Conservative Review

Issue #111

Kukis Digests and Opines on this Week’s News and Views

 January 24, 2010


In this Issue:

This Week’s Events

Happening This Week

Say What?

Joe Biden Prophecy Watch

Must-Watch Media

A Little Comedy Relief

Short Takes

By the Numbers

Polling by the Numbers

A Little Bias

Saturday Night Live Misses

Political Chess

Yay Democrats!

Obama-Speak

Questions for Obama

You Know You’ve Been Brainwashed if...

News Before it Happens

Prophecies Fulfilled

My Most Paranoid Thoughts

Missing Headlines

How to Fix America Part II

The Obama Job Fix

Obama Versus Bush on Spending

Very little is safe for Democrats this fall

By Karl Rove

A wake-up call from Massachusetts

Three elections late, the president gets the message by Charles Krauthammer

He's Done Everything Wrong by Mort Zuckerman

Hood massacre report gutless and shameful

by Ralph Peters

'Special Report' Panel on 'Scott Brown Effect' on Health Care Reform


George Stephanopoulos' Exclusive Interview with President-Elect Barack Obama

FoxNews Discussed on Flopping Aces

posted by Mike’s America

 

Links

Additional Sources

 

The Rush Section

The Unions and Class Warfare

Left Outraged by SCOTUS Ruling

A Memo to Abraham Foeman

Rush is Accused of Anti-Semitism

A Statement from Norman Podhoretz

Where's Your Messiah Now?

Will Republicans Learn the Right Lessons from Masschusetts?

State-Run Media Targets Brown

Where are You Now, RINOs?

Does Obama Really Believe This?

 

Additional Rush Links

 

Perma-Links

 

Too much happened this week! Enjoy...


The cartoons come from:

www.townhall.com/funnies.


If you receive this and you hate it and you don’t want to ever read it no matter what...that is fine; email me back and you will be deleted from my list (which is almost at the maximum anyway).


Previous issues are listed and can be accessed here:


http://kukis.org/page20.html (their contents are described and each issue is linked to) or here:

http://kukis.org/blog/ (this is the online directory they are in)


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I attempt to post a new issue each Sunday by 2 or 3 pm central standard time (I sometimes fail at this attempt).


I try to include factual material only, along with my opinions (it should be clear which is which). I make an attempt to include as much of this week’s news as I possibly can. The first set of columns are intentionally designed for a quick read.


I do not accept any advertising nor do I charge for this publication. I write this principally to blow off steam in a nation where its people seemed have collectively lost their minds.


And if you are a believer in Jesus Christ, always remember: We do not struggle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places (Eph. 6:12).


This Week’s Events


Scott Brown, a moderate Republican, was elected to sit in Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, ironically on the platform that he would by the 41st vote to stop Obama-care.


The Supreme Court ruled that corporate entities could not be excluded from the free speech guarantees of the 1st amendment. Therefore, if a corporate entity wants to run an ad or make a movie with obvious political intent, it cannot be blocked (as was done with a movie on Hillary in this past election).


Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi publically stated that the government healthcare bill was officially dead.


Air America, a liberal radio outlet, went out of business.

As the tragedy in Haiti progresses, very little political stew is made by the press (unlike with Hurricane Katrina).


As President Obama begins talking more and more about taxing bankers for their bonuses, the stock market tanked this week, dropping over 500 points (5%) during this abbreviated trading week.


The 86 page, official government report on the Fort Hood shooting, "Protecting the Force: Lessons From Fort Hood," released this week, never mentions Islamist terror; in fact, the words Muslim and terrorist do not appear anywhere in this report. I guess Major Nidal Malik Hasan’s business card, with the initials SOA (Soldier of Allah) on it was missed in this investigation?


We find out this week that the Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair along with the Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano and Michael Leiter the Director of the National Counter Terrorism Center all admitted that none of them were consulted about how to handle the Christmas day terrorist bomber. We also found out that we do not have anything in place right now with regards to interrogating suspects caught on U.S. soil.

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Nathan Deal introduces legislation (again) to reduce legislator salaries every year the federal budget is not balanced. He did this back in 2004 as well.


The President holds a townhall meeting in Ohio, apparently on public tax dollars.


Terror Suspect Aafia Siddiqui Demands Genetic Testing to "Weed Out Jews" from Her Jury.



Hugo Chavez claims the U.S. caused the earthquake in Haiti with a new weapon.


Happening This Week


President Obama give the state of the Union message this Wednesday.


Plucky Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) plans an anti-State of the Union press conference on the same day.


Congress is going to vote on raising the debt limit in the next week or so. Will the media report on it? How will Republicans vote? They can stop Obama if they unite right here.


Say What?


Concerning this past week’s events, Charles Krauthammer call this, “The best week since my spring break in Med school, which I don’t remember.”


Keith Olbermann: "In short in Scott Brown we have an irresponsible homophobic racist reactionary ex-nude-model tea-bagging supporter of violence against women and against politicians with whom he disagrees. In any other time in our history this man would have been laughed off the stage as an unqualified and disaster in the making by the most conservative of conservatives. Instead the commonwealth of Massachusetts is close to sending this bad joke to the Senate of the United States."


Joe Scarborough, Olbermann’s colleague on MSNBC, tweeted after this tirade: “Olbermann calls Brown a ‘homophobic racist reactionary’ who ‘supports violence against women.’ How reckless and how sad.”


President Obama, during an interview with ABC News' George Stephanopoulos, explained the Scott Brown victory: "Here's my assessment of not just the vote in Massachusetts, but the mood around the country: the same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office. People are angry and they are frustrated. Not just because of what's happened in the last year or two years, but what's happened over the last eight years." Anger about George W. Bush swept Republican Scott Brown into office.


George Stephanopoulos interviews President Obama and he gives that convoluted, strained answer that the same disenchantment which swept him into office also swept Scott Brown into office. So Jim Pinkerton is asked, “Why didn’t Stephanopoulos call him on this answer” Pinkerton answered, “You mean, the former Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos who knows he will never get another exclusive interview if he asks Obama a tough question? I don’t know.”


Boehner on the election of Scott Brown: “I think a lot of Democrats realize this was a seismic shift.”


Evan Bayh said, "I do think there's a chance that Congressional elites mistook their mandate. I don't think the American people last year voted for higher taxes, higher deficits and a more intrusive government. But there's a perception that that is what they are getting."


Evan Bayh on Obama’s healthcare push: "But there's definitely an opportunity cost. You could only spend political capital once; it now can't be spent on other things."


"If you lose Massachusetts and that's not a wake-up call, there's no hope of waking up." -- Sen. Evan Bayh (D-in)


Leftest Steve Benen, “There are, no doubt, widespread misperceptions about the public policy landscape. What Republicans lack in reason and governing abilities they make up for with an unparalleled ability to get people to believe things that aren't true. But isn't that why it's up to prominent Democratic lawmakers like Evan Bayh to help highlight the truth?” It is likely that Benen really believes this. How else could TEA partyers and far right Republicans have such an impact on today’s political discourse (in Benen’s thinking)?


Liberal MSNBC babe Mika Brzezinski admits to the mainstream media bias: “I've worked in the mainstream media for all the networks and I will say what people aren't saying. It's got a liberal world view. There are great people working at the networks, and they're mostly Democrats, ok? I think honestly what needs to happen, is we need to stop pretending about who we are and every journalist should tell us what their political affiliation is, who they voted for, and we go from there.”


Commenting on Obama’s position toward terrorism, Dennis Miller said, “I pray that he is a hard-core ideologue. It’s pretty much a doltish presidency—he can’t be serious that we don’t interrogate this guy [the underpants bomber]; that Gitmo is a big problem; that they get the same trial that I do; that he can give Reid and Pelosi a trillion dollars and think that they’re going to be good with it—I am hoping he is an ideologue.”


Former Obama supporter, Mortimer Zuckerman, of U.S. News and World reports, writes: The consequence is that there isn't a single critical problem on which the president has a positive public rating. Only a minority of Americans now believe the president will make the right decisions for the country. Nor can he any longer take refuge in the rejoinder that "we inherited a terrible situation." Or blame it on fat-cat bankers and insurance companies. Blaming others, including Bush, for the country's predicament is less and less persuasive. "At some point you own your presidency," wrote Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal. "At some point the American people tell you it's yours."


Joe Biden Prophecy Watch


Joe’s in charge of Iraq now.


Must-Watch Media


Glenn Beck does an outstanding show on the true history of Mao, Stalin, Che and Hitler; and women in bikinis (it all fits together):


http://glennbeckclips.com/

Until Monday or Tuesday, and after that:

http://glennbeckclips.com/01-22-10.htm


Frank Luntz focus group on Hannity concerning the Scott Brown election (even if you do not like Hannity, these focus groups are excellent):


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXUn9EDBJQY


Marc Thiessen, former Bush cabinet member, is interviews by Sean Hannity (it’s a good interview):


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zR6r5_lLHA4


McCain questions Intelligence and Security high ups, and it is apparent there are real problems with this administration:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QK0HZ_8JqrM


Chris Matthews grills Howard Dean; it take a minute or two for Matthews to warm up:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9p-9hkdZSEE


Senator Arlen Specter tells Representative Michelle Bachmann to act like a woman:



http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2010/01/21/specter_tells_bachmann_to_act_like_a_lady.html


Mika Brzezinski talks about the imbalance of the mainstream media:


http://blip.tv/file/3102214


I missed this one...Hitler finds out that Palin resigns:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svf0vhVZ3Fo


Reason versus rage (scroll down to these 2 vids):


http://www.olbermannwatch.com/


A Little Comedy Relief


Jon Stewart recognizes that Olbermann is comedy gold:


http://dancleary.typepad.com/dan_cleary/ (January 22, 2010). Interestingly enough, Keith Olbermann did finally apologize for these remarks—to Jon Stewart!


“In a stunning victory, Republican Scott Brown won the Massachusetts’ Senate seat long held by Ted Kennedy. In a desperate move to save his own job, President Obama just re-registered as a Republican.” Jodi Miller on NewsBusted.


“As you may remember, President Obama recently gave his presidency a grade of B+. Meanwhile, the rest of the world gave him a C—C, as in Cree Deeds, Corzine, Copenhagen, Copenhagen again, and now Coakley.” Jodi Miller.


And “Pee Wee Herman is back with a new live theater show; we hope it is better than his last live theater show.” Jodi again.


Dennis Miller: “The French...had to do away with all vending machines in schools because of obesity—no More snack cakes, no more candies, no more sodas. It is all a part of the French master plan to raise healthier cowards. It’s nice to hear the French have finally taken a stand against somebody, and it’s Little Debbie.”


“I knew it was a bad night for Coakley when even dead voters were breaking 2 to 1 for Brown.” Dennis Miller again.

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Short Takes


1) In light of the reassuring news that the Himalayan glaciers may not be melting in the next 25 years leads me to reiterate some points which Rush Limbaugh and others have made. Real scientists, when faced with the fact that we might be in a cold spell as opposed to entering into a time of planet-ending global warming would express relief, and would publish articles like, “Could this be so?” However, they ignore all of the obvious empirical evidence and double down and tell us that it is all worse than we think, and that we will still drown from the rising seas (if we don’t die from heat stroke first; or from the smell of dead polar bears).



2) Let’s say that we do enter in a period of time where it gets colder, to where the coldness is obvious to everyone. Do you know what global warming scientist will not say? “Get into your big SUV’s and drive all over the damn place to warm this planet up.” Even though they can assure us over and over that driving our cars and using light bulbs they don’t like is making the planet warmer, we will never be told to engage in these things in order to keep the planet from getting colder.


3) I forgot who made this observation, but Obama dismantled the CIA interrogators a year ago, and he has never replaced them with anyone else. We have no professional interrogators to deal with Islamic terrorists.


4) Let’s say there is a vice president who keeps saying really stupid things and he cannot seem to keep his mouth shut...where would be a good place to put him where he can talk all that he wants? It should be no surprise that Iraqi officials are saying, they don’t need any help.


5) Democrat Representative Andrews to Greta van Susteren: “We haven’t done a good enough job explaining that, if you like your insurance, you can keep it.” Obama has said much the same thing. I keep saying that this president and his team are complete amateurs at this. Is this really the WH talking points? Does he really think we are this stupid.


6) There was a very serious incident which occurred this past week—Obama went and held a partisan townhall meeting in Ohio and used tax dollars to fund it. You may not realize it, but that is a serious breach of the presidency. Now, I don’t think Obama thought, “I am going to go give a Democratic speech and use tax dollars with which to do it;” I believe the problem is, he is amateurish, as is his staff, and they have no idea. They are unable to separate the presidential office from purely partisan function. To them, here is no difference. This is why we have had very questionable postings on the White House website. They don’t know. For a liberal, government is their life, their god and their existence. They do not separate properly in their minds politics from government. I would not be surprised to find that this could be an offense which could bring upon a censure of the President. Other presidents in the past go over their speeches with a fine tooth comb, and they and their staff endeavor to keep a wall of separation between partisan rhetoric and presidential speeches, particularly when public funds are a part of the picture. According to Mike’s America: ...there is a point of law here. I have firsthand experience of these matters from inside the Reagan White House where even political speeches paid for by the campaign had to be carefully screened by the counsel's office lest we violate government regulations regarding the mixing of political and tax payer events. We never could have made a speech like this [Obama’s speech in Ohio].



By the Numbers


One-third of American women will have had an abortion by age 45.


Polling by the Numbers


Washington Post Poll:

58% of respondents favor smaller government

38% prefer a larger government and more services

The small government preference has climbed 4 points since the last time our pollsters asked the question in June and 5 points from almost the same time a year ago.


Bloomberg:

77% of investors see Obama as anti-business.



A Little Bias


I listen to NPR, now and again, and just when I think, they did a fair job of handling that story, I read or hear something like this: NPR blames conservatives for Obama’s Broken Promises.


From NPR’s website:


As a candidate, Barack Obama promised to pass a health plan with important benefits for the average American. For the typical family, costs would go down by as much as $2,500 a year. Adults wouldn't be required to buy insurance. No one but the wealthy would face higher taxes.

