Do you think the Mafia would achieve its goals and ambitions if the
Capo di tutti
capo's
consigliere were somehow elected to the Office of the President of
the United States?
Well what do you think the results of placing
a Marxist constitutional lawyer in that office will be? Yup!
The Marxists have a pretty good shot at achieving their goals and
ambitions.
But Obama is not just a Marxist. He's a
unique hybrid. He's a Marxist for sure, but he's also a
professional activist, completely in tune with the
American Political Left and the goals of the
Socialist
International. He spent years teaching the US Constitution,
but he certainly wasn't teaching constitutional law from a strict
constructionist point of view. He's a Chicago pol. He's said he's
sympathetic to Muslim's goals and ambitions.
Obama's course
syllabus show that his expertise was in using the Constitution to
change or evade the law and to change the country. The only lie
he never told the American People is that he was all about change.
He's come right out and said it. The problem is, he never told us
what change he had in mind, but he's using
fear and his awesome political power within the government and gangster
tactics and intimidation on those outside the government to implement his
change.
Nixon was an amateur. His "plumbers"
consisted of less than a dozen guys. Some of them were discovered in a
what was described as a "third-rate burglary." Nixon was
impeached.
Obama, now there's an expert.
He's got
operators everywhere -- and they play hardball. You just begin to
look like you're gonna rock the boat and they apply the pressure.
If you don't get the hint, they drop the hammer. Obama is the head
of a gangster government. Everywhere you look, at every level of
government, there are examples of the U. S. Constitution being
manipulated or just outright ignored. When that doesn't work --
the hammer.
JB Williams,
writing
in the Canada Free Press, says that since the most powerful people in
America fear the wrath of Obama and his crowd, maybe you should too!
They are indeed a dangerous bunch, after all…
Every member of
the Supreme Court, every member of congress, every member of the Joint
Chiefs, most members of the DoD, CIA, FBI, Secret Service and state run
media, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, PBS, NPR, MSNBC, Fox and print news, knows
that Barack Hussein Obama II does NOT meet the Article II, Section I
constitutional requirements for the office he holds. By his own
biography, there is NO way he can pass the test. The hard evidence
is so far beyond overwhelming, it is ridiculous.
But not ONE of
America’s most powerful people will dare confront Obama and his
anti-American cabal on the subject. The Constitution does NOT
stand. Do you think there is no reason for this?
And it's
not just the federal government. It's ALL government -- all the
way down to the municipality.
In Florida, the local cops are
being used to
intimidate citizens for exercising their free expression rights.
Since when did cops have a city-wide investigation and chase down
people that post politically satirical flyers? Sedition in
the Age of Obama -- you can burn
the American flag, you can stand on
it, or poop on it, but don't
post graven images of the
Obamamessiah.
Think about it. The American flag represents
the U. S. Constitution. The Joker posters represents a politician.
Since when does the American government place an individual above the
Constitution? When did it become a crime to satirize a politician.
It certainly wasn't for the last 8 years. Just Google
Bush Hitler or
Bush Chimp.
Somebody pressed a button. This isn't a
police action. This is a political action. This is
intimidation and using the civil authorities to do it.
When the
cops can't apply the pressure -- call the
unions. The unions are part of the mob. The Service
Employees International Union (SEIU) has organizing
resources and experience that ordinary citizens can only dream about.
Their goon squads have heckled, harassed and even assaulted concerned
citizens who favor less-costly private options to government-run health
care.
Just ask Kenneth Gladney, the victim of an
assault
outside of a town hall meeting in St. Louis last week by a group of
thugs wearing purple t-shirts emblazoned with the SEIU logo.
Similarly clad union operatives also blocked critics of the Obama health
care plan from attending other meetings, notably in Florida.
Former Oklahoma Rep. Ernest Istook notes that in January SEIU announced
a plan "to hire more than 1,000 activists to work in 35 states on behalf
of the Obama agenda, committing 30% of the union's total resources to
the effort. You've seen SEIU's purple-shirted members in videos of
town hall altercations." Obama calls them the "Purpose People
Beaters."
SEIU has a long history of partnering to generate angry
mobs. The union helped fund the Association of Community
Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN)
"Muscle for Money" program that was set up to pressure corporations in
shakedown campaigns, including demonstrations at the homes of corporate
executives. Labor Department disclosure forms show more than
$600,000 has changed hands between SEIU locals and ACORN affiliates
under the Muscle for Money initiative. It is not an exercise in
subtlety. How's that for coordination?
And don't forget how
Obama paid of the United Auto Workers
by taking General Motors away from the stockholders and giving it to the
union. Obama did that right in front of everybody and there was
hardly a whisper.
Obama will use the Justice Department to defend
his friends and attack his enemies. Do you understnd the implications of
this stuff?
Attorney General Eric Holder's Justice Department just
dismissed the case against two of the baton-wielding
Black Panthers and merely sought a
restraining order against the third, rather than seeking appropriate
penalties, including jail time, for all three. The three were
involved in voter intimidation on Election Day at a Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania polling station. That decision was
approved by an Obama appointee, Associate Attorney General Thomas J. Perelli. No satisfactory explanation for the decision has been
tendered by anyone in the administration. The lesson is clear
enough. If you intimidate voters in the service of Obama, your
offense can be overlooked.
However, if
you're not a supporter, cover your vitals -- The White House just
waived its ethics rules to allow two lawyers in the White House
Counsel's Office to continue to work on matters relating to former
President George W. Bush.
Obama uses
spooks too -- illegally of course. Do you know who John
Brennan is?
John Brennan is Obama’s top terrorism and intelligence adviser,
and he should be in prison, not in the Executive Office Building. During the campaign, he headed a firm that was cited for breaching
sensitive files in the State Department’s passport office, according to
a State Department Inspector General’s report released last July. The
security breach, first reported by the Washington Times and later
confirmed by State Department spokesman Sean McCormack, involved a
contract employee of Brennan’s firm.
