Data Mining: Big Corporations Are Gathering Every Shred Of Information About You That They Can And Selling It For Profit

By Michael Snyder | June 21, 2012 | The Economic Collapse Blog

When most people think of “Big Brother”, they think of the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the Department of Homeland Security and other shadowy government agencies.  Yes, they are definitely watching you, but so are many big corporations.  In fact, there are some companies that are making tens of millions of dollars by gathering every shred of information about all of us that they can and selling it for profit to anyone willing to pay the price.  It is called “data mining”, and these data miners want to keep track of literally everything that you do.  Most people know that basically everything that we do on the Internet is tracked, but data mining goes far beyond that.  When you use a customer rewards card at the supermarket, the data miners know about it.  When you pay for a purchase with a credit card or a debit card, the data miners know about it.  Every time you buy a prescription drug, that information is sold to someone.  Every time you apply for a loan, a whole host of organizations is notified.  Information has become an extremely valuable commodity, and thanks to computers and the Internet it is easier to gather information than ever before.  But that also means that our personal information is no longer “private”, and this trend is only going to get worse in the years ahead.

Are We in Revolutionary Times?

By Victor Davis Hanson | June 15, 2012 | National Review

Legally, President Obama has reiterated the principle that he can pick and choose which U.S. laws he wishes to enforce (see his decision to reverse the order of the Chrysler creditors, his decision not to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act, and his administration’s contempt for national-security confidentiality and Senate and House subpoenas to the attorney general). If one individual can decide to exempt nearly a million residents from the law — when he most certainly could not get the law amended or repealed through proper legislative or judicial action — then what can he not do? Obama is turning out to be the most subversive chief executive in terms of eroding U.S. law since Richard Nixon.

‘This is What a Dictator Does’- Beck Savages Obama’s Fiat on Illegal Immigrants [Video]

Read the full article here.

Obama Amnesty Plan: Catch, Release, Vote

By Rush Limbaugh | June 15, 2012 | RushLimbaugh.com

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  I have a name for this new Obama immigration policy. In case you haven’t heard, folks, very quickly. The regime today told the border agents: “If you catch young illegals, let ’em go and grant ’em work permits.”  No more deportation of illegal immigrants.  They are to be given work permits and they can stay in the country.  So what this is is “Catch, Release, Vote.”

JOHNNY DONOVAN:  And now, from sunny south Florida, it’s Open Line Friday!

RUSH:  That is exactly what this is: Catch, Release, Vote.

Barack Obama and Bill Clinton Agree: Vote Democrats Out of Office [Video]

Liberalism Is Terminally Ill

By J. Matt Barber | June 11, 2012 | CNS News

It’s been a pitiful sight – a sad week for progressives and “Big Union” Democrat-shilling thugs. In the wake of last Tuesday night’s devastating recall smackdown in Wisconsin, tens of thousands of “Occupy” hippies across the nation have simply been too depressed to get stoned and not look for work.

On Wednesday the White House released President Obama’s detailed itinerary through October:

1. Worry

2. Lie

3. Obfuscate

4. Golf

5. Fundraise

6. Worry

Indeed, the president has much to worry about. No honest politico can deny that liberals’ Wisconsin debacle likely represents a shadow of things to come – a precursor to November.

The Illusion of Free Choice [Cartoon]

Hat Tip: We Know Memes

Obama believes the most important issue of second term is ‘climate change’

By Ed Lasky | June 11, 2012 | American Thinker

President Obama is quoted in a New Yorker column by hooked-in journalist Ryan Lizza as believing the most important issue to address in his second term would be climate change

“Obama has an ambitious second-term agenda, which, at least in broad ways, his campaign is beginning to highlight. The President has said that the most important policy he could address in his second term is climate change (italics mine), one of the few issues that he thinks could fundamentally improve the world decades from now. He also is concerned with containing nuclear proliferation.”

Do we have the most obtuse President ever in the Oval Office?

Playing to the Right’s Strengths on the Net

By John Hayward | June 5, 2012 | Human Events

The McCain campaign had a notoriously poor online presence in 2008. The McCain Model T bounced and rattled across the Internet, while the Obama campaign zoomed past in one of the light cycles from Tron. Obama’s team aggressively harvested social media information, gathering it both online and in person, when young voters attended campaign rallies and rock concerts-which the cynical observer might note were virtually synonymous. Meanwhile, the McCain campaign offered a crude Web game called “Pork Busters!” in which visitors basically played “Space Invaders,” but shot at pink pigs instead of aliens.

After Wisconsin Exit Polls, White House Must Wonder If All the Polling is Wrong

By Rush Limbaugh | June 6, 2012 | RushLimbaugh.com

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  You know what they’re asking themselves in the White House today?  They’re probably asking themselves a lot of things, and they’re probably lying to themselves about a lot of things.  I think the question that they’re asking themselves today, something along the lines of, “What if all of the polling we have is wrong?”

Greetings, my friends, great to have you back.  Here we are, Rush Limbaugh, the EIB Network, Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.  Great to be with you.  Here’s the telephone number: 800-282-2882.  E-mail address, ElRushbo@eibnet.com.

The Democrat Crime Family War

By Rush Limbaugh | June 6, 2012 | RushLimbaugh.com

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: We got Bill Clinton going rogue again, even bigger and even better. And the “criminal enterprise” known as the Democrat Party… Well, “criminal enterprise,” in quotes. Think of it as a mob family. Think of the Democrat Party as a mob family with the head honcho in Chicago.

Ayers and Obama: What the Media Hid

By John Sexton | June 4, 2012 | Breitbart News

Obama’s connection to Bill Ayers, like his connection to Jeremiah Wright, briefly became a campaign issue in 2008. The Obama campaign was quick to distance the candidate from the 60’s domestic terrorist, even as blogs continued to dig up evidence connecting the two men. Eventually the issue became enough of a story that, on October 3rd, the NY Times weighed with a piece titled “Obama and ’60s Bomber: A Look Into Crossed Paths” by author Scott Shane. Looking back it’s clear that the Times’ story downplayed or overlooked some significant connections between the two men, connections which may have raised red flags for some voters.

Eight West Virginia Counties Vote for Federal Inmate Over Obama in Dem Primary

By Rush Limbaugh | May 09, 2012 | RushLimbaugh.com

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Democrats did turn out, however. Well, they didn’t turn out in Wisconsin. They didn’t turn out in North Carolina. But guess where they did turn out?Democrats turned out big time in West Virginia in the presidential primary to vote for an inmate. A federal prisoner, the Boyd Crowder of West Virginia. Federal inmate 11593-051. There’s a picture of the guy. Let me see if it’s still up. Let me check real quick. Yep, there’s a picture of the guy on Drudge, a picture of Inmate 11593-051. This is the guy that gave Obama a run for his money in West Virginia. Now, ask yourself this, folks. Why would Democrats in West Virginia vote for a federal inmate as opposed to a president, a sitting president in their own party?

Maybe it is something very simple, very common sense, and very explainable. Maybe it’s that the people of West Virginia realize that Barack Obama poses the biggest threat to their livelihood of anybody on the ballot this time around. With his attacks on the coal industry, with his attacks on the oil industry, with his attacks on natural gas, with his attacks on conventional energy, with his promotion of green energy shutting down all these jobs that exist in West Virginia.

And even now the media (as we’re doing, too, I will admit) is looking at the results yesterday: “What will be the effect on Obama?” How about this? Could we once look at what the effect be on the country will be? Because that’s what the people voting on voting on. Yes, it’s Obama that’s getting them out. There wasn’t a single, singular Republican leader on a ballot yesterday. You had Mourdock in Indiana and Scott Walker attracting votes, but there wasn’t a presidential candidate on the ballot yesterday.

There were ideas. Ideas were on ballots yesterday. Ideas are what triumphed. And it was conservative ideas that skunked socialist utopianism yesterday. So the Democrats don’t turn out in North Carolina. They don’t turn out in Wisconsin. But they do turn out in the Democrat primary in West Virginia. And in eight maybe more counties, they beat Obama with a federal inmate. If I didn’t know better, I would say there is a War on Obama being waged by the Democrats!

It certainly looks that way to me. It looks to me like Democrats in West Virginia want jobs. It would appear to me that Democrats in West Virginia want lower gasoline prices. They want higher home values. They want more disposable income. They don’t want people telling them what kind of light bulb they have to buy! They don’t want a bunch of nameless bureaucrats running around talking about “crucifying” energy executives. But you see, the Democrats in West Virginia figured out their president put a moratorium on drilling for oil in the Gulf and refused to okay the Keystone pipeline.

