Obama’s Patriotism

By Lauri B. Regan | June 20, 2012 | American Thinker

 Last week, I attended a luncheon hosted by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, at which I sat next to former Navy SEAL, Leif Babin.  Among Leif’s numerous and impressive accomplishments is his completion of three tours in Iraq, earning a Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, and a Purple Heart.  Not only was I proud to have an opportunity to talk with one of our nation’s heroes, but I was in awe of his bravery, candor, and pride in serving our great country.  Leif is a true patriot.

Upon my return to my office, I read of the repulsive comments of liberal radio show host Bill Press, calling the national anthem “stupid” and stating, “I’m embarrassed, I’m embarrassed every time I hear it.”  This abhorrent garbage followed on the heels of the news of a New York City elementary school principal who prohibited kindergarteners from singing “God Bless the USA” at their graduation ceremony, replacing it with Justin Bieber’s “Baby.”  After drawing national attention, the Bieber song was also dropped from the event, but the NYC Schools chancellor refused to reinstate the singing of “USA,” which includes the following lyrics:

Leftwing Extremists Bully and Heckle Kindergarteners for Singing Patriotic Song (God Bless the USA) [Video]

Bob Turner Stands with Kids as Libs Heckle Them for Singing Lee Greenwood Song

By Rush Limbaugh | June 19, 2012 | RushLimbaugh.com

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Bob Turner was the president of Multimedia, which was a company that syndicated TV programs, and they syndicated mine in 1992 through 1996. Bob Turner was the president, and it was Bob Turner that chased Roger Ailes and me down one night at 21 with the idea of doing a show. He was a great guy. He is a great guy. And he has the perfect temperament. I mean, the guy knew what he was getting into. Almost. (laughing) He sized it up real quickly, and he was as loyal as the day is long.

Victor Davis Hanson: The Liberal Super Nova

By Victor Davis Hanson | June 11, 2012 | PJ Media

Two parties, left and right, are central to good consensual government — one the perennial check on the other, both within the general boundaries of constitutional free-market capitalism.

Yet the hard-Left takeover of the Democratic Party has meant that there is no longer a credible balance in our system, as almost all the tenets of contemporary left-wing ideology are blowing up, imploding super nova style — unsustainable ideas that are contrary to human nature and demand coercion for their implementation, given that they are increasingly anti-democratic and have to be implemented from high by an elite technocracy whether in Brussels, Sacramento, or Washington.

Far too much is always seen as not enough: Greeks are angry that there was too much “austerity” and not enough of the old borrow and spend; Obama is blamed for only borrowing $5 trillion for too “little” stimulus; Democrats threaten to withhold from the community-organizer Obama because he was not hard enough on “fat cats” and the capitalist state; in California, a 10.3% income tax is too low, not too high. When the remedy is seen worse than the disease, then the patient is indeed terminal.

Let me do a brief survey of the fissuring liberal world in which we live:

Britain’s Already Dead, It Just Hasn’t Been Buried Yet

By Kyle Smith | June 2, 2012 | PJ Media

Don’t be fooled by the pomp of the Queen’s royal Diamond Jubilee flotilla this weekend. Britain is a country rotting from the inside.

Don’t be fooled by the pomp and dazzle of the Queen’s royal Diamond Jubilee flotilla easing past the tourists, celebrity-spotters, and pickpockets on the Thames. Britain is a country rotting from the inside, the first nation on earth that elected to destroy its culture with political correctness.

Asks British columnist Rod Liddle, “Who are the people who have made Britain what it is today, the ones who ensured that we became a limp-wristed and decrepit, post-imperial satrapy of incompetence, sanctimony, self-obsession and self-loathing?”

Who indeed? (By limp-wristed, Liddle means lacking in conviction, not gay). The short answer is the new aristocracy, the bien pensant, well-shod, culturally aloof types who watch the BBC, read The Guardian, and vote to nudge the country ever farther along its current trajectory, which has not even slightly been altered by the return of a Conservative to the premiership. Against the wishes of the average citizen, Britain has a government that is simultaneously abdicating its core functions and pretending to take responsibility for other duties for which it is spectacularly ill-suited. It has abandoned a proud, concrete culture in pursuit of a hazy dream of a transnational ideal. The people’s response has been to fume lightly and do nothing, because they’re British and expect things to be bad and get worse.

Obama’s Third-Party History [Audio]

By Stanley Kurtz | June 7, 2012 | National Review

New documents shed new light on his ties to a leftist party in the 1990s.

Barack Obama campaigns for the Illinois state senate in the mid-1990s

Obama Caught Lying Again: He Was a Member of ‘New Party,’ Says Kurtz

By Joel B. Pollak | June 7, 2012 | Breitbart News

Barack Obama was, in fact, a member of the socialist New Party in the 1990s and sought its endorsement for the Illinois senate–contrary to the misrepresentations of Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008, and in spite of the efforts of Politico’s Ben Smith to quash the story. Stanley Kurtz, author of Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism (2010), has released new “smoking gun” evidence at National Review Online. It is evidence that the mainstream media can no longer ignore–and Obama can no longer deny.

Glenn Beck: Why are leftists complaining about Obama? [Video]

By Staff Report | June 1, 2012 | GlennBeck.com

[…]

“If you are a Marxist, if you are a revolutionary, if you’re a communist, really, if you’re an anarchist, if you’re an extreme leftist, if you’re somebody who doesn’t like the system as it is on the left, what more could this President do for you,” he asked.

[…]

Just a quick look at President Obama’s first three years reveals he has:

Walker’s Protection of WI Public Employee Rights Pays Huge Dividends

By John Nolte | May 311, 2012 | Breitbart News

It’s one of the greatest scams in the history left-wing scams, and it goes a little something like this: Taxpayers of all political stripes pay the salaries of public employees, public employees are forced to join public unions, public unions garnish dues from members and then use those dues to fund Democrat candidates to the tunes of hundreds of millions of dollars.

