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Home Page: George's* Daily Page

Information selectively [at best] reported by the main stream media including CBS, ABC, NBC, MSN and most newspapers.

"Lenin is reputed to have said that the best way to destroy a capitalistic society is to debauch its currency." Samuelson, Robert J.:   The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath, Random House Inc., p. 20, 2008 ]

"The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money." - Margaret Thatcher

"Fascism -- a philosophy or government system marked by stringent socioeconomic control" - Webster's II New Collegiate Dictionary

 "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." -- Article X,  Bill of Rights, U.S. Constitution

Click to read --> Wake up America! - George Edwards, giac2002.org

Click --> Tea Party America Refounding Principles

For a daily updated transcript of a segment of today's Glen Beck show, visit FoxNews.com and click the Glenn Beck icon on the lower left of the page. To view the video, if available, click the associated word "Watch."  You may find other video segments, if you visit GlennBeck.com although there does not seem to be any constancy. Scroll down to view specific date's transcript abstracts.

If the following date is earlier than last night, press f5 to refresh.

2/7/10 The complete Sarah Palin Tea Party speech video

Los Angeles Times

2/7/10 More mistakes found in climate change report

2/7/10 Ukraine exit polls signal turn towards Kremlin

By Andrew Osborn in Kiev, Telephone.co.uk

2/6/10 Tea Party convention draws worldwide interest, scrutiny

By Jennifer Brooks • THE TENNESSEAN

  "There were half a dozen Tea Party rallies in and around Nashville last year and almost all of them drew more people than the 600 who came to the Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center this week for the National Tea Party Convention

  "But it's the convention that has drawn the world's attention squarely to Nashville. Hundreds of reporters from every corner of the globe are here today, trying to figure out whether what's happening signals some sort of sea change in the electorate — or just another protest in a season of unrest."

2/6/10 `Tea party' activists eagerly await Palin's words

2/6/10 Buried wearing an Obama T-Shirt? It's all about him

2/5/10 Tea Party Convention organizer: Tancredo gave 'fantastic speech' From Paul Steinhauser, CNN Deputy Political Director

  "Judson Phillips, a Tennessee lawyer who formed Tea Party Nation and who organized what's being billed as the first national Tea Party Convention, told reporters Friday that 'Tom Tancredo gave a fantastic speech last night. I think he is an amazing politician.'

  "Asked if he agrees with Tancredo's description of Obama, Phillips said, 'The word 'socialist' is a word you don't want to be labeled with in the American political system. It's got a lot of negative connotations, but it also has a very specific political meaning. It refers to a specific political ideology. I think it is very clear that that is the political ideology of Barack Obama.' . . .

  "The other major news to come out of Friday's news conference: some of the organizers are forming a tax-exempt, nonprofit corporation called the Ensuring Liberty Corporation and a soon-to-be-established affiliated political action committee. . . .

  "Along with the corporation and PAC, Skoda announced that candidates seeking backing would need to agree with a list of 'first principles' consisting of fiscal responsibility, lower taxes, less government, states' rights and national security. He said he did not consider those principles a litmus test for candidates.

  "Skoda also said he does not support a third-party movement. . . .

  "The activists are mostly concerned about the 'fiscal insolvency of our nation,' he said. 'We have to do something, and it's not going to come from the career politicians.' . . .

  "'I will not benefit financially from speaking at this event,' Palin said in a statement this week. 'Any compensation for my appearance will go right back to the cause.'"

2/5/10 Tea Party Movement Produces New Political Organization

FOXNews.com  

  "In a bid to advance the tea party movement from holding rallies to holding office, the leaders of the anti-establishment groups announced a new political organization Friday that they say will 'endorse, support and elect' conservatives across the country. . . .

  "'Let us not be naive here. The notion of us holding up signs ... does not get people elected,' said Skoda, who is poised to become president of the new group. Skoda said the organization would take in small donations as well as corporate donations.

  "According to a written statement, the group would work to build a 'sustainable coalition of elected officials' on the national level and in state and local races that might not be getting the attention of the Republican Party establishment.

  "The announcement came with an official platform that could help define what the multi-faceted tea party movement stands for and expects from the candidates it supports. The group's leaders plan to support candidates who stand for a set of 'First Principles.'

  "Those principles are: fiscal responsibility, lower taxes, less government, states' rights and national security."

2/5/10 House to vote on stripping health insurers' antitrust protection By David Lightman, McClatchy Newspapers

2/4/10 Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Soros by Joy Tiz

“Democrats have a Nazi collaborator, literally—international financier
George Soros—funding their phony grassroots organizations.”

-Ann Coulter

  "In a 1998 interview with Steve Kroft, George Soros acknowledged forging documents and pretending to be Christian to save himself from the Nazis, for which he feels no guilt or sorrow.  'I was fourteen,' Soros said. 'My character was made them.'  Regarding his participation in confiscating valuables from innocent Jews,  and serving death camp warrants, Soros told Kroft, 'It created no problem at all.'  Soros has no sense that he shouldn’t be there; he felt he was a mere spectator.  Soros rationalizes his behavior:  'If I didn’t do it, someone else would.' 

  "Thus, it makes perfect sense that Soros is the de facto head of the Democratic Party in America now that it is a foaming-at-the-mouth, rabid, left-wing Democratic Party. . . .

  "In 1979, Soros set up his misnamed foundation, the Open Society Institute (OSI).  The OSI is the hub of the Shadow Party’s operation, doling out tens of millions every year to radical organizations to further the Soros agenda: [followed with a bulleted list in the linked to article of around twenty items and then more damning commentary.]"

1/10/10 Know the TRUTH about the Government Health Care Bill H.R.3200 - Key Points Received in an e-mail [You tube video].

  [Will the text targeted by the headline link here all come through the currently secret House/Senate negotiations or something worse and will the congress read it and pass it? We have to somehow make congress more afraid of our votes overall than the unions, etc. and get it to kill this bill probably until we get responsible people elected who can put something together that will not further wreck the economy but otherwise fix some of our health care delivery problems.

  The end of the You Tube presentation strongly suggests what you can do immediately. Eventually we have to vote those congress-people who support this bill, or anything like it, out in the face of the vast amounts of our "stimulus" moneys, George Soros and others' moneys, such as ACORNand this congress's efforts to let everyone register including illegal immigrants. We need to find and get behind congressional candidates who will act responsibly, STARTING RIGHT NOW. ]

1/10/10 U.S. Judge Comes to Rescue of Terrorist, Throws Out Confession By Warner Todd Huston, Canada Free Press 

  "Get ready folks because this is the world of terrorist coddling that Barack Obama is setting up for us from now on. A left-wing, multicultural-loving, half-wit federal judge has sided with those who would kill us all by throwing out most of the evidence as well as the confession of a terrorist ensconced in Guantanamo Bay.

  "U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan said in a ruling that the government failed to prove that the statements made by Musa’ab Omar Al Madhwani were made free of coercion. I suppose this wonderful judge asked the terrorist if he was coerced and the terrorist unsurprisingly said, “uh, yeah, dat’s what happened. Dey que-orced me!”

  "Fortunately, this lame, idiot judge decided in his infinite wisdom that we should still hold the terrorist because other things he told authorities at other times was deemed important and accurate. So it could have been worse. At least this time, a hack judge didn’t let a killer free to roam about the United States at will… oh, but it’s coming.

  "This is what Obama has set up, America. He has set up a situation where terrorists will be loosed on an unsuspecting American public because some soft-in-the-head judge feels sorry for them."

1/10/10 Wow! Republican leads in Massachusetts

By: Michael Barone, The Washington Examiner

  "Actually, 'leads' is the wrong word: PPP, a Democratic polling firm, reports that Republican Scott Brown is favored by 48% of likely Massachusetts voters and Democrat Martha Coakley by 47%--a statistical tie, given the margin of error. Still, this is big, big news. It looks like Brown could actually win the January 19 special election and provide, as he has promised to do, the 41st and decisive vote against the Democrats’ health care bill. Only last week pollster Scott Rasmussen, accused by liberal bloggers of giving Republican-leaning results, showed Coakley leading 50%-41% among likely voters. PPP confirms Rasmussen’s finding that Republicans are much more interested and motivated to vote than Democrats, as was the case in the November 2009 New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races. In addition, likely voters oppose the Obama health care plan by a 47%-41% margin and give Obama a tepid 44%-43% job approval. In a state (technically, a commonwealth) which Obama carried 62%-36% in November 2008. . . .

  "But Democrats have another trick up their sleeve. The Boston Herald reports that if Brown wins Democratic Secretary of State William Galvin will delay certifying the race for 10 days or until February 20. That would let appointed Democratic Senator Paul Kirk cast a 60th vote for the Democrats’ health care bill. Galvin’s excuse seems to be that it would take time to count absentee and military ballots. But that didn’t stop him from certifying the special election victory in 2007 of Democratic Congresswoman Nikki Tsongas within two days, in time for her to cast a vote to override George W. Bush’s veto of a Democratic children’s health care bill.

  "Reporters should ask Galvin why it was possible to certify a Democratic winner in two days but it will take 10 days to 32 days to certify a Republican winner. What will happen if Democrats pass their health care bill by denying to seat a duly elected Republican? My prediction: Firestorm. National firestorm."

1/10/10 Venezuela Slipping Into Socialist/Statist Darkness, Figuratively and Literally

1/10/10 How I Spent My Hawaiian Vacation

by Jason Killian Meath, Big Government

By Barack Obama

  "It certainly was a holiday to remember.  Since I’m President of the United States, I was able to choose anywhere in the world to spend a long, lazy couple of weeks.  So, we got the 747 gassed up to head to Hawaii for the Holidays.  When I learned Health Care Reform might be held up in the Senate on Christmas Eve, many felt nervous that the holiday kickoff would hit a snafu.  Sure, it’s one of the most complicated and controversial bills in American history, but we had turkeys to baste and chestnuts to roast. . . . [More in a similar humorous vein on other subjects}."

1/9/10 6.5 earthquake reported off of Eureka, Calif. Los Angeles Times

  "5 p.m.: [8 p.m. EST] Sandra Hall, owner of Antiques and Goodies in Eureka, said the quake moved her shop in all directions.

  "Her store is now littered with broken lamps, dishes, and wardrobe items. She said there were at least four people in her store when the quake struck.  A couple managed to run out of the store’s main entrance, while two women took cover under a table.   

  "'We’ve been through a lot of earthquakes but I can’t recall there ever being any this bad,' Hall said."

1/9/10 Suspect: 20 Others Trained to Blow Up Jets

By Armen Keteyian, CBS News

CBS Exclusive: Terror Suspect Abdulmutallab Boasted 20 Other Muslim Men Being Prepared in Yemen to Mimic Christmas Bomb Plot

1/9/10 Socialized Healthcare is closer to reality than you think

 By Otis A. Glazebrook, IV, Canada Free Press 

  "In an article for the Heritage Foundation entitled 'Congress’s Secret Plan to pass Obamacare' authored by Brian Darling layout a four step plan for Obamacare to hitch a ride on an existing piece of Legislation which has originated in the House using a rare parliamentary procedure.

  "Steps one and Two have been completed. . . .

  "This is the cover page from the Christmas Eve Bill passed by the Senate:

This Act may be cited as
In the Senate of the United States,
December 24, 2009.

Resolved, That the bill from the House of Representatives
(H.R. 3590) entitled “An Act to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to modify the first-time homebuyers credit in the case of members of the Armed Forces and certain other Federal employees, and for other purposes.’‘, do pass with the following AMENDMENTS:
Strike out all after the enacting clause and insert:
HR 3590 EAS/PP
1 SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE; TABLE OF CONTENTS.
2 (a) SHORT TITLE.—This Act may be cited as the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act’‘.

  "Step Three - The Senate has stealthily passed Obamacare under a benign House Bill for cover.
  "This satisfies the Constitutional requirement that finance bills originate in the House of Representatives.—Completed.

  "The Senate Bill does not now need to reconcile with H.R. 3692 which is the Pelosi version of Obamacare. Therefore the Bart Stupak anti tax funded abortion rant is a useful diversion. Mr. Stupak may have some influence later on if and when the House takes up H.R. 3692 again.

  "This is why the Republicans have been locked out of the faux Reconciliation Conference. Look for Pelosi to pass an unchanged H.R. 3590 as soon as the House reconvenes.

  "Step Four - All that is now necessary is for the House to pass, by a simple majority vote to pass the Senate’s reconfigured H.R. 3590 without changes and present it to President Obama for his signature.

  "Voila! The Democrat’s 50 year old dream of government controlled healthcare is a fait d’accompli!

  "The United States’ nightmare of Obama-Reid- Pelosi socialized medicine will just be beginning."

1/9/10 Stunner: Scared Mass. Dems Plot to Delay GOP Victory In Teddy Seat Until ObamaCare Passes By Tim Graham, NewsBusters

1/9/10 Barney Frank And Chuck Schumer Channel Wade Rathke

by Andrew Marcus, Big Government

  "Wade Radthe, who admits to helping cover up his brother’s alleged million dollar embezzlement and tax evasion, must be very pleased with Barney Frank and Chuck Schumer’s universal voter registration plan:

Sen. Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, and Rep. Barney Frank, Massachusetts Democrat, have plans to ram through legislation that will produce universal voter registration. No matter what they claim, the rule changes will make it possible for illegal aliens to register to vote and for others to register multiple times. [LINK]

  "Why does this please Wade? Because it’s his plan! [On the original (click Barney Frank And Chuck Schumer Channel Wade Rathke) there are two videos. One is of Wade Rathke on Mandatory Voting, the other on John Fund [via Daley Gator] explaining how this [Universal Voter Registration] will work.]

1/9/10 Don't Worry It's Only $400 to $600 Million to Try Terrorists in NYC

by Greg Knapp, Big Government

1/8/10 The progressive takeover of America Glen Beck Television Show Segment Video Today.

[Click headline link for video. Click here for transcript. The video starts, at least, like last night's show. The one in which a video of I guess a press conference of the trio of Gibbs, Palatano and Brennan took over and on which I reported some of that show's first segment that did get aired. Two selections from tonight's transcript follow:]

1/8/10 We Put Peaceniks in Charge of War Rush Limbaugh Show Transcript  "Look, everybody wants to get rid of Napolitano or get rid of this guy that stayed on the ski slopes.  The guy to get rid of is Obama! Folks, we have a bunch of 1960s, free sex, free love, peaceniks running around in these important positions.  
  "We have people who are obsessed with political correctness, and they take their orders from on high.  The guy at the top sets the tone, and he doesn't care.  All this is a political inconvenience for him.  He doesn't really wish he had to deal with this.  He really believes that "toning down the rhetoric" and running around the world apologizing for America will make all these people love him and thus not attack the country.  He doesn't have the slightest understanding. A peacenik can't possibly because peaceniks always blame America for the problems that we face in the world, and when they blame us they think we sorta deserve whatever we get. So you got guys that don't come back from vacation after an event like this, including the president. And you've got Janet Napolitano out there who is saying some of the most ridiculous things like she's most surprised by "Al-Qaeda's determination."  How can anybody in this country, whether you're in the government or not, be surprised by their determination?  
  "These people are willing to kill themselves for whatever perverted cause they believe in.  It matters who we have in these positions, and we have a bunch of Global Peace March people. We really do have a bunch of New Agers in there who believe that all the problems in the world are caused by this country.  And Obama, because he runs around apologizing, is certainly one of those people, and that's who he hires."

1/8/10 MS-NBC: Intelligence Failure a 'Conspiracy' against Obama?

By William Tate, American Thinker

1/7/10 Administration Let Bomber Arrive In US Before Acting

The Strata-Sphere

  "Update: This administration was definitely caught with their eyes off the ball. Not only did the President continue his vacation after the Christmas Day attack (interspersing golf games with his delayed addresses to the nation) but the head of NCTC also decided he could not pull himself away from the ski slopes as this near disaster played out:

The top official in charge of analyzing terror threats did not cut short his ski vacation after the underwear bomber nearly blew up an airliner on Christmas Day, the Daily News has learned.

  "This is just insane. With all the warning bells about pending attacks (briefed to the WH 3 days before the attack) it is unconscionable that the head of our dot-connectors did not drop everything and attend to his duties. . . .

  "[D]ialing back on the sensitivity of our responses was openly discussed by John Brennan during the campaign (a Bush era reject from the intel community who couldn’t follow orders and thought he knew better than everyone else). . . . [H]e is a central advisor to then candidate and now President Obama. We see again the White House vetted its people to the rigor of a White House dinner guest list. . . .

  "President Obama is inexperienced in these matters, and he allowed himself to be misled by the anti-Bush anti-Cheney lot whose sole purpose has been to prove we did not need to be like Bush and Cheney to protect the country. This warped fever need to not respect the former President’s efforts and successes has led us to this . . .

Jones said Obama 'certainly doesn’t want that third strike, and neither does anybody else.'

  "Exactly. It is time to go back to what Bush and Cheney left us, and it is time for the small minded folks who cannot get over their hatred of the past administration to be pulled from important jobs. We have heard many rumblings since the failed attack on Christmas Day from inside the intelligence and national security community that Obama’s team dialed back our level of alertness and response way too far."

1/7/10 "Cheney: 'We’re not going to win this war through more intense airport screenings'  Robert Costa, NationalReviewOnline

  "Liz Cheney, the founder of Keep America Safe, tells National Review Online that President Obama’s national-security remarks this afternoon, plus the press conference with John Brennan and Janet Napolitano, were “extremely troubling.”

  "'Over the course of the last year, President Obama has taken his eye off the ball and allowed America's counterterrorism systems to erode,' says Cheney. 'Brennan and Napolitano both said they were surprised to learn from the review released today that al-Qaeda in Yemen was operational.  Napolitano went on to say she hadn't realized previously that al-Qaeda might use an individual to attack us.  Yet, in the past year, we’ve had three attacks on America from individuals with Yemeni connections — from the terrorist at the recruiting station in Little Rock to the terrorist at Ford Hood and now the Christmas Day bomber.' Thus, she says, 'it is inexplicable that our nation's top counterterrorism officials would be surprised by a method of attack we've repeatedly seen before.'

  "'At the end of the day, we cannot win this war without daily, unwavering, resolute presidential stewardship,' says Cheney. 'By tasking his counterterrorism officials to spend their time focused on trying to close Guantanamo and investigating their predecessors, by treating terrorists as criminals, by treating terrorist attacks on the U.S. as the acts of ‘isolated extremists,’ President Obama has failed to make fighting terror and keeping the nation safe his top priority.”

  "'The president says he’s using every tool at his disposal but he’s not,' says Cheney. 'We can't prevail against terrorists without intelligence.  When President Obama treats terrorists like criminals, reads them their Miranda rights and allows them to lawyer up, he ensures we won't get the intelligence we need.'  In addition, Cheney says, 'When the president stopped the enhanced-interrogation programs and revealed our tactics to our enemies, he significantly reduced our ability to successfully interrogate any senior al-Qaeda leaders. Intelligence is key. Let’s be clear: We’re not going to win this war through more intense airport screenings'.”

1/7/10 Obama's Interpol Executive Order Glenn Beck

Transcript of a Segment of  his Television Show Today

  "We work together and we should, but the president signed an executive order in December, 'designating Interpol as a public international organization entitled to enjoy certain privileges, exemptions and immunities.' We've been asking ever since it was signed: why?"

  [Extremely disappointing short show segment selection that had the usual really excellent material in its first segment including citing books I was hoping to order to read including "The Roots of Modern Liberalism." Beck started drawing the picture of a creeping modern progressive liberalism departing from the constitution and our founding documents with Woodrow Wilson. But he was interrupted by a trio including the inane Gibbs, Palatano (the foolish Head of Homeland Security not the judge) and Brennan trying to put a decent face on the administration's inept handling of the recent failed bombing attempt that would have killed almost 300. The starting quote above was also uninformative--see much more informative information on the dangerous unprecedented Interpol executive order reported earlier on this site.]

1/7/10 Why Won’t the MSM Cover Islam? What Are They Afraid Of? Alicia Colon, Big Journalism

1/7/10 Strange Tales Of The Vampire Congress

By MICHELLE MALKIN, Investor's Business Daily

  "Team Obama's contempt for meaningful transparency has been on display from Day One. A year ago this month, Obama broke his vaunted open-government pledge with the very first bill he signed into law. On Jan. 29, 2009, the White House boasted that the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act had been posted online for review.

  "Except: Obama had already signed it — in violation of his "sunlight before signing" pledge to post legislation for public comment on the White House Web site five days before he sealed any deal.

  "From the stimulus to the health care takeover to holiday bailouts for bankrupt financial behemoths Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, it's been all backrooms and blackouts ever since. The Prince of Darkness at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. is perfectly happy with his Vampire Congress. Wraiths of a sunshine-evading feather flock together."

1/6/10 Our Politicians Are Addicted to Addiction

 [Glenn Beck Transcript of Segment of his Television Show Today [Abstract below]

1/6/10 "Screw Ups" or On Purpose? Rush Limbaugh Show Transcript [Abstract below]

RUSH: Maybe what we ought to do folks is start working on our national security system.  Maybe we ought to work at making sure that Fruit of Kaboom Bombers don't get on airplanes with bombs in their underwear.  Obama running around talking about it was a screw up.  A screw up?  A screw up that could have been a disaster. A screw up is something that could happen to anybody.  After a screw up you say I'm sorry, you move on.  You don't fire somebody for a screw up.  Letting the Fruit of Kaboom Bomber on a jet into the US is gross incompetence.  It's almost an indictment.  Has anybody been fired in the Secret Service or the White House for three crashers?  Is there any accountability in this administration anywhere?  
  "Oh, by the way, I'm prepared, I know how you leftists work out here because the release of prisoners at Gitmo to Yemen, we're going to pull back on that, yeah, we're going to pull back on that, doesn't look good and the leftists say, 'Hey, Bush let a couple of them out.'  Not because he wanted to.  Bush released people from Guantanamo Bay because our good old ACLU and a number of leftist organizations and members of Congress decided to take the powers of commander-in-chief away from Bush in that way.  Bush did not want to release anybody from Guantanamo.  But the idea that there is some kind of equivalence between Bush and Obama regarding prisoners at Guantanamo Bay is simple folly.  [Emphasis added] What we have here, folks, is not a screw up, and Obama is not going to fire anybody over this because that would be evidence that he screwed up.  Obama will end up holding nobody responsible unless he can find a Bush appointee because it would be a poor reflection on himself, which is pure narcissism.  He's going to hold nobody accountable because he doesn't want to be held accountable.

