumbent Republican-turned-Democratic Sen. Arlen Specter alone.

In Colorado, the Denver Post reported last fall that Deputy White House Chief of Staff Jim Messina “offered specific suggestions” for an Obama administration job to far-left Democrat Andrew Romanoff if he withdrew his challenge to White House-backed incumbent Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet.

And earlier this month, The Washington Times noted that Mary Patrice Brown, the person assigned by the Justice Department to oversee an internal investigation into the shady dismissal of the New Black Panther Party voter intimidation cases, is now “the leading candidate for a federal judgeship — for which she is being vetted by some of the same offices she supposedly is investigating.”

So, wherever did we get the impression that pay-for-play is the Obama way? Somewhere, Chicago corruptocrat Rod Blagojevich — who wanted to play, but didn’t get paid — is laughing bitterly.

Oba-Kabuki: A Box-Office Bomb
by Michelle Malkin

The Oba-Kabuki health care show at Blair House kicked off with a big lie on Thursday morning — and it all went downhill from there. The taxpayer-funded infomercial backfired by exposing the president’s thin skin, the Democrats’ naked disingenuousness and the ruling majority’s allergies to political and policy realities.

Responding to Sen. Lamar Alexander’s opening call for Democrats to renounce parliamentary tactics designed to limit debate, circumvent filibusters and lower the threshold for passage of health care reform to a simple 51-vote majority, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid sputtered indignantly: “No one’s talking about reconciliation!” Everybody and their mother has been invoking the “R” word on Capitol Hill, starting with Reid.

In a letter on Feb. 16, four Democratic senators pushed Reid to adopt the procedure, normally reserved for budget matters. A few days later, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs discussed the option. Then Reid himself talked up reconciliation on a Nevada public affairs show as an option to ram the government health care takeover through in the next 60 days.

According to The Hill, Reid said that “congressional Democrats would likely opt for a procedural tactic in the Senate allowing the upper chamber to make final changes to its health care bill with only a simple majority of senators, instead of the 60 it takes to normally end a filibuster.” A few days after that, Reid snapped that Republicans “should stop crying” about the abrogation of Senate minority rights, since the GOP had used the reconciliation process in the past.

So, the cleanest, most ethical holier-than-thou Congress ever is now defending the unprecedented adoption of ram-down rules for a radical, multitrillion-dollar program to usurp one-seventh of the economy on the grounds of “two wrongs make it right”? Hope and change, baby.

For his part, President Obama responded with one part pique and two parts diffidence. After the summit lunch break, Republicans pushed the reconciliation issue again in the face of the Democrats’ refusal to disavow the short-circuiting of the deliberative process. “The American people,” an annoyed Obama asserted, “are not all that interested in procedures inside the Senate.” Oh, really? A new USA Today/Gallup poll reports that 52 percent of Americans oppose using the procedural maneuver to pass the health care bill in the Senate.

The survey also showed that Americans oppose Demcare-style health care “reform” by 49 percent to 42 percent — with those “strongly” opposed outnumbering those “strongly” in favor by 23 percent to 11 percent. Obama’s best and brightest team of Chicago strategists, new-media gurus and communications specialists still hasn’t figured it out: Voters are as fed up with the corrupt process in Washington as they are with the White House’s overreaching policies. It’s both, stupid.

When he wasn’t cutting off Republicans who stuck to budget specifics and cited legislative page numbers and language instead of treacly, sob-story anecdotes involving dentures and gallstones, Obama was filibustering the talk-a-thon away by invoking his daughters, rambling on about auto insurance and sniping at former GOP presidential rival John McCain. “We’re not campaigning anymore,” lectured the perpetual campaigner-in-chief.

After ostentatiously disputing the GOP’s claims that health care premiums would rise under his plan, Obama walked it back. Confronted with more GOP pushback on the failure of Demcare to control costs, Obama told GOP Rep. Paul Ryan that he’d rather not “get bogged down in numbers.” Not numbers that he couldn’t cook on the spot without staff consultation, anyway.

Obama and the Democrats labored mightily to create the illusion of almost-there bipartisanship by repeatedly telling disagreeing Republicans that “we don’t disagree” and “there’s not a lot of difference” between us. But the dogs weren’t riding the ponies in this show.