Interactive Timeline: Major Milestones In The Health Care Reform Debate


But a year later, the health care proposals in Congress lack many of those easy-to-sell benefits, which became victims of the lengthy process of trying to win over wavering lawmakers, appeasing powerful special-interest groups and addressing concerns about the heavily burdened Treasury.


Certainly, relentless attacks by the Republicans - as well as the Democrats' own inability to clearly articulate the benefits of the legislation - are partly responsible for the legislation's lack of popularity. So are crucial policy decisions made by Democratic leaders as they struggled to push the legislation through Congress, according to experts of different ideological persuasions.


"Health reform is a really hard thing to do," says Jonathan Oberlander, associate professor of social medicine at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. "They did a lot right, strategically. But you can do everything right and still fail in health reform."


For NPR’s marvelous analysis of the healthcare debacle (you should read it, as you paid for this analysis):


http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122774629&ft=1&f=1003


To NPR’s credit, they do allow posts, and many of them are quite critical of this article (and the criticism is well-reasoned).


Michael Bradford wrote:


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Is it possible that the democrats' own inability to clearly articulate the benefits of the legislation is because there is no benefit for the "avrage" American? Consider the possibilty that the American people are not sheep and can see what the ramafications of a government health care program will do to them. There is less than 10% of Americans without health care coverage through conventional insurance programs and most of the other 90% really don't care. When they go to the hospital they are treated like anyone of the 90% that do have health care and the 90% end up paying for it in one form or another. I, like others in my position, are willing to pay the higher medical costs to us to cover them if it means the bastards in Washington do not have more control over our lives.


Saturday Night Live Misses


NBC has to suddenly fill up 5 hour slots, which is a lot of television programming. How about, Biden in Iraq or Joe Does Iraq. I know that SNL can run multiple bogus promos for such a show; Joe is meeting with various Iraqi officials, and he says, “Hey, I’ve got an idea; let’s split your country into 3 countries. It’ll be great!”


Or, how about Olbermann fuming about Scott Brown, calling him every name in the book, from tea bagger to homophobe (only a liberal could call someone else both of those terms in the same breath); and let this go on for several minutes (the humor would be in letting the bit go on 30–60 seconds longer than the real thing; there does not have to be a lot of exaggeration here.


Or, a spoof on Stephanopoulos interviewing President Obama, and Obama gives these long, drawn out, tortured-logic about the TEA party attendees (how they demonstrate the same anger which has been brewing in America for the past 9 years—“Mostly in the 8 years before the last years” “There were no TEA parties 1 year ago.” “I know, George; that is when they were brewing. Tea is organic and there is a brewing time and a time for the partying; so it brewed for 8 years and now it is partying.” “Mr. President, you know that makes no sense.” “That is why it is so true, George.”

Political Chess


Obama thinks that political rallies where he says the word jobs many times, and softball interviews with George Stephanopoulos will help his causes and his standing, but the more he speaks, the more Americans turn against him.


Yay Democrats!


Evan Bayh has said some good things this past week, and he has even voted against Obama now and again. I so much want to say, “This guy is okay.” But he voted for Obama-care.


Obama-Speak


Uniquely-qualified [for this or that position] means, this is the farthest left candidate who we could find without a YouTube video of him or her joining the Communist party.


Questions for Obama


You have never run a business before or had to make a payroll; how do you have any idea how to improve the job market?


Pretty much everyone on this planet has heard you say, dozens of times, that the Congressional healthcare plan says, if you like your insurance, you can keep it. Yet you (and others) say that you have not made this provision clear enough. Did it ever occur to you that most people simply do not believe you?

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You Know You’re Being Brainwashed if...


If you think that Democrat healthcare reform is dead and gone.


If you think this administration has a clue about protecting the American people from terrorism.


News Before it Happens


At this point, I will be shocked if there are no successful terrorist attacks against U.S. citizens in the next 3 years.


Under very similar circumstances, Bill Clinton pivoted toward working at the center, and passing legislation which would appeal to those at the right (welfare reform and a balanced budget). He worked with the Republican majority. However, Obama is a politician only insofar as running a campaign and knowing what to do and say to get elected; he is so much an ideologue, that he is unable to initiate any popular right or center-right ideas. Such a deft pivot at this time—as he pivoted when getting his party’s nomination—would save his presidency. Taking some blame for mishandling Gitmo, public trials for terrorists, the economy, healthcare and/or cap and trade would be a good first move, followed by crafting simple legislation which is popular with the people and with Republicans. If he took this approach, he could turn his presidency around, and possibly save many Congressional seats for his party in 2010. However, at best, he will give lip service to conservative ideas. Just as his radical mentors have told him, he will use the language of conservatives (investment, job creation), but only in pursuit of a far-left agenda. This is one of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals: use the terminology of your opposition, but apply it to your own (radically different) agenda.


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I would not be surprised to see him crack under the pressure. If a few more things go wrong, and he finds himself responsible for the deaths of many Americans because of his policies (and is able to admit this to himself), this could be more than his psyche can handle (despite the fact that Obama clearly has a very healthy ego).


Prophecies Fulfilled


I have repeatedly said that President Obama has very little real interest in foreign affairs; particularly foreign conflicts. I think this was borne out by him sending Vice President Biden to Iraq to run things.


I have also repeatedly said that Obama is an amateur and has no clue how to run anything; much less a presidency. See the Stephanopoulos interview to confirm this.


It turns out that key members of Homeland Security and Department of National Intelligence were never consulted about what to do with the underwear bomber, and no plan or protocol was developed to deal with such an occurrence. Again, the approach of a rank amateur.


My Most Paranoid Thoughts


Biden will help to screw up a stable Iraq.


Missing Headlines


Terror Suspect Aafia Siddiqui Demands Genetic Testing to "Weed Out Jews" from Her Jury



Head of Homeland Security and the Director of National Intelligence not consulted about Christmas Bomber


Obama Interrogation Staff not up and running yet


The UN wrongly links global warming to natural disasters

Melted Himalayan snow by 2035 based upon faulty data


UN apologizes for Himalayan Glacier Error


Come, let us reason together....


How to Fix America Part II


Just one things occurs to me: the czar thing. One of the great things about our democracy is the division and separation of power among the various branches of government, levels of government, and the people themselves. The appointment of czars seeks to bypass the checks and balances of a Senate confirmation. Although this has been abused by presidents of both parties, President Obama has taken this to an extreme, appointing essentially parallel positions in government whose background goes unknown unless Glenn Beck does a story on them.


There needs to be a limit on the number of czars which the president can appoint; perhaps give him 2 to 5 czars of his choice, in whatever area he chooses. However, any czar appointed after that must be on an emergency basis and subject to Senate approval within 1 month of appointment. All previous czars may be called before a Senate committee for questioning and can be removed with a 60% vote.


obamaprivatesector.jpg

Czars who hold a position parallel to a cabinet position will not be allowed.


The Obama Job Fix


So far, the only thing to come out of Washington to fix the unemployment problem is, President Obama plans to bribe business owners to hire more people. This is a clear indication as to just how little the President understands about business.


In Chicago politics, the special interests bribe the politicians and the politicians send some money or government benefits (contracts, bids) toward those businesses. It is the same idea as giving a business $3000 and ask them to hire someone.


Do you recall cash for clunkers? I forget the exact numbers, but $3000–5000 was given to a person who bought a car at the end of this past summer, and the cost to the taxpayer was around $40,000 per car sold; and dozens of hours in paperwork was the cost to the car dealerships. The end result was, car sales were up during the duration of this program and then they plummeted in the subsequent months.


This is how many liberals think. I will give you money and you must do as I say. Elliot Spizer, for instance.



This is the idea behind many governmental unfunded mandates; they give the state government some money to do this or that; and then, the state has to pay for it after that.


Businesses hire workers when there are not enough workers on payroll to handle the work. They do not hire workers because the government slips them $3 grand, and tells them to hire someone. It is essentially bribery, and politicians understand a bribe; unfortunately many of these same politicians do not under stand business.

Obama Versus Bush on Spending

Very little is safe for Democrats this fall.

By Karl Rove


'If Massachusetts puts Brown in, it's a message of 'that's enough.' Let's stop the giveaways and let's get jobs going."


Marlene Connolly is a 73-year-old Massachusetts Democrat who cast her first vote for a Republican in supporting Scott Brown. Her quote and story comes to us via the New York Times, but she stands out for this reason: She shows us that those who actually cast ballots in the Bay State did so because they are frustrated with the administration's unrestrained federal spending and failed economic recovery policies.


And here's what Washington needs to keep in mind as it debates the meaning of Massachusetts. Ramming health care through now won't insulate Democrats from voter ire in November. It will feed a fire over spending that is already blistering them.


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But don't take my word for it. Consider that the administration is now busy scrambling to find a way to dodge responsibility for its own reckless fiscal record. That much was on display recently when David Axelrod, a political strategist for the president, penned an opinion piece in the Washington Post that took aim directly at me.


Mr. Axelrod wrote that no one is entitled to his own facts, even as he argued that George W. Bush is responsible for Barack Obama's deficits. He argued that Mr. Bush forced the hand of this administration by leaving office in the midst of a sharp recession.


That argument won't fly for two reasons. First, at some point this administration has to take responsibility for itself. It's also not even close to accurate. Consider that from Jan. 20, 2001, to Jan. 20, 2009, the debt held by the public grew $3 trillion under Mr. Bush-to $6.3 trillion from $3.3 trillion at a time when the national economy grew as well.


By comparison, from the day Mr. Obama took office last year to the end of the current fiscal year, according to the Office of Management and Budget, the debt held by the public will grow by $3.3 trillion. In 20 months, Mr. Obama will add as much debt as Mr. Bush ran up in eight years.


Mr. Obama's spending plan approved by Congress last February calls for doubling the national debt in five years and nearly tripling it in 10.



Mr. Bush's deficits ran an average of 3.2% of GDP, slightly above the post World War II average of 2.7%. Mr. Obama's plan calls for deficits that will average 4.2% over the next decade.


Team Obama has been on history's biggest spending spree, which has included a $787 billion stimulus, a $30 billion expansion of a child health-care program, and a $410 billion federal spending bill that increased nondefense discretionary spending 10% for the last half of fiscal year 2009. Mr. Obama also hiked nondefense discretionary spending another 12% for fiscal year 2010.

Mr. Bush did move to give voters more control over their tax dollars. Both his Social Security reform ideas and the drug program he created offered templates for driving federal spending curves in the right direction, counter to what Democrats wanted to do.


Democrats, for example, proposed creating a prescription drug program as an alternative to the one Mr. Bush proposed that would have cost a projected $800 billion over 10 years. The Bush drug benefit was originally expected to cost half that amount and today costs a third less than what it was initially expected to cost because it uses market forces to drive prices down.


Mr. Axelrod claims the pork-laden stimulus package has been a success. But Mr. Obama told Americans that if it were passed, unemployment wouldn't rise above 8%. It is now 10%. The president also said it would create 3.7 million jobs, 90% of which would be in the private sector. By Mr. Obama's standards, the stimulus failed miserably.


Mr. Bush did sign the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) into law and loaned $240 billion to banks. But those loans are being returned at a profit to the Treasury. Rather than using those funds to pay down the deficit, Mr. Obama wants to use them for new spending. What's more, he has lavished some $320 billion from TARP on car companies, union allies, and pet causes that will never be fully returned.

taxeshcstimulus.jpg

Mr. Axelrod boasts Mr. Obama's proposed health reforms will "not add to the federal deficit." But if that turns out to be true, it will only be because Massachusetts voters just elected a senator who promises to vote against those reforms.


In going after Mr. Bush's fiscal record, Mr. Axelrod unwittingly revealed why Democrats are losing. Mr. Obama and congressional Democrats have made a mess of the nation's finances and are desperate to pin the blame on someone else. It's not likely to work.


Even in deep blue Massachusetts, voters aren't standing idly by while the administration puts the nation on a dangerous trajectory. When Democrats lose a state they carried by 26 points a little more than a year ago, very little is safe for Mr. Obama's party this fall.


From:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704320104575015072822042394.html


A wake-up call from Massachusetts

Three elections late, the president gets the message

by Charles Krauthammer


WASHINGTON - On Jan. 14, five days before the Massachusetts special election, President Obama was in full bring-it-on mode as he rallied House Democrats behind his health care reform.


"If Republicans want to campaign against what we've done by standing up for the status quo and for insurance companies over American families and businesses, that is a fight I want to have."


The bravado lasted three days. When Obama campaigned in Boston on Jan. 17 for Obamacare supporter Martha Coakley, not once did he mention the health care bill. When your candidate is sinking, you don't throw her a millstone.


After Coakley's defeat, Obama pretended that the real cause was a generalized anger and frustration "not just because of what's happened in the last year or two years, but what's happened over the last eight years."


Let's get this straight: The antipathy to George W. Bush is so enduring and powerful that . . . it just elected a Republican senator in Massachusetts? Why, the man is omnipotent.


And the Democrats are delusional: Scott Brown won by running against Obama, not Bush.

obamawakeup.jpg

He won by brilliantly nationalizing the race, running hard against the Obama agenda, most notably Obamacare. Killing it was his No. 1 campaign promise.


Bull's-eye. An astonishing 56 percent of Massachusetts voters, according to Rasmussen, called health care their top issue. In a Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates poll, 78 percent of Brown voters said their vote was intended to stop Obamacare.


Only a quarter of all voters in the Rasmussen poll cited the economy as their top issue, nicely refuting the Democratic view that Massachusetts was just the usual anti-incumbent resentment you expect in bad economic times.


Brown ran on a very specific, very clear agenda.

 

Stop health care.

 

Don't Mirandize terrorists.

 

Don't raise taxes; cut them.


And no more secret backroom deals with special interests.


These deals - the Louisiana purchase, the Cornhusker kickback - had engendered a national disgust with the corruption and arrogance of one-party rule.


The final straw was the union payoff - in which labor bosses smugly walked out of the White House with a five-year exemption from a ("Cadillac") health insurance tax Democrats were imposing on the 92 percent of private-sector workers who are not unionized.