  "These show trials that Obama is going to bring off, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the boys, Eric Holder and Obama.  This is an absolute disaster waiting to happen.  It's going to cause great harm to the criminal justice system in and of itself.  Now, is giving Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11 and his two henchmen, giving them a show trial with full constitutional rights in New York City, is that a screw up?  Is giving the Fruit of Kaboom Bomber, who isn't a citizen of this country, an attempted act of war, giving him full constitutional rights, is that a screw up?  Multiple unauthorized guests in the White House, is that a screw up? Fort Hood terror attack, was that a screw up?  Being tougher on Israel than Iran, is that a screw up?  Planning on sending 90 hardened terrorists from Guantanamo Bay to Yemen, a screw up?  Is lifting an executive order giving Interpol immunity from American laws a screw up?  Is reneging on an unprompted, calculated campaign pledge to put Obamacare negotiations on C-SPAN eight different times, is that a screw up?  Is creating two trillion-dollar slush funds while calling them TARP and job stimulus plans, is that a screw up?  Has Obama screwed up in everything he's done to try to reignite the US economy?  Ten to 17% unemployment, is that a screw up?  No.  No, all of this is on purpose.  Everything I've just gone through is on purpose, including 17% unemployment.  

  "Now, for those of you who still doubt, who still have trouble putting your arms around the concept that this economic disaster is purposeful . . . . [Click the headline link to read the rest}

1/6/10 Obama promised 8 times during campaign to televise health care debate By CLEMENTE LISI, New York Post

  "Obama has broken his campaign promises to make the health care debate a transparent process after saying he would do so on at least eight ocassions during his 2008 White House run.

  "Instead, Obama prodded House and Senate Democrats to get him a final health care bill as soon as possible -- encouraging them on Tuesday night to go behind closed doors and skip the usual public negotiations between the two chambers in the interest of speed." [After all, it has to go into effect in 2013. No. Do it before the public catches on to what a horrible bill it is. We have an economy to wreck so we can get full-fledged communism in place to "fundamentally transform" America.]

1/6/10 Letting crooks & illegals vote The Washington Times

Democrats plan to manipulate elections with universal registration

  "Democrats have a political death wish. At least that's how it looks. There's no other explanation for their feverish push to take over the health care system when a huge majority of Americans are opposed to the plan. But facing an angry public, Democrats are scheming to find ways to manipulate the electoral process so they can cling to power even when voters want to kick the bums out.

  "Sen. Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, and Rep. Barney Frank, Massachusetts Democrat, have plans to ram through legislation that will produce universal voter registration. No matter what they claim, the rule changes will make it possible for illegal aliens to register to vote and for others to register multiple times. [Emphasis added]

  "The proposal is to register everyone on every welfare list, everyone getting unemployment insurance, everyone with a driver's license, everyone who has had run-ins with the legal system, everyone owning any property - basically everyone on every list the government keeps. People will be registered to vote whether or not they want to be registered. If individuals are on any public record, they will be automatically registered.

  "Obviously a lot of illegal aliens have driver's licenses, and many get other government benefits. Quite a few have rap sheets. People's names and other identification information are frequently recorded differently across these different lists, which means that one could be registered a separate time for every slight variation in how their personal information is kept on file.

  "The legislation is also expected to give felons the right to vote. Why Democrats insist on letting someone who has raped multiple women vote on social policy is beyond us. According to Democrats, robbers who have preyed on helpless victims - and even murderers - have the judgment to tell us how law enforcement should be run in this country.

  "In May 2005, Public Opinion Strategies surveyed felons who had their voting rights restored and nonfelons who voted in Washington state. Even after accounting for the voters' race, gender, education level, religious habits, employment, age and county of residence, the book Freedomnomics found that 'felons were 36 percent more likely than nonfelons with the same characteristics to have voted for [John] Kerry [a Democrat] over [George W.] Bush [a Republican] and 37 percent more likely to be registered Democratic.'

  "For years, Democrats have fought against requiring photo IDs at polling places. The practice, which is simply a way to make sure voters are who they say they are, is used in about 100 other countries. Mexico, for example, has cracked down on voter fraud and is strict about requiring photo identification to vote. If Democrats have their way, it will be easier for Mexicans to vote in America than in their own country.

  "It speaks volumes about Democratic unpopularity that they have to look to criminals and illegal aliens to try to shore up their voting base."

1/6/10 U.S. Government vs. Seniors--"over the transom" e-mail

1/5/10 Cloward, Piven and the Fundamental Transformation of America Glen Beck show segment transcript

1/5/10 Time to re-examine that 'settled' science, Orange County Register

  "New scientific evidence and political realities demand rethinking California's plan to impose economy-stifling rules and congressional and Obama administration plans for even more potentially devastating interventions to curb manmade greenhouse gases.

  "Clearly, the science is not settled, as claimed, and the politics even less so. If the global warming case is solid, scientists who advocate it should be willing to permit extensive review, something they resisted for years."

1/5/10 Leftist Intelligentsia Dementia  J.T. Young, The American Spectator

  "The Copenhagen Climate summit demonstrated once again the leftist intelligentsia's visceral anti-capitalism. First from global cooling then to global warming and now to climate change, like elitist bloodhounds they follow the trail relentlessly through tangled inconsistencies in hope of catching their prey. And the scent remains strong: the capitalist system." 

1/5/10 AMA Doesn't Speak for Most Doctors

  "The American Medical Association officially endorsed the Democrats’ health reform bill.  An eager Barack Obama, of course, used this endorsement to claim that 'doctors' support his healthcare takeover.  This misleading statement plays on the common misperception that the AMA represents some huge block of American  physicians.  Not true.  In fact, excepting membership given to students and residents in training, the AMA represents only 17-19% of physicians actually in practice. . . .

  "[P]hysicians have left the AMA in droves. Some are joining other organizations such as the Association of American Physicians Surgeons, a free market conservative medical society that has opposed government health care since 1943.  40 Medical societies representing over half a million doctors have recently opposed the AMA’s position on health care reform.  Most recently, the New Jersey Medical Society has written a letter of opposition to the AMA’s position, very clearly stating that the AMA does not represent the views of its members."  
 

1/5/10 A Brief 2010 Republican Midterm Platform

  "The slavish devotion to Obama would not matter if Republicans waffled and wavered. Instead, Republicans have united in opposition. Voters increasingly see the two parties as different. Republicans must define that difference. That happened in 1994: House Republicans unified behind a clear and written mission statement for the midterm elections called the Contract With America. Although this bound only those House members who signed on for those ten stated objectives, Americans connected the Contract with America to Republicans at every level, from state legislative races to big state Senate races. . . .

  "Republicans should vote to repeal all health care legislation passed under Obama [among other things] and insist that any new proposal be published completely and without amendment at least thirty days before Congress votes on it, in accord with the new rule. This could allow Republicans in control of the House to circulate to all America a very short and popular health care reform bill which accomplishes, without political payoffs or backroom deals, many good and popular changes. In fact, if Republicans could adopt a bill so short that it could actually be mailed to all Americans a month before its vote in the House, then all Americans could read in a few minutes precisely what Republicans are planning.  

1/4/10 US House hopeful: Defector endorses in Ohio race

  "Ion Mihai "Mike" Pacepa, now an American citizen, is backing conservative Republican Paul Schiffer in the 2010 election because he believes Democrats are turning America into a socialist dictatorship like the one he escaped. Pacepa's long-time translator, Wayne Barnes, confirmed the endorsement's veracity after it was released by the campaign.

  "Pacepa, who is in hiding, said Marx's socialism 'transformed a third of the world into an abysmal 20th century feudalism' and now threatens the contemporary U.S. through the Obama administration.

  "If the Democratic Party has its way, it will transform the United States into a socialist country in all but name. The 2010 elections could prevent that catastrophe from happening,. his statement said."

1/4/10 Misinformer of the Year? You Be the Judge By Glenn Beck

[Transcript of today's show segment. I understand it was a great show. I can find nothing except this, tonight. Maybe videos of all segments later on GlennBeck.com]

  "Well, we're not playing their game any longer. While we continue to argue the facts, they just keep moving the ball down the field anyway. That's exactly what they've done with health care and the Democrat senators who jammed this down our throats, have the nerve to make statements that they've done the work of the American people. We didn't want their bill: 85 percent of us are happy with the health care we have.

1/4/10 Climategate: Failure of a Blind and Biased Mainstream Media

By Dr. Tim Ball, Canada Free Press

Climategate: The Stink is Unavoidable

  "It’s beyond belief that the mainstream media can’t see the devastating importance of the emails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) known as Climategate. The blindness cancels the claim they’re society’s watchdog. Left wing journalist Amy Goodman said when writing about the Bush administration, 'You know governments are going to lie, but not the media.' Now, with a new administration she is silent, proving there are lies of commission and omission.

  "Most haven’t read the emails or summarily dismiss them because of political bias. Journalist Clive Crook illustrated an open mind, albeit on second look. “In my previous post on Climategate I blithely said that nothing in the climate science email dump surprised me much. Having waded more deeply over the weekend I take that back. The closed-mindedness of these supposed men of science, their willingness to go to any lengths to defend a preconceived message, is surprising even to me. The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering.”

  "The mainstream media willfully ignore the massive deception just as they have the political exploitation of climate science. In fact, most led or joined attacks on scientists who dared to point out the problems. They’re still doing it directly or by their silence. There’s no excuse for missing the biggest story in history. It proves the adage that there are none so blind as those who will not see." 

1/3/10 Climategate: You should be steamed

By NEIL FRANK, HOUSTON CHRONICLE

  "Among the more troubling revelations were data adjustments enhancing the perception that man is causing global warming through the release of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other atmospheric greenhouse gases.

  "Particularly disturbing was the way the core IPCC scientists (the believers) marginalized the skeptics of the theory that man-made global warming is large and potentially catastrophic. The e-mails document that the attack on the skeptics was twofold. First, the believers gained control of the main climate-profession journals. This allowed them to block publication of papers written by the skeptics and prohibit unfriendly peer review of their own papers. Second, the skeptics were demonized through false labeling and false accusations. . . .

  "[W]ho are the skeptics? A few examples reveal that they are numerous and well-qualified. Several years ago two scientists at the University of Oregon became so concerned about the overemphasis on man-made global warming that they put a statement on their Web site and asked for people's endorsement; 32,000 have signed the petition, including more than 9,000 Ph.Ds. More than 700 scientists have endorsed a 231-page Senate minority report that questions man-made global warming. The Heartland Institute has recently sponsored three international meetings for skeptics. More than 800 scientists heard 80 presentations in March. They endorsed an 881-page document, created by 40 authors with outstanding academic credentials, that challenges the most recent publication by the IPCC. The IPCC panel's report strongly concludes that man is causing global warming through the release of carbon dioxide.

  "Last year 60 German scientists sent a letter to Chancellor Angela Merkel urging her to 'strongly reconsider her position supporting man-made global warming. Sixty scientists in Canada took similar action. Recently, when the American Physical Society published its support for man-made global warming, 200 of its members objected and demanded that the membership be polled to determine the APS' true position.

  "What do the skeptics believe? First, they concur with the believers that the Earth has been warming since the end of a Little Ice Age around 1850. The cause of this warming is the question. Believers think the warming is man-made, while the skeptics believe the warming is natural and contributions from man are minimal and certainly not potentially catastrophic Ă  la Al Gore.

  "Second, skeptics argue that CO2 is not a pollutant but vital for plant life. Numerous field experiments have confirmed that higher levels of CO2 are positive for agricultural productivity. Furthermore, carbon dioxide is a very minor greenhouse gas. More than 90 percent of the warming from greenhouse gases is caused by water vapor. If you are going to change the temperature of the globe, it must involve water vapor.

  "Third, and most important, skeptics believe that climate models are grossly overpredicting future warming from rising concentrations of carbon dioxide. We are being told that numerical models that cannot make accurate 5- to 10-day forecasts can be simplified and run forward for 100 years with results so reliable you can impose an economic disaster on the U.S. and the world.

  "The revelation of Climate­gate occurs at a time when the accuracy of the climate models is being seriously questioned. Over the last decade Earth's temperature has not warmed, yet every model (there are many) predicted a significant increase in global temperatures for that time period. . . .

  "Neil Frank, who holds a Ph.D. from Florida State University in meteorology, was director of the National Hurricane Center (1974–87) and chief meteorologist at KHOU (Channel 11) until his retirement in 2008.

[The most telling thing to a non-meteorologist were the centuries of global warming --beneficial to human-kind and hidden by its modern day money-driven alarmists--in the middle ages when global warning not being man-made is totally obvious.]

1/2/10 Canadians – Your freedoms are almost gone. Take heed, America. By: Terresa Monroe-Hamilton, NoisyRoom.net

1/2/10 2010 situation grows more difficult for Democrats

By LIZ SIDOTI, AP National Political Writer, Yahoo! News

  "WASHINGTON – An already difficult situation for Democrats in Congress is worsening as the 2010 political season opens.

  "To minimize expected losses in next fall's election, President Barack Obama's party is testing a line of attack that resurrects George W. Bush as a boogeyman and castigates Republicans as cozy with Wall Street.

  "Four House Democrats from swing districts have recently chosen not to seek re-election, bringing to 11 the number of retirements that could leave Democratic-held seats vulnerable to Republicans. More Democratic retirements are expected.

  "Over the holiday break, another Democrat, freshman Rep. Parker Griffith of Alabama, defected to the GOP. 'I can no longer align myself with a party that continues to pursue legislation that is bad for our country, hurts our economy, and drives us further and further into debt,' said Griffith, who voted against Democrats' three biggest initiatives in 2009: health care, financial regulation and reducing global warming.

  "In the Senate, at least four Democrats — including Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and five-term Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd — are in serious trouble. The party could also lose its grip on seats Obama held in Illinois and Vice President Joe Biden long occupied in Delaware."

1/2/10 Global Warming ALERT: British Experts Predicting Coldest Winter in 100 years -- The Lid

  "Word to the British, you better buy a new winter coat. Experts are predicting that this will be one of the coldest winters in the past 100 years. This kind of weather was predicted by scientist, Mojib Latif who back in September predicted that earth was going to cool off for the next 20-30 years. Latif said the cooling would be the result of changes to ocean currents and temperatures in the North Atlantic, a feature known as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and the NAO may be partly the cause of warming during the past 30 years.
  "Its ironic that in Britain,  home of the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, recently made famous by the climategate is facing one of the coldest winters in 100 years, experts predict temperatures hitting minus 16 degrees Celsius (+3 Fahrenheit)."

1/2/10 No Rise of Airborne Fraction of Carbon Dioxide in Past 150 Years, New Research Finds ScienceDaily

  "To assess whether the airborne fraction is indeed increasing, Wolfgang Knorr of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol reanalyzed available atmospheric carbon dioxide and emissions data since 1850 . . .

  "In contradiction to some recent studies, he finds that the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide has not increased either during the past 150 years or during the most recent five decades.

  "The research is published in Geophysical Research Letters."

1/2/10 Obama's Year of Living Blamelessly

  "When you're president of the United States, you can't pass the buck to your superior. In response to this frustration, President Obama has developed what systems people like to call a "workaround": He passes the buck to his predecessor. A lot.

  "He started blaming Bush during the presidential campaign, which was natural enough. Here is candidate Obama on Iran, for example: 'It is time to turn the page on eight years of policies that have strengthened Iran and failed to secure America or our ally Israel.' But after becoming president, Obama just kept on going. On climate change: 'After eight years in which there was resistance to even acknowledging the problem, I think my administration has been very clear that we intend to be a leader on this issue internationally.' On trying terror suspects: “The decisions that were made over the last eight years established an ad hoc legal approach for fighting terrorism that was neither effective nor sustainable.' And now, on the failed Christmas Day terror attack.

  "Here’s a prediction: Obama will find that he’s gone to the Blame Bush well one too many times. With the Christmas Day fiasco something has 'become clear,' alright. But it’s not the failings of George W. Bush. . . .

  "James Carafano of the Heritage Foundation notes, 'Since 2001, there have been 28 failed terrorist attacks against the United States. That averages out to about three foiled attempts per year. That was until this year. This year there were six failed attempts that make 2009 a banner year — the most in one year.'  Unprecedented, as Obama likes to say. A historic first, as his supporters are fond of putting it. Well, you might say, that doesn’t mean that the Obama administration has necessarily opened us up to more attacks, right? Isn’t it fair to say that it has stopped more attacks? Not exactly.

[Emphasis added]

  "Here are further groundbreaking results from Obama’s first year as buck-passer in chief: . . ."

1/1/10 Mayo Clinic in Arizona to Stop Treating Some Medicare Patients By David Olmos, Bloomberg.com

  "The Mayo Clinic, praised by President Barack Obama as a national model for efficient health care, will stop accepting Medicare patients as of tomorrow at one of its primary-care clinics in Arizona, saying the U.S. government pays too little.

  "More than 3,000 patients eligible for Medicare, the government’s largest health-insurance program, will be forced to pay cash if they want to continue seeing their doctors at a Mayo family clinic in Glendale, northwest of Phoenix"

1/1/10 Pantybomber exposes naked bureaucracy

  "The al-Qaida trainee on a terrorist watch list, a man banned from the United Kingdom and reported to the CIA by his own father, got on board the plane, assembled the bomb, and attempted to detonate it. But don't worry 'bout a thing; the system worked.

  "Twenty-four hours later, Secretary Incompetano was back on TV to protest that her words had been taken "out of context." No doubt, the al Qaida-trained CIA-reported cash-paying crotch-stuffed watch-list member's smooth progress through check-in was also taken "out of context."

  "But by then the president of the United States had also taken to the airwaves. For three days, he had remained silent – which I believed is a world record for the 44th president. Since Jan. 20, 2009, it's been difficult to switch on the TV and not find him yakking – accepting an award in Oslo for not being George W Bush, doing Special Olympics gags with Jay Leno, apologizing for America to some dictator or other... but across the electric wires an eerie still had descended. And when the president finally spoke, even making allowances for his usual detached cool, he sounded less like a commander-in-chief addressing the nation after an attempted attack than an assistant DA at a Cook County press conference announcing a drugs bust: "Here's what we know so far... As the plane made its final approach to Detroit Metropolitan Airport, a passenger allegedly tried to ignite an explosive device... The suspect was immediately subdued... The suspect is now in custody and has been charged..."

  "Etc., etc., piling up one desiccated legalism on another: "Allegedly..."

  "'suspect...' 'charged...' The president can't tell an allegedly alleged suspect (which is what he is in Obama fantasy land) from an enemy combatant (which is what he is in cold, hard reality). But worse than the complacent cop-show jargonizing was a phrase it's hard to read as anything other than a deliberate attempt to mislead the public: the president referred to the Knickerbomber as an 'isolated extremist.' By this time, it was already clear that young Umar had been radicalized by jihadist networks in London and fast-tracked to training in Yemen by terror operatives who understood the potentially high value of a westernized Muslim with excellent English from a respectable family. Yet President Obama tried to pass him off as some sort of lone misfit who wakes up one morning and goes bananas. Could happen to anyone.

  "But, if it takes the White House three days to react to an attack on the United States, their rapid-response unit can fire back in nothing flat when Dick Cheney speaks. 'It is telling,' huffed the president's Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer, 'that Vice President Cheney and others seem to be more focused on criticizing the administration than condemning the attackers.'

  "'Condemning the attackers'? What happened to all the allegedly alleged stuff? Shouldn't that be 'condemning the alleged isolated attacker'? The communications director seems to be wandering a bit off-message here, whatever the message is: The system worked, so we're inconveniencing you even more. The system failed, but the alleged suspect is an isolated extremist, so why won't that cowardly squish Cheney have the guts to condemn the attacker and his vast network of associates?

  "The real message was conveyed by Fouad Ajami, discussing the new administration's foreign policy in The Wall Street Journal: "No despot fears Mr. Obama, and no blogger in Cairo or Damascus or Tehran, no demonstrator in those cruel Iranian streets, expects Mr. Obama to ride to the rescue." True. Another Iranian deadline passed on New Year's Eve, but the United States will set a new one for Groundhog Day or whenever.

  "And, just as the thug states understand they now have the run of the planet, so do the terror cells. A thwarted terror attack at Christmas is bad enough. Spending the following week making yourself a global joke is worse. Every A-list despot and dime store jihadist got that message loud and clear – and so did American allies already feeling semi-abandoned by this most parochial of presidents. Expect a bumpy 12 months ahead. Happy New Year."

1/1/10 Obama Administration: Dithering response to foreign enemies, rabid response to domestic opposition By Wordsmith, Flopping Aces

  "[I]t took 4 days for the Administration to figure out how to address the recent terror plot, and only hours to confront Cheney.

  "In the next paragraph, Pfeiffer does as all good Obamadsmen do: Blame the previous administration for where we are at today: . . .

  [Followed by withering commentary on many fronts on what was said.]

  "Let’s be clear: President Obama is an inheritor and beneficiary of many of the tools and policy-decisions he will need to continue keeping America safe. This includes the 'partnership building'. The notion that Bush only engaged in cowboy diplomacy and did not build alliances and cooperation with other nations is ludicrous and false. A lot of the GWoT was waged 'behind the scenes'. The constant usage of the phrase 'military alone can’t solve this' is strawman nonsense to fuel the false premise that the Bush Administration only pursued military use of force in combating Islamic terror. [Emphases added.]