During a State Department
briefing on March 21, 2008, McCormack confirmed that the contractor had
accessed the passport files of presidential candidates Barack Obama,
Hillary Rodham Clinton, and John McCain, and that the inspector general
had launched an investigation. Sources who tracked the investigation say
that the main target of the breach was the Obama passport file, and that
the contractor accessed the file in order to "cauterize" the records of
potentially embarrassing information. "They looked at the McCain and
Clinton files as well to create confusion," one knowledgeable source
said. "But this was basically an attempt to cauterize the Obama file."
What's the difference between what Nixon's spooks did and
what Obama's spooks did? Nothing! Nixon's spooks worked for the government and broke
into a campaign office. Obama's spooks were civilians and they broke
into a federal office building and did something(?) to confidential
government files. Nixon was impeached. Obama was elected. It just
boggles.
Hell, Obama's
going to
spy on your Internet use. He's not hiding the fact. Remember
how the left howled when Bush wanted to intercept communications coming
into the U. S. from al-Qaeda. The Left screamed in protest and
demanded that Bush be impeached. Now, not a whisper.
Now,
the Obama administration has announced plans to lift a government ban on
tracking visitors to government websites, and potentially, collect their
personal data through the use of "cookies" –- an effort some suspect may
already be in place on White House sites.
A ban on such tracking
by the federal government on Internet users has been in place since
2000, however, the White House Office of Management and Budget now wants
to lift the ban citing a "compelling need."
In fact, according
to the Electronic Privacy and Information Center (EPIC), federal agencies have
already negotiated agreements and contracts with social networking sites
like Google, YouTube, SlideShare, Facebook, AddThis, Blist, Flickr and
VIMEO to collect information on visitors for federal web sites. All of
these private companies are known to have agreements with federal
agencies, but the public has never seen them.
In public comments
submitted to the Office of Management and Budget, EPIC notes it has
obtained documents that show federal agencies have negotiated these
contracts with the private sector in violation of "existing statutory
privacy rights." Those agencies include: Department of Defense,
Department of the Treasury, and the National Security Agency.
Now, throw in the pressure and influence that is applied on our society
from the Obots in the
media, from the felons inACORN and the thousands of active and
millions of passive Movement
members on a daily basis.
Defending the
Constitution is not always a peaceful event and these people who want to
destroy the United States
to implement Obama's agenda have just as much at stake as those who want
to save her. They have worked a very long time to push the USA to the
brink of collapse. They intend to finish the job, one way or another.
Can't you figure out why no member of congress or the courts
will be the first to challenge this evil cabal? This enormous,
Hydra-headed monster would apply enormous pressure
and use any means to crush opposition to its agenda.
Think!
If Americans won’t let leftists have their
country, the left will burn it and leave it in ruins. There is no
peaceful way out of the corner leftists have placed Americans in.
Congress, the courts, even the military brass and law enforcement, will
do nothing to save this country. The state run media complex is running
interference. The American People are on their own here, and they
better start paying
attention.
The only thing that can stop this guy is for
constitutionalists to win back control of Congress. Short of that, we're
in deep sneakers.
Obama's Thugocracy
Andrea Tantaros
reports that this past Sunday, in one of the most aggressive and
offensive intimidation tactics to date, hundreds of members of the
largest union -- the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) --
accompanied by D. C. police -- stormed the front yard of Bank
of America deputy general counsel Greg Baer’s home -- in Maryland!
The angry mob had bullhorns, signs and even broke the law by trespassing
to bully Baer’s teenage son, the only one home at the time, who locked
himself in the bathroom out of fear (video).
This is what SEIU does. They pressure politicians into
spending too much. They push government into bad policy decisions.
They sacrifice the private sector for the public sector. And now,
they trespass and break the law only to scare the children of private
citizens to get their way.
If you think the unions are working
along, think again.
These protests, the ones storming Wall Street
bank lobbies and now the private homes of bankers, are likely being
carefully coordinated with the White House to increase their profile
against the financial fat cats and help pass disgraced Connecticut
Senator Chris Dodd’s financial regulatory bill.
Remember, when
the White House visitor records were finally made public, it was SEIU
boss Andy Stern who was the most frequent guest.
There are also
no coincidences in politics. The bill passed the Senate last night.
From the G.M. bondholders, to the
Black Panthers at polling
stations, to ACORN to these assaults on
private citizens, Obama is running a Hugo Chavez-style thugocracy.
Like Chavez, he gets non-official "allies" to act as his henchemen and
do the intimidation work. Obama provides the narrative and tells
the story of "greed" while the SEIU provides the muscle. This is
about power, not prosperity.
This time it’s gone too far.
Unions see the writing on the wall. The goose that laid the golden
egg is bleeding on the operating table -- and they’re the ones who
killed it. They are bankrupting local and state governments, and
putting a strain on the federal budget. Unions have also put us at
a major trade imbalance. The stimulus has gone to create more
public sector union jobs. These jobs cost on average, 30K more
than their private sector equivalents.
Take New York State, for
example, once upon a time there was manufacturing, a robust Wall Street
engine of growth, Fortune 500 companies aplenty. That "Empire
State" is no more. The unions lobbied to ensure that these
companies were taxed to death and made it extremely challenging to do
business -- so much that it became easier to do business in communist
China.
Let’s be clear, I’m not defending Bank of America.
I'm defending the American tax payer from organized labor who has bled
them dry and the politicians who have been too weak to stand up to their
gangster ways.
Unsurprisingly, the SEIU has made no apology for
their behavior toward Baer’s family. Their spokespeople argue that
the protest was over home foreclosures under Bank of America’s watch,
but that still doesn’t give them the right to break the law. It
also doesn’t allow them a carve out like they demanded in the health
care bill for their costly Cadillac insurance plans. It’s absurd
that in a recession, the unions feel they deserve special treatment
because they are connected to the party in power. If that’s what
they’re arguing they need to stand up and say it.