Read the full article here.

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The American People are Fed Up

By Rush Limbaugh | May 09, 2012 | RushLimbaugh.com

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Americans, ladies and gentlemen, are taking their country back — and they’re doing it one election at a time. As was evidenced in Wisconsin, Americans are not afraid of union goons. They’re not impressed with a “slow-jamming” Preezy. They aren’t intimidated by the media anymore. From reconfirming the meaning of marriage, to showing support for a great Wisconsin governor, to humiliating a sitting Democrat president with a huge turnout for a convicted felon, voters demonstrated that the power attributed to Barack Obama and the State-Controlled Media has been overestimated. Conventional wisdom was nuked yesterday.

Tea Party dead and Occupy Wall Street in the ascension? Obama a shoo-in reelection? In fact, the Beltway Republicans, the Republican establishment still think Obama is a shoo-in! They really do. I kid you not. They think… Maybe not a shoo-in now, but before yesterday, “Ah, Rush, don’t get your hopes up. He’s an incumbent. He’s got so much at his disposal,” and that could well be. But the people don’t want to hear that.

The people of this country are not going to allow themselves to be dispirited with phony polls and inaccurate reporting. They’re not gonna be influenced by photo-ops with George Clooney. Being $5 trillion in debt — new debt, given to us by Obama — trumps photo-ops with George Clooney. Years of 8.5% plus unemployment trumps the Preezy slow-jamming the news with Jimmy Fallon.

Out-of-work college graduates are snapping out of their hope and change trance, and they realize all they’re getting is insurmountable student loan debt, not jobs. Voters are continuing to tune out the Drive-By Media in greater numbers. They’re tuning in talk radio, the Internet, Fox News. The people of this country know what’s at stake. They know failure when they see it. They know disaster when they see it. And they know how to stop it.

And they fully intend to.

Last night was a significant aftershock of the 2010 electoral earthquake that rocked the Democrat Party. The Tea Party’s not dead. No, 2010 was a warm-up. The Tea Party’s moved on from a protest movement to an active, vibrant, grassroots movement that knows how to nominate the right people and then get them elected — and that is sending shivers of fear down the spines of professional Democrats, consultants, elected officials, and people in the media.

Democrats are voting against President Obama.

Democrats are distancing themselves from failure.

The cult of personality, the cult of celebrity that this White House has attempted to mine is being overwhelmed by the sting of reality. People’s homes having no value. People’s jobs are paying nothing. People are not able to get jobs. No economic growth. Moratoriums on drilling for oil. Roadblocks on pipelines that would bring oil, which would cheapen energy prices. Attacks on existing, conventional energy sources.

The American people want no part of it.

The American people don’t hate fossil fuels.

Barack Obama might, but the American people don’t, and he has not been able to convince them to. The American people are not going to settle for 8.1% unemployment. The American people aren’t going to settle for 7% unemployment. Vast majorities of the American people understand the greatness of this country. Vast majorities of the American people understand (and listen to me carefully here) that when this nation is on the right track, there’s none better.

When this nation is on the right track, there’s no end to opportunity.

When this nation is on the right track, there’s no end to prosperity.

Our economic and educational opportunity is better than anywhere in the world. But this country isn’t on track, and the American people know it, and they want it back on track. They don’t want this new direction. They don’t want this fundamental transformation of America. They don’t want a silly, impossible socialist utopia. They want reality. They want an acknowledgement of the greatness of this country, not somebody who’s embarrassed of it, or who doesn’t like it, or thinks it’s immoral or unjust.

Read the full article here.

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How Obama’s Enablers Mislead the Public on the Meaning of an Article II “Natural Born” Citizen

By Mario Apuzzo, Esq. | October 10, 2011 | Natural Born Citizen

You have got to love Obama’s enablers. They have a web site called, “A Place to Get the REALLY Right Answers About Natural Born Citizenship,” accessed at http://birtherthinktank.wordpress.com/a-place-to-get-the-really-right-answers-about-natural-born-citizenship/. Clearly, the title of this web site refers this web site, “Natural Born Citizen – A Place to Ask Questions and Get the Right Answers,” accessed at http://puzo1.blogspot.com/, which I created in December 2008.

Before I start, I must advise you of two things: first, you will rarely find an Obama enabler who will ever admit that he or she is a lawyer (most of those who admit it have been outed by citizen researchers). The reason for that is that operating under the blanket of anonymity, they get free reign to say whatever they want without any legal or ethical accountability. And they have said some pretty bad things in the past until many of them were outed and so now they are “perfect gentlemen.” Hence, the first thing the owner of this blog tells us is that he or she is not a lawyer. Now it may be true that the owner of that blog is not a lawyer. But what about all the other enablers who feed at that blog under the cover of anonymity? So, we do need to ask ourselves whether these so-called “owners” are just straw owners who take on such tasks to provide cover for Obama’s enabler lawyers who operate in the background under the cloaking device of anonymity.

Second, before I started explaining that there is a difference between an Article II “natural born” Citizen and a Fourteenth Amendment or Statutory “born” Citizen, we hardly saw the clause “natural born” Citizen in the Obama enablers’ arguments. At that time, they were simply content with telling us that Obama was a “Citizen” of the United States or a “native-born citizen,” whether under U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898), the Fourteenth Amendment, or any Congressional Act. Now, no matter what case or statute they are speaking about, for these enablers its all “natural born” Citizen. The only citizens they have spared from this label are citizens who are naturalized after birth. I guess they figured that the clause would lose whatever little meaning they have given to it if they pushed it that far.

Let us now examine what Obama’s enablers are peddling on this blog. They must and do attack the Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. 162 (1875) decision on two fronts. First, they argue that the definition of a “natural-born citizen” given by the Court is dicta and therefore not binding precedent. But they are wrong. In Minor, the U.S. Supreme Court had to decide whether Virginia Minor, a woman, was a “citizen” in order to determine whether as a “citizen” she enjoyed a constitutional right to vote under the privileges and immunities clause of Article IV. So the Court reasoned that once she was shown to be a “citizen,” it did not matter that she was a woman, unless Missouri could still disqualify a woman from voting because being a “citizen” did not guarantee any person the right to vote. It does not matter whether the Court chose to say that Minor was a “natural born Citizen” or just a “citizen.” Either way, Virginia Minor would advance to the next step in the analysis which was whether as a “citizen” she had the right to vote which Missouri could not abrogate. The Court chose the “natural-born citizen” path. It thoroughly analyzed and considered what a “natural-born citizen” was and after saying that it is a child born in the country to citizen parents, found that Virginia Minor was a “natural-born citizen” and therefore also a “citizen.” After the Court told us what a “natural-born citizen” was, it then made the comment about there being doubts as to whether a child born in the country to alien parents was even a “citizen.” The Court said that it was not necessary for it to decide that question and it did not because Virginia Minor was a “natural-born citizen” which necessarily also made her a “citizen.” So the focus of the Court’s decision regarding citizenship was in defining who the “original citizens” and the “natural-born citizens” were. The Court did not and did not have to answer the question about who was a “citizen” under the Fourteenth Amendment which in the question that it raised involved deciding whether a child born in the jurisdiction of the United States but to alien parents was born “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” We know that this latter question concerning who was a “citizen” under these circumstances was answered by U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark in 1898 which also confirmed Minor’s definition of a “natural-born citizen” and analyzed whether such a child was born “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States under the Fourteenth Amendment.

So as we can see, Minor’s analysis and discussion about citizenship was central to the Court’s answering the question of whether Virginia Minor was a “citizen” which it answered by telling us that she was a “natural-born citizen” which automatically made her a “citizen” also. Hence, Minor’s discussion and decision on what a “natural-born citizen” is was central to the Court’s holding regarding citizenship (as I explained the other holding concerned whether voting was a privilege and immunity originally guaranteed by the constitution’s privileges and immunities clause) and not dicta.

Virginia Minor was not a naturalized citizen. Hence, the Court thoroughly discussed the definition of a “natural-born citizen” which it was compelled to do to decide whether Virginia Minor was a “citizen” and as such entitled to privileges and immunities under the Constitution one of which Mrs. Minor contended was the right to vote. The Court’s definition of a “natural-born citizen” was therefore essential to its holding that voting was not a privilege and immunity originally guaranteed by the Constitution and that Mrs. Minor, a woman, even though she was a “natural-born citizen,” did not have a constitutional right to vote. Minor’s definition of a “natural-born citizen” is therefore binding precedent which to this day has not been changed.