To put it simply: this President is not interested in bellicose rhetoric, he is focused on action.

  "Try 'dithering'. Where was his action when it came to supporting the people of Iran? When it came to Afghanistan [emphasis added]? . . .

  "How about being 'off-key' in spending so much time attacking what a former VP (who left office as deeply unpopular in opinion polls as the president, as noted by Mark Hemmingway) has to say, than in attacking those who wish to kill us:

[T]he White House is still in campaign mode, worried about what a private citizen — who left office remarkably unpopular! — thinks of them."

1/1/10 Executive Order: International Police Granted Full Immunity in US and Not Subject to FOIA Requests by Larry O'Connor Big Government

  "In 1983, President Ronald Reagan issued an Executive Order which gave permission to the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL) to operate within the boundaries of the United States.  Reagan’s EO put INTERPOL under the same basic guidelines as the CIA, FBI, ATF and other Federal law enforcement agencies.

  "Two weeks ago, without any announcement, debate, discussion or inquiry from journalists charged with 'speaking truth to power' President Obama issued an amendment to this EO.  The amendment removed part of Reagan’s order that kept INTERPOL from having full diplomatic immunity while operating within the United States.  In other words:  Under Reagan and right up until two weeks ago, INTERPOL was authorized to operate within the USA but they did not have full diplomatic immunity and had to adhere to certain laws set forth for investigative agencies.  Laws that prohibit authorities from violating our constitutionally protected rights. . . .

  "[I] wonder why this move was made so quietly and why the White House Press Corps has not made any hay about it.

  "I also wonder why my friends on the left, who screamed from the rooftops about phone companies conducting analysis of phone calls made from the US to known over-seas terrorists, about members of the Saudi family being allowed to leave the country in the days following 9/11, about the EVILS of the Patriot Act and how it would lead to the stripping of basic civil rights to anyone checking out a book in a library.  I wonder how they feel about the President granting permission to an international organization to operate within our borders under full diplomatic immunity.

  "One other tasty tidbit:  Due to the amended language created by President Obama, INTERPOL is now, no longer subject to Freedom of Information Act Inquiries."

1/1/10 What ever happened to the "Duke 88"? Paul, PowerLine

  "The 'Duke 88' consisted of 88 Duke professors who signed an ad which implicitly assumed that Duke lacrosse players raped a black stripper, an allegation that proved to be entirely fraudulent. The ad praised protesters who had put lacrosse players' photos on 'wanted' posters, associated 'what happened to this young woman' with 'racism and sexism,' and suggested that the lacrosse players were getting privileged treatment because of their race.

  "The ad appeared almost four years ago. Stuart Taylor takes a look at what has happened since to some of the 88 thoroughly wrongheaded professors who signed it.

  "First, according to Taylor, no member of the 'Duke 88' has publicly apologized. Many have expressed pride in their rush to judgment.

  "Second, signing the ad seems to have been a pretty good career move." [Many examples follow.]

12/31/09 Tea Party America Refounding Principles

By George Edwards, GIAC2002.org

12/31/09 What is Barack Obama doing?

By: Mark Tapscott, The Washington Examiner

[As Lucianne remarks: "The more frightening question is Why?"] IMPORTANT!

  "Some distressing civil liberties questions must be asked about an ever-lengthening list of decisions, proposals, and observations by President Obama.

  "To begin, Obama is the first president to give an international law enforcement organization like Interpol free rein within the territorial confines of this nation, presumably not excluding the arrest and exportation of Americans to be charged with crimes under international law.

  "Put simply, this means the Constitution is no longer the supreme law of the land in America. Thanks to Executive Order 12425 , which Obama signed Dec. 16 without explaining why, the supreme law of the land is now arguably whatever Interpol says it is, most likely as directed by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands, in conjunction with the United Nations.

  "Maybe it's just a bureaucratic snafu. Or perhaps Obama sincerely means to subsume U.S. law to what he views as a morally superior international body.

  "But what if he simply sees it as an innocuous path to the arrest and prosecution of selected political opponents for 'crimes against humanity' in, say, Iraq and Afghanistan? The Far Left would get its pound of Bush-Cheney flesh, while leaving minimal blood on Obama's hands and giving his defense and foreign policy critics reason to think twice before speaking candidly against him in the future.

  "If this seems far-fetched, let me remind you that this is the same Interpol and ICC that took seriously Iran's Oct. 3, 2009, request that 25 top Israeli civilian and military officials be placed on the international 'Most Wanted' list because of their actions in Gaza against murderous Palestinian radicals. [Emphases added.]

  "There's also this observation by National Review's Andy McCarthy: 'Being constrained by the Fourth Amendment, Freedom of Information Act, and other limitations of the Constitution and federal law that protect the liberty and privacy of Americans is what prevents law enforcement and its controlling government authority from becoming tyrannical.' Executive Order 12425 circumvents all of that [emphasis added].

  "So tell us, Mr. President, why do you think Interpol should operate with no accountability and no transparency in our country? Is this what you had in mind in your 2008 presidential campaign when you said "we've got to have a civilian national security force that is just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded" as the U.S. military?

  "Pentagon generals and admirals answer to the president and Congress. Under Obama, Interpol answers to no American.

  "Then there is the president's impatience with such messy democratic necessities as respecting the rights of legislative minorities. It galled him that Republicans dared use parliamentary procedures to require more debate during the Senate's forced march to approve Obamacare before Christmas.

  "Obama vented during an interview with PBS , warning that other countries will 'start running circles around us.' (Note that nobody ever called any of those other countries 'a shining city on a hill' or, given their human rights records, likely ever will.)

  "Obama's next words to PBS hint of a dangerous facet of his outlook: 'We're going to have to return to some sense that governance is more important than politics inside the Senate.'

  "This is the classic complaint of kings and despots throughout history. Don't bother them with delays and deliberation -- what Obama misleadingly calls "politics" -- when there is so much 'governance' to be done.

  "Obama's impatience with the Senate in 2009 recalls liberals' disquietude in the 1950s with Congress constantly blunting the advance of their progressive agenda, thanks to the Constitution's separation of powers, the seniority system, and the still-Democratic Solid South.

  "So liberals created the Imperial Presidency to 'get things done' in Washington. Today, they have a congressional majority that disdains consensus and a president with the most liberal agenda in American history. Now, it's out with 'politics' and in with 'governance.'

  "But, as George Washington explained, 'government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master [emphasis added].'

  "Obama disdains using American force against enemies abroad, but will a man who so furtively empowered Interpol hesitate to use such force against Americans who oppose him here at home?

   "Think very carefully before you answer."

12/31/09 Rush Limbaugh's Show Today--Excerpts

Dr. Walter E. Williams, Professor of Economics at George Mason University, guest hosted on the last show of 2009.

 "Just look at the language of the Constitution: 'Congress shall not infringe... Congress shall not disparage... Congress shall not prohibit... Congress shall not deprive...' Now, with that kind of language does it sounds like the Founders trusted government? Yet we do!" -Dr. Williams

  "When you create a bubble, the cure for it is for the bubble to burst -- and one of the ways for a bubble to burst is for people and companies to go bankrupt, and for people to lose their homes." -Dr. Williams

  "The last year that black unemployment was less than white unemployment,
was the year before the first minimum wage law." -Dr. Thomas Sowell
  "The government has no money of its own. It can only create a job by destroying
a job. Now, the victims of that are not visible, but the job 'created' is." -Dr. Williams

12/31/09 Rasmussen: Obamacare Disapproval at New High

  "Only 13 percent of likely voters think that the cost of health would go down under Obamacare, while 63 percent think it would rise -- a gap of 50 percent.
  "Seniors oppose Obamacare by more than 2 to 1: 63 percent to 31 percent.
  "And the worst news of all for Democrats...
  "Independents oppose Obamacare by the head-turning tally of 66 percent to 28 percent."

12/31/09 The Politics of Incompetence

By The Prowler, The American Spectator

  "[A]s it became clear internally that the Administration had suffered perhaps its most embarrassing failure in the area of national security, senior Obama White House aides, including chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod and new White House counsel Robert Bauer, ordered staff to begin researching similar breakdowns -- if any -- from the Bush Administration. . . .

  "'This White House doesn't view the Northwest [Airlines] failure as one of national security, it's a political issue,' says the White House source. 'That's why Axelrod and Emanuel are driving the issue.'"

12/31/09 IS OBAMA DELUSIONAL OR JUST DISHONEST?

12/31/09 Alerts [Link to target further information as it becomes available]

South Carolina Rally for Freedom, Saturday, January 9, 1:00-3:00 p.m.

12/30/09 Top Ten reasons it took Obama 3 days to respond to terror attempt William Tate, American Thinker [Hey, we need a break.]

12/30/09 Human IEDs   Victor Davis Hanson, National Review Online

  "I think we will see some radical changes from the Obama administration very rapidly. When a Nigerian national, with a history of radical Islamic sympathies, previously reported to U.S. authorities by his father as a threat to America, buys a one-way ticket with cash, has no check-in luggage, previously was denied a British visa, boards a plane easily, and is prevented only by a courageous tourist from murdering over 300 innocents — and when all that is characterized as the system working like 'clockwork' — well, something is terribly wrong. We should see such a threat not as a man-made disaster, but an act of war, in which an enemy has planted a series of human IEDs with the intention of killing hundreds of innocents and destroying a trillion-dollar airline industry vital to the commerce and very health of the West.
  "And a larger problem with our reaction is the context. This latest threat comes amid a climate of  'overseas contingency operations' and 'man-made disasters,' the closing of Guantanamo with no plans to deal with the over 100 Yemeni suspected terrorists currently detained there, and the public trial in New York of the confessed architect of 9/11. If millions of America find all this quite dangerous — in no small part due to the impression it creates for our enemies — then just perhaps radical Islamists sense American regret and remorse over our past eight years of muscular efforts that prevented another attack, and thus a new chance to find a route to another 9/11. . . .

  "I think we will see an end to 'Bush did it,' since that trope is already turning ironic in the sense that Bush spoke out against the Ahmadinejad regime and was clearly on the side of its dissidents, his caricatured protocols not only kept us safe but in part were quietly adopted by the Obama administration, and the war in Iraq has pretty much quieted down. Demonizing Bush as the architect of an unnecessary counterterrorism response in the present climate is nothing short of a political boomerang."

12/29/09 Dissident Iran Rises The Wall Street Journal

  "On Sunday bloody street battles in cities across Iran exposed the regime's brutality for all the world to see. On Monday, the government restarted one of the darker arts it has mastered: grabbing its democrats and stuffing them in a hole.

  "Among the dissidents arrested was veteran democratic activist Heshmat Tabarzadi. On December 17, Mr. Tabarzadi wrote in an op-ed article on these pages that 'If the government continues to opt for violence, there very well may be another revolution in Iran. One side has to step down. And that side is the government—not the people.'

  "Mr. Tabarzadi's home in Tehran is under constant surveillance, so he knew the risks he took when he published an article in The Wall Street Journal under his own name. This is a man who appreciates the consequences of calling publicly for democracy: He spent nine years in Iran's notorious Evin prison, including two in solitary confinement, for his activities as a student leader.

  "On Sunday evening, Mr. Tabarzadi was interviewed on Voice of America Persian. He said he had never seen such vast protests, and he cautioned the demonstrators against resorting to violence.

  "The regime's response came early on Monday, when the Iranian intelligence service knocked on Mr. Tabarzadi's door. When he asked to see their warrant, they barged into his home with force. According to a prominent activist who spoke with Mr. Tebarzadi's family, the agents seized his papers, articles, books and computer, arresting him in front of his wife and son. Multiple calls to his home went unanswered, and no one knows where Mr. Tabarzadi is being held. . . .

  "There are many others. Among the most significant are former foreign minister Ebrahim Yazdi, the secretary general of the outlawed Freedom Movement of Iran. During June's protests, the 78-year-old cancer survivor was arrested by security forces directly from the hospital in Tehran where he was undergoing treatment. This time, they've reportedly rounded up his niece as well.

  "Prominent human-rights activist Emad Baghi was among those taken. This year, Mr. Baghi received the Martin Ennals Award—the Nobel Prize for human rights—and was banned from traveling to receive it in person.

  "Dr. Nushin Ebadi, the sister of Nobel peace laureate Shirin Ebadi, was arrested in her home. So was women's-rights activist Haleh Sahabi. So too were Morteza Haji, an aide to reformist former president Mohammad Khatami, and several aides to reformist leader Mir Houssein Mousavi. . . .

  "In an overdue and brief statement on Sunday, President Obama called for the 'immediate release of all who have been unjustly detained within Iran.'"

12/29/09 A Systematic Failure, Certainly

  "[T]hey didn’t 'effectively collect and analyze all the relevant information' because Abdulmutallab got on the plane and almost incinerated hundreds of people. So what were Napolitano and the president talking about up until now? Were they trying to flim-flam us or were they grossly and inexcusably unprepared and ill-informed?

  "This is a scandal of the first order. On this one there is no George W. Bush to blame. There is only the president and his tragically clueless administration. Unlike the  pre-9/11 bits of data, which never wound up in the right hands, in this case we had a specific bomber, a specific tip, and the imam was literally in our gun-sights (reports say he escaped the predator attack). And the intelligence community was given it all on a silver platter. This is the quintessential failure to connect dots. Had the detonator not failed or an alert passenger not intervened, we would have had not a catastrophic failure but a catastrophe.

  "Two suggestions for the president: end the vacation and fire some people. And if he wants to show that he isn’t cowering from an increasingly infuriated public, he would do well to hold a press conference and answer each and every question put to him."

12/29/09 Awlaki personally blessed Detroit attack

By Victor Morton, The Washington Times

  "The Nigerian accused of trying to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner had his suicide mission personally blessed in Yemen by Anwar al-Awlaki, the same Muslim imam suspected of radicalizing the Fort Hood shooting suspect, a U.S. intelligence source has told The Washington Times.

  "The intelligence official, who is familiar with the FBI's interrogation of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, said the bombing suspect has boasted of his jihad training during interrogation by the FBI and has said it included final exhortations by Mr. al-Awlaki.

12/29/09 Blue state govs. rip Senate health bill

By ALEX ISENSTADT, Politco

 "The governors of the nation’s two largest Democratic states are leveling sharp criticism at the Senate health care bill, claiming that it would leave their already financially strapped states even deeper in the hole." [These are two of many states that will be further strapped by the health care bill. Will these states, like individuals be forced to pay fines too, and governors put in prison if the fail to comply with the constitutionally questionable mandates? Just another manifestation of a ridiculous bill.]

12/29/09 What Suckers We Are Investor's Business Daily

12/29/09 U.S. placed under international police-state

Columbia Conservative ExaminerAnthony G. Martin

  "INTERPOL now has the full authority to conduct investigations and other law enforcement activities on U.S. soil, with full immunity from U.S. laws such as the Freedom of Information Act and with complete independence from oversight from the FBI.

  "In short, a global law enforcement entity now has full law-enforcement authority in the U.S. without any check on its power afforded by U.S. law and U.S. law enforcement agencies. . . .

  "A bit of background is in order here, and Hot Air provides it:

During his presidency, Ronald Reagan granted the global police agency Interpol the status of diplomatic personnel in order to engage more constructively on international law enforcement.  In Executive Order 12425, Reagan made two exceptions to that status.  The first had to do with taxation, but the second was to make sure that Interpol had the same accountability for its actions as American law enforcement — namely, they had to produce records when demanded by courts and could not have immunity for their actions.

Barack Obama unexpectedly revoked those exceptions in a change to EO 12425 last (week)...
 

  "Thus, Interpol now can conduct its operations on U.S. soil with ZERO accountability to anyone in this country."

12/29/09 Pelosi Erases Gingrich's Long-Standing Fairness Rules

  "House Speaker Nancy Pelosi plans to re-write House rules today to ensure that the Republican minority is unable to have any influence on legislation. Pelosi’s proposals are so draconian, and will so polarize the Capitol, that any thought President-elect Obama has of bipartisan cooperation will be rendered impossible before he even takes office.
  "Pelosi’s rule changes -- which may be voted on today -- will reverse the fairness rules that were written around Newt Gingrich’s 'Contract with America.'  ". . .

  "Reforms to the House Rules as part of the Contract with America were designed to open up to public scrutiny what had become under this decades-long Democrat majority a dangerously secretive House legislative process. The Republican reform of the way the House did business included opening committee meetings to the public and media, making Congress actually subject to federal law, term limits for committee chairmen ending decades-long committee fiefdoms, truth in budgeting, elimination of the committee proxy vote, authorization of a House audit, specific requirements for blanket rules waivers, and guarantees to the then-Democrat minority party to offer amendments to pieces of legislation.
  "Pelosi’s proposed repeal of decades-long House accountability reforms exposes a tyrannical Democrat leadership poised to assemble legislation in secret, then goose-step it through Congress by the elimination of debate and amendment procedures as part of America’s governing legislative process."

12/29/09 The Bizarro President J.C. Arenas, American Thinker

12/28/09 Ray Stevens does it again - "You Vote Obamacare; We'll vote you outta there" [You Tube video. Tea Partiers will love this.]

12/28/09 Two al Qaeda Leaders Behind Northwest Flight 253 Terror Plot Were Released by U.S.

By BRIAN ROSS, JOSEPH RHEE and REHAB EL-BURI, ABC News

12/28/09 Sen. Lautenberg Declines To Say Where Congress Gets Constitutional Authority To Mandate Health Insurance

By Edwin Mora, CNSNews.com

   "At the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday, Dec. 22, CNSNews.com asked Senator Lautenberg, 'Specifically where in the Constitution does Congress get the authority to mandate that individuals have health insurance?' 
   "Lautenberg said, 'I am not going to answer that,' and then walked away.

The individual health insurance mandate in the Senate health reform bill would force all Americans to carry some form of government-approved health insurance or pay an excise tax penalty ranging between $500 and $1,500 per year.
    "The Senate health care bill, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, is 2,078 pages long and is estimated to cost -- over 10 years, with benefits starting in 2014 – at least $1.8 trillion.

   "The legislation passed on a party-line vote, 60 – 39, on Dec. 24, Christmas Eve. (Sen. Jim Bunning [R-Ky.] skipped the vote, while the two Independents – Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut – joined with the 58 Democrats to pass the bill.) . . .

  "Back in 1994, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) examined the individual health insurance mandate, which was then being proposed by President Bill Clinton’s health care reform effort, and described the idea as an “unprecedented form of federal action.” [Emphasis added.]
  “'The government has never required people to buy any good or service as a condition of lawful residence in the United States,' the CBO analysis said. 'An individual mandate would have two features that, in combination, would make it unique. First, it would impose a duty on individuals as members of society. Second, it would require people to purchase a specific service that would be heavily regulated by the federal government.'

   "While the Senate debated the health care bill on Dec. 22, Sens. John Ensign (R-Nev.) and Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) raised, on behalf of the Republican Steering Committee, a point of order questioning the constitutionality of the individual mandate.
   "That point of order, however, was dismissed on Wednesday afternoon, Dec. 23, in a roll call vote that split along party lines, 60-39."

12/28/09 It’s Not Socialism, It’s Communism

  "The Medicare 'reform' expands 'socialism' in America, but it is an example of naked Communism at work. It is a bill put together behind closed doors and so extensive its control of the lives of Americans literally determines who lives and who dies. It will wreck the best healthcare system in the world albeit one that has its flaws.
   "It is authoritarianism at work, the kind we associate with regimes in Russia, China, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and everywhere else Communism has been imposed on captive nations.
   "Healthcare 'reform' is not about uninsured Americans. It is not 'socialism.' It is Communism, effectively putting the entire nation’s healthcare system under state control. It must be defeated just as past generations of Americans knew the threat of Communism and devoted the nation’s treasure and even their lives to defeat it."

12/28/09 Analysts see Iran at breaking point amid protests

  "It was these courageous fighters for freedom and democracy who should have been given the Nobel Peace Prize, for only through the overthrow of tyranny can true peace be achieved. We blew one chance to help; those in Iran who hope for change have given us another.

  "Iran is a nation where the median age is 27, where the yearning for freedom beats strong in hearts in a nation whose regime considers Twitter a tool of the Great Satan. Will we hear their cry and respond? Or will we look out the window and once again not get involved in trying to stop the mugging in front of our eyes?

  "Iran was once a friend and could be again if we seize the moment and help the protesters bring freedom to their country. We wouldn't have to worry anymore about sanctions, uranium enrichment or the threat of war and nuclear terror in the region."

12/28/09 Black Panther case: Has a head rolled?

By: David Freddoso, WashingtonExaminer.com

  "Main Justice reports that Christopher Coates, head of the Justice Department's voting rights division, has been removed from his post and replaced.

  "But no, the administration isn't doing damage control after it mysteriously dropped voter intimidation charges against three members of the Black Panther Party who rather openly intimidated Philadelphia voters on Election Day 2008. Rather, the administration is getting rid of the official who initiated the charges: [Emphasis added]

  "Coates signed off on the controversial voter intimidation complaint against the New Black Panther Party and three of its members, filed in the waning days of the George W. Bush administration. The Obama DOJ’s decision to dismiss most of the charges in May has become a political controversy for the administration.

  "Coates is among those who were subpoenaed to testify about the Black Panther controversy before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. [Obama administration gives us and any kind of justice the finger again. Surprise we're so disgusted at it?"]

12/28/08 Glenn Beck Show Today [The foregoing is not a link. Fox News has provided neither a link to a video nor a transcript for today's show. Those finding either would be fortunate, seeing or reading such would be so educational and time well spent.