In this
economy, you can't punch someone without feeling it yourself.
Punch the bank, they stop making loans, thus hurting the private sector.
Punch the private sector, you hurt the markets. Hurt the Street
and you hurt the pensions funds, in fact, the very same ones unions are
going gangster to protect.
We now know, there is nothing they
won't do, nobody the unions won't intimidate. And Obama, who
promised to preside over an administration free from special interest
influence, should be held accountable. As long as we continue to
feed the unions, the country will continue to decline. It’s time
to stand up to this behavior with the same muscle they’ve used to bully
our country all these years and send a message loud and clear: we will
not be intimidated.
Related: What did Obama know and when did he know it?
Related: After getting paid $10 billion from Obama, unions will
spend $100 million this year to keep Democrats in power.
White House Can't Get Its Sestak Story
Straight
The Washington Examiner
asks, did you hear the one about how Obama got Slick Willie Clinton
to offer second-term Democratic Rep. Joe Sestak an unpaid appointment to
an obscure White House advisory panel in return for dropping his primary
challenge to incumbent Sen. Arlen Specter? Obama and his Chicago
boys are still guffawing over how all the chumps in the media reported
that one with a straight face. Hey, it's a just another reason why
running a gangster government is nothing but laughs for the Obama crew
in the White House.
The reality is that nobody outside the White
House gang and its congressional confederates is laughing about this
one. It is simply illegal to offer a job to anybody in return for
doing something designed to influence a congressional election, so the
White House story fails both the legal and the giggle test. In the
first place, nobody can seriously believe that a wizened con man like
Bill Clinton would agree to offer such rotten bait to a deep-water fish
like Sestak, a former three-star admiral. When the job offer was
originally made to Sestak in February, it was done because he clearly
represented a serious threat to Specter's bid for the Pennsylvania
Democratic senatorial primary less than a year after turncoat Arlen
bolted the Republican Party. It is ludicrous to believe that the
prospect of a presidential appointment to an unpaid federal advisory
panel of little stature and less consequence would persuade Sestak to
give up his dream of moving up from the House to the Senate.
Clinton must have known this beforehand.
Second, White House
counsel Bob Bauer apparently was not consulted about this hastily
stitched together cover-up because otherwise the participants in the
Oval Office would likely have been told a key fact: As a sitting member
of Congress, Sestak was barred from serving on such a federal panel and
thus would have been required not only to give up his Specter challenge
but also his House seat in order to agree to the White House offer.
Whatever else he may be, Sestak is not stupid and would not have agreed
to such a bargain.
Third, when are Washington's business-as-usual
politicians going to learn that the cover-up is always worse than the
original crime? As California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa, the
ranking minority member of the House Oversight and Government Reform
Committee, said, "Has there been stalling? Yes. Is there a
possibility that what we're being told now is not true because it's not
so plausible? Yes. Should there be independent investigation
so we can move on? Yes." So there is a real possibility of
obstruction of justice and conspiracy to obstruct in addition to the
original violation. This is the gang that can't come up with a
plausible story, much less shoot straight.
Obama's "Chicago Way" Plunders The Private
Sector
Michael Barone
says an interesting thing about Barack Obama is that he chose, on
two occasions, to live in Chicago -- even though he didn't grow up
there, had no family ties there, never went to school there.
It
was a curious choice. Chicago has a civic culture all its own and
one that is particularly insular. Family ties and personal
connections are hugely important. Professionals who have lived and
worked there for a quarter-century are brusquely reminded, "You're not
from here."
Nonetheless Obama moved upward in the Chicago civic
firmament with apparent ease. The community organizer joined the
Rev. Jeremiah Wright's church in search of street credibility in the
heavily black South Side. The adjunct law teacher made friends
around the University of Chicago from libertarian academics to domestic
terrorist William Ayers. The young state senator designed a new
district that included the Loop and the rich folk on the Near North
Side.
Obama could not have risen so far so fast without a
profound understanding of the Chicago Way. And he has brought the
Chicago Way to the White House.
One prime assumption of the
Chicago Way is that there will always be a bounteous private sector that
politicians can plunder endlessly. Chicago was America's boom town
from 1860 to 1900, growing from nothing to the center of the nation's
railroad network, the key nexus between farm and factory, the
headquarters of great retailers and national trade associations.
The Mayors Daley have maintained Chicago's centrality in commerce by
building and expanding O'Hare International Airport and by fostering a
culture of crony capitalism with the city's big employers and labor
unions. Chicago survived the Depression and recessions to thrive
once again. Sure, small businesses and some outfits lacking
political connections fell by the wayside. But the system seems to
go on forever.
So it's natural for a Chicago Way politician to
assume that higher taxes and a hugely expensive health care regime will
not make a perceptible dent in the nation's private sector economy.
There will always be plenty to plunder.
Crony capitalism also
comes naturally to a Chicago Way politician. Use some sweeteners
to get the drug companies and the doctors to sign on to the health care
plan. If the health insurers start bellyaching, whack them a few
times in public to make them go along. Design a financial reform
that Goldman Sachs and JPMorganChase can live with even while you assail
"Wall Street fat cats."
The big guys will understand that you
have to provide the voters with some political theater while you give
them what they want. As for the little guys, well, hey, in Chicago
we don't back no losers.
If in the process you've written
legislation full of glitches and boondoggles, well, they can be fixed
later. The typical vote in the Chicago City Council is 50-0.
Republicans don't count for nothing. Down in Springfield they're
outnumbered 37-22 and 70-48.
Anyone who has spent much time in
Chicago knows the city has impressive civic and business leaders,
talented and cultured people who creatively support charities and the
arts. But they also play team ball.
One measure of that is
the $25.6 million that the 2008 Obama campaign raised from metro
Chicago. An even more meaningful measure is the $5 million that
Hillary Clinton's campaign raised there -- a virtual shutout in a city
where the Clintons once raised huge sums. The word obviously went
out: You back Barack and you don't back Hillary.