The reason both wings of American liberalism - congressional and mainstream media - were so surprised at the force of anti-Democratic sentiment is that they'd spent Obama's first year either ignoring or disdaining the clear early signs of resistance: the tea-party movement of the spring and the town-hall meetings of the summer.


With characteristic condescension, they contemptuously dismissed the protests as the mere excrescences of a redneck, retrograde, probably racist rabble.


You would think lefties could discern a proletarian vanguard when they see one.


Yet they kept denying the reality of the rising opposition to Obama's social democratic agenda when summer turned to fall and Virginia and New Jersey turned Republican in the year's two gubernatorial elections.


The evidence was unmistakable: Independents, who in 2008 had elected Obama, swung massively against the Democrats: dropping 16 points in Virginia, 21 in New Jersey.


On Tuesday, it was even worse: Independents, who had gone 2-to-1 Republican in Virginia and New Jersey, now went 3-to-1 Republican in hyper-blue Massachusetts.


Nor was this an expression of the more agitated elements who vote in obscure low-turnout elections. The turnout on Tuesday was the highest for any nonpresidential Massachusetts election in 20 years.


Democratic cocooners will tell themselves that Coakley was a terrible candidate who even managed to diss Curt Schilling. True, Brown had Schilling.


But Coakley had Obama.


When the bloody sock beats the presidential seal - of a man who had them swooning only a year ago - something is going on beyond personality.


That something is substance - political ideas and legislative agendas.


Democrats, if they wish, can write off their Massachusetts humiliation to high unemployment, to Coakley or, the current favorite among sophisticates, to generalized anger.


That implies an inchoate, unthinking lashing - out at whoever happens to be in power - even at your liberal betters, who are forcing on you an agenda that you can't even see is in your own interest.


Democrats must so rationalize, otherwise they must take democracy seriously, and ask themselves: If the people really don't want it, could they possibly have a point?


"If you lose Massachusetts and that's not a wake-up call," said moderate-and sentient-Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana, "there's no hope of waking up."


I say: Let them sleep.


From:

http://www.dailymail.com/Opinion/krauthammer/201001220397


He's Done Everything Wrong

by Mort Zuckerman


Obama punted on the economy and reversed the fortunes of the Democrats in 365 days.


He's misjudged the character of the country in his whole approach. There's the saying, "It's the economy, stupid." He didn't get it. He was determined somehow or other to adopt a whole new agenda. He didn't address the main issue.


This health-care plan is going to be a fiscal disaster for the country. Most of the country wanted to deal with costs, not expansion of coverage. This is going to raise costs dramatically.


In the campaign, he said he would change politics as usual. He did change them. It's now worse than it was. I've now seen the kind of buying off of politicians that I've never seen before. It's politically corrupt and it's starting at the top. It's revolting.


Five states got deals on health care-one of them was Harry Reid's. It is disgusting, just disgusting. I've never seen anything like it. The unions just got them to drop the tax on Cadillac plans in the health-care bill. It was pure union politics. They just went along with it. It's a bizarre form of political corruption. It's bribery. I suppose they could say, that's the system. He was supposed to change it or try to change it.

rasmussenobama.jpg

Even that is not the worst part. He could have said, "I know. I promised these things, but let me try to do them one at a time." You want to deal with health care? Fine. Issue No. 1 with health care was the cost. You know I think it was 37 percent or 33 who were worried about coverage. Fine, I wrote an editorial to this effect. Focus on cost-containment first. But he's trying to boil the ocean, trying to do too much. This is not leadership.


• More Daily Beast opinion on Obama's first year Obama's ability to connect with voters is what launched him. But what has surprised me is how he has failed to connect with the voters since he's been in office. He's had so much overexposure. You have to be selective. He was doing five Sunday shows. How many press conferences? And now people stop listening to him. The fact is he had 49.5 million listeners to first speech on the economy. On Medicare, he had 24 million. He's lost his audience. He has not rallied public opinion. He has plunged in the polls more than any other political figure since we've been using polls. He's done everything wrong. Well, not everything, but the major things.


I don't consider it a triumph. I consider it a disaster.


One business leader said to me, "In the Clinton administration, the policy people were at the center, and the political people were on the sideline. In the Obama administration, the political people are at the center, and the policy people are on the sidelines."


I'm very disappointed. We endorsed him. I voted for him. I supported him publicly and privately.


I hope there are changes. I think he's already laid in huge problems for the country. The fiscal program was a disaster. You have to get the money as quickly as possible into the economy. They didn't do that. By end of the first year, only one-third of the money was spent. Why is that?


He should have jammed a stimulus plan into Congress and said, "This is it. No changes. Don't give me that bullshit. We have a national emergency." Instead they turned it over to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi who can run circles around him.


It's very sad. It's really sad.


He's improved America's image in the world. He absolutely did. But you have to translate that into something. Let me tell you what a major leader said to me recently. "We are convinced," he said, "that he is not strong enough to confront his enemy. We are concerned," he said "that he is not strong to support his friends."


The political leadership of the world is very, very dismayed. He better turn it around. The Democrats are going to get killed in this election. Jesus, looks what's happening in Massachusetts.


It's really interesting because he had brilliant, brilliant political instincts during the campaign. I don't know what has happened to them. His appointments present somebody who has a lot to learn about how government works. He better get some very talented businesspeople who know how to implement things. It's unbelievable. Everybody says so. You can't believe how dismayed people are. That's why he's plunging in the polls.


I can't predict things two years from now, but if he continues on the downward spiral he is on, he won't be reelected. In the meantime, the Democrats have recreated the Republican Party. And when I say Democrats, I mean the Obama administration. In the generic vote, the Democrats were ahead something like 52 to 30. They are now behind the Republicans 48 to 44 in the last poll. Nobody has ever seen anything that dramatic.


[Mortimer B. Zuckerman is chairman and editor in chief of U.S. News & World Report and publisher of the New York Daily News. He is also the co-founder and chairman of Boston Properties Inc. He is a trustee of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Washington Institute for Near East Studies, and the International Institute of Strategic Studies.]


From:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-01-19/hes-done-everything-wrong/


Hood massacre report gutless and shameful

by Ralph Peters


There are two basic problems with the grotesque non-report on the Islamist- terror massacre at Fort Hood (released by the Defense Department yesterday). It's not about what happened at Fort Hood. It avoids entirely the issue of whyit happened. Rarely in the course of human events has a report issued by any government agency been so cowardly and delusional. It's so inept, it doesn't even rise to cover-up level. "Protecting the Force: Lessons From Fort Hood" nevermentions Islamist terror. Its 86 mind-numbing pages treat "the alleged perpetrator," Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, as just another workplace shooter (guess they're still looking for the pickup truck with the gun rack). The report is so politically correct that its authors don't even realize the extent of their political correctness -- they're body-and-soul creatures of the PC culture that murdered 12 soldiers and one Army civilian. Reading the report, you get the feeling that, jeepers, things actually went pretty darned well down at Fort Hood. Commanders, first responders and everybody but the latest "American Idol" contestants come in for high praise. The teensy bit of specific criticism is reserved for the "military medical officer supervisors" in Maj. Hasan's chain of command at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. As if the problem started and ended there. Unquestionably, the officers who let Hasan slide, despite his well-known wackiness and hatred of America, bear plenty of blame. But this disgraceful pretense of a report never asks whythey didn't stop Hasan's career in its tracks. The answer is straightforward: Hasan's superiors feared -- correctly -- that any attempt to call attention to his radicalism or to prevent his promotion would backfire on them, destroying theircareers, not his. Hasan was a protected-species minority. Under the PC tyranny of today's armed services, no non-minority officer was going to take him on. This is a military that imposes rules of engagement that protect our enemies and kill our own troops and that court-martials heroic SEALs to appease a terrorist. Ain't many colonels willing to hammer the Army's sole Palestinian-American psychiatrist. Of course, there's no mention of political correctness by the panel. Instead, the report settles for blinding flashes of the obvious, such as "We believe a gap exists in providing information to the right people." Gee, really? Well, thatexplains everything. Money well spent! Or "Department of Defense force protection policies are not optimized for countering internal threats." Of course not: You can't stop an internal threat you refuse to recognize. The panel's recommendations? Wow. "Develop a risk-assessment tool for commanders." Now that'sgoing to stop Islamist terrorists in their tracks. The Fort Hood massacre didn't reflect an intelligence failure. The intelligence was there, in gigabytes. This was a leadership failure and an ethical failure, at every level. Nobody wanted to know what Hasan was up to. But you won't learn that from this play-pretend report. The sole interesting finding flashes by quickly: Behind some timid wording on pages 13 and 14, a daring soul managed to insert the observation that we aren't currently able to keep violence-oriented religious extremists from becoming chaplains. (Of course, they're probably referring to those darned Baptists . . .) To be fair, there's a separate, classified report on Maj. Hasan himself. But it's too sensitive for the American people to see. Does it even hint he was a self-appointed Islamist terrorist committing jihad? I'll bet it focuses on his "personal problems." In the end, the report contents itself with pretending that the accountability problem was isolated within the military medical community at Walter Reed. It wasn't, and it isn't. Murderous political correctness is pervasive in our military. The medical staff at Walter Reed is just where the results began to manifest themselves in Hasan's case. Once again, the higher-ups blame the worker bees who were victims of the policy the higher-ups inflicted on them. This report's spinelessness is itself an indictment of our military's failed moral and ethical leadership. We agonize over civilian casualties in a war zone but rush to whitewash the slaughter of our own troops on our own soil.


There are two basic problems with the grotesque non-report on the Islamist- terror massacre at Fort Hood (released by the Defense Department yesterday):


* It's not about what happened at Fort Hood.


* It avoids entirely the issue of why it happened.


Rarely in the course of human events has a report issued by any government agency been so cowardly and delusional. It's so inept, it doesn't even rise to cover-up level.


"Protecting the Force: Lessons From Fort Hood" never mentions Islamist terror. Its 86 mind-numbing pages treat "the alleged perpetrator," Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, as just another workplace shooter (guess they're still looking for the pickup truck with the gun rack).


WEAK INFO: A Pentagon probe of Fort Hood mass killer Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan blames an

UPI


WEAK INFO: A Pentagon probe of Fort Hood mass killer Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan blames an "information gap."


The report is so politically correct that its authors don't even realize the extent of their political correctness -- they're body-and-soul creatures of the PC culture that murdered 12 soldiers and one Army civilian.


Reading the report, you get the feeling that, jeepers, things actually went pretty darned well down at Fort Hood. Commanders, first responders and everybody but the latest "American Idol" contestants come in for high praise.


The teensy bit of specific criticism is reserved for the "military medical officer supervisors" in Maj. Hasan's chain of command at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. As if the problem started and ended there.


Unquestionably, the officers who let Hasan slide, despite his well-known wackiness and hatred of America, bear plenty of blame. But this disgraceful pretense of a report never asks why they didn't stop Hasan's career in its tracks.


The answer is straightforward: Hasan's superiors feared -- correctly -- that any attempt to call attention to his radicalism or to prevent his promotion would backfire on them, destroying their careers, not his.


Hasan was a protected-species minority. Under the PC tyranny of today's armed services, no non-minority officer was going to take him on.


This is a military that imposes rules of engagement that protect our enemies and kill our own troops and that court-martials heroic SEALs to appease a terrorist. Ain't many colonels willing to hammer the Army's sole Palestinian-American psychiatrist.


Of course, there's no mention of political correctness by the panel. Instead, the report settles for blinding flashes of the obvious, such as "We believe a gap exists in providing information to the right people." Gee, really? Well, that explains everything. Money well spent!


Or "Department of Defense force protection policies are not optimized for countering internal threats." Of course not: You can't stop an internal threat you refuse to recognize.


The panel's recommendations? Wow. "Develop a risk-assessment tool for commanders." Now that's going to stop Islamist terrorists in their tracks.


The Fort Hood massacre didn't reflect an intelligence failure. The intelligence was there, in gigabytes. This was a leadership failure and an ethical failure, at every level. Nobody wanted to know what Hasan was up to. But you won't learn that from this play-pretend report.



The sole interesting finding flashes by quickly: Behind some timid wording on pages 13 and 14, a daring soul managed to insert the observation that we aren't currently able to keep violence-oriented religious extremists from becoming chaplains. (Of course, they're probably referring to those darned Baptists . . .)


To be fair, there's a separate, classified report on Maj. Hasan himself. But it's too sensitive for the American people to see. Does it even hint he was a self-appointed Islamist terrorist committing jihad? I'll bet it focuses on his "personal problems."


In the end, the report contents itself with pretending that the accountability problem was isolated within the military medical community at Walter Reed. It wasn't, and it isn't. Murderous political correctness is pervasive in our military. The medical staff at Walter Reed is just where the results began to manifest themselves in Hasan's case.


Once again, the higher-ups blame the worker bees who were victims of the policy the higher-ups inflicted on them. This report's spinelessness is itself an indictment of our military's failed moral and ethical leadership.


We agonize over civilian casualties in a war zone but rush to whitewash the slaughter of our own troops on our own soil. Conduct unbecoming.


Ralph Peters' latest book is "The War After Armageddon."



From:

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/hood_massacre_report_gutless_and_yaUphSPCoMs8ux4lQdtyGM



'Special Report' Panel on 'Scott Brown Effect' on Health Care Reform


This is a rush transcript of "Special Report With Bret Baier" from January 20, 2010. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.


(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)


REP. NANCY PELOSI, D-CALIF., HOUSE SPEAKER: So in its present form, without any change, I don't think it's possible to pass the Senate bill in the House.


REP. JOHN BOEHNER, R-OHIO, HOUSE MINORITY LEADER: Democrats aren't listening to the people. This bill is dead.


ROBERT GIBBS, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: Obviously Tuesday resulted in new political circumstances.


SEN. JOHN KERRY, D-MASS.: There have got to be some basic things here that we can all agree on.


SEN.-ELECT SCOTT BROWN, R-MASS.: The fact that there seems to be no transparency and the back room deals, people are outraged by that.


(END VIDEO CLIP)


BRET BAIER, ANCHOR: The election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts has essentially pushed the reset button here in Washington. It is a completely different story after Tuesday night.