  Charles Payne filled in for Beck with three other financial gurus. They made the point that our government's propping up failed entities (most recently giving Freddie Mac and Fannie May unlimited dollars, thereby transferring their losses into our treasury's debt) ensure future crises, perhaps creating the next great depression plus an inflationary one. Weak businesses should be allowed to fail and so strengthen the economy. Propping them up merely diverts capital from successful enterprises. The unbridled raids on our treasury will unquestionably lead to high prices for everyone's food and energy--possibly into hyper-inflation as awful as that in the Weimar Republic.] 

12/28/09 Blank check sends Fannie, Freddie soaring

By Chris Isidore, CNNMoney.com

  "Shares of mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac soared Monday after the Treasury Department announced what essentially amounts to a blank check for their bailouts.

  "Treasury lifted a $200 billion limit on the amount it was ready to pump into each of the two mortgage firms after the markets closed Thursday. . . .

  "While the support from Treasury would appear to be a vote of confidence for the firms, the companies' leaders apparently have no interest in owning the stocks themselves.

  "According to pay packages disclosed for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on Thursday, no stock or options are being issued to any of their top managers. That is unusual for shareholder-owned companies.

  "Other firms receiving federal bailouts, such as General Motors and American International Group (AIG, Fortune 500) have been pushed by the government to pay their executives with stock.

  "Both Fannie Mae CEO Michael Williams and Freddie Mac CEO Charles Haldeman were given $6 million annual pay rates for 2009, with all the compensation coming in cash. Other top executives received annual cash payments of $2 million or more each, according to the companies' filings.

  "The lack of stock and options for Fannie and Freddie executives suggests that when Congress and the Obama administration decide what to do with the mortgage firms, shareholders could be left with little or no equity. . . .

  "The conservatorship will give Treasury about 80% of the shares of both companies, but it puts taxpayers on the hook to cover ongoing losses. Fannie has drawn down $60.9 billion and Freddie has drawn $50.7 billion of federal help so far under the reorganization process. [Now that it is explicitly clear that our taxes will cover any losses in Fannie or Freddie, there is absolutely no reason for those who administer it to use any judgment on whomever they lend to on what security. Wasn't that what was primarily responsible for the mess we are in? Answer: yes. IDIOTS.]

12/28/09 Time to resurrect the term limits movement

Tom Endicott, American Thinker

12/27/09 White House condemns "unjust" actions in Iran

Patricia Zengerle, Reuters

   "Four people died in Tehran on Sunday when pro-reform protesters clashed with security forces, Iranian state TV said, in the worst outbreak of violence since June's disputed presidential election sparked political turmoil.

  "'We strongly condemn the violent and unjust suppression of civilians in Iran seeking to exercise their universal rights,' White House National Security Council spokesman Mike Hammer said in a statement.

  "'Hope and history are on the side of those who peacefully seek their universal rights, and so is the United States,' Hammer said.

  "'Governing through fear and violence is never just, and as President (Barack) Obama said in Oslo -- it is telling when governments fear the aspirations of their own people more than the power of any other nation,' Hammer said in a reference to Obama's speech this month accepting the Nobel Peace Prize.

  "Iranian opposition websites said eight people were killed as tens of thousands demonstrated across Iran during the Shi'ite Muslim Tasoua and Ashura festival on December 26-27.

  "It was the first time people had died in street protests against Iran's clerical leadership since the immediate aftermath of the presidential election in which the opposition says more than 70 people were killed."

  "The unrest that erupted after that June vote is the biggest in the Islamic state's 30-year history. Authorities deny opposition charges that the voting was rigged."

12/27/09 Hoekstra doubles down on criticism of Obama on airline attack By Jordan Fabian, The Hill

12/27/09 Washington Democrats gorge on absolute power

Nolan Finley, The Detroit News

  "It's a bill written by Democrats and passed by Democrats, with all of the give-and-take taking place between Democrats. The horse-trading is between the middle and the left, instead of between the right and the left.

  "So instead of a bill that falls close to the middle, Congress will produce one that is well left of center.

  "The old saw, 'power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely,' applies perfectly to the process we're witnessing in Washington. . . .

  "In the House, freshmen Democrats elected from conservative districts balked at voting for the most liberal bill to move in more than 40 years. They were bought off with promises of plum committee assignments or bullied into line by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with threats of burial in committee catacombs. . . .

  "Reid says this is how legislating works. It is when there's no check on power. Some of the stuff we've seen over the past couple of months would qualify as criminal coercion, vote buying and bribery if it were the private sector writing the checks."

12/27/09 Speak out, stop ruin of health care, children's future

  Tom Skoch, The Morning Journal [Ohio]

  "More than merely a disappointment, clear-thinking analysts warn it will bog down the economy, discourage medical innovation and take some major decisions on your medical care out of the hands of your doctor.
  "Its enormous costs, disguised now in a political shell game, will sap America's strength and vitality as a nation. It will push a once vibrant, colorful nation built on self-reliance dangerously closer the point of no return in becoming a gray, lackluster, vessel full of citizens whose dreams extend no further than what the government hands them.
  "The obscene, opaque and bribe-laden 4,400-plus pages of health reform legislation that the Democrat-controlled House and Senate have approved now are to be distilled into a final bill that — if it becomes law — will eventually stick Americans with soaring taxes, eroding medical care and exploding deficits.
  "Ohio, which lags the U.S. economy, would likely see its recovery dreams totally crushed by the job-killing costs and requirements of the Dems' health reforms.
  "As an individual, you would find yourself forced under penalty of law to buy health coverage, the terms of which have been shaped by the government. Bureaucrats in this new American 'doctatorship' would hold sway over what medications and treatments you can get, and their costs.
  "If you don't like the drones' decisions, tough; you can't sue them. Not even your congressman would be much help because provisions buried in the current legislation hamper Congress when it comes to future altering of what Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Obama are striving to impose in law now. . . .
  "Nothing is inevitable. Producing a final health reform bill is expected to take at least until February.
  "Opportunity remains for ordinary Americans — most of whom polls show are not at all happy with this health reform circus — to study up and speak out.
  "Stop the destruction of our health care system, the crippling of our nation and the ruining of your children and grandchildren's futures."
 

12/27/09 Percy Sutton dies; His Obama revelation omitted from obituaries Thomas Lifson, American Thinker

12/27/09 early edition 2009 House Health Care Bill Votes

Thirty-nine House Democrats Who Voted Against the Original 2009 House Health Care Bill [that is to be merged with the Senate bill] and The One Republican Voting For It—Office of the Clerk

12/26/09 2009: The Year of Living Fecklessly

12/26/09 This fight is not over

Senate Conservatives Fund Health Care Target List

  "Senate Democrats passed President Obama's health care takeover . . . by a vote of 60-39. Now the bill goes back to the House where many who supported the original bill say they won't support the Senate's version. If changes are made to the bill in the House, the Senate will have to pass the bill again where Democrats cannot afford to lose a single vote. Americans must continue to put pressure on Senate Democrats throughout the month of January so we can stop the bill.
  "SCF will be targeting several key Senators based on this vote. Their support for this health care takeover is unacceptable, and we will do everything we can to replace them with true conservative leaders as soon as possible.
  "We've broken down the list of Democrat Senators who voted for the bill to show you when they are up for re-election." [Click the above headline link to view the list.]

12/26/09 Griffith's Party Switch Illustrates The Death Of Moderate Democrats by Dick Morris and Eileen McGann, TownHall.com

  "Parker Griffith's decision to step out of line and refuse to drink the Democratic Kool-Aid illustrates the Achilles' Heel of the Democratic regime in Washington: The radical reign of Pelosi and Reid is held up by pillars of moderate and conservative Democrats who come from districts that regularly vote Republican.

  "To survive in these red precincts, Democrats must act like Republicans, advocating a balanced budget, opposing big spending and fighting against socialized medicine. But, in Washington, Pelosi and Reid use their backing to bring a radical left leadership to Congress.

  "Once it sufficed for a moderate Democrat merely to vote 'no.' But American voters are onto their tricks and realize that a Democrat -- any Democrat -- will vote 'yes' when his party leaders need it. The unanimous Senate Democratic support for Obamacare shows that there are really only two types of congresspeople: Democrats and Republicans. All other shadings and adjectives are mere decoration. . . .

  "In 2010, voters will realize that they can vote only for one of the two parties. Individuals don't matter. Candidate personalities, preferences, backgrounds and even ideologies don't matter. Once the smart voter said that he votes for the person, not the party. Now, this once virtuous citizen would be a fool. There is no such thing as a moderate Democrat or a centrist or a conservative or a Reagan Democrat. There are only Democrats who, when the chips are down, will vote as his leaders need him to vote." [Regrettably, emphasis added. True for Senate. Thirty-nine House Democrat votes did not go along with the original House 2009 health bill.See 12/27/09.]

12/26/09 When Legerdemain Is Used to Pass an Unpopular Bill

By Michael Barone, Real Clear Politics [As Lucianne remarks, "legerdemain" is "A fancy way of saying we're being conned....for now." Our readers aren't]

  "It's time to blow the whistle on two erroneous statements that opponents and proponents of the health care legislation being jammed through Congress have been making. Republicans have been saying that never before has Congress passed such an unpopular bill with such important ramifications by such a narrow majority. Barack Obama has been saying that passage of the bill will mean that the health care issue will be settled once and for all.

  "The Republicans and Obama are both wrong. But perhaps they can be forgiven because the precedent for Congress passing an unpopular bill is an old one, and the issue it addressed has long been settled, though not by the legislation in question. . . .

  "He got the Senate to pass a bill some of whose provisions were supported by half of the Senate plus Douglas and some of which were supported by the other half plus Douglas. . . .

  "The issue that Douglas said the Kansas-Nebraska Act would settle forever was slavery in the territories. His bill repealed the 34-year-old Missouri Compromise prohibiting slavery in territories north of Arkansas and substituted popular sovereignty -- territory residents could vote slavery up or down.

  "We cannot say with assurance that the Kansas-Nebraska Act was unpopular -- Dr. Gallup didn't start polling until 81 years later. But the results of the next election were pretty convincing. The Republican Party was suddenly created to oppose the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the 1854-55 elections transformed the Democrats' 159-71 majority to a 108-83 Republican margin. Democrats didn't win a majority of House seats for the next 20 years. . . .

  "Kansas-Nebraska was an attempt to settle a fundamental issue by legislative legerdemain and political trickery. The Democrats' health care bills are an attempt to settle a fundamental issue by partisan maneuver and cash-for-cloture. As Stephen Douglas learned, such tactics can work for a while, but the country -- and the Democratic Party -- can end up paying a heavy price."

12/25/09 Dems' 2010 Strategy: GOP Will "Repeal" Obamacare

The Weekly Standard

  "[T]he Democrats' attack plan is to tell voters that the GOP will repeal the budget-busting, tax-hiking, Medicare-cutting, abortion-funding, big insurance and big pharma giveaway that only has the support of 35% of voters. Brilliant!

  "Conservatives have been saying that if Obamacare passes Republicans should run on the platform of repealing this monstrosity. The Democrats really think it's a smart attack plan to send the same message?

  "Does this count as an in-kind contribution to Republican candidates?"

12/25/09 U.S. promises unlimited financial assistance to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac By Zachary A. Goldfarb, Washington Post Staff Writer
  "The Obama administration pledged Thursday to provide unlimited financial assistance to mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, an eleventh-hour move that allows the government to exceed the current $400 billion cap on emergency aid without seeking permission from a bailout-weary Congress.

  "The Christmas Eve announcement by the Treasury Department means that it can continue to run the companies, which were seized last year, as arms of the government for the rest of President Obama's current term."

12/24/09 In Other Words... by Ann Coulter, HumanEvents.com

[The clearest exposé  of the so called 'health care' bill that I have seen anywhere]

  "Until 10 minutes ago, the liberal argument for national health care was that it wasn't fair that some people -- 'the rich' -- have access to better health care than others.
  "In liberals' ideal world, everyone lives in abject poverty and stands in long lines, but we all live in the same abject poverty and stand in the same long lines -- just like in their beloved Soviet Union of recent memory! (Except the commissars, who get excellent health care, food, housing, maid service and no lines.)
  "Instead of being honest and telling us that their plan is to make health care worse and more expensive -- but fairer! -- liberals have recently begun claiming that providing universal health care will actually save money. Overnight, they went from wailing about basic human needs being 'more important than bombs' to claiming: 'Our plan will be cheaper!'
  "Hmmm, I didn't make any notes to debate the manifestly insane points. But I'm pretty sure that extending full medical benefits to 30 million people who don't currently have them -- 47 million once the federal health commission rules that illegal aliens are covered -- will not be less expensive than the current system.

  "You can say -- mistakenly -- that the liberals' plan is more compassionate. You can say -- also incorrectly -- that it will be fairer. On no set of facts can you say it will be cheaper.

  "Democrats keep citing the Congressional Budget Office's 'scoring' of their bills as if that means something.
  "The CBO is required to score a bill based on the assumptions provided by the bill's authors. It's worth about as much as a report card filled out by the student himself.
  "Democrats could write a bill saying: 'Assume we invent a magic pill that will make cars get 1,000 miles per gallon. Now, CBO, would that save money?'
  "The CBO would have to conclude: Yes, that bill will save money.
  "Among the tricks the Democrats put into their health care bills for the CBO is that the government will collect taxes for 10 years, but only pay out benefits for the last six years. Will that save money? Yes, the CBO says, this bill is 'deficit neutral'!

12/24/09 GOP Chairman Steele: 'Scrooge Would Be Proud' Of Dems' Health Care Plan By Mark Memmott, NPR

'The Democrats have put a $2.5 trillion lump of coal in the stocking of every American knowing that their risky health care experiment still increases premiums, still cuts Medicare, and still enacts hundreds of billions of new taxes to pay for it. . . .

'This Christmas, the Democrats and President Obama have given America the one gift that keeps on taking.'"

12/24/09 Obamacare a pallbearer for American freedom?

12/24/09 Mark Tapscott: Obama's year of falling swiftly

By: Mark Tapscott, WashingtonExaminer.com

  "Here are the numbers: Scott Rasmussen's latest survey of likely voters -- the most reliable predictor of future election results -- finds 56 percent of those questioned either disapprove or strongly disapprove of Obama's performance, with 46 percent falling in the latter category. When Bush left office, 43 percent strongly disapproved of his performance."

  "In the Gallup Poll, only one in four Americans is satisfied with the direction in which Obama and the Democratic Congress are leading the country. Rasmussen's tracking finds Republicans with their biggest lead of the year in the generic congressional party balloting, leading Democrats by 44 percent to 36 percent. Only one in four Americans approves of the job Congress is doing, according to Gallup.

12/24/09 GOP Should Be Looking For Mr. Right Now, Not Mr. Right By Ed Carson, Investor's Business Daily

  "[R]ight now the GOP needs just a few votes to block the Democratic health care plan, the biggest expansion of government in 40 years. A shaky new GOP member today may be worth five stalwart conservatives in 2011. . . .

  "As a previous Capital Hill post noted after the Senate's critical Monday morning vote:

In the end all 60 members of the Senate Democratic caucus voted for the health bill. All 40 Republicans voted no — including Maine’s liberal GOP Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins. One more GOP senator would have stopped ObamaCare.

12/23/09 Senators Cite New Budget Letter to Argue Health Care Bill Will Hike Deficit FOXNews.com

  "Republicans, emboldened by a new letter from the Congressional Budget Office, accused Democrats on Wednesday of 'Bernie Madoff accounting' for double counting the savings from Medicare as a means to pay for the Senate health care bill.

  "Sessions said the cuts to Medicare can extend the government program or create money for a new entitlement program -- but not both. . . .

  "'Either you've weakened the Medicare substantially or you're going to have no money to spend on the new program that's being created,' he said. 'You cannot spend this money twice.'

    "The news comes as Democrats push the Senate health care bill past the last of three procedural votes Wednesday afternoon [passed]. Final passage of the bill is set for Thursday morning, Christmas eve"

12/23/09 Now They Tell Us: CBO Double Counted Medicare Savings By Philip Klein, The American Spectator

After allowing Democrats for weeks to argue that their Medicare cuts would both help finance the new health care legislation and extend the solvency of Medicare, the Congressional Budget Office explained today that the bill could do one or the other, but not both at the same time.

The new memo, released after Democrats have already secured 60 votes, reads [emphasis added]:

The key point is that the savings to the HI (Medicare Hospital Insurance) trust fund under the PPACA (Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) would be received by the government only once, so they cannot be set aside to pay for future Medicare spending and, at the same time, pay for current spending on other parts of the legislation or on other programs. Trust fund accounting shows the magnitude of the savings within the trust fund, and those savings indeed improve the solvency of that fund; however, that accounting ignores the burden that would be faced by the rest of the government later in redeeming the bonds held by the trust fund. Unified budget accounting shows that the majority of the HI trust fund savings would be used to pay for other spending under the PPACA and would not enhance the ability of the government to redeem the bonds credited to the trust fund to pay for future Medicare benefits. To describe the full amount of HI trust fund savings as both improving the government’s ability to pay future Medicare benefits and financing new spending outside of Medicare would essentially double-count a large share of those savings and thus overstate the improvement in the government’s fiscal position. [Does my memory serve me right or didn't Obama make an unprecedented visit by a president to CBO a while back?]

12/23/09 We Interrupt this Socialization of Medicine to Bring You an Abdication of Our National Defense . . .   

Andy McCarthy, NationalReviewOnline

  "Quite intentionally, the Obama administration is making so many radical moves on so many different fronts simultaneously that it's difficult to stay on top of them all, much less give them the attention they deserve. But while we argue health care and Iran policy and a civilian trial for KSM and the decision to transfer enemy combatants to a U.S. prison, it's important to notice how dangerously irresponsible the administration's obsession to close Gitmo has become, and how tawdry the Justice Department is allowing itself to appear.

  "Not content with the Friday bad-news dump, the administration announced on the Sunday before Christmas that it had transferred a dozen detainees out of Gitmo. On its face, this is alarming enough. The Bush administration, it is freely conceded, released many enemy combatants, including many who obviously should have been continued in detention and who have gone on to rejoin the jihad and commit horrific acts of terrorism. That's how we got from about 800 detainees down to about 200. But there's a big difference. 

  "The original 800 included some marginal figures (to hear the Left tell it, all the detainees were shepherds indiscriminately swept up by the Northern Alliance to win bribe money from the CIA). But now we are down to a much smaller core group — detainees whose cases we've had years to study and whom we've held despite enormous pressure to release them. These are the worst of the worst. We have an absolute right under the laws of war to hold them, and when one of them gets sprung it's cause for grave concern.

  "But the release announced this past weekend is just appalling. The twelve detainees have been transferred to: Yemen, an al-Qaeda hotbed whose government makes common cause with jihadists (and has a history of allowing them to escape — or of releasing them outright); Afghanistan, which is so ungovernable and rife with jihadism that we're surging thousands of troops there (troops the jihadists are targeting); and Somaliland, which is not even a country, and which offers an easy entree into Somalia, a failed state and al-Qaeda safe-haven. At least one of the released terrorists, a Somali named Abdullahi Sudi Arale (aka Ismail Mahmoud Muhammad), was released notwithstanding the military's designation of him as a "high-value detainee" (a label that has been applied only to top-tier terrorist prisoners — and one that fits in this case given Arale's status as a point of contact between al-Qaeda's satellites in East Africa and Pakistan).

  "And then there is the appearance of impropriety. As Tom Joscelyn explains, the Justice Department has taken the lead role in making release determinations — the military command at Gitmo has "zero input" and "zero influence," in its own words. DOJ is rife with attorneys who represented and advocated for the detainees, and, in particular, Attorney General Holder's firm, represented numerous Yemeni enemy combatants. Does Justice not appreciate not only how perilous but how unseemly it appears under the circumstances for it to be leading the charge to release the Yemeni detainees? And could anyone really believe that the supposedly noxious symbolism of Gitmo is more dangerous to Americans than is deporting terrorists to the places where terrorism thrives?" 

12/23/09 Health Care Not In Constitution Investor's Business Daily

12/23/09 Richard Epstein: The Reid Bill Is Blatantly Unconstitutional   

Andy McCarthy, NationalReviewOnline
  "At PointOfLaw.com, the distinguished University of Chicago constitutional scholar Richard Epstein provides a painstaking, withering analysis of the healthcare legislation wending its way through the Senate. He concludes that it is clearly unconstitutional. The essay is lengthy and, in places, complex; but it is brilliantly done, accessible, and compelling. [Thanks to Roger Kimball and Glenn Reynolds.]"

12/23/09 The Communists Behind Obama’s Health Care Goals

– by John Perazzo, FrontPage.com [You really should read this.]

12/23/09 CRS report: ACORN didn't break law

Jake Sherman, Politico

  "A Congressional Research Service report commissioned by the House Judiciary Committee says ACORN hasn’t violated any federal regulations the past five years.    

  "The report, released by Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers’s (D-Mich.) staff Tuesday evening, also reports that the undercover filmmakers that allegedly caught employees of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now breaking the law may have violated state law in their filming operation."

12/22/09 CBO: Real 10-Year Cost of Senate Bill Still $2.5 Trillion The Weekly Standard

12/22/09 Obamacare Hazardous to America's Health

  "At least common thieves don't destroy an entire health care system and socialize the American economy when they commit their felonies. Too bad we can't say the same for our illustrious Democratic senators who sold out the nation.
   "In exchange for criminally unconstitutional favors for their respective states, they voted to pass the Senate health care bill just 38 hours after it had been made available to the public for review. . . .

  "At least common thieves don't destroy an entire health care system and socialize the American economy when they commit their felonies. Too bad we can't say the same for our illustrious Democratic senators who sold out the nation.
   "In exchange for criminally unconstitutional favors for their respective states, they voted to pass the Senate health care bill just 38 hours after it had been made available to the public for review. . . .