Second, Obama’s enablers attack the precedential definition of a “natural-born citizen” provided by Minor. To support their position, Obama’s enablers manipulate both the use of the word “born” and the meaning of the word “naturalized.” Regarding the word “born,” their definition of a “natural born” Citizen which is a child born in the United States and “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” does not include all the elements which should be included. When it comes to Obama, the element which they leave out is birth to citizen parents. They arrive at their truncated definition of a “natural born Citizen” by arguing that Minor v. Happersett did say that a child born in the United States of citizen parents was a “natural born citizen.” But they insist that there exists an ambiguity in the Court’s definition of a “natural-born citizen” because the Court did not say that a person not born in the United States of citizen parents was necessarily not a “natural born Citizen.” They add that the condition of being born in the United States of citizen parents was a sufficient condition, but not a necessary one. They add that the condition is not a definition even if Minor constitutes a precedent. They then conclude that persons born in the United States of citizen parents are “natural born citizens,” but that neither birth in the United States nor birth to citizen parents is required. They conclude that as long as one is a citizen at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment or any Act of Congress, even if born in the United States to one or two alien parents or born outside the United States to one or two citizen parents, one is a “natural born citizen. The fallacy of this argument lies in denying the well-established definition of a “natural born Citizen” and arguing that it is not a definition and then putting forth their own definition which is broader than the correct definition so that they can meet the broader definition (not requiring birth to citizen parents in the case of Obama).

The question is whether Minor’s definition of a “natural-born citizen” is ambiguous. The enablers’ argument that it is ambiguous and that it permits for other birth circumstances which do not exist in that definition is meritless. A definition is not ambiguous merely because it does not expressly rule out every possible other factual scenario which someone claims also fits under that definition. De Leon-Ochoa v. Att’y Gen., 622 F.3d at 353 (reviewing 8 U.S.C. § 1254a). The enablers do not tell us that not one U.S. Supreme Court case or Congressional Act in the history of our nation defines a “natural born Citizen” the way they do (i.e., as being any child born a citizen regardless of place of birth or citizenship of the parents) and that on the contrary, these sources (expect for the Naturalization Act of 1790 which is not relevant to Obama, did not support their position, and which was repealed in 1795) have always defined a “natural born Citizen” as being a child born in the United States to U.S. citizen parents. Hence, there is no ambiguity in this time-honored definition. On the contrary, the Minor U.S. Supreme Court has plainly spoken with affirmative language which comprises a definition on who is an Article II “natural born” Citizen. It has clearly set out by definition who is a “natural born” Citizen. Hence, anyone who does not meet that definition is necessarily excluded from that class of citizen.

Another approach that Obama’s enablers take to attacking Minor’s definition of a “natural born” Citizen is to say that we commit the logical fallacy of denying the antecedent. This fallacy is described as:

If A, then X.
Not A.
Therefore, not X.
This reasoning is fallacious, unless A is a necessary condition which in such case, the logic would not be fallacious. In other words, if A is merely sufficient for X to exist, the fact that A does not exists does not necessarily rule out that X can come into existence by some other factors, e.g. B or C. So if A is a bi-conditional which is expressed as “if and only if,” the logical expression presented would not be fallacious. For example, if Joe has a lot of land, then Joe is rich. Joe does not have a lot of land. Therefore, Joe is not rich. This is fallacious logic, for Joe could be rich by having a lot of gold. But if we said if Joe is breathing, then he is alive. Joe is not breathing. Then he is not alive. We do not question the correct logic of this statement. And it is correct because breathing is not only sufficient but also necessary. So what we are really saying is: “If and only if” Joe is breathing, then he is alive.

Obama enablers argue that we deny the antecedent when we say that under Minor, since Obama was not born to two U.S.-citizen parents, he cannot be a “natural born” Citizen. They add that two U.S.-parent citizenship is only a sufficient condition, and not a necessary one. But the logical error that they make in putting forth this argument is in denying that Minor gave us a binding definition of the clause “natural-born citizen” which affirmatively declared what such a citizen is. Hence, being a definition, the elements expressed are necessary conditions and not sufficient ones. Would these same Obama enablers say while reasoning under the Fourteenth Amendment that “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” is only a sufficient condition and that it is wrong to conclude that if someone is born in the United States but not “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,’ that that person could still be a “citizen of the United States” under that amendment? No, they would not make such an argument because they know that the Fourteenth Amendment provides an affirmative and declaratory definition of citizenship each element of which is a necessary condition to earning the right to have that national character. There is no difference with Minor’s affirmative definition of a “natural born” Citizen, but they deny that Minor put forth a definition, but accept that the Fourteenth Amendment does. There simply is no consistency or logic in how these enablers treat Minor in one fashion but then treat the Fourteenth Amendment in another.

Obama’s enablers then move on to Wong Kim Ark and say that it declared Wong a “natural born” Citizen and that since Obama meets the requirements of that case, he too is a “natural born” Citizen. But straightforward reading of the Wong Kim Ark case shows that it did not do any such thing. Here is the question presented as stated by Wong Kim Ark:

“The question presented by the record is whether a child born in the United States, of parents of Chinese descent, who, at the time of his birth, are subjects of the Emperor of China, but have a permanent domicil and residence in the United States, and are there carrying on business, and are not employed in any diplomatic or official capacity under the Emperor of China, becomes at the time of his birth a ‘citizen of the United States’ by virtue of the first clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution” (emphasis supplied).

And here is the specific holding of the case:

Read the full article here.

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America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution

By Angelo M. Codevilla | July 2010 – August 2010 Issue | American Spectator

The only serious opposition to this arrogant Ruling Party is coming not from feckless Republicans but from what might be called the Country Party — and its vision is revolutionary. Our special Summer Issue cover story.

As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors’ “toxic assets” was the only alternative to the U.S. economy’s “systemic collapse.” In this, President George W. Bush and his would-be Republican successor John McCain agreed with the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Many, if not most, people around them also agreed upon the eventual commitment of some 10 trillion nonexistent dollars in ways unprecedented in America. They explained neither the difference between the assets’ nominal and real values, nor precisely why letting the market find the latter would collapse America. The public objected immediately, by margins of three or four to one.

When this majority discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections seriously, that decisions about their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term “political class” came into use. Then, after those in power changed their plans from buying toxic assets to buying up equity in banks and major industries but refused to explain why, when they reasserted their right to decide ad hoc on these and so many other matters, supposing them to be beyond the general public’s understanding, the American people started referring to those in and around government as the “ruling class.” And in fact Republican and Democratic office holders and their retinues show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one another than between both and the rest of the country. They think, look, and act as a class.

Although after the election of 2008 most Republican office holders argued against the Troubled Asset Relief Program, against the subsequent bailouts of the auto industry, against the several “stimulus” bills and further summary expansions of government power to benefit clients of government at the expense of ordinary citizens, the American people had every reason to believe that many Republican politicians were doing so simply by the logic of partisan opposition. After all, Republicans had been happy enough to approve of similar things under Republican administrations. Differences between Bushes, Clintons, and Obamas are of degree, not kind. Moreover, 2009-10 establishment Republicans sought only to modify the government’s agenda while showing eagerness to join the Democrats in new grand schemes, if only they were allowed to. Sen. Orrin Hatch continued dreaming of being Ted Kennedy, while Lindsey Graham set aside what is true or false about “global warming” for the sake of getting on the right side of history. No prominent Republican challenged the ruling class’s continued claim of superior insight, nor its denigration of the American people as irritable children who must learn their place. The Republican Party did not disparage the ruling class, because most of its officials are or would like to be part of it.

Never has there been so little diversity within America’s upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America’s upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government, and “bureaucrat” was a dirty word for all. So was “social engineering.” Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday’s upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed.

Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters — speaking the “in” language — serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America’s ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.

The two classes have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century’s Northerners and Southerners — nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them, “prayed to the same God.” By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God “who created and doth sustain us,” our ruling class prays to itself as “saviors of the planet” and improvers of humanity. Our classes’ clash is over “whose country” America is, over what way of life will prevail, over who is to defer to whom about what. The gravity of such divisions points us, as it did Lincoln, to Mark’s Gospel: “if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.”