Now the
Clintons are part of the Chicago Way team. As witnessed by Bill
Clinton's willingness to dangle some sort of job to Joe Sestak to get
him out of the Pennsylvania Senate race.
To some it may seem
anomalous that Obama, who began his Chicago career as a Saul Alinsky-type
community organizer, should have taken to the Chicago Way. But
Alinsky's brand of community organizing is very Chicagocentric.
It assumes that there will always be a Machine that you can complain
about and that if you make a big enough fuss it will have to respond.
And that the Machine can always get more plunder from the private
sector.
The problem with Obama's Chicago Way is that Chicago
isn't America. The Chicago Way works locally because there is an
America out there that ultimately pays for it. But who will pay
for an America run the Chicago Way?
Obama's Thuggery
Michael Barone
says thuggery is unattractive. Ineffective thuggery even more
so. Which may be one reason so many Americans have been reacting
negatively to the response of Barack Obama and his administration to
BP's Gulf oil spill.
Take Interior Secretary Ken Salazar's remark
that he would keep his "boot on the neck" of BP, which brings to mind
George Orwell's definition of totalitarianism as "a boot stamping on a
human face -- forever." Except that Salazar's boot hasn't gotten
much in the way of results yet.
Or consider Obama's undoubtedly
carefully considered statement to Matt Lauer that he was consulting with
experts "so I know whose ass to kick." Attacking others is a
standard campaign tactic when you're in political trouble, and certainly
BP, which appears to have taken unwise shortcuts in the Gulf, is an
attractive target.
But you don't always win arguments that way.
The Obama White House gleefully took on Dick Cheney on the issue of
terrorist interrogations. It turned out that more Americans agreed
with Cheney's stand than Obama's.
Then there is Obama's decision
to impose a six-month moratorium on deepwater oil drilling in the Gulf.
This penalizes companies with better safety records than BP's and will
result in many advanced drilling rigs being sent to offshore oil fields
abroad.
The justification offered was an Interior Department
report supposedly "peer reviewed" by "experts identified by the National
Academy of Engineering." But it turned out the drafts the experts
saw didn't include any recommendation for a moratorium. Eight of
the cited experts have said they oppose the moratorium as more
economically devastating than the oil spill and "counterproductive" to
safety.
This was blatant dishonesty by the administration, on an
Orwellian scale. In defense of a policy that has all the earmarks
of mindless panic, that penalizes firms and individuals guilty of no
wrongdoing and that will worsen rather than improve our energy
situation. Ineffective thuggery.
And what about the
decision not to waive the Jones Act, which bars foreign-flag vessels
from coming to the aid of the Gulf cleanup? The Bush
administration promptly waived it after Katrina in 2005. The Obama
administration hasn't and claims unconvincingly that, gee, there aren't
really any foreign vessels that could help.
The more plausible
explanation is that this is a sop to the maritime unions, part of the
union movement that gave Obama and other Democrats $400 million in the
2008 campaign cycle. It's the Chicago way: Dance with the girl
that brung ya.
Or the decision to deny Louisiana Gov. Bobby
Jindal's proposal to deploy barges to skim oil from the Gulf's surface.
Can't do that until we see if they've got enough life preservers and
fire equipment. That inspired blogger Rand Simberg to write a blog
post he dated June 1, 1940: "The evacuation of British and French troops
from the besieged French city of Dunkirk was halted today, over concerns
that many of the private vessels that had been deployed for the task
were unsafe for troop transport."
Finally, the $20 billion escrow
fund that Obama pried out of the BP treasury at the White House when he
talked for the first time, 57 days after the rig exploded, with BP
Chairman Tony Hayward. It's pleasing to think that those injured
by BP will be paid off speedily, but House Republican Joe Barton had a
point, though an impolitic one, when he called this a "shakedown."
For there already are laws in place that insure that BP will be held
responsible for damages and the company has said it will comply.
So what we have is government transferring property from one party, an
admittedly unattractive one, to others, not based on pre-existing laws
but on decisions by one man, pay czar Kenneth Feinberg.
Feinberg
gets good reviews from everyone. But the Constitution does not
command "no person . . . shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty or
property, without due process of law except by the decision of a person
as wise and capable as Kenneth Feinberg." The Framers stopped at
"due process of law."
Obama doesn't. "If he sees any
impropriety in politicians ordering executives about, upstaging the
courts and threatening confiscation, he has not said so," write the
editors of the Economist, who then suggest that markets see Obama as "an
American version of Vladimir Putin." Except that Putin is an
effective thug.
Obama's Chicago Network
The hottest, most drama-filled Chicago-style political intrigue
(00:57)
25 Impeachable Crimes And Counting
Fred Dardick identifies what he says are 25
ObamaCrimes that Congress should investigate in 2011.
Last week
Rep. Michelle Bachmann was asked what Republicans had in mind should
they retake the House of Representatives this November, she replied "I
think that all we should do is issue subpoenas and have one hearing
after another and expose all the nonsense that is going on."
Considering the sheer volume of illegal and impeachable offences
committed by Obama and his cohorts over the past couple of years, the
House will be very busy indeed.
Putting aside Obama’s inept
leadership, weakening of our national defenses and transparent attempt
to socialize our great nation, there are a number of more practical
crimes that once investigated could lead to Obama’s impeachment and
perhaps even his well deserved imprisonment.
Jerome Corsi is reporting that Rep. Darrell
Issa, R-Calif., the ranking Republican on the House Committee on
Oversight and Government Reform, issued a scathing staff report today
charging that the White House has "used the machinery of the Obama
campaign to tout the president's agenda through inappropriate and
sometimes unlawful public relations and propaganda initiatives."
An advance pre-publication copy of the report accuses the White House of nothing short of
criminal activity. It charges the Obama administration with violating
federal laws to advance what the Government Accounting Office has
characterized as an unlawful "covert campaign," using federal resources
"to activate a sophisticated propaganda and lobbying campaign."