The Senate bill provides that Medicare fees for doctors would be cut by 20 percent beginning in 2011, but 'nobody believes these cuts will be allowed to happen.' If they don't, just this one change would result in Obamacare's adding $196 billion to the deficit in the first 10 years and $765 billion in the following one.
   "Obamacare would fare even worse, accountingwise, if it didn't force states to increase Medicaid obligations -- another unfunded mandate that would bankrupt states further.
   "Health care costs, say Heritage [Foundation] experts, would rise by $234 billion. They also tell us that though Obama promised that no one would be forced to change his health care plan, the CBO confirmed that 10 million Americans would be forced out of their current plans under Obamacare. And the $493 billion in Medicare cuts would force up to 20 percent of health care providers into insolvency.
   "Finally, Heritage informs us that 'Obamacare is funded with over $400 billion in new taxes at a time of double digit unemployment.'

   "National Center for Policy Analysis health care expert John C. Goodman says: 'This bill does not curb health care expenses, but it will increase taxes and cost jobs. The end result of this bill: most Americans will wait longer for poorer quality care.'
  "Adding insult to injury, most pro-life groups believe the bill does not ensure that federal funding would not be available for abortions."

12/22/09 Can Obama Open His Mouth Without Lying About Health Care? by Matt Welch, Reason [Skip ahead to Rush Limbaugh really "socking it to 'em" on this legislation--although a lot of column-inches. If you want to scan through, I have underlined and even bolded what I think are the best parts.]  

12/22/09 The "Science" Mantra by Thomas Sowell, TownHall.com

  "Science is one of the great achievements of the human mind and the biggest reason why we live not only longer but more vigorously in our old age, in addition to all the ways in which it provides us with things that make life easier and more enjoyable.

  "Like anything valuable, science has been seized upon by politicians and ideologues, and used to forward their own agendas. . . .

  "'Global warming' hysteria is only the latest in this long line of notions, whose main argument is that there is no argument, because it is 'science.' The recently revealed destruction of raw data at the bottom of the global warming hysteria, as well as revelations of attempts to prevent critics of this hysteria from being published in leading journals, suggests that the disinterested search for truth-- the hallmark of real science-- has taken a back seat to a political crusade. . . .

  "When a business accused of fraud begins shredding its memos and deleting its e-mails, the media are quick to proclaim these actions as signs of guilt. But, after the global warming advocates began a systematic destruction of evidence, the big television networks went for days without even reporting these facts, much less commenting on them. . . .

  "No doubt some climate scientists honestly believe that global warming poses a threat. But other climate scientists honestly believe the opposite. That is why the raw data have had to be destroyed before the latter get their hands on it."

12/22/09 Black Education by Walter E. Williams

any level, at any time in the 30-year history of NAEP that has ever registered such low numbers.' The academic performance of black students in other large cities such as Philadelphia, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles is not much better than Detroit and Washington.

  "What's to be done about this tragic state of black education? The education establishment and politicians tell us that we need to spend more for higher teacher pay and smaller class size. The fact of business is higher teacher salaries and smaller class sizes mean little or nothing in terms of academic achievement. Washington, D.C., for example spends over $15,000 per student, has class sizes smaller than the nation's average, and with an average annual salary of $61,195, its teachers are the most highly paid in the nation. . . .

  "Many black students are alien and hostile to the education process. They have parents with little interest in their education. These students not only sabotage the education process, but make schools unsafe as well. These students should not be permitted to destroy the education chances of others. They should be removed or those students who want to learn should be provided with a mechanism to go to another school.

  "Another issue deemed too delicate to discuss is the overall quality of people teaching our children. Students who have chosen education as their major have the lowest SAT scores of any other major. Students who have an education degree earn lower scores than any other major on graduate school admission tests such as the GRE, MCAT or LSAT. Schools of education, either graduate or undergraduate, represent the academic slums of most any university. They are home to the least able students and professors. Schools of education should be shut down.

  "Yet another issue is the academic fraud committed by teachers and administrators. After all, what is it when a student is granted a diploma certifying a 12th grade level of achievement when in fact he can't perform at the sixth- or seventh-grade level?

  "Prospects for improvement in black education are not likely given the cozy relationship between black politicians, civil rights organizations and teacher unions."

12/22/09 Don't Be Polite or Non-Ideological: Fight This Un-American Legislation!

They're changing our country forever. Fight like hell. By Rush Limbaugh [Part of transcript of today's show]

RUSH: Last night on the Senate floor, New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez.
MENENDEZ: It is our solemn duty to put aside our ideology, to turn off Rush Limbaugh and leave politics in the cloakroom. Our vote on this groundbreaking legislation, comparable to Social Security and Medicare --
RUSH: Stop it, that's all we need to hear from the guy, he's just a buffoon, but here we are, they're rolling, they're on track now for their Christmas Eve at nine p.m. vote and still Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey has to tell the Republicans, stop listening to me, stop being ideological, which is all the Democrats are being here, pure 100% ideology. . . .

RUSH: [T]here are unrepealable aspects of the bill, particularly a medical exchange plan that really sets the stage for the government takeover of health care. It cannot be repealed. A rule has been violated, the Constitution has been violated. There is so much of this that is illegal, and somebody's going to have to bring the charge, and I expect that if it's done, if somebody does challenge this, it's going to have to come from some of these states that are being left out of all the goodies. In New York, Bloomberg is fit to be tied, Paterson is fit to be tied, and in Georgia, I mean they're being left out, a lot of states are being left out of this. . . .
  Now, we can go through individual aspects of the bill which we will do today but that's been done ad infinitum, and it ends up sounding like mishmash, people hear it, it all runs together. The ideological approach: this is liberals, this is what liberalism is, liberalism means the loss of economic prosperity and individual freedom and so forth. . .

DEMINT: There's one provision that I found particularly troubling, and it's under Section C titled, "Limitation on changes to this subsection." And I quote: "It shall not be in order in the Senate or the House of Representatives to consider any bill, resolution, amendment, or conference report that would repeal or otherwise change this subsection." This is not legislation, it's not law. This is a rule change. It's a pretty big deal. We will be passing a new law and at the same time creating a Senate rule that makes it out of order to amend or even repeal the law.

RUSH: And this is not how Senate rules are made. Now, the language is tough, but this is how dictators operate. This is how people who know that nobody wants what they're offering operate. People who have power and who do not and who are very well aware that they're running against the wishes and against the grain of the people they supposedly govern make it impossible for those people to do anything about it, in an illegal way. This is not how you change the rules of the Senate. DeMint continued.
DEMINT: I'm not even sure that it's constitutional, but if it is, it most certainly is a Senate rule. I don't see why the majority part wouldn't put this in every bill. If you like your law, you most certainly would want it to have force for future Senates. I mean we want to bind future Congresses. This goes to the fundamental purpose of Senate rules, to prevent a tyrannical majority from trampling the rights of the minority or of future Congresses.

RUSH: Okay, that's Jim DeMint on the floor of the Senate last night. Now, why are they making this provision unrepealable? What we're talking about here is the Independent Medicare Advisory Council making it impossible or difficult for future Congresses to legislate in that area, to change this. Bill Kristol points out: "Because the heart of the bill is the attempt to get control of our health care permanently in the hands of federal bureaucrats, who would allegedly know better than doctors and patients what’s good for them, and who would cut access to care and the quality of care so there’s more money left over for various big government liberal social programs."

  This is just outrageous what is happening. . . .Jim DeMint is upset, but of course this doesn't get carried much outside the Senate floor by the State-Controlled Media, so aside from people like you in this audience and readers of various conservative blogs and so forth the vast majority of the American people have no clue about this yet. . . .

This will forever change the relationship that you and I have with our doctors because the government's going to be a very powerful middleman. There are death panels back in this bill. This is what Harry Reid says cannot be repealed. We are going to ration care. We're gonna make sure that only the approved people get the kind of care that might prolong life. It's all in there. None of this matters! It's all about the process. It's all about the political victory. "Can Obama bring it home?" Meanwhile, the country is undergoing one of the most major transformations since its founding. . . .

This whole thing is un-American. It is unconstitutional, and it's not time to be polite with this. It's not time to be gentlemanly and let the Democrats have their sway on this. . . .

I think at some point they're going to have to resort to a mechanism whereby they get 51 votes instead of 60. Because I think at some point in the Senate they're not going to be able to get 60, and the House is a whole 'nother ballgame. But the fight is not over even if it does pass. . . RUSH: Not one Democrat Senator with integrity or courage, not one. It would only take one Democrat Senator out of 60 to object to all this, this horrendous piece of legislation, and it would die, just one Democrat Senator out of 60 to show some integrity, show some courage. And nobody anywhere thinks it will happen. It's not even being discussed. Now, what does that tell you about Democrats? And yet it is always the Republicans who are portrayed as closed-minded, walking in lockstep. What a laugh. We now see what walking in lockstep is really all about and we see what actually is important, and it's not the country. . . .

  There's no question that these rallies, tea party movement -- do not get [dis]spirited -- those worked. Those were spontaneous uprisings this happen they did slow this down. They wanted to get this down did you know in August. They [tea parties] had tremendous exact and tremendous power, but those are spontaneous things. Those are not the long view. The long view here is replacing current Republican leadership. There is a conservative ascendancy, and it requires the election of genuine conservatives next November to retake the party and then roll this stuff back, because Congress cannot make itself un-repealable. It just won't stand. We'll fix that. [Emphases added throughout this article.]

12/22/09 Dick Cheney: HUMAN EVENTS' Conservative of the Year

by  John R. Bolton, HumanEvents.com [Just plain worth reading.]

12/21/09 Change Nobody Believes In  The Wall Street Journal

A bill so reckless that it has to be rammed through on a partisan vote on Christmas eve.

  "Mr. Obama promised a new era of transparent good government, yet on Saturday morning Mr. Reid threw out the 2,100-page bill that the world's greatest deliberative body spent just 17 days debating and replaced it with a new 'manager's amendment' that was stapled together in covert partisan negotiations [emphasis added]. Democrats are barely even bothering to pretend to care what's in it, not that any Senator had the chance to digest it in the 38 hours before the first cloture vote at 1 a.m. this morning. After procedural motions that allow for no amendments, the final vote could come at 9 p.m. on December 24.

  "Even in World War I there was a Christmas truce. . . .

  "• Health costs. From the outset, the White House's core claim was that reform would reduce health costs for individuals and businesses, and they're sticking to that story. 'Anyone who says otherwise simply hasn't read the bills,' Mr. Obama said over the weekend. This is so utterly disingenuous that we doubt the President really believes it. [Emphases added.]

  "The best and most rigorous cost analysis was recently released by the insurer WellPoint, which mined its actuarial data in various regional markets to model the Senate bill. WellPoint found that a healthy 25-year-old in Milwaukee buying coverage on the individual market will see his costs rise by 178%. A small business based in Richmond with eight employees in average health will see a 23% increase. Insurance costs for a 40-year-old family with two kids living in Indianapolis will pay 106% more. And on and on. . . .

  "• Steep declines in choice and quality. This is all of a piece with the hubris of an Administration that thinks it can substitute government planning for market forces in determining where the $33 trillion the U.S. will spend on medicine over the next decade should go.

  "This centralized system means above all fewer choices; what works for the political class must work for everyone. With formerly private insurers converted into public utilities, for instance, they'll inevitably be banned from selling products like health savings accounts that encourage more cost-conscious decisions. . . .

  "• Blowing up the federal fisc. Even though Medicare's unfunded liabilities are already about 2.6 times larger than the entire U.S. economy in 2008, Democrats are crowing that ObamaCare will cost 'only' $871 billion over the next decade while fantastically reducing the deficit by $132 billion, according to CBO.

  "Yet some 98% of the total cost comes after 2014—remind us why there must absolutely be a vote this week—and most of the taxes start in 2010. That includes the payroll tax increase for individuals earning more than $200,000 that rose to 0.9 from 0.5 percentage points in Mr. Reid's final machinations. Job creation, here we come.

  "Other deceptions include a new entitlement for long-term care that starts collecting premiums tomorrow but doesn't start paying benefits until late in the decade. But the worst is not accounting for a formula that automatically slashes Medicare payments to doctors by 21.5% next year and deeper after that. Everyone knows the payment cuts won't happen but they remain in the bill to make the cost look lower. . . .

  "The truth is that no one really knows how much ObamaCare will cost because its assumptions on paper are so unrealistic. To hide the cost increases created by other parts of the bill and transfer them onto the federal balance sheet, the Senate sets up government-run "exchanges" . . . [Emphases added. Click the headline link for more.]

  "• Political intimidation. The experts who have pointed out such complications have been ignored or dismissed as "ideologues" by the White House. Those parts of the health-care industry that couldn't be bribed outright, like Big Pharma, were coerced into acceding to this agenda. The White House was able to, er, persuade the likes of the AMA and the hospital lobbies because the federal government will control 55% of total U.S. health spending under ObamaCare, according to the Administration's own Medicare actuaries.

  "Others got hush money . . .

  "[W]e have this vast expansion of federal control. Never in our memory has so unpopular a bill been on the verge of passing Congress, never has social and economic legislation of this magnitude been forced through on a purely partisan vote, and never has a party exhibited more sheer political willfulness that is reckless even for Washington or had more warning about the consequences of its actions.

  "These 60 Democrats are creating a future of epic increases in spending, taxes and command-and-control regulation, in which bureaucracy trumps innovation and transfer payments are more important than private investment and individual decisions. In short, the Obama Democrats have chosen change nobody believes in—outside of themselves—and when it passes America will be paying for it for decades to come." [Emphases added.]

OpinionJournal Related Stories: John Fund: Rahm's Fuzzy Math

12/21/09 The Health-Care Backlash Peter Wehner, Commentary Magazine

  "The problem isn’t simply with how substantively awful the bill is but how deeply dishonest and (legally) corrupt the whole process has been. There’s already a powerful populist, anti-Washington sentiment out there, perhaps as strong as anything we’ve seen. This will add kerosene to that raging fire. . . .

  "Together, these actions [enumerated earlier in the article] tell quite a tale. Mr. Obama has revived the worst impressions of the Democratic party – profligate and undisciplined, arrogant, lovers of big government, increasers of taxes. The issues and narrative for American politics in the foreseeable future has been set — limited government versus exploding government, capitalism versus European style socialism, responsible and measured policies versus reckless and radical ones."

12/21/09 Banks with political ties got bailouts, study shows By Steve Eder, Reuters

12/21/09 Ideas Will Matter Most in 2010 By Rush Limbaugh

CALLER: I'm calling because people need to get involved in the 2010 congressional elections right now because this is the time when elections will be won and lost, because, remember, a lot of these challenges are going to be going up against incumbents with multimillion-dollar war chests. So to wait until the fall may be too late. . . .
RUSH: I actually think that that process is underway. I think this whole tea party movement is exactly what this is about, and I know those people are fired up and they are recruiting . . .

CALLER: [A] lot of these challenges are going to be going up against incumbents with multimillion-dollar war chests. So to wait until the fall may be too late. . . .
RUSH: I actually think that that process is underway. I think this whole tea party movement is exactly what this is about, and I know those people are fired up and they are recruiting . . .

CALLER: [W]e just need more ammunition to go up against these guys who are funded, you know, by special interests, unions, and those sort of things.
RUSH: I know and they're going to have slush fund assistance as well. But never before in the upcoming elections will ideas matter as much as they will in November of 2010, never before. . . .I can give you countless examples where candidates who were so underfunded compared to their competition, their opponent, and still won. The mayor of Indianapolis won reelection with practically no money, It can be done. The power of ideas and the power of articulating them and communicating them, rallying the American people, being positive, upbeat, inspirational, motivational, speaking great things about the United States and our potential, and there's no reason for this country to change, there's no reason for us to ever believe that the best days in this country are behind us. It can be done. I know money is important, but money is going to be scarce. The economy is in the tank, ten percent unemployment and maybe higher. The power of ideas -- trust me on this -- the power of ideas next November will matter more than they have in a long time. "

12/21/09 US jobseekers face bleak Christmas as unemployment rises Andrew Clark, Guardian.co.uk

  "The rate of joblessness in the US is significantly worse than in overseas economies which, in GDP terms, have suffered a deeper recession – although definitions may vary slightly, Britain's unemployment rate is 7.9%, Germany's is 7.5%, the European Union's is 9.3% and Japan's is 5.2%. The number of jobs lost in the US during 2009 surpasses any other year since the second world war. And in worst hit pockets, joblessness has reached apocalyptic proportions"

12/21/09 Food stamps altering how retailers do business

Record number of Americans — 37 million — depend upon the benefit

  "At 11 p.m. on the last day of the month, shoppers flock to the nearest Walmart. They load their carts with food and household items and wait for the midnight hour. That's when food stamp credits are loaded on their electronic benefits transfer cards.

'Once the clock strikes midnight and EBT cards are charged, you can see our results start to tick up,' says Tom Schoewe, Wal-Mart Stores Inc's chief financial officer.

As food stamps become an increasingly common currency in a struggling U.S. economy, they are dictating changes in how even the biggest retailers do business."

[Socialist Democrats win as more people become dependent on the government.]

12/21/09 Matthews: Cheney 'Bath-Tub Ring' Of Bush Administration

12/20/09 America Under Barack Obama

An Interview with Nat Hentoff

By John W. Whitehead, Old Speak, The Rutherford Institute

Nat Hentoff: I try to avoid hyperbole, but I think Obama is possibly the most dangerous and destructive president we have ever had. An example is ObamaCare, which is now embattled in the Senate. If that goes through the way Obama wants, we will have something very much like the British system. If the American people have their health care paid for by the government, depending on their age and their condition, they will be subject to a health commission just like in England which will decide if their lives are worth living much longer. . . .

  I am beginning to think that this guy is a phony. Obama seems to have no firm principles that I can discern that he will adhere to. His only principle is his own aggrandizement. This is a very dangerous mindset for a president to have. . . .

JW: Do you consider Obama to be worse than George W. Bush?

NH: Oh, much worse. . . .

  In England, you have what I would call government-imposed euthanasia. Under the British healthcare system, there is a commission that decides whether or not, based on your age and physical condition, the government should continue to pay for your health. That leads to the government not doing it and you gradually or suddenly die.    The present Stimulus Bill sets up the equivalent commission in the United States similar to that which is in England. . . .

JW: Do you think Obama is shallow?

NH: It's much worse than that. Obama has little, if any, principles except to aggrandize and make himself more and more important. You see that in his foreign policy. Obama lacks a backbone—both a constitutional backbone and a personal backbone. This is a man who is causing us and will cause us a great deal of harm constitutionally and personally. I say personally because I am 84 years old, and this is the first administration that has scared me in terms of my lifespan. . . .

JW: A lot of people we represent and I talk to feel that their government does not hear them, that their representatives do not listen to them anymore. As a result, you have these Tea Party protests which the Left has criticized. What do you think of the Tea Party protests?

NH: I spent a lot of time studying our Founders and people like Samuel Adams and the original Tea Party. What Adams and the Sons of Liberty did in Boston was spread the word about the abuses of the British. They had Committees of Correspondence that got the word out to the colonies. We need Committees of Correspondence now, and we are getting them. That is what is happening with the Tea Parties. I wrote a column called "The Second American Revolution" about the fact that people are acting for themselves as it happened with the Sons of Liberty which spread throughout the colonies. . . .

JW: You lived through the McCarthy era in the 1950s. Is it worse now than it was then?

NH: McCarthy's regime was ended by Senators who realized that he had gone too far. What we have now may be more insidious. What we have now in America is a surveillance society. We have no idea how much the government knows and how much the CIA even knows about average citizens. . . .

  If James Madison or Thomas Jefferson were brought back to life and they looked at television and read the papers, they would not recognize the country.

  The media has been very bad about informing us about what is going on. They focus on surface things. They do not focus enough on the fact that the Fourth Amendment is on life support and that we need a return to transparency in government. The media ignores what is really going on. But I am optimistic. I have to be optimistic, as I know you are. That is why you keep writing and keep doing what you do. You have to do this because we have been through very dark periods before. There are enough people who are starting to be actively involved that we can turn things around. And we need to encourage others to become involved.

12/20/09 Questions over business deals of UN climate change guru Dr Rajendra Pachauri

Christopher Booker and Richard North, Telegraph.co.uk

  "No one in the world exercised more influence on the events leading up to the Copenhagen conference on global warming than Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and mastermind of its latest report in 2007.

  "Although Dr Pachauri is often presented as a scientist (he was even once described by the BBC as “the world’s top climate scientist”), as a former railway engineer with a PhD in economics he has no qualifications in climate science at all.

  "What has also almost entirely escaped attention, however, is how Dr Pachauri has established an astonishing worldwide portfolio of business interests with bodies which have been investing billions of dollars in organisations dependent on the IPCC’s policy recommendations."

12/20/09 Lawrence Solomon: Wikipedia’s climate doctor

How Wikipedia’s green doctor rewrote 5,428 climate articles

  "The Climategate Emails reveal something else, too: the enlistment of the most widely read source of information in the world — Wikipedia — in the wholesale rewriting of this history. . . .

   "The Climategate Emails describe how a small band of climatologists cooked the books to make the last century seem dangerously warm.
  "The emails also describe how the band plotted to rewrite history as well as science, particularly by eliminating the Medieval Warm Period, a 400 year period that began around 1000 AD.
The Climategate Emails reveal something else, too: the enlistment of the most widely read source of information in the world — Wikipedia — in the wholesale rewriting of this history.
  "The Medieval Warm Period, which followed the meanness and cold of the Dark Ages, was a great time in human history — it allowed humans around the world to bask in a glorious warmth that vastly improved agriculture, increased life spans and otherwise bettered the human condition.
  "But the Medieval Warm Period was not so great for some humans in our own time — the same small band that believes the planet has now entered an unprecedented and dangerous warm period. As we now know from the Climategate Emails, this band saw the Medieval Warm Period as an enormous obstacle in their mission of spreading the word about global warming. If temperatures were warmer 1,000 years ago than today, the Climategate Emails explain in detail, their message that we now live in the warmest of all possible times would be undermined. As put by one band member, a Briton named Folland at the Hadley Centre, a Medieval Warm Period 'dilutes the message rather significantly.'
  "Even before the Climategate Emails came to light, the problem posed by the Medieval Warm Period to this band was known. “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period” read a pre-Climategate email, circa 1995, as attested to at hearings of the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works."