What a racket.

In other words, against our will, you and I are helping to fund Democrat campaigns. But so are those public employees forced into unions.

Breitbart News: Media Ties Romney to Trump, Ignores Obama-Sharpton Connection

By John Nolte | May 29, 2012 | Breitbart News

As I mentioned in my piece this morning examining the organized narrative the media built over the weekend to aid Obama and damage Romney, the primary push was going to be to tie Romney to Donald Trump. Because Trump is still pushing the discredited “birther” conspiracy surrounding Obama’s place of birth, the corrupt media feels it can hurt our likely GOP nominee by either tying him to a “racist extremist” or by threatening him with this distraction until he backs down and repudiates Trump.

Waking the Sleeping Giant: Book Offers Solutions to Put Liberals on Defense in Politics and Culture

By Tony Lee | May 24, 2012 | Breitbart News

The late Andrew Breitbart knew that in order to defeat the left,  Americans had to first take back the cultural institutions used by the left to advance liberalism.

In their new book, Waking The Sleeping Giant: How Mainstream Americans Can Beat Liberals At Their Own Game, authors Timothy Daughtry and Gary Casselman offer everyday “mainstream” Americans a valuable and important playbook for taking back the broader culture.

The Left’s National Vote Fraud Strategy Exposed

By James Simpson | May 8, 2012 | Accuracy in Media

This report reveals the Left’s vote fraud strategy for the 2012 elections. Like a KGB operation, it is thorough, multi-faceted and redundant. It has overt and covert, illegal and legal elements, the latter of which are designed, at least in part, to facilitate illegal activities later. It is a deliberate, premeditated, comprehensive plan to win the 2012 presidential election at all costs, and is in keeping with the organizational methods, associations and ethics of the Community-Organizer-in-Chief, Barack Obama.

The Left seeks fundamental structural change to our entire form of government. In keeping with their amoral, means-justifies-ends philosophy, they will register any voters, dead or alive, legal or illegal, who will then vote as many times as possible, in order to establish a “permanent progressive majority.” As two New York Democrats recently caught in a vote fraud scandal told police, “voter fraud is an accepted way of winning elections…”

Low income individuals are the perfect dupes for this strategy. An expanding welfare state makes them increasingly dependent on government benefits, a development that guarantees their vote for liberal-left candidates. At the same time, people with marginal attachment to society may be less inclined to report illegal activity at the polls—or actually participate. The “victim” narrative promoted in popular culture and press may even encourage such behavior. Meanwhile, a growing tax burden and public debt suck private enterprise dry—pushing ever more people onto the dole.

Politicians of both parties are not above engaging in vote fraud. But this kind of corruption is relegated to individual campaigns or areas where corrupt political establishments have been able to develop unchallenged. It is not a systematic component of overall national strategy, as it is with the Left.

This strategy has been under development for decades. They have constructed an entire industry devoted to this task and pursue a multifaceted strategy to accomplish it:

1. Swamp election officials with overwhelming numbers of registrations at the last possible minute, a huge proportion of which are deliberately fraudulent, in order to create systematic chaos. This accomplishes numerous goals:

• Makes verification of registrations difficult, given the small size and limited budgets of state and local election offices.
• Provides multiple opportunities for vote fraud.
• Throws the entire voting process into question, providing pretext for lawsuits where concessions may be obtained from election officials.
• When election officials challenge registrations, they are accused of “voter suppression.” This in turn serves complementary goals:
  • Charge of “voter suppression” reinforces the Left’s narrative about America as an oppressive, “racist” country.
  • Publicity and lawsuits intimidate election officials, who settle on terms favorable to the Left.

2. Activists sue state authorities for “voter suppression,” creating further chaos and pressuring them to become de facto taxpayer-funded voter registration operations;

3. Eric Holder’s Justice Department tacitly supports voter intimidation tactics, sues states and backs private lawsuits, and resists reform as “voter suppression.”

4. Leftist echo chamber discredits allegations of vote fraud, supports “suppression” theme, and promotes advantageous legislation.

The ultimate goal is a systematized, taxpayer-funded voting machinery that will guarantee maximum participation from the Left’s voting demographic while undermining the ability to manage elections and prevent fraud.

The ACORN Swamping Method

Key to understanding the Left’s vote-fraud strategy is the community organizing group ACORN. ACORN has become synonymous with corruption, complicity in the subprime mortgage crisis and especially vote fraud.

ACORN and its voter registration arm, Project Vote, hire marginal and unskilled workers at very low rates and use incentive bonuses or quotas to encourage them to collect as many voter registrations as possible. The resulting flood of registrations are fraught with duplicates, errors and omissions, and a large number are overtly fraudulent, including names like “Donald Duck,” “Mickey Mouse,” “Tony Romo” of the Dallas Cowboys, etc.[2] According to MatthewVadum, the senior editor at Capital Research Center, a total of 400,000 bogus ACORN registrations were thrown out in 2008 alone.

ACORN was supposedly disbanded in 2010 but resurrected itself under a slew of new names. Former ACORN President Bertha Lewis bragged that they created “…18 bulletproof community-organizing Frankensteins…” These are reproduced in the table below. Most of these groups occupy former ACORN offices, many with the same staff.

ACORN is directly connected to Obama and the Democratic Party. Counsel to The Advance Group, a strategic planning company, is Michael Gaspard, Patrick Gaspard’s brother. Patrick is currently the DNC’s executive director and President Obama’s former political director. He has worked for ACORN, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the Working Families Party, a descendant of the ACORN-founded New Party which Barack Obama joined in 1996. Obama has bragged of “fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career.”