The Political Divide

Important as they are, our political divisions are the iceberg’s tip. When pollsters ask the American people whether they are likely to vote Republican or Democrat in the next presidential election, Republicans win growing pluralities. But whenever pollsters add the preferences “undecided,” “none of the above,” or “tea party,” these win handily, the Democrats come in second, and the Republicans trail far behind. That is because while most of the voters who call themselves Democrats say that Democratic officials represent them well, only a fourth of the voters who identify themselves as Republicans tell pollsters that Republican officeholders represent them well. Hence officeholders, Democrats and Republicans, gladden the hearts of some one-third of the electorate — most Democratic voters, plus a few Republicans. This means that Democratic politicians are the ruling class’s prime legitimate representatives and that because Republican politicians are supported by only a fourth of their voters while the rest vote for them reluctantly, most are aspirants for a junior role in the ruling class. In short, the ruling class has a party, the Democrats. But some two-thirds of Americans — a few Democratic voters, most Republican voters, and all independents — lack a vehicle in electoral politics.

Sooner or later, well or badly, that majority’s demand for representation will be filled. Whereas in 1968 Governor George Wallace’s taunt “there ain’t a dime’s worth of difference” between the Republican and Democratic parties resonated with only 13.5 percent of the American people, in 1992 Ross Perot became a serious contender for the presidency (at one point he was favored by 39 percent of Americans vs. 31 percent for G.H.W. Bush and 25 percent for Clinton) simply by speaking ill of the ruling class. Today, few speak well of the ruling class. Not only has it burgeoned in size and pretense, but it also has undertaken wars it has not won, presided over a declining economy and mushrooming debt, made life more expensive, raised taxes, and talked down to the American people. Americans’ conviction that the ruling class is as hostile as it is incompetent has solidified. The polls tell us that only about a fifth of Americans trust the government to do the right thing. The rest expect that it will do more harm than good and are no longer afraid to say so.

While Europeans are accustomed to being ruled by presumed betters whom they distrust, the American people’s realization of being ruled like Europeans shocked this country into well nigh revolutionary attitudes. But only the realization was new. The ruling class had sunk deep roots in America over decades before 2008. Machiavelli compares serious political diseases to the Aetolian fevers — easy to treat early on while they are difficult to discern, but virtually untreatable by the time they become obvious.

Far from speculating how the political confrontation might develop between America’s regime class — relatively few people supported by no more than one-third of Americans — and a country class comprising two-thirds of the country, our task here is to understand the divisions that underlie that confrontation’s unpredictable future. More on politics below.

The Ruling Class

Who are these rulers, and by what right do they rule? How did America change from a place where people could expect to live without bowing to privileged classes to one in which, at best, they might have the chance to climb into them? What sets our ruling class apart from the rest of us?

The most widespread answers — by such as the Times‘s Thomas Friedman and David Brooks — are schlock sociology. Supposedly, modern society became so complex and productive, the technical skills to run it so rare, that it called forth a new class of highly educated officials and cooperators in an ever less private sector. Similarly fanciful is Edward Goldberg’s notion that America is now ruled by a “newocracy”: a “new aristocracy who are the true beneficiaries of globalization — including the multinational manager, the technologist and the aspirational members of the meritocracy.” In fact, our ruling class grew and set itself apart from the rest of us by its connection with ever bigger government, and above all by a certain attitude.

Other explanations are counterintuitive. Wealth? The heads of the class do live in our big cities’ priciest enclaves and suburbs, from Montgomery County, Maryland, to Palo Alto, California, to Boston’s Beacon Hill as well as in opulent university towns from Princeton to Boulder. But they are no wealthier than many Texas oilmen or California farmers, or than neighbors with whom they do not associate — just as the social science and humanities class that rules universities seldom associates with physicians and physicists. Rather, regardless of where they live, their social-intellectual circle includes people in the lucrative “nonprofit” and “philanthropic” sectors and public policy. What really distinguishes these privileged people demographically is that, whether in government power directly or as officers in companies, their careers and fortunes depend on government. They vote Democrat more consistently than those who live on any of America’s Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Streets. These socioeconomic opposites draw their money and orientation from the same sources as the millions of teachers, consultants, and government employees in the middle ranks who aspire to be the former and identify morally with what they suppose to be the latter’s grievances.

Professional prominence or position will not secure a place in the class any more than mere money. In fact, it is possible to be an official of a major corporation or a member of the U.S. Supreme Court (just ask Justice Clarence Thomas), or even president (Ronald Reagan), and not be taken seriously by the ruling class. Like a fraternity, this class requires above all comity — being in with the right people, giving the required signs that one is on the right side, and joining in despising the Outs. Once an official or professional shows that he shares the manners, the tastes, the interests of the class, gives lip service to its ideals and shibboleths, and is willing to accommodate the interests of its senior members, he can move profitably among our establishment’s parts.

If, for example, you are Laurence Tribe in 1984, Harvard professor of law, leftist pillar of the establishment, you can “write” your magnum opus by using the products of your student assistant, Ron Klain. A decade later, after Klain admits to having written some parts of the book, and the other parts are found to be verbatim or paraphrases of a book published in 1974, you can claim (perhaps correctly) that your plagiarism was “inadvertent,” and you can count on the Law School’s dean, Elena Kagan, to appoint a committee including former and future Harvard president Derek Bok that issues a secret report that “closes” the incident. Incidentally, Kagan ends up a justice of the Supreme Court. Not one of these people did their jobs: the professor did not write the book himself, the assistant plagiarized instead of researching, the dean and the committee did not hold the professor accountable, and all ended up rewarded. By contrast, for example, learned papers and distinguished careers in climatology at MIT (Richard Lindzen) or UVA (S. Fred Singer) are not enough for their questions about “global warming” to be taken seriously. For our ruling class, identity always trumps.

Much less does membership in the ruling class depend on high academic achievement. To see something closer to an academic meritocracy consider France, where elected officials have little power, a vast bureaucracy explicitly controls details from how babies are raised to how to make cheese, and people get into and advance in that bureaucracy strictly by competitive exams. Hence for good or ill, France’s ruling class are bright people — certifiably. Not ours. But didn’t ours go to Harvard and Princeton and Stanford? Didn’t most of them get good grades? Yes. But while getting into the Ecole Nationale d’Administration or the Ecole Polytechnique or the dozens of other entry points to France’s ruling class requires outperforming others in blindly graded exams, and graduating from such places requires passing exams that many fail, getting into America’s “top schools” is less a matter of passing exams than of showing up with acceptable grades and an attractive social profile. American secondary schools are generous with their As. Since the 1970s, it has been virtually impossible to flunk out of American colleges. And it is an open secret that “the best” colleges require the least work and give out the highest grade point averages. No, our ruling class recruits and renews itself not through meritocracy but rather by taking into itself people whose most prominent feature is their commitment to fit in. The most successful neither write books and papers that stand up to criticism nor release their academic records. Thus does our ruling class stunt itself through negative selection. But the more it has dumbed itself down, the more it has defined itself by the presumption of intellectual superiority.

The Faith

Its attitude is key to understanding our bipartisan ruling class. Its first tenet is that “we” are the best and brightest while the rest of Americans are retrograde, racist, and dysfunctional unless properly constrained. How did this replace the Founding generation’s paradigm that “all men are created equal”?

The notion of human equality was always a hard sell, because experience teaches us that we are so unequal in so many ways, and because making one’s self superior is so tempting that Lincoln called it “the old serpent, you work I’ll eat.” But human equality made sense to our Founding generation because they believed that all men are made in the image and likeness of God, because they were yearning for equal treatment under British law, or because they had read John Locke.

It did not take long for their paradigm to be challenged by interest and by “science.” By the 1820s, as J. C. Calhoun was reading in the best London journals that different breeds of animals and plants produce inferior or superior results, slave owners were citing the Negroes’ deficiencies to argue that they should remain slaves indefinitely. Lots of others were reading Ludwig Feuerbach’s rendition of Hegelian philosophy, according to which biblical injunctions reflect the fantasies of alienated human beings or, in the young Karl Marx’s formulation, that ethical thought is “superstructural” to material reality. By 1853, when Sen. John Pettit of Ohio called “all men are created equal” “a self-evident lie,” much of America’s educated class had already absorbed the “scientific” notion (which Darwin only popularized) that man is the product of chance mutation and natural selection of the fittest. Accordingly, by nature, superior men subdue inferior ones as they subdue lower beings or try to improve them as they please. Hence while it pleased the abolitionists to believe in freeing Negroes and improving them, it also pleased them to believe that Southerners had to be punished and reconstructed by force. As the 19th century ended, the educated class’s religious fervor turned to social reform: they were sure that because man is a mere part of evolutionary nature, man could be improved, and that they, the most highly evolved of all, were the improvers.