What about that and how it will affect legislation moving forward? Let's bring in our panel: Fred Barnes, executive editor of The Weekly Standard, Mara Liasson, national political correspondent of National Public Radio, and syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer. Mara, first to you about what has happened since Tuesday.



MARA LIASSON, NATIONAL POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT, NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO: Well, a lot has happened since Tuesday. Obviously health care was about to pass. Everybody here at this table and this town felt that way. No longer.


And I think what happened is really a stunning indictment, more than anything else, of the Democratic majority, the fact that with 60 votes in the Senate they could not in one solid year after their president got elected pass his signature domestic priority. I mean, that is stunning. I can't think of a Republican majority that would have failed to do that.


So I think it's a real indictment of them, the fact that they couldn't get it done by now, and now they have lost the 60 votes that they need to pass it.


The president clearly signaled that he was willing to retreat to a kind of health insurance reform package. I don't know if the Republicans are in any mood to give the president anything.


But that clearly, you know, if you go to them, and the interesting thing about that if you go down to health insurance reforms, you might lose all of your industry buy-in. Don't forget, the health insurance industry basically called a truce on this one, said they would agree to be regulated like utilities if they could get those 30 million new customers. They were willing to sacrifice margin for volume. That was the new business model that they had bought into.


Well, health insurance reform regulates them but doesn't give them all the new customers. So I think you lose them, and that was the grand bargain that was made even before Barack Obama was elected. So that's...


BAIER: Fred, your assessment?


FRED BARNES, EXECUTIVE EDITOR, THE WEEKLY STANDARD: You know, scaling back Obama care is a non-starter. Look, it is dead. It is dead in the House. It is dead in the Senate. I'm not sure it would have passed even before Brown. Nancy Pelosi was down to 218 votes and some of the more moderate Democrats were queasy.


But the whole thing is dead. Republicans aren't going to help out on this. The Republican position is get that off the table. We will start anew. We can deal with all these things that people want, whether it's sick people with preexisting conditions or all these things. But you are going to have to give some Republicans some things.


BAIER: Tort reform.


BARNES: They want tort reform. They want the competition produced by allowing people to buy insurance across state lines, and so on. But President Obama and congressional Democrats after writing these bills, completely shutting out Republicans, except on the Senate finance committee when they had some Republicans involved there, but except for that, now they want Republicans to come in and help them fine tune this bill so it will pass? That's just not going to happen.


BAIER: Charles, in that interview with ABC, President Obama, we saw it in James' piece, James Rosen's piece, he told George Stephanopoulos about the reaction to Scott Brown's election.


"We were just so busy getting stuff done, dealing with the immediate crises that were in front of us, that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people."


Now, we did some research. President Obama gave 411 speeches, comments, and remarks, 52 of those specifically on health care, 158 interviews, 90 for TV, 11 radio, the rest in print, 42 news conferences, 23 town hall meetings. It's hard to say that he wasn't speaking directly to the American people, right?


CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: It's amazing that his explanation for all of this is that he was so occupied with helping the American people working quietly and late nights in the White House that he was overly reticent. The man was ubiquitous. The man was everywhere. The man hovered like big brother. Every night you turned him on.


He gave 29 speeches on health care, and at the end every time he gave a speech the numbers were declining.


Look, it is not that - Democrats want to think there is a question of the message. They want to believe it was a matter of tactics. They want to say he contracted out and ended up owing Congress. He should have directed out of the White House. All of that is cosmetic.


The problem is the substance. He tried - he had one issue he wanted above all. He had cap and trade, which also didn't succeed. But his signature issue was health care. The bills that were produced were monstrosities.


At the beginning it was a contradiction in terms. He says I'm going to expand the coverage, include everybody who is uninsured, and cut costs. A child would know that's impossible. It was doomed because of the internal contradictions.


And the problem is that, in the end, it was all substance. The reason that it failed in Massachusetts, of all places - again, it wasn't a cosmetic issue, it was a resistance of the substance. And then in the end it was a disgust over the process and all the deals.


BAIER: Mara, what about this turn to populism, really focusing on the banks, and that's trying to focus the anger, he says, that he sees in this past election?


LIASSON: I think there's going to have to be more ways that the White House will get in touch with how the voters are feeling. But this is a start. Voters are angry at Wall Street and that unites the left and the right and independents. They are angry about the big bonuses.


I think that the ideas that he is talking about in terms of resurrecting some kind of fire wall for the banks make sense. I don't think that's going to be a problem for him.


BAIER: Fred?


BARNES: He needs independents. Independents are rejecting him now overwhelmingly in the New Jersey and Virginia governor's races and on Tuesday in Massachusetts. You don't get them with populism. They are not the folks that will go for that. They never have. And so he is on the wrong track.

demindependents.jpg

You have to realize that President Obama is a weaker president than he was before the election on Tuesday. You can't go around for the third time and campaign for somebody who loses and polls show that you might have actually marginally hurt that candidate as polls showed in Martha Coakley's case.



And the second thing is, when the center piece, the centerpiece of your domestic policy is rejected, not just in polls, which has been going on for months, but by voters in one of the most liberal states in the country that he won by 26 points in 2008, when it's rejected, he is weaker.


He will not be taken as seriously by Democrats who won't regard him in the same way, and Republicans as well.


KRAUTHAMMER: The ultimate cause of the debacle in Massachusetts and of his decline, Obama's decline, is that he misread his mandate. This is a center-right country and he tried governing left. His only hope of success is to tack to the center, the way that Clinton did.


The problem is that he is much more ideological and he may not have the capacity or the will to end up back in the center.


BAIER: Because Mara, the left is saying he needs to go further left.


LIASSON: Yes. You know center, left, it depends on what you mean by tacking to the center. And populism doesn't mean necessarily left-wing populism, either. I think that anger at Wall Street unites every part of the political spectrum. Do Republicans really want to defend Wall Street bonuses right now? No.


BARNES: I don't think people want to hear some angry populist attacks.


LIASSON: He's not an angry populist. I think he is expressing the anger of the people at the bailouts and the fact that Wall Street hasn't...


KRAUTHAMMER: You abandon health care and you abandon cap and trade as a starter.


BAIER: OK, some changes, big changes coming in how political campaigns are funded. We will discuss today's big Supreme Court ruling and what it means for the midterms in three minutes.


(COMMERCIAL BREAK)


(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)


SEN. CHARLES SCHUMER, D-N.Y.: The Roberts court has turned back the clock on our democracy by over a century. This disastrous decision paves the way for free and unlimited special interest spending in our elections. With the stroke of a pen, the court decided to overrule the 100-year-old ban on corporate expenditures.


SEN. MITCH MCCONNELL, R-KY., SENATE MINORITY LEADER: I don't know why the opponents are so freaked out about this. They don't seem to be bothered by the fact that media corporations have free speech. Why shouldn't a non-media corporation have free speech as well?


(END VIDEO CLIP)


BAIER: A big ruling today by the U.S. Supreme Court justices voting five to four to essentially give corporations and unions, for that matter, the same First Amendment rights that individuals have when it comes to political arena, the funding of political ads, speaking out, just as Anthony Kennedy writing this - "When government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought. This is unlawful. The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves."


We're back with the panel. Charles, what does this mean practically?


KRAUTHAMMER: I think it's going to be extremely important. I think it's a great ruling. The most important amendment is the First Amendment. The most important of our rights is free speech, and the most important element in free speech is political speech.


And that's why the governing class has always attempted the kind of regulation of political speech - the less the better.


Now, it has to be admitted that one of the down sides of this will be a marginal increase in the power of money. However, for all of the restrictions that we have had under all our laws, the finance laws, money always ends up having its influence one way or the other. It finds its level, it goes around loopholes, you hire smart and now rich lawyers and you get around it.


And, secondly, the only way to completely abolish the power of money is to do what was done in other English-speaking countries and have it - you ban all political money and you have it all paid by the government.


The problem is if you do that, it's a huge advantage for any incumbent. So, I think the - what we heard today is exactly what you ought to do - disclaimers and disclosures so everybody knows who is giving and who is financing, but open the gates.


BAIER: Mara, Chuck Schumer, senator from New York said it's probably one of the three or four decisions in the history of the Supreme Court that undermines democracy. That was his take.


LIASSON: I can say this, on a practical level for 2010 and 2012 it will help Republicans. Corporations generally support Republicans. And in the battle of political money, they have more money than the unions.


BAIER: What about unions?


LIASSON: They have more money net than the unions. They just do. The unions will be in there, and believe me, this ruling obviously affects them and opens the door for them, too. But dollar for dollar, corporations are going to beat the resources and the assets of the labor unions. They just are.


So this is a win for Republicans and is yet another kind of blow to the solar plexus this week for Democrats.


BARNES: I don't really think so. Look, I don't think we are going to see all kinds of corporate expenditures in races, independent expenditures that show we are for this candidate and not for that candidate. Most big companies have shareholders. Do they want their companies doing that? Do they want they want them spending money on that?


And the other thing is, look, in 28 states, with about 60 percent of the population, the states allow corporations to participate with expenditures in campaign races, in elections. They do it.


Now, has that distorted the process? Has that been a huge asset to Republicans in these states? States like Oregon for one, for a very Democratic state? In Virginia, which now sort of goes back and forth between Republicans and Democrats? The history just isn't there.


And look, we - as Charles said, there is so much money out there. We already have rich people - a lot of them are liberals, you know, George Soros and so on - and a lot of them are conservatives, pouring money in all these independent expenditures. I'm very doubtful that corporations are going to be jumping in there so much.


BAIER: And Mara, quickly, this does not overturn the McCain-Feingold legislation entirely.


LIASSON: Right.



BAIER: And although Senator Feingold says he wants to go back and get more legislation to go back at this, that's not going to happen, right?


LIASSON: That's not going to happen. There is still disclosure and corporations are still banned from giving individual candidates money, so you can't have like the Senator from Boeing the way we used have in the old days. Some people thought that was good because at least you knew where they were coming from.


So pieces of the campaign finance system are still intact, and no, I don't think there will be any legislation overturning this ruling.


BAIER: That is it for the panel, but stay tuned because they're back. We'll explain, next.


George Stephanopoulos' Exclusive Interview with President-Elect Barack Obama

Jan. 11, 2009


GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Hello, again. In nine days he will be president of the United States. This morning Barack Obama is our exclusive headliner. Welcome back to THIS WEEK.


BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT-ELECT: Thank you, George.


STEPHANOPOULOS: Does it feel like you're president already?


OBAMA: No.


STEPHANOPOULOS: This is on quite a pace.

PHOTO Obama on This Week

(Lauren V. Burke/ABC)


OBAMA: All of those bells and whistles -- as much we are working hard in the next couple of weeks, I think that when you're actually in the Oval Office making decisions, I think that's going to be different.


STEPHANOPOULOS: You know, we asked our viewers what they wanted to hear from you, and we got hundreds of pages of questions, thousands of questions, almost all about the economy. And it's clear there's a lot of pain out there, a lot of fear. And if I could sum up the questions, it would be very simple, can you fix this?


OBAMA: I think we can fix this. But it's going to take some time. It's not going to happen overnight. And what we tried to do this week was, first of all, explain where we are in the economy. That the jobs numbers this week were terrible. That means we've lost 2.5 million last year. That's the most since World War II. You've got another 3.4 million people who have gone from full-time work to part-time work, or want full-time work. So the underemployment rate is extremely high. And, you know, whether it's retail sales, manufacturing, all of the indicators show that we are in the worst recession since the Great Depression.


And it's going to take some time to fix it. But what we tried to do was put forward a plan that says let's act boldly, let's act swiftly. Let's not only provide a jumpstart to the economy and immediately or save 3 million jobs, but let's also put a down payment on some of the structural problems that we have in our economy.


STEPHANOPOULOS: It has been pretty well-received in the Congress. But you're getting some pushback as well, especially from Senate Democrats on the tax cut portions. Senator Tom Harkin said this is trickle down economics all over again. They're focused especially on the business taxes.


Do you really believe those business tax cuts are going to work to create jobs? Or do you put them in so you could get Republican votes?



OBAMA: Well, let's look at the package as a whole, the bulk of the package is direct government spending. And here are a few things we're going to do. We're going to alternative energy production. We are going to weatherize 2 million homes. We are going to create a much more efficient energy system.


And that's going to have enormous ramifications for the economy as a whole down the line. I think we can create a new green economy. And that's going to be one of the keys to the 21st Century. Health care, which is a drain on our economy, both families and businesses, we're going to make investments in information technology, update our systems work, reduce medical error, that's going to save people money.


Education, we want to create a classroom for the 21st Century for every child, as well as community colleges and public universities. So we're making a series of investments that point to the future as well as just dealing with rebuilding our roads, bridges, et cetera.


Now there is no doubt that that probably gives you the most bang for the buck in terms of stimulus, in terms of getting the economy started, putting people back to work. But there are only so many projects that you can do quickly of that sort.


And so then the question becomes, do tax cuts also provide a stimulus? Do they also help? And they may not help as much as some of the direct spending projects do, but they still provide a stimulus, especially if they are targeted towards people who are really in need.


And there are a lot of families hurting out there. So what we've done is design the bulk of our tax cuts.


STEPHANOPOULOS: But you might give up on some of the business tax cuts?


OBAMA: Well, you know, there are a range of different business tax cuts that we proposed, that we looked at. Some of them, for example, accelerating the depreciation, accelerating the losses that can be


written off by businesses, it turns out those are short-term, temporary measures that actually can have an impact.


But our general philosophy, and I said this yesterday when I was asked at a press conference, is we don't have pride of authorship. There are a couple of basic principles that I laid out. We've got to move quickly. We've got to make sure that any investments that we make have good long-term benefits for the economy, not just short-term.


We can't set up a situation where we're adding to the structural deficit over the long-term. We can't have waste and abuse in it. We can't have earmarks in it.


STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, let's look at some.


OBAMA: But -- just to finish the point, if people have better ideas on certain provisions, if they say, you know, this is going to work better than that, then we welcome that. And so we're going to have a collaborative, consultative process with Congress over the next few days.