ACORN’s former deputy regional director, Amy Busefink was convicted in 2010 of vote fraud stemming from a 2008 Nevada case. Judicial Watch found that, “while under criminal indictment in Nevada… [Busefink] managed an online program for Project Vote’s 2010 Colorado campaign, the ultimate goal of which is to allow people without a driver’s license or state identification to register to vote online.” Busefink is now national field director for Project Vote.

Barack Obama established his organizing bona fides with Project Vote in 1992, when he registered 150,000 Illinois voters.

Zach Polett (courtesy Anita MonCrief)

Project Vote was created and run for years by Zach Polett, who bragged that he trained Barack Obama in 1992 and said of Obama, “ACORN produces leaders.” Polett is listed in Manta.com as president of Voting for America, one of Project Vote’s former names, although his name is not on Project Vote’s website. Calls to that listing roll into a voice mail identifying the organizations as “CSI.” Polett’s extension is #3. CSI is the acronym for Citizens Services Inc., another supposedly defunct ACORN group that was used to hide over $800,000 paid by candidate Obama to ACORN in 2008.

This kind of duplicitous activity reflects a deliberate methodology. ACORN is a criminal organization.

The Cloward Piven Strategy

ACORN is the face of vote fraud, but its intellectual foundation is the Cloward Piven Strategy. Sociology professors Richard Cloward (Columbia University) and Frances Fox Piven (CUNY) were founding members of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Cloward died in 2001 but Piven lives on.

Richard Cloward

In 1966 Cloward and Piven penned an article for The Nation magazine titled “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty.” They posited that if the poor were organized into street armies to demand all welfare benefits available to them, they could overwhelm and crash the system.

It became known as the “Cloward-Piven Strategy,” and is credited with expanding welfare rolls 151 percent between 1965 and 1974 and bringing New York City to the brink of bankruptcy in 1975.

The Issue is Never the Issue

The Left’s solution to everything is socialism, although they are usually careful not to name it, instead identifying issues that seemingly only their policies can redress. But “the issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution” as David Horowitz has explained. The “issues” are mere distractions.

Cloward and Piven initially claimed to be agitating for a “guaranteed national income.” Such a policy is plainly unsustainable; however, it would institutionalize their strategy, creating an enormous, permanent drag on the whole economy precipitating an even larger crash later on. Cloward and Piven’s true goal was to find any instrument to institutionalize their orchestrated anarchy, and poor people were the tool.

Wade Rathke, a veteran of those early efforts, was mentored by Cloward and Piven. Rathke and other radicals created a new organization, ACORN,and sought ways to further extend the Strategy.

White House ACORN photo: Bill Clinton center; Wade Rathke third to his left; Zach Polett in lower left-hand corner. Courtesy Anita MonCrief

With passage of the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, ACORN and other activist groups got in the housing business. They began pushing banks to offer high-risk mortgage loans to low/no income borrowers. The Clinton administration aggressively ramped up the effort. To encourage lenders and investors, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac underwrote the risk. Since its passage, CRA lending has exceeded $6 trillion.[ii] The mortgage crisis was Cloward-Piven on steroids.[2]

Meanwhile, Cloward and Piven had not been idle. In 1982 they created the Human Service Employees Registration and Voter Education Fund (Human SERVE) to build political momentum for a law that would turn state motor vehicle and welfare agencies into low-income voter registration offices.

National Voter Registration Act

Motor Voter Signing Ceremony – Cloward in light grey suit, Piven in green. Source: the White House

Throughout the 1980s, Human SERVE field-tested legal and political strategies to promote this plan. The fruits of its labor were finally realized with “Motor Voter,” the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA), signed into law with Cloward and Piven standing directly behind President Clinton.

The NVRA requires motor vehicle, military recruiting, public assistance and other state and local offices to offer voter-registration services.

The NVRA has become a beacon for vote fraud. Its minimal verification requirements opened the door to ACORN-style massive voter registration fraud, and in the confusion provide blanket opportunities for vote fraud.

Voter ID laws have become critically important. According to a Pew report, approximately 24 million or 12.5 percent of voter registrations nationally are either invalid or inaccurate, including about 1.8 million deceased individuals, and 2.75 million with multiple-state registrations.

And while the NRVA has provisions for purging the rolls in Section 8, they require a complex, process spanning multiple election cycles. In some cases, the NRVA replaced better mechanisms already in use. Many states have simply not followed these procedures with any regularity. The Left ignores all this, focusing on enforcing NRVA’s Section 7.

Section 7 Lawsuits

While capitalizing on the vote fraud swamping strategy enabled by the NVRA, ACORN, Project Vote and others sue states that don’t aggressively execute the voter registration activities required by Section 7 of the law. The narrative is always “voter suppression,” and settlements have forced state agencies to become de facto low income voter registration drives.

Not only must states develop, maintain and execute plans for assuring comprehensive registration, they are forced to report regularly to ACORN lawyers. A 2009 settlement between ACORN and Missouri’s Department of Social Services is illustrative. DSS must:

• Create an NVRA State Coordinator position
• Designate an NVRA Site Coordinator for Family Support Division offices
• Keep detailed records of client visits and registration activities
• Immediately send a letter offering registration to any individual who “may not have been given the opportunity to register…”
• Report detailed compliance data to plaintiff lawyers every month.
• State coordinator’s performance measured by NVRA compliance
• ACORN will receive $450,000 in settlement.

In these settlements, ACORN effectively assumes an executive role over state agencies. Notably, there is no corollary requirement to ascertain the legality of registrations or to clean up the rolls.