Pulling no punches, the Oversight Republican Report accuses the Obama
White House of "violating federal law prohibiting the use of
appropriated funds for publicity or propaganda purposes."
"The
White house has failed to transition from campaign mode to leadership
mode and is now inappropriately leveraging those campaign-trail
relationships to unlawfully generate support for the president's
agenda," the report concludes.
Read in its entirety, the
Oversight Republican Report charges the Obama administration with the
type of callous, unethical and possibly criminal manipulation of public
opinion that is reminiscent of Watergate and the illegal campaign
activities engineered by Donald Segretti on behalf of the Committee to
Re-Elect the President during Richard Nixon's presidential election
campaign of 1972.
In 1964, Donald Segretti pleaded guilty to
three misdemeanor counts of distributing illegal campaign materials, for
which he served in federal prison four months of a six-month term.
The Obama administration's abuses alleged in the Oversight
Republican Report can be summed up under the term "astro-turfing," a
fraudulent public relations activity in which "the White House and the
agency whose resources it is co-opting attempt to create the impression
that grassroots support for a particular policy exists when in fact it
has been fabricated using taxpayer dollars."
The report points
to several instances of alleged, unlawful abuse,
detailed here . . .
Another Episode Of Gangster Government
Scott Johnson
says
the adoption of
ObamaCare and related nationalization of health insurance represents
the abandonment of limited government in many respects. HHS
Secretary Kathleen Sebelius put an exclamation point on this observation
last week as she
warned health insurers not to pipe up regarding the consequences of
ObamaCare if they knew what was good for them.
When I read the
news account of Seblius's letter letter to the national association of
health insurers, I thought immediately of Michael Barone's frank
description of the delivered by the Obama administration.
Barone
first diagnosed the Obama administration's exercise of Gangster
Government in a May 2009 column on the Chrysler bankruptcy. "We
have just seen an episode of Gangster Government," Barone wrote.
He added: "It is likely to be part of a continuing series."
He
got that right. Who better than Barone to address the Seblius
letter? He
turns to it today in "Gangster government stifles criticism of
ObamaCare." ObamaCare needs to be repealed and Obama needs to be
defeated.
Abraham Lincoln decried the Know Nothings in his
famous letter to Joshua Speed. The Sebelius letter puts me in mind
of Lincoln's lament: "When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating
to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty -- to
Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the
base alloy of hypocracy [sic]." We're not going anywhere, but the
point stands.
Obama Use Of Foe's Tax Records Reviewed
The Washington Times is reporting that a federal inspector general is
looking into whether the Obama administration used confidential taxpayer
information in an effort to attack a political opponent, Koch
Industries.
The review was revealed Tuesday by Sen. Charles E.
Grassley of Iowa, two weeks after he and a handful of other top Senate
Republicans called for the Treasury Department's inspector general for
tax issues to look into the matter, saying either administration
officials had illegal access to taxpayer information or were
inappropriately speculating in public about the company's tax status.
Charles and David Koch, brothers who control the Kansas-based
company, are libertarians who have used some of their wealth to fund
conservative groups and causes that oppose much of Obama's agenda. Obama
has singled out the company for criticism in speeches.
In an
Aug. 27 briefing with some reporters on calls to restructure the
corporate tax code, an unidentified administration official cited Koch
Industries, a major privately held energy company, by name, and then
seemed to indicate that the company didn't pay any corporate income tax,
according to the Wall Street Journal.
"In this country, we have
partnerships, we have [S corporations], we have [limited-liability
companies], we have a series of entities that do not pay corporate
income tax," said the senior administration official, according to press
reports. "Some of which are really giant firms -- you know, Koch
Industries is a multibillion-dollar business."
The Weekly
Standard, which first questioned whether the comments crossed a legal
line, has reported that the unidentified administration official
"appears to have been" Austan Goolsbee, named last month as chairman of
the White House Council of Economic Advisers.
A White House
official said Tuesday that the administration will not use the Koch
example in the future, but that the comment was "not based on any review
of tax filings." Other White House officials have told reporters that
the information was publicly available, including in testimony to
Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board and on Koch's website.
But an attorney for Koch said in a statement last month that the company
does pay corporate income taxes and that information about its structure
and tax liability are not publicly available.
Mr. Grassley and
his fellow Republicans pointed to that statement in their request for an
investigation.
"The statement that
Koch is a [nontaxable] pass-through entity implies direct
knowledge of
Koch's legal and tax status, which would appear to be a
violation of Section 6103" of the Internal Revenue Code, the senators
wrote. "Alternatively, if the statement was based on speculation,
it raises the question of whether the administration speculating about
any specific taxpayer's liability is appropriate."
Tyler Durden
is reporting that a majority of
Americans believe the US Government no longer operates within the
Constitution.
A rather indicative poll released by Rasmussen earlier this week
finds that a majority of Americans (44%) now believe that the government
operates outside the confines of the Constitution, compared to just 39%
who believe government does not take liberties with the precepts laid
out by the founding fathers (and 17% were busy watching dancing with the
stars to have an opinion either way). Some other unflattering findings
on US democracy: "Earlier surveys
have shown that
just one-in-five voters believe that the government today has the
consent of the governed.Forty-eight percent (48%)
see the
government as a
threat to individual rights.
According to the Declaration of Independence, governments are formed to
protect certain inalienable rights." Not surprisingly, politicians are
shown to not only be usurping and incompetent despots but biased as
well: "As is often the case, there’s a wide gap between the perceptions
of the
Political Class and those of Mainstream voters when it comes to the
federal government. Eighty-three percent (83%) of Political Class voters
say the government now operates within constitutional limits, but 62% of
those in the Mainstream don’t share that view." Most worryingly, "nearly
two-out-of-three voters (65%) are at least somewhat
angry at the current policies of the federal government, including
40% who are Very Angry." That's 65% with not even a whiff of
austerity on the horizon...