But what we can't do is get involved in the typical partisan wrangling or pet project, you know, bartering that takes place.


STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, that's what I wanted to ask you about, because like one of the signature proposals already is this Museum of Organized Crime out in Las Vegas. I had Mitch McConnell out on the show last week and he ridiculed it, saying that, you know, this is an example of the kind of pork we don't want.



Yet its advocates say, wait a second, it's a construction project, it's ready to go, it's going to create jobs. Is that the kind of project that you want to fund or not?


OBAMA: Well, let's be clear, that was a project that was proposed as part of the mayors' project. The country's mayors put together -- here are a range of projects we can do, we didn't include that.


STEPHANOPOULOS: But would you want to fund it or not?


OBAMA: Well, I think that what we have to do is evaluate whether or not these are projects that, as I said, are going to provide long-term benefits to the economy. You know, I would prefer spending money on things like making sure that all federal buildings are energy efficient so the taxpayers are saving money over the long-term.


I want to make sure that on health care we are creating the infrastructure that can make our health care more -- system more efficient. So, you know, we want to spend the money wisely. We want to spend it prudently.


In a package of this magnitude, will there end up being certain projects that potentially don't meet that criteria of helping on health care, energy, or education? Certainly.


But what we don't want is this thing to be a Christmas tree loaded up with a whole bunch of pet projects that people have for their local communities.


STEPHANOPOULOS: I've heard that -- and your meetings on Capitol Hill, the one thing you've been most focused on is get this done now.


OBAMA: Yes.


STEPHANOPOULOS: It has to be done...


OBAMA: Right.


STEPHANOPOULOS: . Presidents Day weekend.


OBAMA: Right.


STEPHANOPOULOS: What happens if it's not?


OBAMA: Well, you know, then Congress was going to hear from me. And I was pleased to hear Nancy Pelosi say that if we don't get it done by the Presidents Day recess, we won't have a Presidents Day recess.


STEPHANOPOULOS: But what's your fear?


OBAMA: Well, the concern is that in a non-emergency situation, Congress exercises all sorts of prerogatives. They've got all sorts of procedures. Everybody wants to be heard. And I'm respectful of that. I'm coming from the United States Senate. I understand why that is important.


And, you know, one of the things that we're trying to set a tone of is that, you know, Congress is a co-equal branch of government. We're not trying to jam anything down people's throats.


Here's what we know though, that the sooner a recovery and reinvestment package is in place, the sooner we can start turning the economy around. We can't afford three, four, five, six more months where we're losing half a million jobs per month.


And the estimates are that if we don't do anything, we could see 4 million jobs lost this year.


STEPHANOPOULOS: Another part of that is the financial rescue package.


OBAMA: Right.



STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you want President Bush to request that second $350 billion? And how do you want that spent differently from the first?


OBAMA: Well, I started off with the premise, when this crisis first arose, that we have to keep our financial system stable, and we have to maintain the flow of credit to businesses and families. That's as important as what's happening in terms of consumer spending or business investment, because if companies can't make payroll, people get laid off. If a guy can't borrow for a car loan, that affects not only him, but the car dealer and the car manufacturer.


So keeping flow of credit is critical. And we had to do something last fall. I, like many, are disappointed with how the whole TARP process has unfolded. There hasn't been enough oversight. We found out this week in a report that we are not tracking where this money is going.


I think that when you look at how we have handled the home foreclosure situation and whether we've done enough in terms of helping families on the ground who may have lost their homes because they lost their jobs or because they got sick, we haven't done enough there. So.


STEPHANOPOULOS: Congressman Frank says he wants $50 billion of the new money to go just to that.


OBAMA: Well, so here's what we have done. What I've done is asked my team to come together, come up with a set of principles around how we are going to maintain transparency, what are we going to do in terms of housing, how are we going to target small businesses that are under an enormous business crunch?


Let's lay out very specifically some of the things that we are going to do with the next $350 billion of money. And I think that we can gain -- regain the confidence of both Congress and the

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American people that this is not just money that is being given to banks without any strings attached and nobody knows what happens, but rather that it is targeted very specifically at getting credit flowing again to businesses and families.


STEPHANOPOULOS: If both of these packages go through, that's more than a trillion dollars in spending in your first couple of months in office.


OBAMA: Right.


STEPHANOPOULOS: When you look at the array of things you want to do, as president, something is going to have to give.


OBAMA: Right.


STEPHANOPOULOS: Which of your ambitions, which of your campaign promises will you have to scale back on because of all of this?


OBAMA: Well, we are going to be presenting a budget in February. And as we learned this week, we are inheriting over a trillion dollar deficit. Unheard of in recent history and.


STEPHANOPOULOS: Eight percent of gross domestic product.


OBAMA: Exactly. So one of the things that I've said is -- and I've said this to my economic team, we are going to have to make some tough choices under my watch to ensure that on the medium term and the long term we're starting to bend the curve where we are getting the deficit under control.


They are going to report back to me in the next month to give me a plan. Now as difficult as it is to spend money wisely, it's going to be even tougher to make some of the adjustments that are needed to get the deficit under control.



STEPHANOPOULOS: But you're going to face some real hard choices. You brought up health care a couple of times.

OBAMA: Absolutely.


STEPHANOPOULOS: . in this interview already. During the campaign you said you would pay for health care by repealing the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy. According to the CBO, you're going to get a $1.2 trillion to $1.8 trillion deficit even if all of the tax cuts are repealed.


OBAMA: Right.


STEPHANOPOULOS: So how do you pay for health care?


OBAMA: Well, you know, these are going to be major challenges. And we're going to have to make some tough choices. Now what I've done is indicated to my team that we've got to eliminate programs that don't work.


And I'll give you an example in the health care area. We are spending a lot of money subsidizing the insurance companies around something called Medicare Advantage, a program that gives them subsidies to accept Medicare recipients but doesn't necessarily make people on Medicare healthier.


And if we eliminate that and other programs, we can potentially save $200 billion out of the health care system that we're currently spending and take that money and use it in ways that are actually going to make people healthier and improve quality.


So what our challenge is going to be is identifying what works and putting more money into that, eliminating things that don't work, and making things that we have more efficient.


I'm not suggesting, George, I want to be realistic here, not everything that we talked about during the campaign are we going to be able to do on the pace that we had hoped.

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STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me press you on this, at the end of the day, are you really talking about over the course of your presidency some kind of a grand bargain? That you have tax reform, health care reform, entitlement reform, including Social Security and Medicare where everybody in the country is going to have to sacrifice something, accept change for the greater good?



OBAMA: Yes.


STEPHANOPOULOS: And when will that get done?


OBAMA: Well, the -- right now I'm focused on a pretty heavy lift, which is making sure that we get that reinvestment and recovery package in place. But what you describe is exactly what we're going to have to do.


What we have to do is to take a look at our structural deficit, how are we paying for government, what are we getting for it, and how do we make the system more efficient?


STEPHANOPOULOS: And eventually sacrifice from everyone.


OBAMA: Everybody is going to have to give. Everybody is going to have to have some skin in the game.


STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me move on to national security and foreign policy. We're now in the second week of the conflict in Gaza between Israel and the Palestinians. I know you've been reluctant to speak out too much on this. Let me show everyone what you said when you were in Israel last July.


(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)


OBAMA: I don't think any country would find it acceptable to have missiles raining down on the heads of their citizens. If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that. I would expect Israelis to do the same thing.


(END VIDEO CLIP)


STEPHANOPOULOS: Would you say that in Israel today?


OBAMA: I think that's a basic principle of any country is that they've got to protect their citizens. And so what I've said is that given the delicacy of the situation, the one area where the principle of one president at a time has to hold is when it comes to foreign policy.


We cannot have two administrations at the same time simultaneously sending signals in a volatile situation. But what I am doing right now is putting together the team so that on January 20th, starting on day one, we have the best possible people who are going to be immediately engaged in the Middle East peace process as a whole.


That are going to be engaging with all of the actors there. That will work to create a strategic approach that ensures that both Israelis and Palestinians can meet their aspirations.


STEPHANOPOULOS: But as you know, in much of the Arab world, your silence -- your relative silence has been interpreted as callousness. And we also had a viewer question on this, Marin Guerrero of Riverside, California, asks you: "Why is Obama remaining silent on the Gaza crisis when so many innocent people are being killed?"


OBAMA: Well, look, I have said -- and I think I said this a couple of days back, that when you see civilians, whether Palestinian or Israeli, harmed, under hardship, it's heartbreaking. And obviously what that does is it makes me much more determined to try to break a deadlock that has gone on for decades now.


STEPHANOPOULOS: But more broadly, will your policy in the Middle East, will it be building on the Bush policy or a clean break?


OBAMA: Well, you know, I think that if you look not just at the Bush administration, but also what happened under the Clinton administration, you are seeing the general outlines of an approach.



And I think that players in the region understand the compromises that are going to need to be made. But the politics of it are hard. And the reason it's so important for the United States to be engaged and involved immediately, not waiting until the end of their term, is because working through the politics of this requires a third party that everybody has confidence, wants to see a fair and just outcome.


And I think that an Obama administration, if we do it right, can provide that kind of (INAUDIBLE).


STEPHANOPOULOS: Former Defense Secretary Bill Perry said this week at a conference that you will almost certain face, almost certainly face a conflict, a crisis with Iran in your first year in office.


Based on what you've learned, do you agree with that analysis and are you ready for it?


OBAMA: Well, I think that Iran is going to be one of our biggest challenges. And as I said during the campaign, you know, we have a situation in which not only is Iran exporting terrorism through Hamas, through Hezbollah, but they are pursuing a nuclear weapon that could potentially trigger a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.


STEPHANOPOULOS: And you have to do something about it in your first year.


OBAMA: And we are going to have to take a new approach. And I've outlined my belief that engagement is the place to start. That the international community is going to be taking cues from us in how we want to approach Iran.


And I think that sending a signal that we respect the aspirations of the Iranian people, but that we also have certain expectations in terms of how a international actor behaves, is.


(CROSSTALK)


STEPHANOPOULOS: But a new emphasis on respect.


OBAMA: Well, I think a new emphasis on respect and a new emphasis on being willing to talk, but also a clarity about what our bottom lines are. And we are in preparations for that. We anticipate that we're going to have to move swiftly in that area.


STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me ask you about homeland security. You haven't talked too much about it. This week, President Bush's homeland security adviser, Ken Wainstein was talking about the Mumbai attacks.

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And he said: "You could envision it happening in any American city, and it's chilling when you think about it." And, you know, you've been getting the president's daily brief every single day, do you agree with that?



OBAMA: I think that homeland security always has to be our number one priority. When I set up the hierarchy of things that I've got to do, my number one priority every single day that I wake up is how do I make sure that the American people are safe. We've got an outstanding person in Janet Napolitano who's going to be heading up our homeland security department. She is already in deep consultation with the other members of my national security team and we are going to have to stay vigilant and that's something that doesn't change from administration to administration. When you see what happened in Mumbai that potentially points to a new strategy, not simply suicide bombings but you have commanders taking over -


STEPHANOPOULOS: (INAUDIBLE)


OBAMA: I think that the dangers are always there and I think you have to anticipate that having seen the mayhem that was created in Mumbai that there are going to be potential copycats or other terrorist organizations that think this is something they can replicate. And so we're going to have to be vigilant in terms of our intelligence, we're going to have to make sure that we are more effective in terms of anticipating some of these issues and we've got to continue to put pressure on al Qaeda, which is our major target, that's something that I talked about extensively during the campaign. That has to be one of our primary areas of focus when it comes to our international security.


STEPHANOPOULOS: So based on what you've learned during all these intelligence briefings, are we safer or more at risk than you believed during the campaign?


OBAMA: Well George you know I can't say what the --


STEPHANOPOULOS: Without giving me any confidential information, just generally.


OBAMA: I think that we have made progress in certain areas but those dangers are still there. And those dangers are not going to immediately go away because we're not talking about conventional armies where we have very clear measures of what their capacity is. We know exactly what they're planning, where they're positioned. If you have a small group of people in today's world with today's technology who are intent on doing harm and are willing to die, that is something that's always going to be a challenge.


STEPHANOPOULOS: Your smile goaded me into another question. I was thinking about Harry Truman. You know when he took office he didn't even know about the Manhattan project, found out about it after he was president. Have you been shocked by anything you've learned?


OBAMA: Most of what I've learned is -- are things that I've anticipated, partly because I was in the senate and although I wasn't on the intelligence committee we would get top secret briefings. So there hasn't been something that was eye popping. But you know the situation still requires vigilance.


STEPHANOPOULOS: Vice President Cheney has been giving a series of exit interviews and he told Mark Nolan(ph) of CBS that the Bush counterterrorism policies have definitely made the United States safer. And he added this piece of advice for you.


(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)



DICK CHENEY: Before you start to implement your campaign rhetoric you need to sit down and find out precisely what it is we did and how we did it. Because it is going to be vital to keeping the nation safe and secure in the years ahead and it would be a tragedy if they threw over those policies simply because they've campaigned against them.


(END OF AUDIO CLIP)


STEPHANOPOULOS: Are you going to take it?


OBAMA: I think that was pretty good advice, which is I should know what's going on before we make judgments and that we shouldn't be making judgments on the basis of incomplete information or campaign rhetoric. So, I've got no quibble with that particular quote. I think if Vice President Cheney were here he and I would have some significant disagreements on some things that we know happened.


STEPHANOPOULOS: You would say for example?


OBAMA: For example, Vice President Cheney I think continues to defend what he calls extraordinary measures or procedures when it comes to interrogations and from my view waterboarding is torture. I have said that under my administration we will not torture.


STEPHANOPOULOS: How about them taking that to the next step. Right now the CIA has a special program, would you require that that program -- basically every government interrogation program be under the same standard, be in accordance with the army field manual?


OBAMA: My general view is that our United States military is under fire and has huge stakes in getting good intelligence. And if our top army commanders feel comfortable with interrogation techniques that are squarely within the boundaries of rule of law, our constitution and international standards, then those are things that we should be able to (INAUDIBLE)


STEPHANOPOULOS: So no more special CIA program?