This was a set-up from the start. The “we’re so close” mantra is the rhetorical wedge the White House will use to blame Republicans for fatal obstructionism, while whitewashing festering opposition from both pro-life Democrats who oppose the government funding of abortion services still in the plan and left-wing progressives in the House who are clinging to a full, unadulterated public option.

While Republicans came off well, the six-hour blowhard-fest was a monumental waste of time. Obamacare Theater tied up GOP energy and resources as the White House readies its “Plan B” (expanding government health care coverage, just at a slower pace) and Democratic leaders prep their reconciliation ram-down for early next week. This Washington box-office bomb is a prelude to much bigger legislative horrors still to come. Don’t you love farce?

Corruptocrat Eric Holder’s National Security Cover-Up
by Michelle Malkin

The White House wants to play Transparency Olympics with the Tea Party movement. President Obama’s Chief Technology Officer Andrew McLaughlin dared Tea Party activists and conservatives last week to “push the administration to make its policies more open” and make it a “political competition … to see who can be more radical in their openness,” The Hill reported. So, let’s start by knocking down Attorney General Eric Holder’s national security stonewall at the Department of Justice, shall we? Let the sun shine in.

For more than a year, I’ve been writing about the looming national security and conflict-of-interest problems posed by Holder’s status as a former partner at the prestigious law firm Covington and Burling. The company currently represents or has provided pro bono representation and sob-story media-relations campaigns in the past to more than a dozen Gitmo detainees from Yemen who are seeking civilian trials on American soil.

The firm wasn’t just a bit player. It led the charge, contributing more than 3,000 hours to Gitmo litigation in 2007, according to The American Lawyer. At least one known Covington big shot and fellow former Clintonite, Lanny Breuer, now works for Holder as head of the DOJ’s criminal division. Though he himself did not participate in the detainee cases, Holder’s celebrity undoubtedly boosted company-wide prestige.

How many of Holder’s former colleagues and associates are now on the DOJ payroll? How many like them, who worked at other law firms or for left-wing lobbying groups, now inhabit DOJ offices? How many of them have been allowed to work on government terrorism cases related to their past crusades for al-Qaida-tied clients? How many have had to recuse themselves — and have those recusals been full and forthcoming? How can the public judge whether these lawyers are representing America’s best interests — or those of the jihadis?

GOP Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa has been trying to get answers. DOJ information suppressors have snubbed him repeatedly. As the Washington Examiner’s Byron York reported on Friday, Holder has now acknowledged that “at least” nine Obama appointees in the Justice Department “have represented or advocated for terrorist detainees before joining the Justice Department.” But the tight-lipped, taxpayer-funded litigators at the agency won’t name names or cough up any relevant details.

Grassley asked for “the names of political appointees in the Department who represented detainees (or) worked for organizations advocating on behalf of detainees … the cases or projects that these appointees worked on with respect to detainees prior to joining the Justice Department … and the cases or projects relating to detainees that they have worked on since joining the Justice Department. …” Beyond two DOJ appointees whose work for jihadi defendants had already been made public, Holder gave up nothing. Zip. Zilch.

It’s not even clear that the Gitmo Nine are the end of the line. The list is not a comprehensive tally of DOJ appointees, Holder told Grassley and other GOP senators who pressed for public disclosure. Why not? What are they trying to hide? Who are they trying to spare?

Americans have a right to know whether they are subsidizing jihadi sympathizers, and whether their Justice Department is now a sanctuary for human rights transnationalists and little terrorists’ helpers in the mold of Lynne Stewart, who was convicted of abetting Muslim terrorist mastermind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and spreading messages inciting violence on his behalf while representing him.

Americans have a right to know whether Holder — who put political interests ahead of security interests at the Clinton Justice Department in both the Marc Rich pardon scandal and the Puerto Rican FALN terrorist debacle — has made hiring decisions that provide for the common defense and promote the general welfare.

Tellingly, Holder has treated the GOP’s national security concerns dismissively. He’s hoping his nonresponsive blow-off of Grassley’s request will die on the vine. And just as he used his past lapses in judgment during the Clinton era to argue that they made him more qualified for the job he holds now, Holder argues that the phantom jihadi lawyers on the DOJ payroll are a good thing for the country, so we should just shut up:

“A prosecutor of white-collar fraud cases may have previously represented defendants in such cases. This familiarity with and experience in the relevant area of law redounds to the government’s benefit.”