Project Vote has taken recent actions against Louisiana, Ohio, Indiana, Georgia, and New Mexico. They just announced their intention to sue Pennsylvania.

Project Vote formed agreements with Colorado in 2008 and 2010. According to Judicial Watch, after Project Vote’s involvement “the percentage of invalid voter registration forms from Colorado public assistance agencies was four times the national average.”

Though largely unnoticed until now, this litigation tactic has been used since the 1980s, when Human SERVE’s legal allies sued state authorities for settlements creating localized versions of Motor Voter.

While capitalizing on the vote swamping strategy enabled by Motor Voter, ACORN and Project Vote picked up the torch for SERVE, which closed its doors in 2000. Frances Fox Piven serves today on Project Vote’s Board of Directors. Significantly, President Obama has named the voter registration initiative of his reelection effort “Project Vote.”

Piven also has many other connections to Obama.  She was a founding member of Progressives for Obama. Her Democratic Socialists of America bragged that it was responsible for the success of Obama’s “ground game” in 2008. Piven was one of 130 founding members of the radical left Campaign for America’s Future. Many CAF members also sit on the board of the Apollo Alliance, the executor of Obama’s “Green” jobs initiative.

DOJ and ACORN Team Up for 2012

Judicial Watch obtained several documents showing coordination between DOJ, Project Vote and the White House.[i] In one email, Project Vote demanded action on NVRA cases. Less than a month later, DOJ sued Rhode Island for NVRA noncompliance. Similarly, DOJ’s Louisiana NVRA suit followed Project Vote’s by a few months. Project Vote is promoting prospective employees for DOJ’s Voting Rights section.

Voting Rights Act of 1965

The VRA outlawed poll taxes and literacy tests for voting. Section 5 requires certain states and other political subdivisions to obtain “preclearance,” or permission, from either DOJ or the U.S. District Court in Washington, DC, on any change affecting voting. Currently, preclearance states covered in whole or in part include: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas and Virginia. Set in 1982 to expire in 2007, Congress extended the VRA for another 25 years in 2006.

The VRA has come into sharp focus this year as the Holder administration has used VRA preclearance requirements to stall or prevent voter ID laws from being enacted. Non-preclearance states have faced stiff court challenges from other leftist groups.

Alabama – Alabama’s new photo ID law has a 2014 effective date. Alabama has not yet applied for pre-clearance.

Arizona – 9^th Circuit upheld ID requirement of new law; struck requirement that voter prove citizenship.

Mississippi – A Voter ID amendment was approved by voters with a 62 percent margin in 2011. A bill to implement the amendment passed April 10, 2012. Requires preclearance. No word yet from Justice.

South Carolina – DOJ denied pre-clearance for new ID law in December 2011. State filed for reconsideration.

Texas – DOJ denied pre-clearance for new ID law. Texas filed suit with three-judge panel seeking pre-clearance; DOJ asked court to postpone trial.

Wisconsin – State judge ruled Wisconsin’s voter ID law unconstitutional (read the opinion). State will appeal.

The Wisconsin case is an example of independent groups working to sabotage reform efforts. In a suit brought by the League of Women Voters, the NAACP and others, the judge found ID laws “unconstitutional to the extent they serve as a condition for voting at the polls.” This was a bizarre ruling. Wisconsin’s Constitution clearly allows mechanisms to establish voter eligibility.

Despite the Left’s best efforts, voter ID laws have been proposed this year in 32 states.

A Personal Testimony

J. Christian Adams is a former DOJ election lawyer who worked on the Philadelphia Black Panther voter intimidation case. He resigned in protest of Eric Holder’s race-based application of the law. According to Adams’ new book, Injustice, Eric Holder became directly involved in the Black Panther case. Mr. Adams agreed to be interviewed for this report. Some highlights:

Read the full article here.

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The Forwardism Disease [Video]

By Daniel Greenfield | May 01, 2012 | Sultan Knish

The Obama slogan for 2012 is in and it’s “Forward”, which is a compact version of that old classic, “Don’t change horses in the middle of a stream” that every incumbent is forced to run on sooner or later. Forward implies that there’s no alternative but to go backward, which is a place that no right-thinking person wants to go.

The left has always been enamored of “Forwardism” or “Progressivism” which mean much the same thing. Before MSNBC had Lean Forward, Mao had the Great Leap Forward which killed some 40 million people, far more people than MSNBC can ever dream of tuning in to their programs.

When Lenin wanted to launch his own newspaper, he called it, “Vperod” or Forward. The name still lingers on among the left and appears on the mastheads of newspapers across the world. It’s Vorwarts in Germany, Voorwarts in the Netherlands and Ila al-Amam in the Arab world. Back in New York it’s The Forward, the venerable blotting paper of the Jewish left.

There are any number of left-wing political parties who have already named themselves “Forward”, including the Forward Communist Party of India, Kadima, the left-wing opposition party in Israel, and Vperod, a Russian political party that split off from the Socialist Resistance on account of the latter not being radical enough.

Picking “Forward” as his campaign slogan puts Obama in good company with the likes of Lenin and Mao, and it sounds positive until you stop and realize that it’s meant more as an order than a suggestion. There’s a reason most leftist newspapers with that name add an exclamation mark at the end of it. It’s not a proposal, it’s a command. Lean forward, march forward, live forward and then die forward. We’ve burned the bridges, run up the deficit and trashed the economy so there’s no going back.

An old Soviet era joke told the story of the wife of a Communist leader who upon hearing that her husband had developed a progressive paralysis, clapped her hands and exclaimed that at least it was progressive. That is the underlying message of “Forward” to voters, the country may be paralyzed, but at least it’s a progressive paralysis which leaves us unable to move our heads and stop leaning forward while the Entertainer in Chief croons to us about the wonderful world to come.