While we uge readers to
read the full surveyfor all queries, the following
financial-related disclosure is important as it shows that the path the
government is on will continue to make the vast majority of the American
population increasingly angrier.
• Despite
continuing gun control efforts by federal, state and local
governments, Americans overwhelmingly believe the Constitution
guarantees
the right of the average citizen to own a gun.
• At the same
time, most voters (65%) say they
prefer a smaller government with lower taxes rather than one
with more services and higher taxes.
• Most
Americans say the government already has
too much influence over the economy and is involved in too many
things that would be better left to the private sector.
• Seventy
percent (70%) of voters
think
big government and big business generally work together against
the interests of investors and consumers.
If the readers find these results disappointing now, we suggest
waiting until austerity is adopted and 5 year interest-free installment
plans are no longer offered on those 10 LCD TVs you just must have.
And while the topic of the Federal Reserve was not breached this
time, the last time around Ben Bernanke's despotic institution was
discussed, nearly 90% of Americans (those who actually knew what it is)
expressed a very unfavorable opinion. The other 10% were probably
all Wall Street executives.
Obama's Police State
Jeffrey Kuhner says Obama is engaging in a
relentless assault on our freedoms and constitutional government.
The growing backlash against the new Transportation Security
Administration (TSA) airport screening procedures signifies that
Americans finally may have had enough.
There is a grass-roots
revolt against state-sanctioned sexual harassment. And who can
blame the protesters? Children are stripped of their shirts, and
their private parts are touched. Nuns and old ladies are groped by
intrusive TSA agents. Breasts have been fondled. Men's
crotches have been patted down. Full-body scanners show images of
people naked -- a clear violation of privacy and civil liberties.
The administration insists that the enhanced procedures are vital
for national security. The rationale: Last year's underwear bomber
nearly blew up a plane flying over Detroit. Hence, everyone's
private parts are now the property of the federal government -- at least
when flying.
This is wrong and dangerous. Airport screening
procedures have been a huge experiment in mass political correctness.
For fear of insulting Muslims, the U.S. government has insisted that all
Americans take off their shoes, pull out their belts and walk through
metal detectors at airports. Americans have patiently put up with
these inconveniences. But now, for many, enough is enough.
"Don't touch my junk" has become a national rallying cry.
The
central problem with modern airport security is that it falsely assumes
that every person -- each of the 7 billion people who inhabit the planet
-- is an equal terrorist threat. The 80-year-old Irish Catholic
nun, the 3-year-old toddler, the 61-year-old bladder cancer survivor
whose urine bag was punctured by TSA apparatchiks -- all of them,
according to Obama, are potential suicide bombers. They're not.
To pretend they are is to engage in leftist multicultural fantasy.
It embodies the triumph of ideology over reality -- the deranged belief
that anyone at any time is a lurking jihadist.
Islamic terrorism
is not an open-ended, universal characteristic. Rather, it is a
specific, narrowly defined phenomenon. It is fueled by Muslim
extremists bent on waging a holy war against the West. Its
perpetrators tend to be young adults from the Middle East, North Africa,
the Arab world and the Muslim ghettos of Europe. Most jihadists
fit this profile. What is needed is not more groping,
crotch-grabbing or nude screening, but better intelligence-gathering,
random checking and targeted profiling.
Washington insists on
perpetrating the illusion that a Christian grandmother in Iowa poses the
same possible national security threat as a 19-year-old Yemenite
exchange student majoring in Islamic studies. Hence, America is
squandering precious resources and manpower, as well as abrogating basic
civil liberties and humiliating its population, in order to appease the
sensitivities of the Muslim lobby.
Moreover, the new TSA
procedures mark another major step in Obama's drive to impose state
socialism. If anyone else did what TSA agents do regularly, they
rightly would be charged with sexual assault. Obama has done the
unthinkable: He has extended the federal government's reach into our
most private, intimate body parts. Big Brother not only watches us
in the nude, he can routinely molest us at will.
The
administration is not restricting its unprecedented power grab to
airports. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano recently
said that trains, boats and subways also may implement the same
screening procedures. If the White House has its way, Americans
will be getting felt up on the Metro and Amtrak every day -- morning,
afternoon and night.
The very same
people, who defend all this insanity, would go bonkers over the
requirement to show an ID at the polling station and would scream
"violation of privacy."
These same people would screech at the
requirement for illegal aliens to have to show an ID when stopped by the
police for a criminal violation.
This entire program is crazy.
Psychological profiling is the answer.
Crony Car Capitalism
Gary Jason of Real Clear Politics draws our
attention to the cesspool of crony capitalism that the American auto
industry has become. The United Auto Workers Union is leading the
pack and is well and truly in bed with the Obama Administration.
Below are three very key excerpts from his article,
"First is the
news that the "new" GM walked away from the crony bankruptcy proceedings
with a huge tax break -- one worth up to $45 billion. It was
revealed in the paperwork filed for its IPO that Obama gave the new GM a
sweetheart deal: it will be allowed to carry forward huge losses
incurred by the "old" GM prior to its bankruptcy. Of course, the
IRS doesn't allow the new companies that emerge from bankruptcy to write
off their old losses. But the feds decided to waive that rule for
companies bailed out by TARP. Thus, the new GM will save about
$45.4 billion in taxes on future earnings, which may allow it to escape
taxes for the next twenty years..."
Second, "...The UAW was given
a big chunk of new GM in the crooked bankruptcy settlement. To be
precise, the very monster that drove GM off the cliff -- the UAW --
received 35% of the stock in the new company. With the sale of the
stock in the new GM, the UAW earned an immediate $3.4 billion in selling
about one third of its shares. Moreover, if the UAW can get $36
per share for the other two-thirds of its shares, it will walk away
breaking even -- meaning it will walk away with its outrageously bloated
pension and health care fund fully intact. The taxpayer, on the
other hand, hasn't fared well at all..."