12/20/09 Obama, left behind By MATT WELCH, New York Post

Boy, this “Obama Derangement Syndrome” really has gotten out of hand. Why, just this past week the decreasingly popular president has been called a “bald-faced liar,” “an executive who can’t bring himself to lead,” and even an “Uncle Tom.” And that’s just by liberals.

12/20/09 Civil Rights Panel Subpoenas Justice Department in New Black Panthers Case By Stephen Clark-FOXNews.com

12/19/09 Nelson To Vote For Healthcare In Exchange For Medicaid Payments To Nebraska By Noel Sheppard, Newsbusters

  "As Politico reported moments ago:

      'Sen. Mary Landrieu got the 'Louisiana Purchase.' Sen. Ben Nelson got the   

      federal government to pick up most his state's future Medicaid tab -- forever.

       'As part of the deal to win Nelson's support, the federal government will fund

       Nebraska's new Medicaid recipients. It's a provision worth about $45 million

       over the first decade. [...]

       'Medicaid is usually paid for with a mix of federal and state funding, but Nelson's

       carve out means that any Medicaid beneficiaries who join the program after the

       bill passes will be funded by the federal government. [That is all of us will be

       paying taxes to finance the payoffs to Nebraska and, of course, Louisiana.

       Politics begin at home.'"

  [Bribery puts the disastrous health care bill over the top. What a bunch of scum!]

12/19/09 The Party of Repeal

By Arnold Ahlert, Jewish World Review

  "Republicans must understand that Democrats and their media lapdogs are unwittingly doing them a huge favor by referring to them as obstructionists for refusing to abide Democrats' intention to socialize America. They should take that obstructionist label and double down on it: Republicans must become the 'Party of Repeal.' To wit:
  "If Democrats pass government-run health insurance, Republicans must first tell Americans they want no part of it — and them tell them that if they become a majority in 2010, they will repeal it.
  "Ditto for a host of other leftist agendas. Cap-and-trade passes? We'll 'unpass' it. Terrorist trials in civilian courts? We'll overturn the Attorney General's decision by crafting a law stating that all non-citizen terrorists will stand before military tribunals. Democrats pass illegal immigration "reform?" We'll toss it overboard and enforce the laws already on the books — and we'll also cut federal funds to all "sanctuary cities" until they comply with those laws.
  "Runaway government spending? We'll peg federal spending to inflation and population growth, and come up with a realistic plan to reduce federal debt — including a pledge that no Republican will ever again add a single earmark to any federal bill. Democrats raise taxes? We'll lower them and get America working again.
  "Gutsy? Only if Republicans ignore the reality that Americans identify themselves as forty percent conservative, thirty-five percent independent and twenty-one percent liberal. Only if they have managed to miss the stunning uptick in people supportive of Tea Party Americans who have prospered despite a relentless bashing by the mainstream media and Democrats.
  "Only if they don't understand that one of the primal fears of most Americans is that once a government program is enacted, it is forever.
  "Republicans can make it crystal clear that nothing is forever, especially anything which has the capacity to undermine two hundred and thirty three years of individualism, freedom and prosperity."

12/19/09 New Report Shows Stimulus Plan Job Prediction Almost 70 Thousand Jobs Off The Mark in South Carolina  CarrollCampbell.com

12/19/09 All the president's mendacity By David Harsanyi, DenverPost.com

  "Iran's hard-line judiciary acknowledged for the first time Saturday that at least three prisoners detained after June's disputed presidential election were beaten to death by their jailers, confirming a key claim by the country's opposition movement."

12/18/09 Swiftboated? Glenn Beck Show Segment Video This Date

[As long as they leave the target of the link as this date's video, the first video you see is apparently from a previous interview by Glenn Beck. It speaks for itself in revealing the left's winning through lies. It fails to correct the fact that the left has distorted the term "swiftboat" itself. The original swift-boaters revealed facts that discredited John Kerry. If you watch beyond the first video, you will see part of one segment of

the other segments of today's show that were hosted by Judge Napolitano.]

12/18/09 Rush Limbaugh Transcripts for Today's Television Show

12/17/09 Progressives Want to Bring Europe to America

By Glenn Beck, First Television Show Segment Transcript this Date

12/17/09 Chavez Rips Capitalism, Draws Cheers from Copenhagen Confab By Rush Limbaugh, Today's Television Show Transcript

RUSH: To Copenhagen: Hugo Chavez has the biggest applause line of the whole conference showing you what the global warming conference is really all about. This has a translator, by the way, because he speaks Spanish.
CHAVEZ: There's a ghost lurking. And Karl Marx said - a ghost running through the streets of Copenhagen. And I think that ghost is silent somewhere in this room amongst us coming through the corridors underneath. And that ghost is a terrible ghost. Nobody wants to name him or her. It's capitalism. Capitalism is that ghost. (applause) Nobody I don't think wants to name it. Capitalism.
RUSH: I wish we'd have left the applause in there because it went on and on and on. That was the biggest applause line of the entire conference so far. The ghost in the room is capitalism. And we're supposed to fork over our money. We are forking over our money to these people!

12/17/09 Threatening and Scaring Americans

12/17/09 Club For Growth Ranking Members: U.S. Senate and House   "As voted daily by Club Members. Not a member?  Join the Club today!
Click here to watch a video tutorial on how the Club for Growth Economic Freedom Power Ranking works to provide you with a way to judge the Congressional voting records and actions of members of the House of Representatives and U.S. Senate."

Club for Growth Philosophy:
  "The goal of tax policy should be to raise the amount of money needed to fund legitimate functions of government while doing the least amount of damage to the economy and respecting the principle of treating taxpayers equally."

 [The higher the number, the greater the approval by the Club for Growth. I have extracted South Carolina choices and others for comparison purposes as of today.]

Rank  Lawmaker State  Score

Senate:

1st    Jim DeMint (R) SC 96.46%

36th  Joe Lieberman (I) CT 36.13%

38th  Lindsey Graham (R) SC 30.69%

40th  Jon Tester (D) MT 26.61% [Highest Rated Senate Democrat]

41st  Susan Collins (R) ME 22.46%

57th  Olympia Snowe (R) ME 9.21% [Only Republican Senator Rated Lower]

House:

41st    Joe Wilson (R) SC-02 78.36% 

65th.   Gresham Barrett (R) SC-03 77.24%

97th    Bob Inglis (R) SC-04 72.17%

129th  Henry Brown (R) SC-01 61.76%

344th  James Clyburn (D) SC-06 0.0%

420th  John Spratt (D) SC-05 0.0%

Overall by Party in House

157 Republicans in the top 157 rankings

222 Democrats in the bottom 225 rankings

12/17/09 The Political Class [I'm just amused with the site's (correct) menu selections:]

12/16/09 Rewriting Our History, Changing Our Traditions

Video of the First Segment of the Glenn Beck Television Show This Date

  [I'm breaking with my "tradition" of targeting the headline link to the video of the 12/16/09 show rather than the transcript, because it is much more effective for you to see it than read it. If you want to read the transcript, click here.

  The most dramatic of his first segment presentation was his showing such as magazine covers that the main stream media highlighted concerning this past year including its "man of the year." He would show one instance and then photos of the throngs at the tea parties, show another and then the throng at the "March on Washington," etc.--making the point that the MSM is erasing what really happened. He said they are changing our history. Then he gave instances showing the indoctrination of our children--trying to change our traditions.]

12/16/09 Very Important Observation Within Rush Limbaugh's "Stack of Stuff" Today By Rush Limbaugh [Headline here is not a link.]

RUSH: If you dig deep in the Rasmussen Crist-Rubio story, however, you find this: "Republican candidates have a seven-point lead over Democrats in the latest edition of the Generic Congressional Ballot. ... However..." Look at me. "However if a Tea Party candidate is in the race, the picture changes dramatically. A separate, three-way Generic Ballot test finds that Democrats attract 36% of the vote, while the Tea Party candidate picks up 23% and Republicans finish third at 18%,"which means that the Democrats win.  Now, Rasmussen is considered by most to be an objective right-down-the-middle polling organization, and getting lost in their polling data on Crist and Rubio is this notion that a third-party candidate will simply guarantee a Democrat Party victory, and I would be remiss in not passing that along to you. [Emphases added.]

12/16/09 Health-care bill wouldn't bring real reform

12/16/09 Seeing Red By Jim Geraghty, NationalReviewOnline
Scenes from the latest tea-party rally on Capitol Hill.

  "What stands out about Tuesday’s 'Red Alert' rally on Capitol Hill, at which participants urged senators to vote no on their version of Obamacare, is how quickly the phenomenon of thousands of grassroots conservatives’ making a trek to Washington, D.C., has become a regular occurrence. . . .

  "When building a consensus proved much harder than expected, members of Congress aimed to make the sales pitch during the summer recess; but they found themselves confronted with angry, fired-up, and often well-informed skeptics who were immune to the usual talking points.

  "When the loud and sometimes unruly counter-arguments threatened to drown out the Democrats’ message, some members stopped holding town-hall meetings entirely, or shifted to invitation-only sales pitches. When the members stopped coming to the public, the skeptics started coming to the members. Back in November, some 10,000 tea-party activists turned out on Capitol Hill, on relatively short notice, to attend a rally and make 'house calls' on their members. . . .

  "Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina reminded the crowd that Senate Democrats were at the White House, meeting with a president who was expected to urge them to 'make history' rather than “[listen] to their constituents. . . .

  "Speakers from the Tea Party Patriots organization spoke of visiting a congressional office and hearing no phones ringing, even though their calls to those same offices met busy signals all day. For many attendees, the only way to have their voices heard by their elected leaders is to literally stand outside their offices and shout. No wonder one of the most common signs at Tuesday’s rally read, 'Listen to ME!' . . .

  "All of this . . . occurs in an atmosphere of artificial drama, driven by a deadline that no one ever explicitly set and no one ever quite justifies. While the opposition gathered on the Senate side of Capitol Hill, the Democratic senators themselves were, as DeMint said, down Pennsylvania Avenue, hearing President Obama tell them that this was their 'last chance' to pass comprehensive health-care reform. . . . Throughout the lengthy legislative process, any notion of going back to the drawing board and starting over has been dismissed; both sides are acting as if this is, indeed, the final battle on health care for a generation. 
   "Why? Why couldn’t a better-thought-out bill be passed early next year? If passing legislation so close to Election Day 2010 represents an act of political self-immolation of metaphysical certitude, perhaps it’s worth reexamining whether it’s such a good idea in the first place. 
   "Skeptics suspect that an unpopular bill will become impossible to pass with further public scrutiny . . No wonder thousands of Americans are willing to travel to Washington, again and again, to do what they can to stop the farce."   

12/16/09 Media Are Waking Up to Obama

By: Ronald Kessler, NewsMax.com

[After many examples of how the media is starting to wake up:]

  "As traditionally liberal media outlets finally wake up to how extreme Obama is, his approval ratings will continue to sag. . . .

  "To those who insisted during the campaign that Obama did not really believe in Wright’s views, I would say: Would you listen to such hatred without walking out? Even among the most liberal Democrats who are my friends, the answer was always of course not.
  "Nonetheless, the mainstream media refused to report on Wright for more than a year. As chief Washington correspondent of Newsmax, I began doing stories about Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ and its so-called Black Value System on Jan. 7, 2008, with 'Barack Obama’s Racist Church.' The stories continued until mid-March, when the mainstream media finally began exposing Wright and his connection to Obama.
  "Beginning with the first story, I sent the Newsmax pieces and later a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed on the subject to key reporters, editors, and television producers at major news organizations. A reporter for one of the networks told me she could never pursue such a story.
  "'The media love Obama,' she said. 'If you want to do a critical story about him, you are considered by the network to be biased.'. . .

  "Clearly, if the media had done the job the First Amendment envisioned for the press, Obama would not be president today. Belatedly, we now see the media beginning to atone for what can only be described as a shameful coverup during the campaign."

12/15/09 Three Questions for Health Care Reform Glenn Beck Show Segment Transcript This Date

[Strongly recommend watching the video (click here] but if you can't spare the time:]

  Some highlights: What is real goal? CONTROL. Are they helping or hurting? HURTING. Is it constituional [to make people buy something (health insurance)] NO.

  Liebermann's selling out--"To be fair, I'm know that enormous pressure was brought to bear on Lieberman — look what they did to his wife. They are so desperate to pass their 'reform' that liberal groups went after Hadassah Lieberman, who is global ambassador for the Susan B. Komen Foundation for breast cancer research, demanding that her salary not be paid or that she be fired outright.

  If they can't bribe you, they'll try to destroy you. Which one happened here? I don't know. Was Lieberman promised something or did he cave in to their intimidation tactics?"

  Obama's rhetorical blast against "fat cats" while absorbing "fat cats" in his administration. The federal government with its $70,000 average salary compared to the $40,000 national average, etc. is the biggest "fat cat" of all.

12/15/09 Democrats Will Do Anything to Pass Obamacare; RINOs Clueless By Rush Limbaugh, Today's Show Transcript Segment

12/15/09 Senate Health Care Bill Would Force Some Middle Class Families to Pay $15,200 Yearly Insurance Fee, According to CBO Analysis By Terence P. Jeffrey, Editor-in-Chief, CNSNews.com

  "A family of four—two parents and two children—earning $88,200 would be at 400 percent of the poverty level this year, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. A family of four earning $88,201, therefore, would not be eligible for a federal subsidy to buy insurance under the Senate health-care bill. If the mother and father in such a family could not get employer-based health insurance—because their employers decided not to buy their workers insurance—the family would be required by law to purchase a policy with its own money that would cost an estimated $15,200 per year, according to the CBO."

12/15/09 Tea Party Movement Evolves Into Political Force With Eye Toward 2010 FOXNews.com

  "She [Sherry Phillips, vice president of convention organizer Tea Party Nation] said there's a split within the multifaceted movement over whether tea party should be big 'T' or little 't.' In other words, do the activists form their own party, officially, or try to influence the composition of the existing ones? 

  "Tea Party Nation opposes the creation of a new third party. And FreedomWorks' Matt Kibbe said the special election in upstate New York last month -- in which Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman drove the Republican candidate out of the race with the help of tea party activists -- can be considered an 'anomaly.' (Hoffman ended up losing narrowly to Democrat Bill Owens.) 

  "'I think a more practical solution is to take over the GOP,' Kibbe said, explaining that the tea party movement can have the most impact by directing volunteers and money in support of GOP candidates who reflect their small-government values. . . .

  "FreedomWorks, meanwhile, is planning to put its money where its mouth is in the coming months. Armey told Fox News his group will start a PAC, not to fund candidates directly but to fund activities who support them. . . .

  "The Republican Party would prefer to invite tea partiers into the fold rather than run against them in general elections, and this may force a change in the makeup of the GOP itself."

12/15/09 Kerry fundraising letter: Defeat Sarah Palin and Tea Parties Patrik Jonsson, The Christian Science Monitor

12/15/09 Copenhagen climate summit: Al Gore condemned over Arctic ice melting prediction By Murray Wardrop, Telegraph.co.uk

12/15/09 A Moment of Reflection for Bill of Rights Day: We're Screwed Brian Doherty, Reason.com

12/14/09 Like a Stone John Steele Gordon, Commentary Magazine

  "Polls, like markets, fluctuate on a daily basis. One day’s or even one week’s change doesn’t amount to much. But the chart below sure looks like a political bear market to me. And in politics, that translates into a loss of power to persuade other politicians to go along. With public approval of the Senate Health Care bill at an all-time low (-32 in the latest CNN poll), it seems as though it will be increasingly difficult for the president to persuade all 60 Democrats and Independents in the Senate to walk that particular plank.

  "My guess is that if just one of the needed 60 senators were to announce that he or she would not vote for cloture this month, regardless of what Harry Reid comes up with in the next few days, ('I’m in favor of health-care reform, but we need to consider this more carefully' — translation: I like my job and want to keep it) others would quickly follow. That would push it into 2010 and, almost surely, into a richly deserved political oblivion."

12/14/09 Climate change for 18 years: ‘An orchestrated litany of lies’ By: Barbara Hollingsworth, WashingtonExaminer.com

  "As the Copenhagen climate talks enter their final phase, President Obama and 115 other world leaders are attempting to impose drastic carbon dioxide reductions on developed nations and to transfer billions of dollars to Third World countries to help them do the same, based entirely on highly suspect computer models.
  "Dr. Vincent Gray, who resigned from the Royal Society of New Zealand to protest the inaccuracies in a report on climate change it issued on July 12, minced no words when he called the entire global warming scenario 'an orchestrated litany of lies': . . .

  "'I am therefore very familiar with the arguments presented by the IPCC, many of which have now been copied by the Royal Society of New Zealand, and the responses to them'….
"'The globe is warming
  "'This statement is a lie. The globe is currently cooling. According to the CSSP Report (Karl et al 2007), there are currently nine authorities currently involved in providing a dataset of monthly global temperature anomalies. They are: . . . [listed in the original] . . .

  "'Eight of these authorities agree that the globe is currently cooling. Only GISS disagrees.'
  "'[The globe is warming] because of increasing greenhouse gas emissions 
“'No evidence is presented to justify this conclusion. There are 'projections' of computer models but these are not predictions, they are merely the results of assumptions made in the model. No 'projected' result has ever been successfully related to an actual change in the climate.
  "'Measurements show that greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere are well above levels seen for many thousands of years.
  "'This statement is a lie. 90,000 measurements published in peer-reviewed journals since 1850, some by Nobel Prize-winners, have been suppressed by the IPCC because they do not agree with this statement. (Beck 2007). . . .

  "'Further global climate changes are predicted
  "'This is another lie. Computer models of the climate have never been shown to be capable of prediction, and the IPCC recognises this by using the term 'projections' for the output from the models. This statement refers only to greenhouse gas concentrations anyway, not to any other ‘global climate change.’'"
  "Here’s a link to Dr. Gray’s entire statement: http://nzclimatescience.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=312&Itemid=1"

12/14/09 Climate Treaty Would Create New Global Agencies to Transfer Money and Technology from U.S. and Other Developed Countries to Third World By Matt Cover, Staff Writer, CNSNews.com

12/14/09 Global Warming's Real Inconvenient Truth

Glenn Beck Show First Segment Transcript this Date [Sample follows]

12/14/09 Obama: What a Difference A Year Makes

12/13/09 The 'Cost Control' Bill of Goods The Wall Street Journal

How Peter Orszag and the White House sold a health-care illusion.

  "ObamaCare's core promise—better quality care for everyone at lower costs—is being exposed as an illusion as it degenerates into the raw exercise of political power. Naturally, the White House and its media booster club are working furiously to prop up this fiasco, especially on cost control."

12/13/09 The Democrat Health Care Bill is an Unmitigated Disaster

By Rush Limbaugh

12/13/09 The Government Is Monitoring Facebook And Twitter

Noel Sheppard, NewsBusters  "'The government is increasingly monitoring Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites for tax delinquents, copyright infringers and political protesters.-

  "So ominously began an editorial in Sunday's New York Times.

  "Those with accounts at such websites should pay attention, for according to the Times, and other sources, Big Brother is watching you"

12/13/09 Obama Gives Britain the Cold Shoulder

 By CON COUGHLIN, The Wall Street Journal

  "Britain is the only European country President Barack Obama can really count on to respond positively to his plea for NATO to provide extra forces for Afghanistan. So why is it, then, that the Obama administration can barely conceal its disdain for a nation that, by its deeds, time and again proves itself to be America's staunchest and most reliable ally? . . .

  "Before he became president it was said that Mr. Obama harbored a deep grudge against Britain for its colonialist past. It is alleged that his paternal grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was tortured by the British during the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya in the 1950s, when it was controlled by Britain. In his autobiographical book 'The Audacity of Hope,' Mr. Obama unflatteringly compares the British Empire to South Africa's apartheid regime and the former Soviet Union.

  "Soon after his inauguration, he sent back to the U.K. a bust of Sir Winston Churchill that had been loaned to President George W. Bush after the 9/11 attacks. The sculpture had enjoyed pride of place in the Oval Office.

  "There is also an important ideological reason that Britain's leading policy makers find themselves increasingly shunned by the U.S. Key foreign-policy advisers to Mr. Obama are keen advocates of a federal Europe, one in which the European Commission based in Brussels is the main center of power and influence, rather than the individual capitals, such as London, Paris and Berlin. In this context, Britain's dogged attachment to a "special relationship" with America is regarded as an embarrassing relic of a previous era. . . .

  "[I]n recent years, whenever the EU has been faced with a major international crisis, whether in the Balkans or the Middle East, the major European powers have tended to put their national interests first. This was graphically illustrated in Bosnia and during the build up to the Iraq war. And in Afghanistan, Europe divides between those who are prepared to fight, such as Britain, and those that are not, such as France and Germany.

  "For this reason alone, Mr. Obama and his advisers may regret their disregard for their most important battlefield ally in Afghanistan."

12/13/09 Sign of the times: Obamavilles Ralph Alter, American Thinker

  "'Welcome to Obamaville Colorado's Fastest Growing Community' reads the large banner that was temporarily posted within sight of the city's encampment of hundreds left homeless by the bumbling ineptitude of the Obama economic team. Of course the Obamaville tag refers to the Depression era shantytowns where the destitute camped out during the Hoover admistration: . . .