OBAMA: I'm not going to lay out a particular program because again, I thought that Dick Cheney's advice was good, which is let's make sure we know everything that's being done. But the interesting thing George was that during the campaign, although John McCain and I had a lot of differences on a lot of issues, this is one where we didn't have a difference, which is that it is possible for us to keep the American people safe while still adhering to our core values and ideals and that's what I intend to carry forward in my administration.


STEPHANOPOULOS: You also agreed on Guantanamo when you say you want to shut it down. You say you're still going to shut it down. Is it turning out to be harder than you expected, will you get that done in the first 100 days?


OBAMA: It is more difficult than I think a lot of people realize and we are going to get it done but part of the challenge that you have is that you have a bunch of folks that have been detained, many of whom who may be very dangerous who have not been put on trial or have not gone through some adjudication. And some of the evidence against them may be tainted even though it's true. And so how to balance creating a process that adheres to rule of law, habeas corpus, basic principles of Anglo American legal system, by doing it in a way that doesn't result in releasing people who are intent on blowing us up.


STEPHANOPOULOS: So not necessarily first 100 days.


OBAMA: That's a challenge. I think it's going to take some time and our legal teams are working in consultation with our national security apparatus as we speak to help design exactly what we need to do. But I don't want to be ambiguous about this. We are going to close Guantanamo and we are going to make sure that the procedures we set up are ones that abide by our constitution. That is not only the right thing to do but it actually has to be part of our broader national security strategy because we will send a message to the world that we are serious about our values.


STEPHANOPOULOS: The most popular question on your own website is related to this. On change.gov it comes from Bob Fertik of New York City and he asks, "Will you appoint a special prosecutor ideally Patrick Fitzgerald to independently investigate the greatest crimes of the Bush administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping."


OBAMA: We're still evaluating how we're going to approach the whole issue of interrogations, detentions, and so forth. And obviously we're going to be looking at past practices and I don't believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards. And part of my job is to make sure that for example at the CIA, you've got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don't want them to suddenly feel like they've got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering (ph).


STEPHANOPOULOS: So, no 9/11 commission with Independence subpoena power?


OBAMA: We have not made final decisions, but my instinct is for us to focus on how do we make sure that moving forward we are doing the right thing. That doesn't mean that if somebody has blatantly broken the law, that they are above the law. But my orientation's going to be to move forward.


STEPHANOPOULOS: So, let me just press that one more time. You're not ruling out prosecution, but will you tell your Justice Department to investigate these cases and follow the evidence wherever it leads?


OBAMA: What I -- I think my general view when it comes to my attorney general is he is the people's lawyer. Eric Holder's been nominated. His job is to uphold the Constitution and look after the interests of the American people, not to be swayed by my day-to-day politics. So, ultimately, he's going to be making some calls, but my general belief is that when it comes to national security, what we have to focus on is getting things right in the future, as opposed looking at what we got wrong in the past.


STEPHANOPOULOS: You know, you've mentioned Eric Holder. He's coming under some fire on Capitol Hill by the ranking Republican Senate Judiciary Committee Arlen Specter and some others who are worried about just that, that he's not going to be independent. Are you confident he's going to be confirmed?


OBAMA: Yes.


STEPHANOPOULOS: And are you worried at all, troubled at all by the questions that are being asked about his independence, also questions about his involvement in the Marc Rich case?


OBAMA: Oh, I think most of the criticism has revolved around the Marc Rich pardon and he has publicly acknowledged that it was a mistake. George, as you know, if the criteria for somebody being confirmed on a cabinet or being elected president was that they've never made a mistake .


STEPHANOPOULOS: Nobody would get in.


OBAMA: Nobody would get in. So, you know, here's somebody who's publicly taken responsibility, he said he dropped the ball on that one. Beyond that, though, everybody will acknowledge that you can't find a guy who's more qualified. He was second at the Justice Department, has been a prosecutor, has been a judge, and with respect to the issues of independence, he locked up the most powerful Democrat on the Hill, Dan Rostenkowski. So, I think this is a man of unimpeachable integrity, I have every confidence that he will be confirmed.


STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me ask you about the inaugural. I know you've been working on your inaugural address. You say you've been reading a lot of Lincoln. Is there anything else that you've come across as you've been preparing the speech that's been a particular inspiration to you?


OBAMA: Well, you know, I have been reading Lincoln. I'm not sure whether that's been wise because every time you read .


STEPHANOPOULOS: High bar.


OBAMA: Every time you read that second inaugural, you start getting intimidated, especially because it's really short. You know, there's a genius to Lincoln that is not going to be matched. People then point to Kennedy's inauguration speech. Sorenson and Kennedy together did an extraordinary job. Some of the others are not as inspiring.


STEPHANOPOULOS: To say the least.


OBAMA: And so, I think that the main task for me in an inauguration speech, and I think this is true for my presidency generally, is to try to capture as best I can the moment that we are in it. I mean, I think that when you have a successful presidential speech of any sort, it's because that president is able to say -- is able to put their finger on here's the moment we're in. This is the crossroad that we're at. And then to project confidence that if we take the right measures that we can once again be that country, that beacon for the world.


And so, my focus is to try to be able to describe in simple, plain terms what are the challenges we face, but then also to let people know I have every intention of working with the American people so that we meet those challenges.


STEPHANOPOULOS: I just have a couple more questions.


OBAMA: Sure.


STEPHANOPOULOS: You've been without a worship community now for about a year. Do you miss it?


OBAMA: I do and it's been a difficult time. Now, I've got a wonderful community of people who are praying for me every day, and they call me up and -- you know, but it's not the same as going to church and the choir's going and you get a good sermon.


STEPHANOPOULOS: So, do you have a church here in Washington?


OBAMA: Not yet. And so, one of the things that Michelle and I will be doing is probably visiting some churches and seeing what's comfortable. It is tougher as president. You know, this is not just an issue of going to church, it's an issue of going anywhere. You don't want to subject your fellow church members, the rest of the congregation, to being magged every time you go to church. And so, we're going to try to be balancing, not being disruptive to the city, but also saying we want to be part of Washington D.C.


But one of the things that I don't like historically about Washington is the way that you've got one part of Washington, which is a company town, all about government, and is generally pretty prosperous. And then, you've got another half of D.C. that is going through enormous challenges. I want to see if we can bring those two Washington D.C.s together.



STEPHANOPOULOS: Also, your girls started school this week. How'd the first week go?


OBAMA: They seemed to thrive. I'm trying to figure out why it is that they don't seemed to be fazed by anything. People think -- you know, folks think I'm cool, they are a lot cooler than I am. They just don't seem to be intimidated.


STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, I got to tell you, you know, they're out touring the museum right now, I heard they were taken straight to the first dog exhibit and while you were getting made up, they went into the control room and played director and producer. And they actually gave me a question they want me to ask you. You know exactly what it's going to be.


OBAMA: Uh-oh. Go ahead.


STEPHANOPOULOS: What kind of a dog are we getting and when are we getting it?


OBAMA: The -- they seem to have narrowed it down to a labradoodle or a Portuguese water hound.


STEPHANOPOULOS: A medium sized.


OBAMA: Medium sized dog, and so, we're now going to start looking at shelters to see when one of those dogs might come up.


STEPHANOPOULOS: So, you're closing in on it?


OBAMA: We're closing in on it. This has been tougher than finding a commerce secretary.


STEPHANOPOULOS: Thank you very much for your time today and best of luck.


OBAMA: Appreciate it. Thank you, George.


STEPHANOPOULOS: The round table is next with George Will, Newt Gingrich, Peggy Noonan and Tom Friedman.


From:

http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/Economy/story?id=6618199&page=1


FoxNews Discussed on Flopping Aces

posted by Mike’s America


When they say Fox News is fair and balanced they can prove it. Here is a comparison from Johnny Dollar showing the amount of time the cable news networks devoted to covering the Coakely concession speech and the Brown victory speech in last Tuesday's Massachusetts special election:


speeches.jpg

You would think that considering Brown's amazing win, that his speech would be the greater story. But apparently the news directors at MSNBC and CNN thought that giving the loser more time was newsworthy.

Fox News Record Ratings


Considering how blatant the bias is at the other two news channels it won't surprise anyone to learn that Fox News is #1. But did you know that on Tuesday night the Fox News prime time lineup beat the entire ABC broadcast lineup in ratings? Fox News had three out of the top ten shows. Their ratings might have gone even higher had some viewers not been confused and tuned to NBC's "Biggest Loser" by mistake thinking it was about Martha Coakley.


Scookum, in response, posted this:

 

Mike, I listen to Marxist radio and read Media matters, they are proclaiming vociferously that Fox is biased and a political propaganda organ of the Republican Party. Are you prepared to answer those charges?

 

In response, I posted this:

 

Quite obviously, Hannity is strongly partisan, although he will certainly criticize the Republican party and Republican candidates on substantive issues.

 

O'Reilly has bent over backwards to be fair to Obama.

 

The various Fox panels skew right, often having more opinions from the right than the left, but they do include opinions from the left (and the far left).

 

However, to assert that FoxNews is a propaganda organ of the Republican party is absurd. Do you recall the recent congressional election in New York? Do you recall who got the most positive coverage on FoxNews? The independent did; not the Republican, who was skewered by Hannity and others.

 

What I have noticed is, some people (and organizations) make judgments based upon what they do themselves. Have you ever noticed on the liberal stations (which is most of them), that they often repeat the exact same phrases all day long, despite them being (supposedly) independent news organizations? How do 5-10 news people on different stations and even in different media use the exact same phrase on the same day?

 

It is much more reasonable to make a case that there are Democratic talking points which make it to many and various news desks.


From:

http://www.floppingaces.net/2010/01/23/fair-and-balanced-election-news/

settledscience.jpg

Links


This is hilarious; President Obama holds a rally to support Coakley and some people there are blaming Bush for her flailing candidacy...really!


http://hotlineoncall.nationaljournal.com/archives/2010/01/after_obama_ral.php



Hmmm, more bad news for global warming enthusiasts....looks like the Himalayan glaciers are not going to melt by 2035. That prediction seems to be based upon faulty data.


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6991177.ece


From the UK again; the UN wrongly links global warming to natural disasters:


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7000063.ece


Mike’s America and his take on Obama’s Ohio speech/townhall meeting:


http://www.floppingaces.net/2010/01/23/obama-took-his-perpetual-campaign-to-ohio-friday/


Zuckerman’s editorial from U.S. News and World Reports:


http://www.usnews.com/articles/opinion/mzuckerman/2010/01/21/mort-zuckerman-the-incredible-deflation-of-barack-obama.htm


Megan McCain writes a column on boobs:


http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-01-20/americas-boob-police/


Additional Sources


Terror suspect Siddiqui wants her prospective jury to undergo genetic testing to eliminate the Jews:


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6988777.ece (so, it is right to profile jurors, but not right to profile terrorist suspects?)


Washington Post Poll on smaller versus larger government:


http://voices.washingtonpost.com/federal-eye/2010/01/eye_opener_poll_smaller_govt_s.html


Key players in Domestic Intelligence left out of the loop with regards to the terrorist bomber; and no plan in place to deal with such an event.


congressunions.jpg

http://standbyliberty.org/2010/01/21/homeland-security-director-of-national-intell-admits-they-were-never-consulted-about-the-christmas-bomber-and-we-had-no-plan-on-how-to-deal-with-a-terrorist-caught-in-the-usa-welcome-to-the-new/


Biden in Iraq:


http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100123/pl_nm/us_iraq_usa_biden


Olbermann apologizes to Jon Stewart for his remarks about Scott Brown:


http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2010/01/23/olbermann-apologizes-stewart-i-have-been-little-over-top-lately


The Rush Section


The Unions and Class Warfare

RUSH: We're going to start in Indianapolis with Alex. Great to have you on the program, sir. Hello.


CALLER: Hello, sir. It's an honor to speak with you.



RUSH: Thank you very much.


CALLER: I have one quick question. I agree with about 95% of what you say. I listen to you every day. I haven't missed in quite some time. But there was one point that I'd like to ask you about. I'm a member of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, the UFCW. It wasn't an option. I had to do it with my job, and it's a great job. But they make sure I have better pay than I would have otherwise. I have friends that aren't unionized groceries and they get paid less. I have good health insurance. I have good overtime rules, good vacation rules, and I'm just wondering: Do you see that there's some benefit to unionization for the individual workers. Not when they get involved in politics but just for individual workers?

RUSH: Look, I'm all for freedom.


CALLER: Yes.


RUSH: You want to join a union -- if it makes sense for you, if it makes you happy, and it's the best you think you can do -- go for it. I have no problem with that. My problem is primarily with the public employees unions, although they're all aligned. The leadership of these unions are all leftist to the point of... There was a piece written by the head honcho of the Service Employees International Union. This is the bunch that donated $60 million to President Obama during his campaign. There was an article published this week urging the Democrats to continue, to not stop this, that the union people of this country demand it. Now, union people are 8% of the population.


CALLER: Yes.


RUSH: This article appeared in the Communist Party of the United States magazine. The unions, the public employee unions and the leadership of most unions are not just Democrats. They are far-left liberals. They work expressly for the destruction of the private sector. Look at what just happened with President Obama. He's got this tax plan, this tax increase on anybody that has what he considers to be a "Cadillac health insurance plan," meaning if your health insurance plan costs your company $23,000 or more per year, then there's going to be a 40% tax on that. Well, almost every government worker, government union's health care, is a Cadillac health care policy. Obama exempted the unions. Eight percent of the population will not have to pay his 40% tax. The other 92% of the people that work in this country here are not unionized, will have to pay it for them.


CALLER: Yeah. Like I said, I think when they get involved in politics, it comes really poorly (sic), but I think that if they could find -- if the unions, like UAW, FCW could find -- a way to state of out of politics but still make certain --


RUSH: Impossible.


CALLER: I know. It would be nice, though, but I just wanted to let you know that they do help me out and they help me take care of my family and they help me in a lot of ways personally.