And then as if that
isn't enough, the U.S. Government is pumping even more tax-payer dollars
into the UAW via GM and Ford by purchasing almost 15,000 "unsaleable"
hybrids in the last two years.
"...It turns out that the
administration itself has purchased a huge, unprecedented chunk of
American-made hybrid cars assembled since it took over two of the loser
companies. This has propped up the sales of hybrid cars in the
face of widespread consumer indifference. The U.S. General
Services Administration (which handles the federal fleet of cars) bought
nearly 15,000 hybrid cars over the last two years, or about 10% of the
government cars purchased. This compares to only 1% of the fleet
being hybrids just two years ago. Even more striking, more than
20% of the hybrids the GSA purchased were bought using "stimulus money"
(yes, the GSA got "stimulus money" -- $300 million in total!).
Furthermore, it is interesting to note that of the 15,000 hybrids that
the GSA bought, only 22 were from Toyota and Honda. All the rest
were purchased from GM and Ford..."
I can't help but think that
the Obama Administration's approach to dealing with businesses is
something along the lines of "If it's profitable, tax it to death.
If it fails, bail it out." ...Especially if it was destroyed by an
Administration-friendly union, and heck, bail out the union as well.
Walter Williams
reports Dr. Thomas Sowell, in "Dismantling America," said in reference to Obama, "That such an administration could
be elected in the first place, headed by a man whose only qualifications
to be president of the United States at a dangerous time in the history
of the world were rhetoric, style and symbolism -- and whose animus
against the values and institutions of America had been demonstrated
repeatedly over a period of decades beforehand -- speaks volumes about
the inadequacies of our educational system and the degeneration of our
culture." Obama is by no means unique; his characteristics are
shared by other Americans, but what is unique is that no other time in
our history would such a person been elected president. That says
a lot about the degeneration of our culture, values, thinking abilities
and acceptance of what’s no less than tyranny. As Sowell says,
"Barack Obama is unlike any other President of the United States in
having come from a background of decades of associations and alliances
with people who resent this country and its people." In 2008,
Americans voted for Obama’s change. Let’s look at some of it.
Obama’s Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius
threatened that there would be "zero tolerance" for "misinformation" in
response to an insurance company executive who said that ObamaCare would
create costs that force up health insurance premiums. That’s not
only an attack on our constitutionally guaranteed free speech rights,
but an official threat against people who express views damaging to the
administration.
Not to be outdone by his HHS secretary’s attack on free speech,
Obama wants full disclosure of the names of people who were backers of
campaign commercials critical of his administration, saying that there
has been a "flood of deceptive attack ads sponsored by special
interests, using front groups with misleading names." Disclosure
would leave administration critics open to government and mob
retaliation.
Obama and his congressional and union allies have
lectured us that socialized medicine is the cure for the nation’s ills,
but I have a question.
If socialized medicine, ObamaCare, is so
great for the nation, why permit anyone to be exempted from it? It
turns out that as of the end of November, Obama’s Health and Human
Services secretary has issued over 200 waivers to major labor unions
such as the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Union and
Transport Workers Union of America and major companies such as
McDonald’s and Darden Restaurants, which operates Red Lobster and Olive
Garden. Keep in mind that the power to grant waivers is also the
power not to grant waivers. Such power can be used to reward
administration friends and punish administration critics by saddling
them with millions of dollars of health care costs.
Obama’s heath
care legislation contains deviousness that has become all too common in
Washington. What was sold to the American people as health care
reform legislation includes a provision that would more heavily regulate
and tax gold coin and bullion transactions. Whether gold and
bullion transactions should or should not be more heavily regulated and
taxed is not the issue. The administration’s devious inclusion of
it as a part of health care reform is.
Fighting government
intrusion into our lives is becoming increasingly difficult for at least
two reasons. The first reason is that educators at the primary,
secondary and university levels have been successful in teaching our
youngsters to despise the values of our Constitution and the founders of
our nation -- "those dead, old, racist white men." Their success
in that arena might explain why educators have been unable to get our
youngsters to read, write and compute on a level comparable with other
developed nations; they are too busy proselytizing students.
The
second reason is we’ve become a nation of thieves, accustomed to living
at the expense of one another and to accommodate that we’re obliged to
support tyrannical and overreaching government.
Adolf Hitler had
it right when he said, "How fortunate for governments that the people
they administer don’t think."
Remember
the promise Obama made just after his inauguration in 2009?
"Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this
presidency."
Instead, Americans have suffered through lies, stonewalling,
cover-ups, corruption, secrecy, scandal and blatant disregard for the
rule of law…this has been the Obama legacy in its first two years.
In 2010, Obama was
caught in a lie over what he knew about Illinois Governor Rod
Blagojevich’s scheme to sell Obama’s vacated Senate seat.
Blagojevich’s former Chief of Staff John Harris testified that Obama had
personal knowledge of Blago’s plot to obtain a presidential cabinet
position in exchange for appointing a candidate handpicked by Obama.
In fact, according to Harris’s court testimony, Obama sent Blagojevich a
list of "acceptable"
Senate candidates to fill his old seat. Obama was interviewed by
the FBI even before he was sworn into office. He claimed he and
his staff had no contact with Blagojevich’s office. Unfortunately
federal prosecutors never called Obama or his staff to testify under
oath.
Obama also broke his famous pledge to televise healthcare
negotiations. And in 2010, we learned why he broke his pledge.
In what is now known as the "Cornhusker
Kickback" scheme, Obama and the Democrats in the Senate "purchased"
the vote of one of the last Democrat hold-outs, Nebraska Senator Ben
Nelson, who opposed ObamaCare over the issue of covering abortions with
taxpayer funds. Nelson abandoned his opposition to ObamaCare after
receiving millions of dollars in federal aid for his home-state, helping
to give the Democrats the 60 votes they needed to overcome a Republican
filibuster. Same goes for Louisiana Democratic Senator Mary
Landrieu, who received a $100 million payoff in what has been called "The
Louisiana Purchase." (The Kickback was so corrupt that
Democrats stripped it out at the last minute.)