Thus began the Progressive Era. When Woodrow Wilson in 1914 was asked “can’t you let anything alone?” he answered with, “I let everything alone that you can show me is not itself moving in the wrong direction, but I am not going to let those things alone that I see are going down-hill.” Wilson spoke for the thousands of well-off Americans who patronized the spas at places like Chautauqua and Lake Mohonk. By such upper-middle-class waters, progressives who imagined themselves the world’s examples and the world’s reformers dreamt big dreams of establishing order, justice, and peace at home and abroad. Neither were they shy about their desire for power. Wilson was the first American statesman to argue that the Founders had done badly by depriving the U.S. government of the power to reshape American society. Nor was Wilson the last to invade a foreign country (Mexico) to “teach [them] to elect good men.”

World War I and the chaos at home and abroad that followed it discredited the Progressives in the American people’s eyes. Their international schemes had brought blood and promised more. Their domestic management had not improved Americans’ lives, but given them a taste of arbitrary government, including Prohibition. The Progressives, for their part, found it fulfilling to attribute the failure of their schemes to the American people’s backwardness, to something deeply wrong with America. The American people had failed them because democracy in its American form perpetuated the worst in humanity. Thus Progressives began to look down on the masses, to look on themselves as the vanguard, and to look abroad for examples to emulate.

The cultural divide between the “educated class” and the rest of the country opened in the interwar years. Some Progressives joined the “vanguard of the proletariat,” the Communist Party. Many more were deeply sympathetic to Soviet Russia, as they were to Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Not just the Nation, but also the New York Timesand National Geographic found much to be imitated in these regimes because they promised energetically to transcend their peoples’ ways and to build “the new man.” Above all, our educated class was bitter about America. In 1925 the American Civil Liberties Union sponsored a legal challenge to a Tennessee law that required teaching the biblical account of creation. The ensuing trial, radio broadcast nationally, as well as the subsequent hit movie Inherit the Wind, were the occasion for what one might have called the Chautauqua class to drive home the point that Americans who believed in the Bible were willful ignoramuses. As World War II approached, some American Progressives supported the Soviet Union (and its ally, Nazi Germany) and others Great Britain and France. But Progressives agreed on one thing: the approaching war should be blamed on the majority of Americans, because they had refused to lead the League of Nations. Darryl Zanuck produced the critically acclaimed movie [Woodrow] Wilson featuring Cedric Hardwicke as Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who allegedly brought on the war by appealing to American narrow-mindedness against Wilson’s benevolent genius.

Franklin Roosevelt brought the Chautauqua class into his administration and began the process that turned them into rulers. FDR described America’s problems in technocratic terms. America’s problems would be fixed by a “brain trust” (picked by him). His New Deal’s solutions — the alphabet-soup “independent” agencies that have run America ever since — turned many Progressives into powerful bureaucrats and then into lobbyists. As the saying goes, they came to Washington to do good, and stayed to do well.

As their number and sense of importance grew, so did their distaste for common Americans. Believing itself “scientific,” this Progressive class sought to explain its differences from its neighbors in “scientific” terms. The most elaborate of these attempts was Theodor Adorno’s widely acclaimed The Authoritarian Personality (1948). It invented a set of criteria by which to define personality traits, ranked these traits and their intensity in any given person on what it called the “F scale” (F for fascist), interviewed hundreds of Americans, and concluded that most who were not liberal Democrats were latent fascists. This way of thinking about non-Progressives filtered down to college curricula. In 1963-64 for example, I was assigned Herbert McCloskey’s Conservatism and Personality (1958) at Rutgers’s Eagleton Institute of Politics as a paradigm of methodological correctness. The author had defined conservatism in terms of answers to certain questions, had defined a number of personality disorders in terms of other questions, and run a survey that proved “scientifically” that conservatives were maladjusted ne’er-do-well ignoramuses. (My class project, titled “Liberalism and Personality,” following the same methodology, proved just as scientifically that liberals suffered from the very same social diseases, and even more amusing ones.)

The point is this: though not one in a thousand of today’s bipartisan ruling class ever heard of Adorno or McCloskey, much less can explain the Feuerbachian-Marxist notion that human judgments are “epiphenomenal” products of spiritual or material alienation, the notion that the common people’s words are, like grunts, mere signs of pain, pleasure, and frustration, is now axiomatic among our ruling class. They absorbed it osmotically, second — or thirdhand, from their education and from companions. Truly, after Barack Obama described his opponents’ clinging to “God and guns” as a characteristic of inferior Americans, he justified himself by pointing out he had said “whateverybody knows is true.” Confident “knowledge” that “some of us, the ones who matter,” have grasped truths that the common herd cannot, truths that direct us, truths the grasping of which entitles us to discount what the ruled say and to presume what they mean, made our Progressives into a class long before they took power.

The Agenda: Power

Our ruling class’s agenda is power for itself. While it stakes its claim through intellectual-moral pretense, it holds power by one of the oldest and most prosaic of means: patronage and promises thereof. Like left-wing parties always and everywhere, it is a “machine,” that is, based on providing tangible rewards to its members. Such parties often provide rank-and-file activists with modest livelihoods and enhance mightily the upper levels’ wealth. Because this is so, whatever else such parties might accomplish, they must feed the machine by transferring money or jobs or privileges — civic as well as economic — to the party’s clients, directly or indirectly. This, incidentally, is close to Aristotle’s view of democracy. Hence our ruling class’s standard approach to any and all matters, its solution to any and all problems, is to increase the power of the government — meaning of those who run it, meaning themselves, to profit those who pay with political support for privileged jobs, contracts, etc. Hence more power for the ruling class has been our ruling class’s solution not just for economic downturns and social ills but also for hurricanes and tornadoes, global cooling and global warming. A priori, one might wonder whether enriching and empowering individuals of a certain kind can make Americans kinder and gentler, much less control the weather. But there can be no doubt that such power and money makes Americans ever more dependent on those who wield it. Let us now look at what this means in our time.

Dependence Economics

By taxing and parceling out more than a third of what Americans produce, through regulations that reach deep into American life, our ruling class is making itself the arbiter of wealth and poverty. While the economic value of anything depends on sellers and buyers agreeing on that value as civil equals in the absence of force, modern government is about nothing if not tampering with civil equality. By endowing some in society with power to force others to sell cheaper than they would, and forcing others yet to buy at higher prices — even to buy in the first place — modern government makes valuable some things that are not, and devalues others that are. Thus if you are not among the favored guests at the table where officials make detailed lists of who is to receive what at whose expense, you are on the menu. Eventually, pretending forcibly that valueless things have value dilutes the currency’s value for all.

Laws and regulations nowadays are longer than ever because length is needed to specify how people will be treated unequally. For example, the health care bill of 2010 takes more than 2,700 pages to make sure not just that some states will be treated differently from others because their senators offered key political support, but more importantly to codify bargains between the government and various parts of the health care industry, state governments, and large employers about who would receive what benefits (e.g., public employee unions and auto workers) and who would pass what indirect taxes onto the general public. The financial regulation bill of 2010, far from setting univocal rules for the entire financial industry in few words, spends some 3,000 pages (at this writing) tilting the field exquisitely toward some and away from others. Even more significantly, these and other products of Democratic and Republican administrations and Congresses empower countless boards and commissions arbitrarily to protect some persons and companies, while ruining others. Thus in 2008 the Republican administration first bailed out Bear Stearns, then let Lehman Brothers sink in the ensuing panic, but then rescued Goldman Sachs by infusing cash into its principal debtor, AIG. Then, its Democratic successor used similarly naked discretionary power (and money appropriated for another purpose) to give major stakes in the auto industry to labor unions that support it. Nowadays, the members of our ruling class admit that they do not read the laws. They don’t have to. Because modern laws are primarily grants of discretion, all anybody has to know about them is whom they empower.