As usual, Holder puts ordinary civilian crimes on the same footing as terrorism plots and acts of war against our country. But why not let the people decide for themselves whether his staff decisions redound to their benefit? “The American people have the right to information about their government’s activities,” Holder himself said in a press release trumpeting new freedom of information rules last year. Put up or shut up, Mr. Attorney General.

The Other Stupid Things John Brennan Said
by Michelle Malkin

It’s bad enough that John Brennan, President Obama’s national security deputy, thinks Gitmo jihadi recidivism is “not that bad.” But in his talk last week with Islamic law students at New York University, Brennan made even more reckless comments about our counterterrorism programs while pandering to one of the worst Muslim grievance-mongers and sharia peddlers in America.

During the question-and-answer session, Brennan welcomed a question from Omar Shahin. He identified himself as the head of the “North American Imams Federation.” What he didn’t mention was his role as the chief ringleader of the infamous flying imams. You remember them: They were the six Muslim clerics whose suspicious behavior — provocatively shouting “Allahu Akbar!” before boarding the plane, fanning out in the cabin before take-off, refusing to sit in their assigned seats, requesting seat-belt extenders, which they placed on the floor — led to their removal by a U.S. Airways crew in 2006.

In coordination with the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Shahin and his radical delegation attempted to shake down the airline with a discrimination lawsuit and bully the citizen “John Does” who flagged the imams’ security-undermining behavior. CAIR mouthpiece Ibrahim Hooper blasted “anti-Muslim hysteria” by those who saw something and said something about the imams’ in-flight shenanigans. Shahin ranted in a teleconference strategy session in 2007 that, indeed, he and his cohorts were spoiling for the incident and planning to engineer “many, many cases” to sabotage airline security efforts.

As head of the Islamic Center of Tucson in Arizona (home to past jihadi dry-run plotters), Shahin preached that his followers must put Islamic sharia law above Western laws. He told the Arizona Republic that he doubted Muslims were behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks, concluding: “All of these, they make it up.” Brennan didn’t appear to know who Shahin was. Somebody around him should have briefed him. Shahin’s involvement in Hamas-linked charities and radical Wahhabi “youth groups” has earned the Jordanian-born naturalized citizen increased FBI scrutiny over the years.

Instead, Brennan treated him as just another innocent Muslim with “reasonable” concerns about the government. “We came to this country to enjoy freedom,” Shahin began with faux, flag-waving emotion. “We feel that since September 11, we aren’t enjoying these values anymore. … Also, we feel that there’s a big lack of trust between Muslims’ community and our government. … My question: Is there anything being done by our government to rebuild this trust?”

Instead of countering the narrative, exposing Shahin’s true intentions and vigorously defending America’s homeland security apparatus, Brennan dutifully genuflected to the gods of political correctness. Obama, he told the militant 9/11 inside-job theorist and jihad white-washer, is “determined to put America on a strong course.”

No, not a “strong course” that includes national security profiling of Islamic radicals pretending they care about our country’s best interests. By “strong course,” Brennan assured Shahin, he meant a course toward assuaging the civil rights groups who have objected to every security program at airports, borders, train stations and visa offices for the past nine years.

Brennan told Shahin that the post-9/11 response of the Bush administration was a “reaction some people might say was over the top in some areas” (insert indignant grievance-monger nodding and mmm-hmming here), and that “in an overabundance of caution, (we) implemented a number of security measures and activities that upon reflection now we look back, after the heat of the battle has died down a bit, we say they were excessive, OK.”

It gets worse: Brennan then went on to decry the “ignorant feelings” of Americans outraged at the jihadi attacks on American soil. And then he told Shahin and the audience of Muslim students that he “was very concerned after the attack in Fort Hood as well as the December 25 attack that all of sudden there were people who went back into this fearful position that lashed out not thinking through what was reasonable and appropriate.”

The Fort Hood jihadist slaughtered 14 innocent soldiers and an unborn baby after an Army career of openly threatening the lives of our soldiers, and Brennan is wringing his hands about the rest of us “lashing out” over government incompetence. He believes our true sin is not in the systemic underreacting by the military, homeland security, intel and White House officials in charge, but in the “overreacting” of the American public.

With clueless capitulationists like Brennan in charge of our safety, who needs enemies?