Obama lied about his White House’s involvement in this legislative
bribery that helped lead to the passage of the signature policy
achievement of his presidency.
Related:The Historically Corrupt, Traitorous, 111th US
Congress
Bachmann Sticks With "Gangster Government"
Politico
is reporting that Rep. Michele
Bachmann (R-Minn.) refused to walk back her comment comparing the Obama
administration to a "gangster government."
"I don’t take back my
statement on gangster government," said Bachmann, who is weighing a 2012
run for president, on NBC's "Meet the Press." "I think there are
actions taken by this government that are corrupt."
After the midterm
elections, Bachmann had blogged that the debt ceiling would be "one of
the most significant challenges to the start of the 112th Congress" and
that "Congress simply cannot continue to operate under the pretense of
'gangster government,' raising the limit upon our whim."
The Obama File has been referring
to Obama's administration as a "gangster government" for two years.
Obama's Gangster Politics
Kimerly Strassel says Obama has officially
kicked off his 2012 re-election campaign, and don't Republicans know it.
Obama is expected any day now to sign an executive order that routs 70
years of efforts to get politics out of official federal business.
Under the order, all companies (and their officers) would be
required to list their political donations as a condition to bidding for
government contracts. Companies can bid and lose out for the sin
of donating to Republicans. Or they can protect their livelihoods
by halting donations to the GOP altogether -- which is the White House's
real aim. Think of it as "not-pay to play."
Whatever you
call it, the order amounts to the White House brazenly directing the
power of government against its political opponents -- and at a time
when Obama claims to want cooperation on the budget and other issues.
Senate Republicans from Mitch McConnell to Susan Collins are fuming,
warning this is one political sucker punch too far, an unabashedly
partisan move that will damage Senate work.
Minority Leader
McConnell in an interview calls the order the "crassest" political move
he's ever seen. "This is almost gangster politics, to shut down
people who oppose them. . . . I assure you that this going to create
problems for them in many ways -- seen and unseen -- if they go
forward."
That might not matter to a White House that's already
monomaniacally focused on 2012. Democrats are obsessed with the money
game, in particular rubbing out any GOP opportunities that came with the
Supreme Court's Citizens United decision to restore some corporate
free-speech rights. Democrats last year tried to ram through the
Disclose Act, designed to muzzle those new corporate rights, while
allowing unions to continue spending at will.
When the party
failed to get the bill through even an overwhelmingly Democratic Senate,
the White House stepped up. The draft order, which came out last
month, would require federal bidders to supply a complete list of all
political contributions made by the company, its political action
committee, and its senior executives -- going back two full years.
(Richard Nixon would be impressed.) More astounding, the order
requires the list to include donations made to third-party political
groups -- disclosure that is not currently required by law, and that is,
as a result, surely unconstitutional.
Ever audacious, the White
House is spinning this as "reform," claiming taxpayers deserve to know
how federal dollars being paid to contractors are being spent in
campaigns. This might hold (a drop of) water if the executive
order also required all the (liberal) entities that get billions in
taxpayer dollars via federal grants and funding -- unions, environmental
groups, Planned Parenthood -- to disclose also. It doesn't.
The whole reform language is "Orwellian," says Ms. Collins.
It's a measure of the order's naked political nature that she's leading
the pushback -- spearheading a GOP letter to Obama and briefing
Republican senators at a policy lunch this week. This is the same
Susan Collins who has bucked her party in the past on campaign-finance
issues, voting for McCain-Feingold.
The administration's
argument that this is about disclosure is "a fraud," she declares.
The very notion "offends me deeply," she says, since the order
undermines decades of work by her and others to ensure federal business
is free of corruption of political influence.
John Hinderaker
says
Hatch was talking about Obama's attempt to use unconstitutional means to
bully companies into supporting him and his party. But really,
Hatch's comments sum up the last four years of Reid/Pelosi and
Obama/Reid/Pelosi government:
"They want to intimidate all of the
corporations in this country and other businesses from giving money
that might help Republicans. And they know it's
unconstitutional what they're doing, they know it's wrong, but
they're going to go do it anyway, because it's political time to
them. And frankly, it's been political time from Day One with
this president. They play politics very, very tough, they play
it well, and they don't give a damn about what's right and what's
wrong."
Orrin Hatch is a fine Senator and a solid
conservative. There have been rumblings about a primary challenge
to him; in my opinion, that would be dumb. The conservative
movement has limited resources and we are operating in a target-rich
environment. Let's not eat our own.
Obama Solicitor General Tells Americans To
Earn Less Money
Philip Klein is reporting that Obama's
solicitor general, defending the national health care law on Wednesday,
told a federal appeals court that Americans who didn't like the
individual mandate could always avoid it by choosing to earn less money.
Neal Kumar Katyal, the acting solicitor general, made the argument,
"...someone doesn’t need to earn that much income," under questioning
before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati,
which was considering an appeal by the Thomas More Law Center. The
three-judge panel, which was comprised of two Republican-appointed
judges and a Democratic-appointed judge, expressed more skepticism about
the government's defense of the health care law than the Fourth Circuit
panel that heard the Virginia-based ObamaCare challenge last month in
Richmond. The Fourth Circuit panel was made up entirely of
Democrats, and two of the judges were appointed by Obama himself.
During the Sixth Circuit arguments, Judge Jeffrey Sutton, who was
nominated by President George W. Bush, asked Kaytal if he could name one
Supreme Court case which considered the same question as the one posed
by the mandate, in which Congress used the Commerce Clause of the U.S.
Constitution as a tool to compel action.
Kaytal conceded that the
Supreme Court had "never been confronted directly" with the question.
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