RUSH: This is the great seduction. This is the great hook. I actually believe that... I don't know what you earn annually. I know that many government workers, many government unionized people, if you add their salaries and benefits together, you get an annual compensation of $175,000 a year.


CALLER: That's true.


RUSH: They are not being laid off. They are not losing their jobs. The unemployment rate in government worker unions is 3.6%. It's 17% throughout the rest of the country.


CALLER: Yes.


RUSH: Look at what the UAW did! Look at what UAW did to General Motors and Chrysler.


CALLER: They tore 'em apart, yes. I see that. I know. It's a double-edged sword. But when I go to the store or when I'm trying to pay my bills, you know, it is nice to see that. I wish they could do it without tearing GM apart. My dad lost his job with GM because of unions. But it is nice on an individual basis, sometimes. But, I mean, like I said: 95% of the time I'm right there with you, but I just want you to understand that when I cash my check, I do in some ways appreciate the UFCW.


RUSH: Well, yeah. That union, however, you work at a private sector store, right? You don't work for a government entity?


CALLER: Yes.


RUSH: That's not a government union although they all pool their resources, and vast majority of them -- whether they're in government or not -- still advocate liberalism and Democrats, and they have had an unfair political and financial advantage for a hundred years, 50 years up until yesterday. That's now going to change. That's why they're all squealing like stuck pigs. But I think in large measure -- this isn't true in virtually every case -- when you look at an American company or industry or type of industry in trouble, the odds are you're going to find a union smack-dab in the middle of it, and not the workers. You guys are just like rank-and-file Democrats really don't know what their leaders are really all about.


You're Democrat because you were born that way and your parents were. Your parents have always been union and it just gets passed down to the family. It's like you. You owe your life, you think -- you owe your salary, your living, your ability to pay bills, your ability to eat -- to the union. I'm not trying to talk you out of that. This is free country. If you want to be a member of a union and you derive that from it, fine and dandy. But I want you to know what they're doing with their mandatory dues that they are taking from you. I mean, they're financing a leftist, liberal movement in this country. Look what it's doing. We're at 10% unemployment, probably 10.8% in reality.


If you count the people that stopped looking, it's up to 17% unemployment. There's no hope. There's nothing. The people that run this country have the same mentality of the people who run these government unions, and they don't have any love or appreciation for the private sector. They all hate corporations (even though they make deals with them for salary, wages, and benefits) and they end up doing them great harm. It's the most amazing thing to watch. I'm glad you called, though. I appreciate the opportunity to answer the question. I have no animus at all toward people who work as members of unions and so forth. The only people I disagree with are liberals, whether they work or not, and I always am going to. I think they will destroy this country if given half the chance. Don in Miami, I'm glad you waited, sir. You're on Open Line Friday. You're up next. Hello.


CALLER: Hello, Rush. I respect this opportunity.


RUSH: Thank you, sir.



CALLER: I think the Republicans have lost their vision. The president is not a lame duck because of Massachusetts. The opportunity seems to be... The Republican opposition seems to be proud of derailing the health of America, but the Democrats, from my scope of vision, seems to be on the right direction, the right direction. We'll soon see the derailing of the right-wing voice of opposition.


RUSH: Well, tell me specifically: From your "scope of vision," what is it the Democrats are doing right?


CALLER: The Democrats are trying to raise the standard of the middle class, at the same time bring the standard of the lower class up and I'm not... I'm a conservative, trust me.


RUSH: Uh, Don?


CALLER: I don't think... I don't think the upper class in this society should be so selfish as to not, um, like the president's sense to go straight down the middle and help the economy.


RUSH: Don, may I ask how old you are?


CALLER: Oh-ho-ho! Sir, you wouldn't... I'm up there.


RUSH: Okay. And you believe this all your life?


CALLER: I'm a registered Republican, I vote Democrat, and I believed this all my life.


RUSH: That's... Don, I --


CALLER: I know you take opposition, that this is free speech.


RUSH: It's not just I take opposition. It's just I'm sad, because you sound like a smart guy but you couldn't be more wrong. I mean, this administration particularly -- Barack Obama and this bunch of Democrats -- is destroying the

govtloans.jpg

middle class. They are putting more people in poverty. They never try to elevate people at the low-end of the scale. They always try to punish people at the top, which is what Obama's doing now by double taxing the banks. There's not one thing this man has done for the people of this country. Not one thing, Don. He hasn't done one thing for the middle class. He hasn't done one thing for any group or individual that you can find. He hasn't done one thing. Name for me, anybody, exactly one thing he's done good? You think they are trying. You didn't even say they've done it. You think they're "trying," which means that you are falling for their rhetoric. You are falling for their good intentions. Look how they've destroyed black families in this country, Don, with their welfare programs. Look how they have kept people in poverty with their poverty programs. Look at how they have kept more and more people dependent on government for their lives, for their very existence -- and they live as paupers. Yet those people think the Democrats are fighting for them. It's an age-old myth that way too many people believe, but we are in the process of changing gazillions of minds. Glad you called.


Labor Unions push the House to pass Senate healthcare bill:


http://sweetness-light.com/archive/seius-stern-theres-no-reset-button



Left Outraged by SCOTUS Ruling


The left is outraged over the Supreme Court decision that stood up for the First Amendment and free speech. They are beside themselves both in print and in politics and in the broadcast media. Last night on MSNBC Barney Frank was asked for his reaction to the Supreme Court ruling saying that corporations can advertise as often and wherever they want in political campaigns.


FRANK: Fortunately, there is an approach we can take. What we can do what's perfectly possible and constitutional, I believe, unassailable is to impose restrictions as a matter of corporate law on what corporations can do. We can limit what corporations do. And we limit it not as a matter of campaign finance regulation per se, but as a matter of corporate law. We will be cooperating with the Obama administration in drafting the toughest possible constitutional legislation to prevent the drowning of American democracy in corporate dollars. There's no other way to say it.


RUSH: That's right, because we want the American democracy to continue to choke on union dollars. We don't want competition, we don't want fairness. Your Democrat Party against the First Amendment, Barney Frank, shell-shocked over what happened in Massachusetts.


Barney Frank from a district won by Scott Brown and Massachusetts and the day they lost Massachusetts. By the way, speaking of Massachusetts, folks, do you remember, do you remember how the media and the Democrats were linking me to Scott Brown? They put me in Scott Brown ads. I had said not a word about this campaign. They linked me with Scott Brown before the vote. He wins in a near landslide and now they ignore that I had something to do with it by their own admission and trying to call him a moderate and they're peppering him with questions, "What are you going to do to work with Democrats?"


RUSH: Now, the Supreme Court came out with this big free speech decision yesterday. It's sweeping. It is huge. Did you hear Obama's response? Obama said that he needs to develop a forceful response to this decision. The public interest requires nothing else, a forceful response. Now, I want to point out that Obama was a law professor, or technically a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago law school for 12 years. Now, why would a law professor oppose a Supreme Court decision on a matter of constitutional law and not respect the authority of the court and honor our system of separation of powers? Why? Of course it's easy. Because he doesn't like the Constitution. And this we know. He thinks the Constitution restrains him and restricts him for doing things to people. The Constitution spells out what the government may not do, and that's what he doesn't like.


Thomas Lifson writing about this in the AmericanThinker.com: "No more need to set up political action committees in order to have a constrained voice. [Corporations] can pay for their own ads, though they cannot contribute directly to campaigns. ... The political dialogue in America will become more varied and intense, with for-profit and nonprofit corporations able to spend money in order to influence politics. The changes should be far-reaching. This diminishes the power of the left, overall, as corporations now have the ability to speak as loud or louder than unions, who have been unfettered. ... 'Today's Supreme Court ruling in the Citizens United case means that the anti-incumbent furor that has been growing is partly released from the shackles created by "incumbent protection" election and campaign finance laws,'" which is exactly how I characterized McCain-Feingold, the Incumbent Protection Act. "The dirty little secret about all campaign finance laws passed by Congress since 1972 is that they were designed to protect incumbents by stifling competition," and restraining their opponents.


The more I hear people react to this on the left and the more I read, the more I understand just what a huge win for freedom and liberty this decision was. The liberals are having a fit. Here's Howard Fineman: "I rarely attend a Supreme Court argument, but I did last fall for a 'rehearing' of the campaign-spending case. I wrote a column about it, predicting that the Roberts Court would sweep away long-established restrictions on spending by corporations. The most vivid image I saw was the red-faced Chief Justice John Roberts, veins popping on his neck as he vibrated with disgust at the idea that government could limit what a corporate entity could do or say in the political arena. The 5-4 opinion issued Thursday by the Roberts Court -- written by swing voter Anthony Kennedy -- was even more sweeping than I had imagined and predicted.


"It's nothing short of revolutionary. Here's how I add up the possible consequences: It adds to Republican chances of pickups in red states with small, cheap media markets. It turns the cottage industry of campaign consulting into a Hollywood-lucrative major media sector. It reduces candidates and political parties to mere appendages in their own campaigns. It will turn corporate boardrooms into political cockfighting pits, since that is where the key decisions will be made. It gives President Obama a populist issue, if he has the cojones and imagination and sense of injustice to take it on. It rips the veil of 'conservatism' from this court, which just rendered one of the most wildly 'activist' opinions in decades. It makes a mockery of the legal theory of 'original intent.' The Founders would be rolling over in their graves. Other than that, it's not much of a story."


The left thinks this is judicial activism? That's where we've come to. Judicial activism is standing up for the First Amendment. Judicial activism is simply recognizing the constitutionality of speech. That, to the left, is an abomination. Judicial activism is rewriting the Constitution to say things it doesn't say, interpreting it in ways that were never intended to be interpreted. Writing new law from the bench is activism. But simply upholding the constitutionality of the First Amendment? That is original intent. It's certainly not activism in any way, shape, manner, or form.


I'll tell you, the Washington Post has a story here, and the argument that was advanced by the government in this case, you will not believe this. It all started with David Bossie, "a veteran Republican campaign operative who made his mark investigating the Clintons, thought his group could offer a conservative answer to Michael Moore's successful films. After Moore's 'Fahrenheit 9/11' premiered in 2004, Bossie's Citizens United group released 'Celsius 41.11.'And after it became clear that Bossie's longtime enemy Hillary Rodham Clinton would run for president, Citizens United released another flick: 'Hillary: The Movie.' Featuring a who's-who cast of right-wing commentators, the 2008 film takes viewers on a savaging journey through Clinton's scandals. The sole compliment about the then-senator comes from conservative firebrand Ann Coulter: 'Looks good in a pantsuit.' But 'Hillary: The Movie' never became a blockbuster. The Federal Election Commission restricted Citizens United's ability to advertise the film during the 2008 primary season, a decision that Bossie and other conservative activists saw as a threat to their freedom of speech. 'The marketplace for my movie was completely and totally shut down by the Federal Election Commission,' Bossie said in an interview Thursday. So he sued -- and thus was born Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.


"Bossie said Ted Olson was 'singularly responsible for our winning this case.' Olson transformed the case from a narrow one about McCain-Feingold to an assault on the law's constitutionality, helping crystallize the issue for the justices. When the Supreme Court first heard the case in March, Deputy Solicitor General Malcolm L. Stewart, representing the FEC --" this is Obama's lawyer "-- was pulled into a discussion of an issue that took him down a slippery slope: If the movie were a book, would the government ban publishing the book if it mentioned a candidate for office within the election timeframe?" And this guy representing the FEC said, yes, the government would ban the book, and the justices shot up, stood up and said what the hell are you talking about. 'That's pretty incredible,' Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said. Then came questions about electronic devices such as the Kindle. 'If it has one name, one use of the candidate's name, it would be covered, correct?' Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. asked. 'That's correct,' Stewart replied. 'It's a 500-page book, and at the end it says, 'And so vote for X,' the government could ban that?' Roberts asked." The government lawyer said yes. He had to. If he's going to ban a movie, he's gotta be consistent. "Bossie said this was the argument that turned a majority of the bench against the FEC and in favor of Citizens United."


In the LA Times on the opinion page: "Conservatives Embrace Judicial Activism in Campaign Finance Ruling -- The Supreme Court's decision in favor of corporate spending in elections makes previous rhetoric laughable." Look, if they want to call me an activist for speech and liberty then I'll raise my hand, I'll gladly be an activist. You know, it's a sad damn thing we need activists for speech and liberty in the United States of America, folks. It's a damn sorry sight that we need activists for speech and liberty. The liberals say that the framers never meant to protect corporations. The hatred for corporations on the American left, I'm still dialing in on that. It is more intense than even I was aware of. Snerdley, I'm not surprised the ruling wasn't unanimous. I mean you got four huge libs. I'm not surprised at all it wasn't unanimous. The left is a monster the likes of which average people still have not come to grips with.


The Washington Post: High Court Shows it Might be Willing to Act Boldly. And Roberts said, all you people disagreeing here, if we held -- see, the liberals think stare decisis is that's it, you cannot overturn precedents, ever. And Roberts said, oh, yeah? If we held to precedent, segregation would still be legal. Minimum wage laws would be unconstitutional. The government could wiretap ordinary criminal suspects without a warrant. If stare decisis cannot be seen as inexorable command, if we can't overturn precedent then I'm sure you liberals do not want to go that route. The New York Times: "The Court's Blow to Democracy." Listen to this characterization of the New York Times: "The majority is deeply wrong on the law. Most wrongheaded of all is its insistence that corporations are just like people and entitled to the same First Amendment rights. It is an odd claim since companies are creations of the state that exist to make money. They are given special privileges, including different tax rates, to do just that. It was a fundamental misreading of the Constitution to say that these artificial legal constructs have the same right to spend money on politics as ordinary Americans have to speak out in support of a candidate." Well, corporations are made up of ordinary Americans. What does he mean here, corporations are created by the state? (interruption) Because you gotta give a charter? Well, no, he means the state, the central planners, corporations are created. The state creates nothing. They may grant the creators of an idea permission to do it, but they create zilch.


RUSH: You know, it is amazing what these libs are saying. We cannot compete with the unions. We can't compete with unions. One alone gave Obama $60 million! We can't compete. One union gave him $60 million. This is just leveling the playing field. Howard Fineman says it's an activist opinion. All corporations are to be censored during elections? Why are media corporations accepted, then? This is one question I would love to ask all of these people in the media. You work for corporations! "Yeah, but we are the press, the First Amendment."