That may be why it remains a popular campaign slogan among desperate left of center candidates. When Adlai Stevenson, dean of the liberal eggheads, ran in 1952, the campaign buttons read, “Forward with Stevenson”. The country chose to go backward instead with Eisenhower winning by a landslide.

Tony Blair ran for his third term under the slogan, “Britain, forward, not back”, which despite its clumsiness did conclusively explain that”Forward” as a campaign slogan means there’s no going back. However Blair forgot to tell voters that this referred to his immigration policy which helped create Broken Britain.

In this forward-thinking Britain, the police are being trained to look for signs of sorcery among immigrants after children have been murdered on suspicion that they might be witches. The last woman to be executed on witchcraft charges in the area was back in 1727, but now the UK is back in the witch hunting business or the hunting witchhunters business as the case may be. That’s not to mention the Islamic female genital mutilation business, which is also booming as part of Britain’s forward march into the 7th century.

Had Blair been a touch more honest, the slogan would have been, “Britain, so forward, it’s backward.” Much like having a mind so open your brains fall out, that is one of the dangers of being so forward, going so far ahead you end up in the middle of the Arabian desert praising absolute monarchies and slave states like Qatar as beacons of freedom and democracy, while your police hunt witchhunters and the mutilators of little girls.

In Australia, Julia Gillard rolled out “Moving Forward”, explaining that the slogan fit because Australians are an optimistic forward-looking people. Which they had to be as their country had suffered the worst economic decline in twenty years. When things are that bad, you might as well look forward and find something to be optimistic about.

The Grenadan Revolution had its own forward thinking slogans like “Who Controls the Minds of the People Have the Power” and “Forward Ever, Backward Never”. Sadly the revolution ended up going backward when the reactionary running dog capitalists overthrew the Cuban backed revolutionaries and robbed them of control over the minds of the people.

The Obama campaign has largely adopted both Grenadan slogans, but its control over the minds of the people may prove to be as tenuous as that of the People’s Revolutionary Army did over Grenada. The backward view is surprisingly appealing even to Obama supporters who can’t help remembering that there used to be more jobs and more money before the Hope and Change revolution.

Romney might ask you if you are better off now than you were four years ago, but Obama will tell you to forget the past and look forward to the eternal future that is always peeking over the horizon. The mirage of the progressive world of tomorrow which we can reach over a pile of dead senior citizens, energy saving lightbulbs and multicultural coloring books.

The very use of “Forward” as a slogan summons up a century’s worth of socialist ghosts that they are blind to. But recognizing that would require looking backward, which forward thinking people do not do.

Read the full article here.

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With ‘Tyranny of Clichés,’ Jonah Goldberg Delivers a Second Triumph [Update: Interview With Piers Morgan]

By John Nolte | April 30, 2012 | Breitbart

 No one who writes for a living wouldn’t want to be the person behind Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism,” which was not only a number-one New York Times’bestseller, but also a seminal publication in the growing canon of conservative-leaning books. What I would wish on no writer, however, is having to face the challenge and pressure of writing a follow-up to such a stunning debut. But with “The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas” (out today), not only has Goldberg (editor-at-large for National Review Online) avoided the sophomore slump — in many ways he has an even bigger triumph on his hands.

Everything conservatives will be looking for is on every page of “Tyranny.” Just as he did with “Liberal Fascism,” Goldberg uses scholarly history, damning logic, pop culture, and laugh-out-loud humor to connect the dots that expose the Left as the vacuous, dishonest, State-addicted mercenaries they really are. But what sets “Tyranny” apart from its predecessor and, in my opinion, improves on it, is two things:

First, simply by its title alone, “Liberal Fascism” was red meat for the Right; a delicious, timely, page-turning balm in The Year Of Obama. As we were getting our electoral butts kicked in every corner of America — as our worst political nightmares were impossibly coming true — we could at least get under the covers and flick a flashlight onto Jonah’s reassurance that we were right, dammit!

“Liberal Fascism” is ours and all ours, but to its credit, “Tyranny” is less so.

“Tyranny” isn’t red meat as much as it’s an argument. Yes, so was “Liberal Fascism,” but that was a more pointed argument made from a somewhat belligerent posture (which I loved). “Tyranny,” though, is something I would (and have) send to my Obama-loving, swing state-dwelling, left-wing mother. For years now, the two of us have fired books at one another in the hopes of persuading the other to see the light, and because Goldberg’s theme is less about partisan politics than it is about intellectual honesty, I’m convinced it’s going  to be one of my more persuasive missives.

“Tyranny” isn’t about ideology. Don’t get me wrong, Goldberg still takes it to the Left, but liberalism (for very good reason) is merely the vehicle the author drives to explore the much bigger theme of how and why the left and their allies in media and academia have allowed political debate to devolve into cliché. The over-arching theme, however, is even bigger and speaks to conservative and liberal alike:

Think.

For.

Yourself.

Unfortunately for the Left, they’re the ones most guilty of failing in that department (don’t worry, Republicans take a few well-deserved licks), but I can’t imagine any reasonable liberal, like my mother, reading Goldberg’s words and not only rethinking how they themselves argue, but also feeling a little unsettled and bamboozled by some of the arguments they’ve bought into. Which brings me to my second point:

Read the full article here.

Update:

Piers Morgan’s Childish, Hostile, Cliché-Ridden Interview of Jonah Goldberg [Video]

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Why the Supreme Court Will Strike Down All of Obamacare

By Peter Ferrara | April 5, 2012 | Forbes

Barack Obama made a national laughingstock out of himself with his recent comments on the Obamacare law now before the Supreme Court. Obama said on Monday, “I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.” (emphasis added).