  "Media coverage of the tent-city phenomena was all the rage back in March when Oprah Winfrey featured a Lisa Ling profile of the burgeoning Obamavilles. Of course Hope and Change remained in the air during the opening months of the new administration and the time was still ripe to blame Bush for the misery.
  "A trillions dollars later, it's a B.O. problem and the party-of-government media has forgotten all about the Obamavilles. While the Obamas jet back and forth from Scandanavia garnering Nobel loot and posing greenly for the Gropenhagen climate conference, many Americans will spend Christmas living in tents or their automobliles. . . .

  "It seems Mr. Obama got the best education available at little or no
charge and regardless of his qualification for it. He was elected to office on the flimsiest of credentials and rode in on a wave of questionably contributed cash. Now he takes the wife and kids off on exotic shopping trips and vacations to London and Paris compliments of the American taxpayer.
  "Perhaps in between rounds of golf Barry can find time to look at the Christmas
lists from the folks living in Obamavilles. I bet they can't wait to see what "nicer stuff" is in store for them."

12/13/09 Obama Continues to Prove He Is a Muslim

  "A number of my columns have been stating that Obama is NOT a Christian as he says, but that he is an Islam/Muslim and continues to PROVE it." [Plausible reasons listed in what follows in the targeted text of the headline link.]

12/13/09 Bush better than Obama on Aids in Africa

12/13/09 REGISTER EXCLUSIVE: Thomas Sowell dissects intellectuals

By MARK LANDSBAUM, Orange County Register

  "Thomas Sowell, certainly no fool but clearly an intellectual, has written a book on the subject, titled 'Intellectuals and Society.' His bottom line: intellectuals, unlike normal people, are unaccountable for what they do, and as a result are unconstrained when it comes to foolishness.

  "Therefore, he concludes, immeasurable damage is done by intellectuals who pontificate, but avoid the consequences of the tripe they pass off as wisdom from on high. . . .

  "'Just imagine if we'd had the three major broadcast networks only, no cable, no Fox News, no Internet. We probably would not have heard about the climate thing in East Anglia ... like it never happened,' he said, alluding to the leak of thousands of secret documents from an English research facility published on the Internet that suggests data may have been manipulated to advance the theory of global warming.

  "'Like the famine in Russia in the '30s,' Sowell said, 'It never happened as far as the New York Times is concerned.' During the 1930s, New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty was awarded a Pulitzer Prize after reporting: 'There is no famine or actual starvation, nor is there likely to be.'

  "But a Soviet state-imposed starvation was killing millions. Indeed, at the time Duranty was telling others privately that he believed it 'quite possible that as many as 10 million people may have died directly or indirectly from lack of food,' Sowell wrote.

  "The vision of the self-anointed left-leaning media, however, preferred to portray the Soviet Union as the world's foremost model of progressive policies. When British writer Malcolm Muggeridge reported accurately on the Russian starvation, he was 'vilified and unable to get work as a writer.'

  "Critics may point out that Dr. Sowell benefits from the same unaccountability with its potential for lack of constraints as do those he disparages. In light of this, how should an outsider weigh the conflicting visions?

  "'Just read what they say and read what I say,' he told us. 'And then go get some facts and compare.'

  "Still, Sowell anticipates mainstream media's predetermined response.

  "'The usual reaction to most of my writing is that they just simply ignore it. And they proceed as if I've never said anything,' he told us. 'I've now shown you the world is round, and if they want to say it's flat, they'll just go on saying it's flat and say, 'Thomas who?'"

12/12/09 Obama Reducing the Debt? Dream On

  "Two recent news stories illustrate, more clearly than ever, the Obama Democrats' contempt for the free market and individual economic liberty. If given the chance, they will expand government and spend as much of our money as they can get away with.
  "First we learn that Obama and his party simply will not agree to keep their grubby government hands off the estimated $200 billion the banks are going to repay under TARP. . . .

  "Likewise, the Democrats' various health care plans contemplate $500 billion in Medicare savings between 2010 and 2019. But instead of using the savings to shore up this entitlement's solvency, they are charging forward with a new entitlement: major subsidies to the uninsured to buy health insurance.

  "They just can't help themselves, what with their firm control of the executive and legislative branches of the federal government. They barely have to pretend to like capitalism anymore.
  "Obama's economic radicalism was as plain as day for those paying attention during the presidential campaign and not otherwise hypnotized by his platitudes. But it's not just him; the lion's share of his party is right on board, putting the lie to their long-professed centrism. . . .

  "Why can't everyone see the obvious? For Obama and his comrades, this isn't about creating jobs, or they wouldn't be hoarding so much of the 'stimulus' money for purposes of 'buying' the upcoming national elections. It isn't about getting everyone health insurance. It's about leveling the economic playing field by lowering the common denominator and spreading the misery. It's about evening the score. It's about power, i.e., who makes the decisions over how our money is to be spent.
  "Obama Democrats believe that they know better than we do how our money ought to be spent and that they have a superior moral right to our money. They might even recognize that supply-side economics works -- just as they know capital gains tax reductions generate more revenues. But to them, the free market isn't fair because winners and losers are determined, not by the government, but by other factors, including people's raw efforts. They believe that economic 'fairness' -- or 'economic justice,' a good old Jane Fonda/Tom Hayden/Marxist phrase -- should be dictated from the top down by government officials and bureaucrats."

12/12/09 Vindicating climate change skeptics

By SALIM MANSUR, TorontoSun.com

  "It is worth recalling that then-U.S. President Bill Clinton and Vice-President Al Gore failed to win the approval of the U.S. Senate for the 1997 treaty. Kyoto was rejected by a bipartisan vote of 95-0.

  "The recent revelations -- now known as Climategate -- of how proponents of man-made global warming fudged and manipulated temperature data at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit in the U.K. to back the IPCC claim confirms the skepticism of many scientists for more than a decade.

  "Among scientists voicing concerns over the IPCC claim was Freeman Dyson, the eminent physicist and mathematician at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

  "Dyson's voice was a reminder of Galileo's observation, 'In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.'

  "In a lecture given at the American Physical Society meeting in March 1999, Dyson spoke about the science and politics of climate. He noted, 'that the climate models on which so much effort is expended are unreliable.'

  "Dyson explained the models 'use fudge-factors rather than physics' and, besides 'the general prevalence of fudge-factors,' there were other specific defects adding to their unreliability.

  "Critical defect?

  "One critical defect was the models did not predict the existence of El Nino -- 'a major and important feature of the observed climate' -- and, according to Dyson, 'any model that fails to predict it is clearly deficient.'

  "Climategate has revealed, vindicating Dyson's cautionary note, that climate models at the CRU could not explain, among other things, the Medieval Warm Period (900-1300 AD) and the Little Ice Age that followed until around 1850.

  "Hence, temperature data were falsified to produce the now discredited hockey stick graph showing stable temperature through the past millennium by erasing the WMP and LIA and then showing a sharp rise in the last century attributed to human activity.

  "It does not matter, now at Copenhagen and after, how the IPCC with its legion of true believers circle the wagons around the claim of man-made global warming since climategate revelations have falsified the theory.

  "In other words, climategate confirms there was inconclusive science in the 'science' of man-made global warming preached by the priests of environmentalism."

12/12/09 Will Congress Unlock Free Trade? 

  "The link between free trade and jobs is simple. More trade, more high-paying jobs. If NAFTA is anything to go by, forecasts for job-creation underpromise and overdeliver. Just ask President Clinton.

  "But with unemployment at 10%, politicians are getting so desperate, they might actually try something that works.

  "For much of the year, Democrats’ solution to jobless has been to hire government workers and throw more deficit spending at the problem. They’re still trying: President Obama plans to throw another $200 billion log onto the stimulus fire.

  "But free trade offers a chance to improve the private sector and jobs without a dime from the taxpayer.

  "After a year of hibernation and false starts, free trade may be quietly but quickly making a comeback. . . .

  "And its biggest export isn’t corn.

  "'It’s tractors — like John Deere,' Levine said proudly.

  "NAFTA’s Mexico and Canada, bought 43% of Iowa’s exports. Proximity obviously helps, but so does the lack of customs duties.

  "Grassley followed up with a letter to Obama extolling how free trade helps states like Iowa in the midst of recession.

  "At about the same time, several other GOP lawmakers, including House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, and House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, R-Va., also wrote to Obama urging passage of free trade pacts still awaiting a vote. And they got a pledge from House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., that free trade would be “a priority” come January.

  "There is good reason to be skeptical. Pro-free trade Democrats like Clinton are virtually extinct. Just 15 House Democrats voted to ratify the modest CAFTA deal in 2005.

  "Labor unions, which pretty much oppose trade deals on sight, have their strongest allies in decades controlling the White House and Capitol Hill."

12/12/09 GOP hopefuls get litmus test in Tarrant, Collin, Denton counties By GROMER JEFFERS JR. / The Dallas Morning News

12/11/09 Time to Cut Up Congress' Credit Cards

Glenn Beck Show Segment Transcript this Date [unless they change the link target.]

12/11/09 Developing nations slam EU climate fund pledge Breitbart

  "Developing nations at the UN climate conference rejected as 'insignificant' on Friday an EU pledge of 7.2 billion euros (10.6 billion dollars) to help them tackle global warming. . . .

12/11/09 Scientist Uses UN Security To Stop Questions About ClimateGate By Noel Sheppard, NewsBusters

  "A Stanford professor with ties to Nobel Laureate Al Gore and the growing ClimateGate scandal used United Nations security officials at the climate conference in Copenhagen to halt questions about e-mail messages obtained from Britain's Climatic Research Unit.

  "Dr. Stephen Schneider was speaking at the Bella Centre Thursday when Irish journalist Phelim McAleer began asking about ClimateGate. . . .

  "Schneider has been a controversial global warming alarmist for quite some time. As NewsBusters reported in October, he appeared in a 1978 television program warning Americans of a coming Ice Age (relevant section at 6:04):

  "Since then, Schneider has been a close confidant to Gore. In fact, as McAleer demonstrated in the following video, Schneider was with the Global Warmingist-in-Chief when he acknowledged winning the Nobel Peace Prize:"

12/11/09 Judge: ACORN funding restored Jake Sherman, Politico

  "A judge in New York ordered that ACORN’s federal funding be restored, rolling back a slew of Congressional actions that sought to stop taxpayer money from flowing to the community group on the heels of a fall full of embarrassments for it. 

  "Nina Gershon, a district judge in New York, issued a preliminary injunction directing the department of Housing and Urban Development, the Office of Management and Budget and the Treasury department to disregard a bill signed into law by President Obama that prohibited federal funding of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

  ''The question here is only whether the Constitution allows Congress to declare that a single, named organization is barred from all federal funding in the absence of a trial,' Gershon wrote in her opinion. 'Because it does not, and because the plaintiffs have shown the likelihood of irreparable harm in the absence of an injunction, I grant the plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction.' . . .

  "It is also is the second in a string of victories for ACORN. An investigation by former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger largely absolved the organization from any wrongdoings or illegalities in a hidden-video scandal which allegedly showed the organization’s employees offering advice on how to dodge taxes while setting up a prostitution ring of underage illegal immigrants. 

  "Republicans are already hammering away at the decision. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), a longtime critic of ACORN and author of a report on the group’s problems, framed Gershon as an “activist judge” appointed by former President Bill Clinton.

  "'This left-wing activist Judge is setting a dangerous precedent that left-wing political organizations plagued by criminal accusations have a constitutional entitlement to taxpayer dollars,' Issa said in a news release. 'The Obama administration should immediately move to appeal this injunction.' [It's probably popping wine bottles.]

12/11/09 Business Roundtable edges away from health reform plan By JEANNE CUMMINGS, Politico  "Without fundamental changes to the current health reform plans, the White House and congressional Democrats risk losing the last major corporate group that is standing by their effort: The Business Roundtable.

  "In an interview with POLITICO on Friday, Roundtable President John Castellani raised concerns about the effectiveness of cost containment provisions in the proposal, and the timing of various fees and taxes that ultimately could be passed on to employers that provide insurance to workers.

  "'If these areas aren’t improved the reform effort will not work and we need something that works,' said Castellani."

12/11/09 CAIR Finally Under Investigation

by  Robert Spencer, Human Events

  "Islamic Relations (CAIR), a longtime partner of the FBI in its efforts to reach out to American Muslims, now appears to be under criminal investigation by that same FBI. It’s a refreshing breakthrough of sanity in the FBI’s dealing with the domestic terror threat -- and it came to light just as CAIR was poised to win yet another victory in its ongoing campaign of harassment and intimidation against anyone who dares draw attention to jihadist activity in the United States.
  "CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, is an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case -- so named by the Justice Department. CAIR operatives have repeatedly refused to denounce Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups. Several former CAIR officials have been convicted of various crimes related to jihad terror."

12/11/09 Stack of Stuff Quick Hits Page [Rush Limbaugh's]

12/10/09 Robert Creamer Strikes Back Glenn Beck show segment transcript for this date. See the above to find the video that may be available for 24 hours.]

  "I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the left is lining up to support convicted felon Robert Creamer, the patron saint of progressivism, who was recently crowned a lifetime achievement award for his wonderful work pushing the progressive agenda.

. . . [I can't begin to do this justice with an abstract. Read the transcript linked by the above head line or find and view the video as described above that.]

  "Creamer, darling of the left, while in prison for a $2.3 million bank swindle, wrote the book that Democrat notables have extolled as their blueprint for progressive victory in such as their national healthcare swindle. Creamer and the left are now doing their best to discredit Beck for publicizing this and allegedly lying about many things. Beck demolishes all this, holds the earpiece of the red telephone--for which he has given the white house the number to call--to his microphone so everyone can hear it's dial tone, and as many times before challenges anyone to call to his show correcting ANYTHING he says.] . . .

  "Progressives would rather just say the debate is settled and march forward; destroying anything that gets in the way using whatever kinds of 'means we can to shut the opposition down.'"

12/10/09 ObamaCare Keeps Falling in the Polls

By JOHN FUND, The Wall Street Journal

A business ad campaign could turn the tide even in the House.

  "The Senate's compromise bill on health care was announced on Wednesday to much fanfare. But there's not much there for moderate Democrats to write home about. It waters down a provision creating a 'public option,' but it also expands (to include people over 55) Medicare, a program already expected to go bankrupt in 2017.

  "The Senate bill is so unwieldy that the health-care system it will create will almost certainly break apart and force us into Canadian-style care. . . .

  "These are all potent issues if TV ads and grass-roots activism can be directed into the districts of House Democrats vulnerable to defeat in 2010. Fourteen Blue Dog Democrats who voted to pass health-care reform last month represent districts rated as leaning Republican by the Cook Political Report. Another nine Democrats hail from districts that are only slightly Democratic. Pressure will be put on the 39 Democrats who voted no the first time to switch their vote, but they will be hard to budge. There are enough votes among the three groups to make it agonizingly difficult to pass health care a second time.

  "Speaker Pelosi has told her members that health-care reform is so important she is willing to lose 20 seats next year if that is what it takes to get it. Polls showing Republicans leading in the generic vote for Congress make some Democrats worry that she is seriously lowballing the risk. She may not mind if some members lose their seats, especially if they are moderates who are possible future votes against her in a leadership contest. The Blue Dogs who are the subject of her political science experiment may decide they'd rather not be her guinea pigs".

12/10/09 The EPA's Carbon Bomb Fizzles The Wall Street Journal

The administration has given a skittish Congress another reason not to pass cap and trade.

  "From the start, the Obama team has wielded the EPA action as a club, warning Congress that if it did not come up with cap-and-trade legislation the EPA would act on its own—and in a far more blunt fashion than Congress preferred. As one anonymous administration official menaced again this week: 'If [Congress doesn't] pass this legislation,' the EPA is going to have to 'regulate in a command-and-control way, which will probably generate even more uncertainty.' . . .

  "President Obama, having failed to get climate legislation, didn't want to show up to the Copenhagen climate talks with a big, fat nothing. So the EPA pulled the pin. In doing so, it exploded its own threat.

  "Far from alarm, the feeling sweeping through many quarters of the Democratic Congress is relief. Voters know cap-and-trade is Washington code for painful new energy taxes. With a recession on, the subject has become poisonous in congressional districts. Blue Dogs and swing-state senators watched in alarm as local Democrats in the recent Virginia and New Jersey elections were pounded on the issue, and lost their seats.

  "But now? Hurrah! It's the administration's problem! No one can say Washington isn't doing something; the EPA has it under control. The agency's move gives Congress a further excuse not to act.

  "'The Obama administration now owns this political hot potato,' says one industry source. 'If I'm [Nebraska Senator] Ben Nelson or [North Dakota Senator] Kent Conrad, why would I ever want to take it back?'

  "All the more so, in Congress's view, because the EPA 'command and control' threat may yet prove hollow. Now that the endangerment finding has become reality, the litigation is also about to become real. Green groups pioneered the art of environmental lawsuits. It turns out the business community took careful notes. . . .

  "Bottom line: At least some congressional Democrats view this as breathing room, a further reason to not tackle a killer issue in the run-up to next year's election. Mr. Obama may emerge from Copehagen with some sort of '  "deal.' But his real problem is getting Congress to act, and his EPA move may have just made that job harder."

[Don't let Congress off the hook. It set up the EPA and its funding, and can kill it.]

12/10/09 Climategate gaining traction - even in New Jersey

Joseph Smith, American Thinker

"The column goes on to quote a Princeton physics professor, William Happer:

In Happer's opinion, the carbon-control movement is really a population-control movement. He traces it back through the 'Population Bomb' movement of the late 1960s all the way to the 18th-century writings of Thomas Malthus.

Other scientists have said the same, but Happer says it the loudest. He terms the IPCC crowd a 'religious cult' and says, 'Disagreeing with them is like going to Saudi Arabia and criticizing Muhammad.'

As for the media, we've been guilty of putting our faith in the carbon cult as well, he said.
 

  "By running the Politico column and the op-ed column today, the paper has finally turned the heat up on the climate elites, ending the three week-long deep freeze."

12/10/09 Obama's Pay Czar to Release New Rulings on Executive Pay By MATTHEW JAFFE, ABC News

12/10/09 Hoax and Change Rush Limbaugh transcripts for today's show.

12/9/09 Obama's Safe School Czar's 'Black Book' for Kids included Fisting and Pi$$ing on Your Partner

By Jim Hoft, Big Government

[I just finished watching Michelle Malkin on Hannity talking about a school-book for 7-12 graders telling a story of kindergarten boys fellating each other in the school bathroom. Parents read your kids' books. She says what is in them can not be reported on TV, it is so vile. Only Fox reports anything about it. Obama has invited a really wonderful crowd into his administration!]

12/9/09 Dems Vote to Allow Federal Funding for Corrupt ACORN

  "In September, large Congressional majorities in both houses voted to sever all ties between the federal government and ACORN.  The Senate vote was 85-11; the House vote was 345-75.  You’d think that those votes, which USA Today described as prohibiting “any federal funding for the community organizing group,” would have settled the matter.  You’d be wrong.

  "Last night, Rep. Tom Latham (R-IA) offered an amendment during deliberations on the Democrats’ massive year-end appropriations bill to clarify the prohibition on federal funds going to ACORN or its subsidiaries.  That amendment was shot down on a 5-9 party line vote as Republicans sided with taxpayers while Democrats stood with ACORN.

  "Rep. Latham’s amendment is necessary to prevent taxpayer money from going to ACORN because the Obama Administration’s Department of Justice has taken advantage of a legal loophole to allow ACORN to continue to receive federal funds – despite the passage of the House GOP’s Defund ACORN Act in the fall."

12/9/09 Obama to GOP: 'Stop trying to frighten the American people' By Sam Youngman, The Hill

  "Republicans made it clear that they want to see a 'spending freeze' and a 'no-cost' jobs plan that consists largely of tax cuts.
  "'We can't keep spending money we don't have,' House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said.
  "House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) pushed back on Obama's request for an end to Republicans' scare tactics by saying that Obama's policies have led to a hiring freeze, and the GOP is simply telling constituents what is happening.

  "'[E]mployers are sitting there and they're frozen because they don't know what's really going to happen here,' Boehner said. 'And the president wants to blame us for informing the American people about what's happening here and how it will affect them, but it's not what we're doing; it's the policies that they're promoting here in Washington.'
  "The Republicans presented a letter to Obama detailing how they think he should approach job creation, including by way of tax cuts and trade expansion."

12/9/09 Venezuela, a Dictatorship in the Making

Diario las Americas.com

  "Hugo Chávez continues with his arbitrary and extremely dangerous policies, to say the least, in Venezuela. Because of his speeches and his decisions, it is no exaggeration to call him a dictator. Dictatorship is a title determined by circumstances more than by a specific text saying who is a dictator. The title is assigned in accordance with the way the individual governs."

12/9/09 More Lies From Al Gore As He Attempts To Dismiss ClimateGate Steve Watson, Prisonplanet.com

'These people are examining what they can or should do to deal with the P.R. dimensions of this, but where the scientific consensus is concerned, it’s completely unchanged. What we’re seeing is a set of changes worldwide that just make this discussion over 10-year-old e-mails kind of silly.'

[Al Gore quotation]

  "Of course, if Al Gore had bothered to read any of the emails or spend five minutes looking at any reports related to the greatest scientific scandal of the century, he would know that the emails cover a period of ten years, with the most recent being sent just one month ago on November 12th.

  "Some of the most damming emails, where the scientists debate being unable to account for a lack of warming, discuss how deceptive their figures may be, and advocate deleting all their emails to avoid freedom of information requests are less than one year old.

  "As for Gore’s insistence that the “consensus” remains unchallenged, try telling that to the 141 experts at The International Climate Science Coalition who have put their names to an open letter to the UN calling for convincing evidence on dangerous human-caused climate change.