By making economic rules dependent on discretion, our bipartisan ruling class teaches that prosperity is to be bought with the coin of political support. Thus in the 1990s and 2000s, as Democrats and Republicans forced banks to make loans for houses to people and at rates they would not otherwise have considered, builders and investors had every reason to make as much money as they could from the ensuing inflation of housing prices. When the bubble burst, only those connected with the ruling class at the bottom and at the top were bailed out. Similarly, by taxing the use of carbon fuels and subsidizing “alternative energy,” our ruling class created arguably the world’s biggest opportunity for making money out of things that few if any would buy absent its intervention. The ethanol industry and its ensuing diversions of wealth exist exclusively because of subsidies. The prospect of legislation that would put a price on carbon emissions and allot certain amounts to certain companies set off a feeding frenzy among large companies to show support for a “green agenda,” because such allotments would be worth tens of billions of dollars. That is why companies hired some 2,500 lobbyists in 2009 to deepen their involvement in “climate change.” At the very least, such involvement profits them by making them into privileged collectors of carbon taxes. Any “green jobs” thus created are by definition creatures of subsidies — that is, of privilege. What effect creating such privileges may have on “global warming” is debatable. But it surely increases the number of people dependent on the ruling class, and teaches Americans that satisfying that class is a surer way of making a living than producing goods and services that people want to buy.

Beyond patronage, picking economic winners and losers redirects the American people’s energies to tasks that the political class deems more worthy than what Americans choose for themselves. John Kenneth Galbraith’s characterization of America as “private wealth amidst public squalor” (The Affluent Society, 1958) has ever encapsulated our best and brightest’s complaint: left to themselves, Americans use land inefficiently in suburbs and exurbs, making it necessary to use energy to transport them to jobs and shopping. Americans drive big cars, eat lots of meat as well as other unhealthy things, and go to the doctor whenever they feel like it. Americans think it justice to spend the money they earn to satisfy their private desires even though the ruling class knows that justice lies in improving the community and the planet. The ruling class knows that Americans must learn to live more densely and close to work, that they must drive smaller cars and change their lives to use less energy, that their dietary habits must improve, that they must accept limits in how much medical care they get, that they must divert more of their money to support people, cultural enterprises, and plans for the planet that the ruling class deems worthier. So, ever-greater taxes and intrusive regulations are the main wrenches by which the American people can be improved (and, yes, by which the ruling class feeds and grows).

The 2010 medical law is a template for the ruling class’s economic modus operandi: the government taxes citizens to pay for medical care and requires citizens to purchase health insurance. The money thus taken and directed is money that the citizens themselves might have used to pay for medical care. In exchange for the money, the government promises to provide care through its “system.” But then all the boards, commissions, guidelines, procedures, and “best practices” that constitute “the system” become the arbiters of what any citizen ends up getting. The citizen might end up dissatisfied with what “the system” offers. But when he gave up his money, he gave up the power to choose, and became dependent on all the boards and commissions that his money also pays for and that raise the cost of care. Similarly, in 2008 the House Ways and Means Committee began considering a plan to force citizens who own Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) to transfer those funds into government-run “guaranteed retirement accounts.” If the government may force citizens to buy health insurance, by what logic can it not force them to trade private ownership and control of retirement money for a guarantee as sound as the government itself? Is it not clear that the government knows more about managing retirement income than individuals?

Who Depends on Whom?

In Congressional Government (1885) Woodrow Wilson left no doubt: the U.S. Constitution prevents the government from meeting the country’s needs by enumerating rights that the government may not infringe. (“Congress shall make no law…” says the First Amendment, typically.) Our electoral system, based on single member districts, empowers individual voters at the expense of “responsible parties.” Hence the ruling class’s perpetual agenda has been to diminish the role of the citizenry’s elected representatives, enhancing that of party leaders as well as of groups willing to partner in the government’s plans, and to craft a “living” Constitution in which restrictions on government give way to “positive rights” — meaning charters of government power.

Consider representation. Following Wilson, American Progressives have always wanted to turn the U.S. Congress from the role defined by James Madison’s Federalist #10, “refine and enlarge the public’s view,” to something like the British Parliament, which ratifies government actions. Although Britain’s electoral system — like ours, single members elected in historic districts by plurality vote — had made members of Parliament responsive to their constituents in ancient times, by Wilson’s time the growing importance of parties made MPs beholden to party leaders. Hence whoever controls the majority party controls both Parliament and the government.

In America, the process by which party has become (almost) as important began with the Supreme Court’s 1962 decision in Baker v. Carr which, by setting the single standard “one man, one vote” for congressional districts, ended up legalizing the practice of “gerrymandering,” concentrating the opposition party’s voters into as few districts as possible while placing one’s own voters into as many as possible likely to yield victories. Republican and Democratic state legislatures have gerrymandered for a half century. That is why today’s Congress consists more and more of persons who represent their respective party establishments — not nearly as much as in Britain, but heading in that direction. Once districts are gerrymandered “safe” for one party or another, the voters therein count less because party leaders can count more on elected legislators to toe the party line.

To the extent party leaders do not have to worry about voters, they can choose privileged interlocutors, representing those in society whom they find most amenable. In America ever more since the 1930s — elsewhere in the world this practice is ubiquitous and long-standing — government has designated certain individuals, companies, and organizations within each of society’s sectors as (junior) partners in elaborating laws and administrative rules for those sectors. The government empowers the persons it has chosen over those not chosen, deems them the sector’s true representatives, and rewards them. They become part of the ruling class.

Read the full article here.

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Federal Workers Make Nearly Twice Private Sector Compensation

By Wynton Hall | April 17, 2012 | Breitbart

In their new book, Debacle: Obama’s War on Jobs and Growth and What We Can Do Now to Regain Our Future, Grover Norquist and John Lott, Jr. explain just how bloated the pay and benefits of government workers have become.

According to Norquist and Lott, the average private sector worker in America earns $61,000 annually in pay, pension benefits, and health care benefits.   That compares to state and local government workers who make $80,000 and federal workers who bag $120,000 taxpayer dollars in pay, pension, and benefits.

So how many government workers are there in America?

Read the full article here.

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Military votes don’t count

By Eric Eversole | April 16, 2012 | The Washington Times

Obama Justice Department excuses failure to deliver ballots to troops

Military voters must feel like Bill Murray’s character in GroundhogDay. Election after election, certain state and local election officials fail to meet the deadline for sending absentee ballots. The outcome is often the same – thousands of ballots are received too close to the election to be returned or, if they are returned, the ballots arrive after the deadline to be counted. In either case, the military voter is disenfranchised.

Congress attempted to fix this time loop in 2009. The MOVE Act was a new law that created a simple requirement: State and local election officials had to send absentee ballots to military voters at least 45 days before an election. Yet, this simple requirement has been hard to follow.

In 2010, for example, local election officials in at least 14 states failed to comply with the new law. The worst offenders, counties and boroughs in New York and Illinois, missed the deadline by more than two weeks. More than 40,000 military and overseas ballots were impacted by this failure with many of the ballots being sent only 25 days before the election.

Two years later, military voters are waking to the same rotten story in the presidential primaries.

Thus far, at least three states – Alabama, Ohio and Wisconsin – have had local election officials that failed to mail their absentee military ballots on time. Wisconsin and Alabama are repeat offenders from 2010.

Much of the blame for this recurring nightmare rests with the Department of Justice and its Voting Section. Time and again, the Voting Section has been dilatory in its investigations and has failed to take timely action. These failures were well documented in 2010.

But, even when the Voting Section does act, the negotiated settlements with states often lack meaningful relief or real consequences for the local election officials who missed the deadline.

Take, for example, the case against New York in 2010. Even though standard mail delivery to a war zone may take 30 or more days for the one-way delivery of a ballot, the Voting Section negotiated a settlement that allowed counties and New York City to mail absentee ballots using standard mail delivery. In other words, many of the ballots sent under the agreement would not arrive before the election.

Read the full article here.

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If Voting Isn’t Fair, We’re Not Free: An Interview With Catherine Engelbrecht

By Breitbart News | April 15, 2012 | Breitbart

Breitbart.com interviewed Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of anti-fraud organization True the Vote. Engelbrecht has taken citizen journalism and activism to the next level, leading the way in making sure the 2012 elections are free, fair, and transparent, in the face of efforts by the institutional left to suppress wildly popular voter ID legislation.

On April 27 and 28, Engelbrecht and True the Vote are hosting a National Summit in Houston, Texas. The two-day event will bring together nationally recognized experts on the issue of election integrity, as well as and grassroots leaders of election integrity movements from across the country. Last year’s Summit drew leaders from 27 states (including Alaska), and Engelbrecht expect this year’s event to be even bigger.