President Obama is not stupid. But he thinks you are. He knows the Obamacare health care takeover was not passed by a strong majority. But he figures you’re so dumb he can rewrite recent history in plain sight. The law passed a House with a huge Democrat majority at the time by only 219-212. It did not get a single Republican vote, but the opposition was bipartisan.

The law also barely squeaked past a Senate filibuster despite an overwhelming 60 Senate Democrats, and even then humiliating buyoffs were necessary. Public opposition was so strong that the ultraliberal Democrat controlled Massachusetts, the only state to go for George McGovern in 1972, elected a Republican in a special election for Sen. Ted Kennedy’s seat, to terminate the Democrats’ filibuster-proof majority. That required final passage of the law improperly in violation of Congressional rules as a reconciliation measure, which is only to be used to clean up the budget and so cannot be filibustered.

And given that Obama is so certain you can’t remember what happened just two years ago, he is more than certain that you have never heard of the ancient history of Marbury v. Madison, where the 14-year old Supreme Court in 1803 took the then unprecedented step of overturning a provision of law adopted by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress, in the Judiciary Act of 1789. That case was where the Supreme Court first recognized its power of judicial review, under which it is empowered to strike down laws found unconstitutional. As the Wall Street Journal observed on Tuesday:

“In the 209 years since, the Supreme Court has invalidated part or all of countless laws on grounds that they violated the Constitution. All of these laws were passed by a ‘democratically elected’ legislature of some kind, either Congress or in one of the states. And no doubt many of them were passed by ‘strong’ majorities….probably stronger majorities than passed the Affordable Care Act.”

As a former constitutional law professor and President of the Harvard Law Review, Obama no doubt knows all about Marbury v. Madison and judicial review. But he figures he can safely assume a majority of you know nothing about it, and his party controlled media will not tell you anything concerning it at this inopportune moment. Hence, another classic example of what I have called Calculated Deception.

President Obama further assailed any Supreme Court decision ruling his Obamacare health care takeover unconstitutional as “judicial activism, or a lack of judicial restraint, that an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law.” Alexander Hamilton disagreed over 200 years ago in Federalist 78, writing, “There is no position which depends on clearer principles, than that every act of a delegated authority, contrary to the tenor of the commission under which it is exercised, is void. No legislative act, therefore, contrary to the Constitution, can be valid. . . .”

Or, as the Wall Street Journal explained on Monday:

“Judicial activism is not something that happens every time the Supreme Court overturns a statute. The Justices owe deference to Congress and the executive, but only to the extent that the political branches stay within the boundaries of the Constitution. Improper activism is when the Court itself strays beyond the founding document to find new rights or enhance its own authority without proper constitutional grounding.”

The Journal added, “Far from seeking an activist ruling, the Obamacare plaintiffs aren’t asking the Court to overturn even a single commerce clause precedent.”

In my role as General Counsel of the American Civil Rights Union, I filed 3 amicus curiae briefs with the Supreme Court in the Obamacare litigation. I also filed amicus briefs in the lower federal courts in the cases in Virginia and Florida.

Read the full article here.

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Wisconsin Teachers Union Threatens Parent for Challenging Union Abuses

By Education Action Group | April 25, 2012 | Breitbart

RACINE, Wis. – Former Racine Unified school district board member Brian Dey has had his fair share of run-ins with the district’s teachers union.

He proposed Act 10-style cuts when he served on the board between 2005 and 2008. More recently, he pressed school officials to launch an investigation into the union’s allegedly illegal campaigning on school property.

But it was the outspoken education reformer’s comments about the apparent union connection to a “Student Bill of Rights” that prompted a Wisconsin Education Association Council attorney to threaten a defamation lawsuit to shut him up.

It didn’t work.

In an interview with EAGnews.org, Dey said he was somewhat surprised by the threatening letter he received from the WEAC earlier this month, but the experience has only strengthened his resolve to speak out about union abuses and the benefits of Act 10 in Wisconsin’s public schools.

“Initially I laughed because it’s similar to threats (from the union) in districts across the state against those who come out … for Act 10 and Scott Walker,” Dey said. “I’m not intimidated, nor am I going to be quiet about it.

“I don’t agree with collective bargaining for professionals, I just don’t.”

Collective bargaining for teachers is somehow at the center of a “Student Bill of Rights” allegedly drafted by students in Milwaukee and Racine, most of whom have been inducted into the radical group Youth Empowered in the Struggle (YES).

YES is led by left-wing Horlick High School teacher Al Levie, who is prone to dragging his students with him to protest and heckle lawmakers he doesn’t agree with. YES and Levie are also tied to Voces de la Frontera, an organization that advocates for extremely liberal immigration policies and collective bargaining privileges.

Teachers involved with YES are WEAC members, and a central issue of the “Student Bill of Rights” conveniently mirrors the union’s top priority – collective bargaining. The fact that students introduced the document after marching from Big Labor headquarters in Racine has convinced Dey that WEAC likely is involved with the “student effort.” He has spoken up about the issue on blogs and online news forums.

Now, WEAC’s high-dollar attorney wants Dey to shut his mouth about the situation, and to stop talking about union abuses he has highlighted for taxpayers in the past.

Cease and desist

Here are some excerpts from WEAC’s cease and desist letter, sent to Dey by union attorney Jina Jonen:

“I have received information that you have made defamatory and other false statements about the Racine Education Association (REA), Mr. Jack Bernfeld (REA Executive Director) and Mr. Pete Knotek (REA President) to the public, and in particular, on your blog and in the press.