  "Of course, what else should we expect from Gore? Not only is he is uninterested in debating the issue, he is also uninterested in discussing real solutions to the issue of the increased CO2 emissions that he admits have not been the driving factor behind global warming."

12/9/09 Rush Limbaugh Show: Today's Transcripts

12/9/09 This Is the Best America Has to Offer? Glenn Beck Video Segment of this Date's Show Link Above. Click here for the transcript.

[I've reversed the link order to encourage you to watch the video and get the segment's full flavor.]

GLENN BECK: Labor Secretary Hilda Solis said her agency will seek to enact an array of 90 rules and regulations next year aimed at giving more power to workers and unions. .   

  According to the [Wall Street] Journal, Solis' agenda will, 'promote rules requiring employers to increase disclosure to workers on how their pay is computed, strengthening Affirmative Action requirements for federal contractors and compelling greater disclosure from employers about their dealings with consultants who advise the companies on how to deal with workplace unions or unionization attempts.' . . .  

  Why don't we just mandate that SEIU President Andy Stern is in charge of every corporation in America? Or at least give him the name and home address of every executive in American business and provide Stern and his goons with all the free clubs they need to beat those company heads into submission? Metaphorically speaking, of course — even though Stern has acknowledged, he's not above a show of power:

 ANDY STERN, PRESIDENT PRESIDENT OF SEIU: We're trying to use the power of persuasion. And if that doesn't work we're going to use the persuasion of power. [End Video Clip.]

GLENN BECK: It's obviously not a coincidence that Stern shows up at the White House more than anyone else; judging by Solis' announcement he's apparently having quite an impact on policy.

  SEIU and Andy Stern seem to be getting their way on just about every issue with this administration. Obama has told us that Stern is his go-to guy when it comes to health care. In fact, Obama has told SEIU on several occasions that their agendas are the same:

BARACK OBAMA: Your agenda has been my agenda in the United States Senate. Before debating health care, I talked to Andy Stern and SEIU members. [End video clip]

GLENN BECK: Then he talks about his relationship with SEIU Local 880 in Chicago: [Begin video clip]

OBAMA: We organized voter registration drives. That's how we built political power on the south side of Chicago. [Cheers]

And now the time has come for us to do it all across the country... [Cheers]

We are going to paint the nation purple with SEIU. [Cheeers] S-E-I-U! S-E-I-U! S-E-I-U! . . .

GLENN BECK: Andy Stern [President of SEIU] has a global master plan. It's the only way SEIU can continue to survive. The deals they've made for workers — they can't sustain what they've promised their members. That's why SEIU has put up only token resistance to the proposed tax on 'Cadillac plans': Insurance plans worth $8,000 for an individual and $21,000 for a family. Stern knows that when those taxes kick in, the union will simply be "forced" to switch over to the government option and he'll let the taxpayer foot the bill.

  What was his slogan again?

STERN: Workers of the world unite, [if you didn't know: Communist slogan] it's not just a slogan anymore. It's the way we're going to have to do our work. [End of clip]GLENN BECK: Unite to foot the bill for his grand scheme of wealth redistribution.

  What is going on here? SEIU — a union with just 2 million members — seems to have set the agenda for controlling one-sixth of the nation's economy? . . .

  They've already admitted that they know they have many members here illegally from all over the world and they don't care:

ELISEO MEDINA, SEIU EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT: SEIU is the largest union of immigrant workers in the country. A number of them are undocumented. But let me hasten to add this: They are not just Latinos. In our membership there are Eastern Europeans, Irish, Polish, Indians, Chinese — the whole world is represented among the undocumented and also in our membership. We also represent American-born workers, legal residents. [End video clip]

GLENN BECK: Is this the best America has to offer? We both know the answer to that question. We don't need to settle for a convicted felon who had too much time on his hands in prison so he wrote a health-care manifesto or for a union thug, bent on redistributing America's wealth to the rest of the world.

  These two are just the hand-selected goons, who are leading the way down the road to total transformation.

[Beck closed a later segment: "Listen to your gut America--something is very wrong."

The head of the National Black Chamber of Commerce appeared as a guest and reported they were not invited to the job summit. He noted that 80% of jobs are created by small business and opined that our government's take over seems like a communist manifesto.}

12/8/09 President Hoax and Change Gives Speech Full of Lies, Blames Bush Rush Limbaugh Show Transcript Link Above, Abstract Below.

RUSH:  It is a crying shame, ladies and gentlemen, that that economic speech at Brookings that President Hoax and Change just gave was not in primetime.  Hoax and Change.  It's a shame it was not in primetime so all of America could have the choice of listening to his latest version of "I inherited and I am great."  That is the theme of his speeches, I inherited, and I'm great.  He dumped all over the Bush administration.  TARP was flawed, his treasury secretary designed it!  His tax cheat secretary designed it!  It was flawed?  My God, it is unbelievable what an immature little kid this guy is, bumping and blaming everything on prior administrations.  I tell you, folks, it is breathtaking to watch this. . . .

  Hoax and Change does not sell in the Universe of Reality, and we got a Universe of Lies speech today at Brookings on the economy that's breathtaking.  It was so sweeping a series of lies that it's hard to start with which one first.  His words, his ideas are what have resulted in the loss of millions of jobs, and yet we've had a turnaround, we are growing, we are out of the recovery now, we have the best job report news we've had in three years.  It was as though we are now into a new era of prosperity the likes of which this country has never seen before.  There's absolutely no credibility.  He can give speeches all day long, but this isn't a campaign.  He's not running against anybody anymore.  He's running against his own lousy record and the blame game does not wash.  Obama voted for everything that caused these deficits when he was in the Senate.  And he sits there like a spoiled rotten school kid blaming it on somebody else. . . .

  Let's go to the audio sound bites.  This is the president summing it all up here blaming George W. Bush.
OBAMA:  One of the central goals of this administration is restoring fiscal responsibility.  The deficit had been building dramatically over the previous eight years.
RUSH:  In one year Barack Obama has added more to the deficit than George Bush did in eight years.  Recue that to the top.  I mean this is an example of I don't know where to begin.  I could start-stop this whole speech.  It would take me three hours to do it and by the time I finished, I'd need blood pressure medicine.  I could do a start-stop on every sentence of this abomination today.  All right, here.  Try it again.
OBAMA:  One of the central goals of this administration is restoring fiscal responsibility.
RUSH:  Stop the tape.  I'm sorry, but you have destroyed it!  There is no fiscal responsibility.  He's back to the old, "Don't listen to what I say; listen to how I say it."

12/8/09 Iran chokes off Internet on eve of student rallies

12/8/09 Climate Deal Likely to Bear Big Price Tag

  "If negotiators reach an accord at the climate talks in Copenhagen it will entail profound shifts in energy production, dislocations in how and where people live, sweeping changes in agriculture and forestry and the creation of complex new markets in global warming pollution credits.

12/8/09 A White House Power Grab That Congress and America Doesn't See by SusanAnne Hiller,  Big Government

  "To achieve the goal of a universal, single-payer health system, the White House must secure the power it needs by amending the Social Security Act to transfer pivotal controls from Congress to the executive branch.  This transfer of power would ultimately give the President and the majority party, in this case the radical left Obama White House and Pelosi-Reid led progressive Democrats, the authority to frame and manipulate new policy, coverage options, and reimbursements, ultimately reshaping the future US health care system into a something unrecognizable in this country.

  "The deliberate setup for the White House power grab is built into the each of the health care bills and, if they fail, little-known twin bills called “MedPAC Reform of 2009” are waiting in the wings.  The bills, S.B. 1110 and H.R. 2718, craftily amend the Social Security Act and transfer the Medicare guideline and rule setting processes, from the legislative branch to the executive branch.  These bills offer cover to one another in case one doesn’t pass the House or Senate, respectively.       

  "Remember, Democrats need to gain executive branch authority by amending the Social Security Act over Medicare regulations and physician fee schedules to transform the health care system in a single-payer, socialized system. . . . [Particulars follow in headline linked article] . . .

  "If there are any questions if the White House would flex its executive branch authority over an agency, just look the way of the EPA.  Congress stalled on cap and trade and Climategate has proven to be a problem, so the White House and EPA took matters into their own hands to keep moving on the agenda—to intentionally put regulations in place that further strangle American businesses, create unemployment, and further destabilize the economy.

  "Furthermore, with most of the Obama administration graduates of the Saul Alinsky school of thought, of course the main goal of all legislation and policies would be to support the overall intention of Alinsky, which is for the “have-nots on how to take it away.”

  "In any of these legislative scenarios–Pelosi, Reid or MedPAC bills–the White House gets the power it seeks–and needs–in order to accomplish the task at hand–a single payer, government-run health system.

  "These bills must be defeated; the power grab thwarted because after the Social Security Act is amended in any form these bills present and the rule changes take effect, it is not likely for the Act to be reopened and amended again.  The problem is Congress doesn’t even comprehend what’s at stake in either of the health care bills or MedPAC Reform–and you can’t stop something you don’t see."

12/8/09 Stimulus III The Wall Street Journal

Democrats want TARP to become a revolving line of political credit.

  "If at first fiscal stimulus doesn't succeed, spend, spend again. That's the motto President Obama embraced yesterday, even if he didn't use the word "stimulus," which has managed to set a political record in the speed with which it has become unpopular with voters. This time, the spending is being called "Proposals to Accelerate Job Growth and Lay the Foundation for Robust Economic Growth.". . .

  "This time around, the President is at least suggesting a couple of good ideas. One proposal would revive his 2008 campaign promise for a zero capital gains tax on new investments in small business stock. Mr. Obama dropped the idea from his first stimulus because liberals on Capitol Hill hate the words "capital gains," but yesterday he proposed a zero rate for one year.

  "Another decent idea would extend enhanced expensing for small business that was otherwise set to expire at the end of this year. This will allow businesses to immediately expense up to $250,000 of certain investments, which should help with business cash flow.

  "Both ideas would reduce the cost of capital, and thus would partially counteract the many tax increases coming from the House and Senate that would raise the cost of capital and hiring. These tax reductions also recognize that the only source of real long-term job creation is private business.

  "Most of the rest of Mr. Obama's proposals are unfortunately a grab-bag of greatest Congressional mis-hits. . . .

  "One note of hope here is that the White House admits that the TARP statute restricts its use to the 'stabilization' of the financial system. The law also specifies that repaid money must go to deficit reduction, a fact that allowed Mrs. Pelosi to gather enough votes to pass TARP last year. This means Democrats are going to have to rewrite the law to spend TARP on pork and green jobs, giving Senate Republicans some leverage and Blue Dog Democrats another chance to write the ad scripts for their 2010 opponents."

12/8/09 Attorney general changing Alaska ethics rules

12/7/09 Proposed Amendment 28 to the US Constitution

--Received in an e-mail
  "Congress shall make no law that applies to any citizen of the United States that does not apply equally to all US Senators and Representatives, and Congress shall make no law that applies to any US Senator or Representative that does not apply equally to all citizens of the United States. All existing laws and regulations that do not meet these criteria shall be declared null and void!"

12/7/09 An Inconvenient Democracy The Wall Street Journal

The EPA aims to bully Congress and business with its carbon ruling.

 "EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said yesterday that her ruling that greenhouses gases are dangerous pollutants would 'cement 2009's place in history' as the moment when the U.S. began 'seizing the opportunity of clean-energy reform. She's right that this is an historic decision, though not to her or the White House's credit, and 'seizing' is the right term. President Obama isn't about to let a trifle like democratic consent impede his climate agenda.

  "With cap and trade blown apart in the Senate, the White House has chosen to impose taxes and regulation across the entire economy under clean-air laws that were written decades ago and were never meant to apply to carbon. With this doomsday machine activated, Mr. Obama hopes to accomplish what persuasion and debate among his own party manifestly cannot.

  "This reckless 'endangerment finding' is a political ultimatum: The many Democrats wary of levelling huge new costs on their constituents must surrender, or else the EPA's carbon police will inflict even worse consequences.

  "The gambit is also meant to coerce businesses, on the theory that they'll beg for cap and trade once the command-and-control regulatory pain grows too acute—not to mention the extra bribes in the form of valuable carbon permits that Democrats, since you ask, are happy to dispense. . . .

  "For now, this decision moves into the courts, and years if not decades of litigation. Yet the decision really is historic: The White House has opened a Pandora's box that will be difficult to close, that is breathtakingly undemocratic, and that the country, if not liberal politicians, will come to regret."

12/7/09 Tale of Two Hoaxes: Man-made Global Warming and Obamacare By Rush Limbaugh [transcript of today's radio show]

  "The EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, has concluded greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide, are endangering people's health and must be regulated, signaling that the Obama administration is prepared to contain global warming without congressional action if necessary. . . .

  "There is an underground government.  All of these bureaucracies, all of these bureaucrats, in fact, in the Senate health care bill there are 111 new bureaucracies created, 111 new federal bureaucracies created.  We now have an underground government.  We are going to get the effect of cap and trade, cap and tax, without any legislation on it. . . .

  "ClimateGate and Obamacare are the most significant power grabs, tax increases, and losses of freedom and liberty in American history.  ClimateGate and Obamacare require central planners running a command-and-control economy.  ClimateGate and Obamacare require much higher taxes that will cripple the private sector and the domestic United States economy.  ClimateGate and Obamacare severely limit personal freedom and disposable income.  ClimateGate and Obamacare are both job killers.  ClimateGate and Obamacare are economy killers.  ClimateGate and Obamacare are budget killers.  ClimateGate and Obamacare require, demand everyone's participation.  
  "Violating the laws of these two pieces of legislation will result in fines and/or incarceration.  ClimateGate and Obamacare put the public sector and public servants in total control of the private sector and over every individual American.  Truth, facts, and public opinion mean nothing to the radical leftists ramming through ClimateGate and Obamacare.  They are one and the same issue.  They have the same technique, the same propaganda, the same end objective.  They are part-and-parcel of an un-American and unconstitutional takeover of American lives by radical leftists in the United States government and governments all over the world, and they are all based on lies.  They are all based on frauds." 

  [Yesterday, Glenn Beck said that Obama's going to Geneva and pledging the U.S. would cut greenhouse gases by 17% (or whatever) was meaningless as congress had to agree. Beck said: "We are not a dictatorship."  Today we see congress  rendered irrelevant by Obama's "czardom." Might this make Obama an oligarch--ruling member of an oligarchy (rule by a few)--rather than a dictator?]

12/7/09 EPA chief: The hacked e-mails change nothing

12/6/09 Health Care BS

OBAMACARE’S 111 NEW BUREAUCRACIES

12/6/09 Understanding Climategate's Hidden Decline

12/6/09 It’s Got to Suck to be a Climavangelist!

[A light-hearted approach to the same situation as the above article.]

12/6/09 Rally Against Holder/KSM in NYC: "The Beginning of a National Campaign" The Weekly Standard

12/6/09 How's that Saudi Rehab Program for Gitmo Detainees Working Out? By Andy McCarthy, National Review Online
  "At the Long War Journal, Tom Joscelyn has another success story rung up by the brilliant project to wean jihadists off jihad by sending them to ... a 'rehabilitation' program in Saudi Arabia (where Wahhabism is the state religion and infidels are deemed too low a life-form to enter the holy cities). Sort of like a 12-step program that meets at the local gin-mill. 

  "It seems that Ibrahim Suleiman al-Rubaish has left the Kingdom — one of several Saudi rehab program graduates to rejoin the jihad. He now sits in Yemen as al-Qaeda's top mufti in the Arabian Peninsula. That is, he is an authority in Islamic jurisprudence who can approve (among other things) terrorist attacks. Rubaish had been held at Gitmo for five years after his capture in Pakistan in 2001, but the Saudis persuaded our government that they could handle the matter. Consider it handled."

12/5/09 Dubious science drives climate fears

By SALIM MANSUR, Toronto Sun

  "By now, the attentive public everywhere has learned about the scam called Climategate despite the mainstream media's reluctance to prominently report it.

  "This is about the manipulating of science, fudging of data, excluding the work of skeptical scientists and preventing peer-reviewed journals to publish dissenting views as well as trashing historical temperature records and e-mail evidence from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit in the United Kingdom.

  "This scam is likely the tip of the rot inside the UN-based International Panel on Climate Change that has driven the politics of man-made global warming. . . .

  "Climategate has exposed the fraudulent science of man-made global warming.

  "But since the UN and big governments are deeply invested in this hoax and the public remains awestruck with the mystique of science,in Copenhagen in the coming week, there will be more alarms sounded to obscure the scam pushed by the International Panel on Climate Change."

12/5/09 Alinsky Does Afghanistan
By Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review Online

  "If there is one word that captures President Obama’s much-anticipated Afghanistan speech, it is 'cynical.' Yes, the speech was also internally contradictory, counter-historical, and premised on fatally flawed assumptions about Islam and the Afghan people. Cynicism, however, is the defining feature of Obama speeches. This one was no different: from its use of the United States Military Academy as a prop to its concluding assertion that 'our resolve is unwavering' . . .  after the president had spent the preceding 40 minutes in full waver mode. . . .

  "[T]he president is an Alinskyite, so steeped in the ideology of the seminal community organizer that he became a top instructor in Alinskyite tactics for other up-and-coming radicals. As David Horowitz explains in an essential new pamphlet, Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model, Alinksyites are fifth-column radicals. They have, in substance, the same goals as open revolutionaries: overthrowing the existing free-market republic and replacing it with a radical’s utopia.  

  ""That’s why Obama could befriend such unrepentant former terrorists as Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, and take inspiration from Jeremiah Wright, a black-liberation theologist. But Alinskyites are more sophisticated, patient, and practical. They bore in, hollowing out the system from within, appropriating the appearance and argot of mainstream society. Their single, animating ambition is to overthrow the capitalist social order, which they claim to see as racist, corrupt, exploitative, imperialist, etc.    "Apart from that goal, everything else — from the public option to Afghanistan — is negotiable: They reserve the right to take any position on any matter, to say anything at any time, based on the ebb and flow of popular opinion. That keeps them politically viable while they radically transform society. . . .

  "In any event, the president gives the game away in disingenuously describing dissenters from his plan: 'Those who oppose identifying a timeframe for our transition to Afghan responsibility [and] . . . call for a more dramatic and open-ended escalation of our war effort, one that would commit us to a nation building project of up to a decade.' If we were actually in pursuit of the vital national interest 'to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and to prevent its capacity to threaten America and our allies in the future,' there could be no timetable constraining that worthy goal. The nation would commit to stay as long as it took to win, and we dissenters would be the plan’s most ardent supporters.

  "To be sure, it’s laughable when a president who has now spent generations’ worth of money we don’t have suddenly 'refuses to set goals that go beyond . . . our means.' Afghanistan is a rounding error compared to Obama’s monstrous domestic agenda. But Obama is not too embarrassed to say such things, because he doesn’t see this fleeting surge as a matter of national security. It’s nation building, pure and simple, and, while defending our nation has no price tag, building somebody else’s does.

  "If this were really the war we set out to fight after 9/11, our warriors would not be hamstrung by rules of engagement that require them to retreat, and result in their taking rather than inflicting casualties, simply because there is the slightest chance of harming civilians. Those rules are imposed because we are nation building — in a place where they don’t want our kind of nation, much less Obama’s kind of nation."

12/5/09 Intimidation then Normalization

 By Marion Valentine, Canada Free Press

  "What is the difference between Marxism, Communism, and Socialism? These days, not much. In the beginning the main difference was disagreement on how to achieve their common goal of complete control of a Nation’s people, resources and wealth.

  "The ideologies melded over the years and even though the movement for world domination suffered many setbacks, Communism did not die with the fall of the Berlin wall and the rending of the iron curtain.The word Communism became so unpopular the name changed to Socialism, then Liberalism, then to Progressive. They have even been somewhat open about what they are doing, the Communist goals for the United States were entered into the Congressional record in June, 1963. They stopped using bombs and tanks to conquer and pillage, their formula now is, I. I. D. I. N. Infiltrate, Indoctrinate, Demoralize, Intimidate then follows Normalization. . . .

  "America is now in the Intimidation stage, as witnessed by the attacks on critics of the Administration. The threats to Insurance companies and banks that would not accept Government control. All that is needed now is a Crisis severe enough to give the Government an excuse to isolate incarcerate and neutralize dissenters. A pandemic such as a more deadly (mutated version) of the H1N1 virus could be used as an excuse.

  "If the current health care plan is passed, and the Cap and Trade Bill is passed, the attacks on dissenters will continue until the people are enslaved. Then there will be a period of Normalization. Every aspect of American lives will be controlled by the Government."

12/5/09 Wishful Thinking, Biased Reporting Endanger Rifqa Bary

By Pamela Geller, American Thinker

  "Hussein Wario, a native of Kenya and, like Rifqa, an apostate from Islam, tells the truth that Heagney ignores: 'I am very concerned for Rifqa. If the judge reunites her with her family, you know that she will either be severely persecuted or killed here in the United States or elsewhere. An ardent Muslim father would rather kill his child in order to preserve his family from ridicule (from fellow Muslims) than see him or her alive. Mr. Mohamed Bary would be hailed as a hero to Muslims if he were to carry out -- God forbid -- Islamic judgment on Rifqa because she refuses to revert to Islam.' . . .

12/4/09 Relax America--President Obama Saves the Economy

 Transcript of segment of this date's Glenn Beck 5 p.m. television show--available for maybe only 24 hours? -- or  Watch Beck's Job Summit--Real world solutions to job creation (video).

  [You should really watch this date's Beck video. It would be an intense learning experience, like a year's course crammed into one class.

  His "job summit" included three articulate business leaders sitting around a table with him and two with their views presented via video in real time--major condensation: businesses have no way of knowing how the rules will be changed by this government and how much a new employee will cost. Until that changes, few jobs will be created.

  If you're too pressed for time to watch the video or read the linked-to transcript, here is a quotation abstract of the transcript of Beck's opening remarks:]