Breitbart.com: Election fraud–how big a problem is it?

Engelbrecht: I think you have to start by asking: how much fraud is OK? The answer is none. But, there do seem to be very organized, methodical, strategies in place to exploit our system. Examples like the coordinated vote buying that goes on in parts of Texas; absentee ballot fraud in Wisconsin and New York, non-citizens voting in Florida and Colorado; the nationwide ACORN voter registration scandals–these are just a few of the problems we’ve seen recently. In fact, in the past ten years, forty-seven states have prosecuted some kind of election fraud. It’s not the rarity some pretend it to be. It’s a serious, pervasive, corrosive problem and it has to be stopped. Belief that the results of our elections reflect the will of the people is the underpinning of our entire republic.

Breitbart.com: Why does there need to be a program like True the Vote?

Engelbrecht: In recent years, we’ve seen increasingly lax standards produce increasingly unreliable results–and our problems are compounded by a severe shortage of volunteers who are desperately needed to help work in the polls, help review the registry, help support a fair and legal electoral process at every possible stage. We believe the best solution is a well-organized national volunteer program that inspires and equips citizens to actively protect the rights of legitimate voters.

Read the full article here.

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Perpetual Revolution

By Robert Ringer | November 8, 2011 | Personal Liberty Digest

As the election season revs up, bull-slinging, the favorite sport of the criminal class east of the Potomac, is in full bloom. Some of the best zingers we’ve been treated to lately include:

• Che Obama, at the G-20 in France, saying, with a straight face: “I have to tell you, the least of my concerns at the moment is the politics of a year from now.” Sure, Barry.
• Nancy Pelosi, at a recent press briefing, saying, with a straight face: “If President Obama and the House congressional Democrats had not acted, we would be at 15 percent unemployment.” Sure, Nancy.
• Joe Biden saying, with a straight face, that if Obama’s $447 billion “jobs bill” (i.e., stimulus package) is not passed, there won’t be enough police to prevent rapes and robberies. Sure, Joe.

Do they really believe any of this nonsense? No, of course not. But they do know, through experience, that slinging a decorative array of fecal matter against the wall can win over a significant portion of the electorate — particularly those who don’t know the difference between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

But let’s put the sleepwalkers aside for a moment. They’re pretty much already owned by the left anyway. I’m more concerned about the supposedly conservative media types who are hopelessly trapped in the Beltway Paradigm.

By Beltway Paradigm, I’m talking about those who believe the far-left zealots will ultimately fail because, in the end, the free market will overrule their desires. They are fond of saying that socialism is simply not in the American DNA; thus, in the next election voters will root out those on the far left.

Their problem is that they do not understand how the left-wing revolutionary mind works. Lefties know that communism makes the masses worse off, but they also know they can override that reality through the use of force.

Media mainstreamers, even those who are usually on target, simply cannot grasp a scenario that is so far outside the Beltway Paradigm. In their minds, they naively assume there will always be a next election.

And, even more naively, they assume the government would never use violence against U.S. citizens. Underlying this naiveté is that they cannot bring themselves to believe there is a serious revolution afoot in this country — and throughout the world.

In that vein, a year ago I participated in a panel discussion with three staunch Republicans, one of whom was a high-profile Fox News contributor. At one point in our discussion — and without giving it a second thought — I happened to mention Mao Zedong, Adolf Hitler and Barack Obama in the same sentence, which caused the Fox News contributor to frantically blurt out, “I didn’t say that!” to make certain the audience knew the comment had not come from him.

Read the full article here.

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By Dr. Timothy Daughtry | April 12, 2012 | Breitbart

You know it is campaign season when the left starts quoting the Bible, and the Obama campaign is in full Bible-thumping swing. Gone are the unguarded references to those bitter people who cling to their guns and religion. Instead, the stump speech is now adorned with references to being our brother’s keeper, and we are reminded that much is required of those to whom much is given. The Obama we see on the campaign trail sounds more like a preacher and less like a community organizer.

People familiar with orthodox Christian teaching — as opposed to liberation theology — will instantly note that the scriptures in question convey the exact opposite message from that which Obama intends. In the Christian worldview, caring for our neighbors and giving from what we have is a result of an inner conviction and conversion. Those actions represent submission to God, not to government. Consequently, charitable attitudes and actions are voluntary and not coerced. Jesus told the rich young man to sell his riches to give to the poor, not to redistribute what his neighbor has earned.

But the most interesting facet of Obama’s religious references is not his leftist interpretation of the message; it is the left’s sudden tolerance for mentioning scripture in public. Liberals who constantly warn the rest of us to keep our deepest religious values out of the voting booth seem strangely happy with the daily devotional coming from the White House. Where is the ACLU? Where are those who decry any public suggestion of a power higher than government as establishing a state religion? Though it is tempting to interpret their silence as yet another example of liberal double standards, it is more likely that the left sees Obama’s religious appeals as purely tactical, as less about saving souls and more about saving Obamacare. In that light, we can see Obama’s scriptural references as more in line with Alinsky’s classic Rules for Radicals than with orthodox Christianity.

Read the full article here.

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https://johnmalcolmdotme.wordpress.com/2012/04/13/2969/

What if the Government Rejects the Constitution?

By Andrew Napolitano | April 11, 2012 | WND

 Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel and anchor of “FreedomWatch” on Fox Business Network. His most recent book is “It Is Dangerous to Be Right When the Government Is Wrong.”To find out more about Judge Napolitano and to read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com.

Andrew Napolitano asks rhetorical questions about all 3 branches dishonoring charter

What if the government never took the Constitution seriously? What if the same generation – in some cases the same human beings – that wrote in the First Amendment, “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech,” also enacted the Alien and Sedition Acts, which made it a crime to criticize the government? What if the feds don’t regard the Constitution as the Supreme Law of the Land?

What if the government regards the Constitution as merely a guideline to be referred to from time to time, or a myth to be foisted upon the voters, but not as a historic delegation of power that lawfully limits the federal government? What if Congress knows that most of what it regulates puts it outside the confines of the Constitution, but it does whatever it can get away with? What if the feds don’t think that the Constitution was written to keep them off the people’s backs?

What if there’s no substantial difference between the two major political parties? What if the same political mentality that gave us the Patriot Act, with its federal agent-written search warrants that permit unconstitutional spying on us, also gave us Obamacare, with its mandate to buy health insurance, even if we don’t want or need it? What if both political parties love power more than freedom? What if both parties have used the Commerce Clause in the Constitution to stretch the power of the federal government far beyond its constitutionally ordained boundaries and well beyond the plain meaning of words?

What if both parties love war because the public is more docile during war and permits higher taxes and more federal theft of freedom from individuals and power from the states? What if none of these recent wars has made us freer or safer, but just poorer?

What if Congress bribed the states with cash in return for their enacting legislation Congress likes, but cannot lawfully enact? What if Congress went to all states in the union and offered them cash to repave their interstate highways, if the states only lowered their speed limits? What if the states took that deal? What if the Supreme Court approved this bribery and then Congress did it again and again? What if this bribery were a way for Congress to get around the few constitutional limitations that Congress acknowledges?

Read the full article here.

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Reaping the Rewards of a ‘Progressive’ America

By Frank Salvato | April 8, 2012 | Breitbart

 As the nation directs its attention to the events taking place at the United States Supreme Court, specifically, the oral arguments surrounding the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, now may be a good time to evaluate some of the “progress” we have made, both as a country and as a culture, where the Progressive Movement’s efforts are concerned.

I say that now may be a good time for this evaluation because as the Justices of the Supreme Court debate the merits of the case before them, we stand on the precipice of the largest expansion in government authority since the institution of the income tax. And while both Republicans and Democrats; Conservatives and Liberals, have all had a hand in the expansion of government, no other group has celebrated that expansion over our liberties, over our freedoms, more than Progressives.

Now, I am not an overly religious man. As regular readers understand, my Mother would be very happy if I attended church more often. But even I can see that at the hand of the Progressive Movement the idea of secularism has become totalitarian. In a nation built, in part, as a sanctuary for the religious (this is the onus behind the First Amendment’s right to “Freedom of Religion”), people of the cloth are being placed under arrest for preaching on public grounds.