“To give a few examples, contrary to your statements, the REA and/or its representatives:

– Did not draft or participate in drafting the student bill of rights;
– Did not organize any “sick out” last year when Governor Walker and his legislature stripped teachers of their right to have a voice in making educational decisions that drastically impact students and our schools;
– Did not advocate for or participate in any illegal actions regarding political campaigns, Act 10 or any other matters.”

Jonen then threatened Dey with a lawsuit if he doesn’t keep quiet.

Read the full article here.

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Do You Know Why Earth Day is April 22?

By Kevin DeAnna | April 19, 2012 | WND

Clue: It didn’t start as celebration of butterflies, recycling and solar energy

School children, businesses, clergy, politicians and even the United States military soon will honor the birthday of Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Soviet Union.

Of course, they will call it Earth Day.

Brian Sussman points out in his explosive new book, “Eco-Tyranny: How the Left’s Green Agenda will Dismantle America,” that the first nationwide Earth Day was held April 22, 1970, the 100th anniversary of the birth of the communist Bolshevik leader.

The “nationwide teach in” was spearheaded by Democratic Sen. Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin and college professor Paul Ehrlich.

Ehrlich had just written the “Population Bomb” in 1968, which famously – and falsely – predicted, “In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

Building on the idea, Ehrlich went on to advocate “brutal and heartless decisions” to solve the “problem” of overpopulation.

Comparing humanity to a cancer, he stated, “A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. … We must shift our efforts from treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions.”

Ehrlich went on to add, “We must have population control at home, hopefully through changes in our value system, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail.”

Inspired by the book, Nelson met with Ehrlich and came up with the idea of the “nationwide teach in” with the purpose of tapping the “environmental concerns of the general public and infuse the student anti-war energy into the environmental cause.”

Nelson selected campus anti-war and left-wing activist Denis Hayes to coordinate efforts for the first “Earth Day.” Hayes later would brag to the New York Times how he fled overseas because “he had to get away from America” and refused to print bumper stickers for the event because “they go on automobiles.”

Organized by radical student activists, built on the model of left-wing “teach-ins” at American universities, and created with the objective of furthering progressive activism, Sussman notes that the movement for Earth Day took to heart Lenin’s adage, “Give us the child for eight years and it will be a Bolshevik forever.”

However, Sussman exposes in “Eco-Tyranny” that the Bolshevik influence goes beyond tactics. After implementing his tyrannical rule over Russia in the October Revolution, Lenin issued a Decree on Land within his first year as Communist Party chairman. The decree declared that all forests, waters and minerals were property of the state.

Lenin also issued the decree “On Hunting Seasons and the Right to Possess Hunting Weapons,” which banned hunting moose and wild goats and ended open seasons for a variety of other animals.

Another resolution adopted by the Soviet government titled “On the Protection of Nature, Gardens, and Parks” established zapovedniki, or human-free nature preserves.

Despite the poverty of the people under Soviet rule, Lenin decided that it better served the national interest to place the rich natural resources of the area beyond human reach.

Sussman summarizes, “During Lenin’s reign, Russia initiated the most audacious nature conservancy program in the twentieth century. Starting with a vision created by Marx 50 years prior, Lenin had successfully implemented version one of the green agenda. His accomplishments would eventually … [be] celebrated the world over each April.”

Today, Earth Day is the most widely celebrated secular holiday in the world, with almost every major American institution paying it some sort of recognition in spite of its extreme origins. Despite the mainstreaming of Lenin’s anniversary celebration, left-wing activists honor the true history of the holiday by attacking property rights and human economic activity.

Read full article here.

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Obama’s Secret Plan to Seize Americans’ Land

By Kevin DeAnna | April 18, 2012 | WND

Revealed! Confidential memos from inside administration

Brian Sussman, author of “Eco-Tyranny: How the Left’s Green Agenda will Dismantle America,” has exposed Barack Obama’s secret plan to seize land from the American people, on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends.”

In an interview with Steve Doocy, Sussman said the scheme was “secret no longer” because of his new book, “Eco-Tyranny,” which reveals confidential memos from inside the administration.

Sussman explained to Doocy’s audience that the plan revealed in “Eco-Tyranny” was “concocted by Obama’s Department of the Interior to take over hundreds of thousands of acres of private land, take it off the books for development.”

Doocy observed that federal landholdings are already considerable, with the government owning more than half of some Western states.

Agreed, Sussman said.

“The government owns seven hundred million acres and they want more.”

He added, “This plan must be stopped because it’s antithetical to what America is all about. It’s not about the federal government owning land, it’s about we the people owning land and allowing us to do whatever we would like to do with that land, especially when it comes to natural resources.”

Sussman believes that the Obama administration is deliberately trying to restrict America’s energy production in order to keep the country dependent on foreign foes. He drew laughter from Doocy when he commented, “If we started drilling for oil in our own country the way we should, the Saudis would soil their tunics.”

Sussman also made the point that environmentalists explicitly seek to prevent energy production, even clean nuclear energy, which Doocy referred to as a no brainer.

Finally, Sussman laid out the case that rising population requires not just additional energy but additional water supplies that are not being developed. Sussman asked, “Who is standing in the way of our water resources? The environmentalists and the Department of the Interior.”

“This is a long running plot, quite frankly concocted in the minds as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels – use the environment to hammer capitalism,” he said.

Read the  full article here.

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What Left-Wing Law Professors Really Think About You, and the Role of Lawyers

By Hans Bader | April 3, 2012 | OpenMarket.org

You’re just a lab rat to be socially re-engineered by activist judges and lawyers — who think they know how to run your life better than you do — or a chump to be fleeced for lawyers’ enrichment. That’s the message some law professors apparently instill in students at Howard University: “At Howard, they tell us as soon as we get there, ‘If you’re going to be a lawyer, you’re either a social engineer or a parasite on society,’” a student at Howard declared. “That’s how I think about life, is to be a social engineer.” (Although Howard University is nominally “private” and thus not accountable to taxpayers, it is directly “funded by the U.S. Government, which gives approximately $235 million annually” to it in special appropriations.)