John Murtha: Requiem for a Corruptocrat
by Michelle Malkin

We are not supposed to speak ill of the dead. But those whom the deceased viciously smeared and humiliated deserve to be defended. Entrenched Democratic Rep. John Murtha passed away on Feb. 8 after a botched gallbladder surgery. He has been hailed as a “military advocate” (Associated Press) and “one of the greatest patriots ever to serve in Congress” (former Democratic Rep. Harold Ford Jr.). These obsequious obituaries leave out inconvenient truths:

John “Jack” Murtha was an unrepentant smear merchant and corruptocrat to the bitter end.

In May 2006, during an MSNBC TV show appearance that Marines and their families will never forget or forgive, Murtha accused U.S. troops of wantonly killing some two dozen civilians, including children, in the terrorist stronghold of Haditha, Iraq. Bellowed Murtha: “Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood.” Murtha publicly indicted the Marines before military investigations had been completed. His remarks opened military-bashing floodgates around the world.

In the wake of Murtha’s reckless blabbing, MSNBC executioner Keith Olbermann accused the Haditha Marines of “willful targeted brutality.” The Nation magazine claimed that “members of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment perpetrated a massacre.” The New York Times dubbed Haditha the “defining atrocity” of the Iraq war. International papers piled on with Vietnam-era “My Lai” allusions. Murtha cold-bloodedly sat back and enjoyed the ride while the Marines were left twisting in the wind.

By 2008, seven of the Marines charged in the incident had been exonerated or had charges against them dropped. Lt. Andrew Grayson was acquitted. Lance Cpl. Stephen Tatum, Capt. Lucas McConnell, Lance Cpl. Justin Sharratt, Sgt. Sanick Dela Cruz and Lt. Col. Jeffrey Chessani all had their cases dismissed. Sgt. Frank Wuterich, the last of the Marines facing charges, awaits a long, dragged-out trial this year.

Murtha, the so-called “military advocate,” went to his deathbed refusing to apologize or retract the attacks on the Haditha Marines (several of whom unsuccessfully sued him for libel to restore their honor). Decent people would call this intransigent treachery. Murtha’s friends apparently consider it great patriotism.

The ego-bloated, big-mouthed lawmaker treated his own constituents with trademark contempt. During his last congressional campaign, he mocked voters in his district as bigots. “There’s no question that western Pennsylvania is a racist area,” he told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Responding to mounting criticism on both sides of the aisle about his logrolling orgies on the Hill, he sniffed: “If I’m corrupt, it’s because I take care of my district.”

First, foremost and forever, Jack Murtha took care of Jack Murtha. The glowing encomiums from his liberal colleagues have glossed over the 19-term Democrat’s defining moment of political self-service. In 1980, Murtha was an unindicted co-conspirator in a massive bribery probe — in which undercover FBI agents videotaped Murtha entertaining a $50,000 bribe from agents posing as emissaries for Arab sheiks trying to enter our country illegally. From transcripts of those conversations published by the late newspaper columnist Jack Anderson, Murtha’s true colors shined:

“I want to deal with you guys awhile before I make any transactions at all, period. … After we’ve done some business, well, then I might change my mind. …”

“I’m going to tell you this. If anybody can do it — I’m not B.S.-ing you fellows — I can get it done my way,” he boasted. “There’s no question about it.”

Murtha worried not about his integrity or how his constituents might be harmed, but about getting ratted out:

“All at once,” he said, “some dumb (expletive deleted) would go start talking eight years from now about this whole thing and say (expletive deleted), this happened. Then in order to get immunity so he doesn’t go to jail, he starts talking and fingering people. So the (S.O.B.) falls apart.”

“You give us the banks where you want the money deposited,” offered one of the bagmen.

“All right,” agreed Murtha. “How much money we talking about?”

“Well, you tell me.”

By the time of his death, Murtha had been caught intervening on behalf of a law-breaking Pennsylvania company convicted of selling military equipment parts illegally overseas; had steered unprecedented billions in federal earmarks to friends, family and donors; had earned multiple “most corrupt in Congress” designations from both the left-leaning Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the right-leaning Judicial Watch; and had remained intimately tied to PMA Group, a former lobbying firm under federal investigation, and Kuchera Industries, a defense contractor also under federal investigation.

From his character assassination of innocents to his insatiable appetite for pork and power, Jack Murtha embodied everything that is wrong with Washington. If only the culture of corruption he serviced could be buried six feet under with him.