In Hemet, California, the Rev. Mark Mackey, a preacher with the Calvary Chapel, was arrested for “preaching to a captive audience” as he read passages from the bible outside a still closed Department of Motor Vehicles building. The arresting California Highway Patrol Officer said to Mackey, as he was leading him away in handcuffs, “You’re not allowed to preach here because this is a captive audience…You can preach on your own property.” One so-called constitutional attorney said Mackey was “creating an intimidating situation.”

In Florida, as the details of a highly publicized crime are still coming into focus, a volunteer neighborhood watch captain, George Zimmerman, is in hiding because the New Black Panther Party has put a $10,000 bounty on his head, along with a “dead or alive” precursor, for the shooting death of Trayvon Martin (and we all thought vigilantism was a thing of the past). And as race-baiting activists – the likes of self-anointed Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, both whom have become quite wealthy in their pursuits of keeping the nation divided along racial lines, and elected officials call for – and incredibly so – the arrest of a man before an investigation into the event is even concluded, racist organization La Raza (“The Race” in Spanish) has issued a statement questioning his ethnicity. “His background is not clear…Is he Latino? Is he white? Is he both? Who knows?,” La Raza spokeswoman Lisa Navarrete said in an interview with The Daily Caller. Zimmerman’s Mother is Hispanic.

Speaking of the New Black Panthers, as the men and women of our military fight and die to liberate whole national populations from the tyranny of Islamofascist oppression, our own Justice Department, led by Eric Holder – who is turning out to be not only a racist but a racial activist by proof of both his actions and inactions, refuses to prosecute to the fullest extent of the law, paramilitary-clad, night-stick wielding New Black Panther racists who stood outside a Philadelphia polling place during the 2008 General Election intimidating every Caucasian voter who tried to enter. J. Christian Adams, a former Justice Department Voting Rights Section attorney, who served in the Holder regime, has testified that orders were given not to prosecute any Black defendants…period.

Read the full article here.

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Obama is Losing His War on the Supreme Court, But Winning His Wars on Women & the Economy

Rush Limbaugh | April 09, 2012 | RushLimbaugh.com

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: There’s a new Rasmussen poll out.  The Supreme Court’s approval rating. (laughing) No, I kid you not.  The Supreme Court’s approval rating has skyrocketed since taking up Obamacare, since the oral arguments. Forty-one percent of likely voters now rate the Supreme Court’s performance as good or excellent.  It’s up 13 points.  It’s up 13 points since mid-March, where it was 28%. (interruption) Well, I don’t know what they’re gonna do about it, but it’s back to the drawing board for Obama and Axelrod.  I mean, the court’s approval numbers are… I don’t care who you are; you like it when your approval numbers are on the upswing.  You just do.  I mean, whether you’re a justice, whether you’re a judge.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: The Supreme Court, approval numbers up to 41% now of likely voters, even though nobody will ever vote on them.  It’s a Rasmussen poll, but the fact of the matter, the numbers are going up, and dramatically.  Thirteen points after the oral arguments.  Now, the White House is gonna look at this, it cannot make them happy.  Obama has been trying to make people despise the court, distrust the court.  It’s like everything else in reality that’s happening to Obama, it’s going in the wrong direction.  Like they’re trying to manufacture, for example, this phony Republican war on women, and now they’re out trying to say that Romney is forever tainted by this and cannot overcome it.

Now, the fact of the matter remains, the stock market today is down anywhere from 139 to 150 points, and most of the analysts that we trust on this program are saying that it is a delayed reaction to the lousy job news on Friday.  “US stocks sank in opening trade Monday, reacting for the first time to disappointing job market data released Friday when the markets were closed.  In the first five minutes of trade, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dived 137.51 points (1.05 percent) to 12,922.63.” And what is it now?  12,929.  Down 131 points now, and it’s been in that range.  And this is prompting a lot of people — (interruption) No, that’s right.  They’re losing their war on the Supreme Court, Snerdley, is what it means.  You know, I settle something. I solve it. I explain it. And Snerdley keeps asking me in the IFB.  No, it means that they have lost their war on the Supreme Court.  But they think they’re winning their war on the economy.

The war on the economy is to make people think that 8.2% unemployment is equal to 5% unemployment.  That five-dollar-a-gallon gasoline is the same as three dollars.  They’re trying to redefine the economy now, what we have now as the new normal.  This is it.  And, folks, we can’t allow that to happen.  It simply isn’t true.  This country is much better than what is happening now.  The media and the Democrats are continuing this mythical Republican war on women as though out of the blue the Republicans decided to take away birth control pills from women.  All of this was started on January 7th with a question from George Stephanopoulos to Mitt Romney in a Republican primary debate asking him if states should be able to ban contraception, birth control pills. Romney said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.  Nobody’s thinking about this.”  But all it took was the question be asked, therefore the subject has been introduced by the Republicans, since Romney answered the question.  Santorum answered it last fall.  And so they’re off to the races on this now.

Read the full article here.

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How much is your country really worth to you?

By imperfectamerica (Diary) | April 9, 2012 | RedState

Over the course of the last ten years millions of brave men and women have served in the United States military. Those people, those fathers, mothers, sons and daughters deserve every ounce of respect that Americans of all stripes have.

It says a lot about both the country and these individuals that they still see something in the United States worth defending and that they were willing to sign on the dotted line to do so.

Unfortunately, that is simply not enough. Not that those brave men and women aren’t giving enough, but rather, the great sacrifice they have been and are making today is simply not sufficient to save the United States.

The United States is far more than a military power. In reality, military power is but a small part of what makes America great and a leader in the world. People around the planet have been flocking to watch Hollywood movies for decades. They’ve also been sending the best and the brightest of their progeny to study at our universities. During the Cold War it was Levis and Pepsi that Soviet citizens were clamoring for. According to Interbrand, ten of the ten most valuable consumer brands in the world are American, including names like Coke, Disney, McDonalds and Google. None of these things were accomplished with a barrel of a gun. From Star Wars to Big Macs to our private and public universities, people around the world see the United States as a place where seemingly everything is possible, where great ideas come from and where anyone can find success. Little of that is the result of American military intervention. It’s the result of accomplishments and achievements Americans have forged throughout the nation’s history… although winning two world wars certainly didn’t hurt.

The bottom line is, the United States’ military is strong because America is strong. Not the other way around. And what has made America strong is her people, the individual freedom and liberty they have enjoyed since June 21, 1788 and the economic strength that freedom has created.

Read the full article here.

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Bill Whittle Explains the “Electoral College” Once and for All!

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Can We Learn Something from the Classics about Vetting Obama?

By Monte Kuligowski | March 29, 2012 | American Thinker

After my last piece on why it’s reasonable to authenticate Obama’s elusive birth certificate, I received an e-mail from a reader. His name is Bill Meisler, and he is fluent in ancient Greek. Recently, Bill was reading the speeches of Demosthenes.

Bill relayed the following:

In the scholarly notes to the Speech Against Meidias the commentator wrote that before an Athenian could hold any magistracy of the city, he had to undergo what was called a dokimasia, a formal public inquiry into whether the man who wished to hold the magistracy possessed all the necessary criteria needed to prove his Athenian citizenship and thereby be allowed the privilege of holding office. The dokimasia was open to the public and was presided over by the appropriate authorities in the presence of the boule, the democratic council representing the entire citizenry. Witnesses and unequivocal documentation were required, and any citizen could challenge the proceedings of the inquiry.

Though it may seem a little odd to us at first glance, the dokimasia was held after the election.  In the book Aspects of Athenian Democracy, by Robert J. Bonner, it’s noted that:

… [t]hese disqualifications and restrictions [to holding office] were matters of record or observation[.] But there were other disqualifications that could be discovered only by a judicial investigation involving the production of witnesses. Obviously it would be economical of time and effort to defer this inquiry until after the election[.] This examination was known as the dokimasia.

In contemporary America, the examination of candidates is thought to be done by the free press prior to the election.  But when serious vetting of the winning candidate has not occurred, we have a predicament: judges have ruled that citizens have no standing to enforce eligibility requirements because of the election.

In such a system, the incalculable power of the unified media to create impressions and manufacture public opinion means that election results may be engineered and shielded from substance and sound judgment.

Unfortunately, with regard to the matter of Barack Obama, as David Kupelian puts it, instead “of vetting him as was their solemn duty, the media lifted him high overhead and giddily raced across the finish line[.]”  Excluding those who did independent research, voters knew little on Election Day about the actual substance of the candidate chosen by the JournoLists to “make history.”

Read the full article here.

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 […]