Promoting social engineering by lawyers (through “institutional-reform” lawsuits brought by left-wing lawyers and law-school clinics) is a bad idea. Left-wing law professors are a bossy lot: some want to ban conservative or politically-incorrect speech as “hostile-environment harassment,” control what you eat and drink, control your sex life (they view heterosexual sex as patriarchal and thus “consensual rape”), raise your taxes through state-court decrees ordering increased funding of government programs, and take away your property (and your children, if you home-school them).  They also often lack common sense, or a grasp of certain basic realities of life. One of my professors at Harvard Law School was notorious among his colleagues for behaving as if on drugs. Another of my professors, the radical Duncan Kennedy, who was so prominent and respected among law professors that he was called the “Pope” of the “Critical Legal Studies” movement, advocated rotating the law professors and the janitors into each others’ jobs. (The janitors liked the idea of being paid like law professors, but had no interest in teaching law, and thought Kennedy’s idea was flaky. Kennedy himself was married to a wealthy heiress, and did not need a law professor’s handsome salary to live on. America would be better off being run by Harvard Law School’s modest, hard-working janitors than by its mostly left-wing law professors.)

Read the full article here.

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Mark Stevens: A Profile in Courage

By Jeffrey Lord | April 5, 2012 | American Spectator

Threatened for sticking with Rush, defiant advertiser declares “Battle for America.”

In whatever arena of life one may meet the challenge of his conscience — the loss of his friends, his fortune, his contentment, even the esteem of his fellow men — each man must decide for himself the course he will follow. The stories of past courage can define that ingredient — they can teach, they can offer hope, they can provide inspiration. But they cannot supply courage itself. For this each man must look into his own soul.
— John F. Kennedy in Profiles in Courage

Mark Stevens was 17 years old when his father died.

A self-described “lower middle class” rebellious kid from Queens, when Mark went about the task of ordering his father’s affairs, he discovered his father’s bank account — containing $84. He was told that his best option was “to go on welfare.”

Marks Stevens had another idea. Said Stevens in an interview with The American Spectator: “I knew then at 17 I wasn’t going on welfare.” If Mark was going to achieve anything in life, he would have to be responsible for making that happen.

He made it happen.

Today the suddenly fatherless 17-year-old with an $84 dollar inheritance is a highly successful businessman and bestselling author of 25 business books, the very embodiment of the American Dream. His marketing firm, MSCO, is “a business-driven, entrepreneurial-minded marketing and business advisory firm relentlessly driven to accelerate the growth of our clients.” The company, located in Rye Brook, New York, has 40 employees, and — since health care is very much in the news — yes, Stevens pays for their health insurance.

Life was good for Mark Stevens. Minding his own business, literally and figuratively, he got up every day and went about the business of business. Part of any business, of course, is advertising. And as a routine part of his business, Mark Stevens spends a considerable dime advertising MSCO in the expensive New York media. MSCO ads have appeared on CBS, Bloomberg, ABC, WINS radio in New York and even, where doable in the format, on NPR.

Then one day last month, out of the seeming blue, Stevens arrived at work to learn the startling news that his office was “getting actual phone calls” from people using (he eventually realized) phony names and leaving phony numbers. What were the callers saying? They called his female executive assistant a “slut.” Another employee, also a woman — a lawyer and like Stevens an up-by-her-bootstraps professional — was taking calls from hostile strangers telling her she was “anti-woman.”

What was this?

It didn’t take long for Stevens to find out.

One of the places MSCO was advertising was on The Rush Limbaugh Show. Mark advertised MSCO there for one reason — and that reason had nothing to do with politics. Simply put, Rush has a huge audience, an audience of precisely the kind of potential customers MSCO wants to reach.

Rush, Mark was aware, had generated controversy with a joking description of the leftist Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke as a “slut” — following a Limbaugh tradition of illustrating the absurd by being absurd. Mark thought it a mistake and he disagreed. In fact, Rush himself was shortly out there saying that his “choice of words was not the best, and in the attempt to be humorous, I created a national stir. I sincerely apologize to Ms. Fluke for the insulting word choices.”

No matter.

MSCO was now being targeted because it was an advertiser on The Rush Limbaugh Show. The calls and now an increasing volume of hostile e-mail were pouring into MSCO.

Mark Stevens is a smart guy — and he quickly realized he was being targeted by somebody using a highly skilled, highly organized campaign that was deliberately designed to make the target feel besieged. When in fact marketing expert Stevens understood he was on the receiving end of a campaign involving a tiny handful of people extremely skilled in making others think dozens were tens of thousands.

Read the full article here.

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Andrew Klavan: Stop the Hate!

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The Ryan Test: Demagoguery Versus Ideas

August 12, 2012 By John Malcolm Leave a Comment

By Jonathan S. Tobin | August 11, 2012 | Commentary Magazine As John wrote earlier today, liberals are convinced that Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan to be his running mate offers them a golden opportunity to savage the Republicans about the Wisconsin congressman’s budget plans. Predictably, the New York Times delivered one of the first such salvos in its editorial posted […]

Smoking Obama’s Crack and Yearning for the Mud

August 12, 2012 By John Malcolm Leave a Comment

By Vanderleun | August 10, 2012 | American Digest [From 2008. Only the names have been changed because the target has changed.] This downward flight of intellectuals has been going on ever since the Romantic movement began its counter-revolution a couple hundred years ago. No matter how much they flap their lips it’s a fall, not […]