Well, everybody has First Amendment protections. Everybody is acknowledged to have the right to free speech. "Yeah, but we're special, we're the press." Yeah, but you work for corporations. Your corporations are putting you out there. You're not independent contractors. Look at your paycheck. It's coming from ABC or Disney or it's coming from GE or NBC, or coming from CBS and whoever the hell else. You work for corporations, and you despise 'em. What the lib media are trying to do here, folks -- and the Democrats as well -- is they're trying to misuse the language again. I mean, the simple fact of the matter is that when the court upholds the Constitution, that's not activism. When the court rejects activist precedent from prior courts, that's not activism. Rejecting the Constitution is activism -- and they're trying to misappropriate this word, "activism," for their own purposes.


Dred Scott would be the law of the land. Slavery would be the law of the land. Plessy v. Ferguson would be the law of the land. That's segregation. Korematsu would be the law of the land, ladies and gentlemen. That's the internment of the Japanese-Americans. On and on and on, all of these things. If we couldn't overturn precedent, we'd still have slavery and segregation. Following the Constitution can never be activism. Following the Constitution is fidelity to the law. Corporations are nothing more than individuals organized into a group to the purpose of conducting business. At the core of the attacks on this decision is the hate for liberty and competition and debate. That is what the media doesn't like, it's what the Democrat Party doesn't like, and of course the left doesn't like any of that: Liberty, competition, and debate. As far as I'm concerned, the left does not get to decide, my friends, which parts of the Constitution have meaning which question parts do not. But they want to have that power. It is we, the conservatives, who stand for the Bill of Rights. They don't. The right to speech, the right to religious liberty and freedom, the right to bear arms, the right to private property, et cetera. Thank God for the Bill of Rights, and it has just been freed. Freedom awoke from a 100-year coma yesterday with this decision. Here's David "Rodham" Gergen and... It's actually a montage here of a bunch of people who do not like this one bit.


DAVID GERGEN: The court here is guilty of, uh, something conservatives say they don't like, and that is judicial activism.


SIMON ROSENBERG: This is judicial activism.


BOB EDGAR: What the Supreme Court has done today is they've shown their political activism.



BARNEY FRANK: The conservatives talk about not having interference with the democratic process. This is judicial striking down of the law.


HOWARD FINEMAN: The notion that John Roberts and his court were careful proceduralists who looked to original intent and, you know, only went incrementally the law that's completely out the window. This is one of most radical decisions in a long, long time.


RUSH: Ah, they're squealing like stuck pigs. It tells you how good a decision it is. The media wants freedom of speech all to themselves, even if they do work for corporations.


RUSH: Let me put this in perspective, this caterwauling of the left over upholding the First Amendment. These people who are upset with American citizens who happen to work in corporations, who happen to be directors in corporations, having the ability to participate in our political process, these are the same people who want to grant constitutional rights to terrorists, and do. These are the same people that want to put on a show trial with the masterminds of the 9/11 disaster, grant them freedom of speech, grant them every constitutional right, including Miranda rights -- the Fruit of Kaboom Bomber -- and yet they hate American corporations. They have some ingrained, genetic "despisal" of corporations because corporations are competitive. They foster and thrive in free, open markets, all of which are opposed by the left.


Media upset at the loss of their protected status:


http://www.mrc.org/biasalert/2010/20100121083618.aspx


Howard Fineman of Newsweek fumes over this decision:


http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/thegaggle/archive/2010/01/22/the-sweeping-impact-of-scotus-campaign-spending-decision.aspx


LA Times: this is judicial activism:


http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/thegaggle/archive/2010/01/22/the-sweeping-impact-of-scotus-campaign-spending-decision.aspx


NY Times: a blow to democracy:


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/opinion/22fri1.html


A Memo to Abraham Foeman

Rush is Accused of Anti-Semitism


Earlier this week, I posed a political question in the process and in the context of trying to help a friend and my audience understand the concept that people ask me about a lot: "Why are so many Jewish people liberal?" And a friend of mine -- a good friend of mine, Norman Podhoretz -- has written a book, an excellent book to explain it. Mr. Podhoretz is himself Jewish. He is the husband of Midge Decter and the father of John Podhoretz, and I know all of them very well and have socialized with them on a number of occasions, and in the process of... Let me just read you this. Podhoretz has written a response to Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, who is demanding that I apologize for "borderline anti-Semitism." Now, anybody who listens to this program even marginally knows that this program is and has consistently been one of the most outspoken supporters of the Jewish people and of Israel in particular.


And Mr. Foxman knows this as well. What I suspect is the usual thing that happened. Somebody took a few words that I said in a pretty long monologue, cut them up, and published them in a way to make it appear I said something that I didn't say, and rather than check it out... And by now I would think anybody in the mainstream media or in any mainstream American endeavor, after 20 years of these types of attacks -- me being taken out of context and every one of them being shown to be wrong, every one of these attacks being shown to be fallacious -- I would think that by now some people would realize what's going on. But I don't think that they do. I think they want these attacks to be real. I think they want the out-of-context quotes to be real. It's just like during this NFL controversy, when there were purely fabricated quotes of me that were plastered all over the American media: newspapers, websites, television.


The Reverend Jackson repeated them. They said that I supposedly supported slavery because it kept the streets safe at night and that I wanted a congressional medal given to the assassin of Dr. Martin Luther King. And people knew that I didn't say it but they wanted to believe I'd said it, because they would love to get rid of me. Folks, the left has never been angrier at me than they are this week because of what I myself said this week only yesterday. Back when Obama was inaugurated, even prior to him being inaugurated, everybody was inside the celebrity bubble. "Oh, we must not criticize our brand-new president. He's so young and he's so historical. This means so much to America. We must hope and we must pray that he succeeds." Well, I didn't join any of that. I didn't want him to succeed. I don't want socialism in this country. I do not want the government running car companies, the banks, the student loan program.


I don't want the government telling banks how they can and can't operate. I don't want Obama being everybody's boss. I don't want the government being able to hire and fire people and set salaries. That's all happened. I don't want that kind of thing. I wanted him to fail. I was the only person to say so, and that changed the political dynamic. It got rid of it. It burst the celebrity bubble that everybody was in treating Obama not as a politician but something much larger: "Transformational, postpartisan, postracial," and now we know post-achievement: He hasn't achieved anything. So this year has transpired and everything he's fought for, the big things, have crashed and burned. And it all came to a culmination this week.


So the sheer hatred of me crystallized and compacted this week. You know, I totally understand people trying to damage me and my credibility so that I'm no longer a factor. The thing is when they do this they only amplify me and add to my supposed importance. But you don't have to be anything other than a liberal to lie about me and attack me and so forth, and this is silly. This "borderline anti-Semitic" charge from the Anti-Defamation League is just silly, and here is what Mr. Podhoretz himself has written in response. He titled this: "It's Not Rush Limbaugh Who Should Apologize -- In my new book, 'Why Are Jews Liberals?', I argue that it no longer makes any sense for so many of my fellow Jews to go on aligning themselves with the forces of the Left.


"I also try to show that our interests and our ideals, both as Americans and as Jews, have come in recent decades to be better served by the forces of the Right. In the course of describing and agreeing with the book the other day, Rush Limbaugh cited a few of the numerous reasons for the widespread puzzlement over the persistence of liberalism within the American Jewish community. And while discussing those reasons, he pointed to the undeniable fact that for 'a lot of people' -- 'prejudiced people,' as he called them twice -- he was not referring to himself; he was referring to bigots, prejudiced people..." I was refer to Jew haters -- and, Mr. Foxman, this is what's been omitted from what you read that I said. I was alluding to what you know exists. You know that there are Jew haters out there and I know there are Jew haters out there, and many of them are in the Obama administration or in his circle of friends.


And Mr. Foxman, if you really want to go after anti-Semitism you should first start looking at it on the left and within the Obama administration and within his circle of friends, because that's why you're going to find it. You're not going to find anti-Semitism on this radio show. You're going to find nothing but love and respect and admiration for the Jewish people and an unwavering support for Israel that has not ever shaken. I was referring to the Jew haters, the bigots. Twice I referred to "prejudiced people." Let me read the paragraph over here again: "And while discussing those reasons, he pointed to the undeniable fact that for 'a lot of people' -- 'prejudiced people,' as he called them twice -- he was not referring to himself; he was referring to bigots, prejudiced people the words 'banker' and 'Wall Street' are code words for 'Jewish.'


"Was it possible, he wondered, that Obama's attacks on bankers and Wall Street were triggering a certain amount of buyer's remorse within the American Jewish community, which gave him 78% of its vote? Finally, taking off from my observation that many Jewish liberals like to call themselves independents," this is Mr. Podhoretz speaking, "[Limbaugh] wondered whether a fair number of the self-described independents who deserted Obama and voted for Scott Brown might actually have been Jewish liberals. If so, [Limbaugh] concluded, Brown's 'victory could be even more indicative of an even bigger change in the political temper of the country than has so far been recognized.' For this, Rush Limbaugh has been subjected to a vile attack by Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League.


"Of course, Mr. Foxman has a long history of seeing an anti-Semite under every conservative bed while blinding himself to the blatant fact that anti-Semitism has largely been banished from the Right in the past forty years, and that it has found a hospitable new home on the Left, especially where Israel is concerned." The left is where the anti-Israel forces exist, including in this administration, Mr. Foxman! "This makes Foxman a perfect embodiment of the phenomenon I analyze in 'Why Are Jews Liberals?' Now Foxman has the chutzpah to denounce Rush Limbaugh as an anti-Semite and to demand an apology from him to boot. Well, if an apology is owed here, it is the national director of the Anti-Defamation League who should apologize for the defamatory accusation of anti-Semitism that he himself has hurled against so loyal a friend of Israel as Rush Limbaugh."


Michael Ledeen... By the way, we've put Mr. Podhoretz's statement on my website. It's also at the Commentary blog. Michael Ledeen weighed in on this with a post at the National Review Online Corner blog. "Norman Podhoretz quite properly takes Anti-Defamation League czar Abe Foxman to task for insinuating that Rush is somehow a Jew-hater for wondering if Jewish voters are having buyer's remorse regarding Obama. They certainly should, both because of Obama's striking nastiness to Israel and of his attacks on 'greedy bankers' (which Rush mentioned), free broadcasting, and of course the crusade against American medicine, all enterprises in which Jews have long flourished. Rush should be a hero to Foxman and American Jews, but they are so blindly partisan that they can no longer distinguish between their friends and their enemies.


"Foxman has relentlessly attacked American Evangelicals -- arguably the most pro-Jewish and pro-Israel people in America -- but conveniently disappears when the government goes after real Jews for presumed 'dual loyalty.' Which, one might say, is the core principle of the ADL. Foxman wants Rush to apologize. Nuts. I want Foxman retired and replaced by somebody who fights for Jews and our friends." That's Michael Ledeen. You know, I have to tell you, folks, one of my closest friends is Mark Levin. Everybody knows this. Mark Levin is Jewish. Mark Levin is disgusted with Abraham Foxman. What I've come to learn through this episode is how many Jewish people are disgusted with Abraham Foxman and have been for many years. I guess, basically... I really don't want to do this because Mr. Podhoretz' book is great (Why Are Jews Liberals?) and if you've ever wondered that, you need to read his book.


I know a lot of you do because it's been a question that I've received a lot, particularly since the Obama administration. It was obvious from the early days of this administration that Israel was in the crosshairs of this administration. The Hollywood left supports Obama, and Jewish people on the left support Obama, and there are some people who said, "I don't understand. I thought Israel was a key thing to all Jewish people," and I say, "Read Mr. Podhoretz's book: Why Are Jews Liberals?" Basically... It's more complicated than this but I synthesize it down to one thing: Liberals are liberals first. They're partisans first, whatever else they are. If they're feminists, they're still liberals first. If they're animal rights nuts, they're liberals first. If they are the hoaxers of climate change and global warming, they are liberals or socialists first -- and the issues that they attach themselves to are simply their springboards, their jumping-off points for advancing liberalism and statism.


That's what the Democrat Party has become: A coalition of all these disparate groups -- the civil rights coalitions, the animal rights groups, feminism, the Hollywood left, all this stuff -- and they all have one mission, and that is they hate conservatives and Republicans and they love government, and they have big problems with capitalism. So they're all united in trying to destroy capitalism -- or limit it, or blame it -- and make America more like a Western European, socialist democracy. Anyway, thanks to Mr. Podhoretz for his reply, also to Michael Ledeen. But Mr. Foxman, not only am I not going to apologize, I'm going to say you should be embarrassed and next time call me if you think I've said something anti-Semitic or call somebody that knows me and find out what I actually said rather than trusting your friends on the left to accurately report what I said. I was in the midst of promoting, because I think it was worthwhile, the work of a celebrated and brilliant American Jew: Norman Podhoretz, and you refer to me as "borderline anti-Semitic." That doesn't compute, Mr. Foxman.


A Statement from Norman Podhoretz


In my new book, "Why Are Jews Liberals?", I argue that it no longer makes any sense for so many of my fellow Jews to go on aligning themselves with the forces of the Left. I also try to show that our interests and our ideals, both as Americans and as Jews, have come in recent decades to be better served by the forces of the Right.


In the course of describing and agreeing with the book the other day, Rush Limbaugh cited a few of the numerous reasons for the widespread puzzlement over the persistence of liberalism within the American Jewish community. And while discussing those reasons, he pointed to the undeniable fact that for "a lot of people"--prejudiced people, as he called them twice--the words "banker" and "Wall Street" are code words for "Jewish." Was it possible, he wondered, that Obama's attacks on bankers and Wall Street were triggering a certain amount of buyer's remorse within the American Jewish community, which gave him 78% of its vote? Finally, taking off from my observation that many Jewish liberals like to call themselves independents, he wondered whether a fair number of the self-described independents who deserted Obama and voted for Scott Brown might actually have been Jewish liberals. If so, he concluded, Brown's "victory could be even more indicative of an even bigger change in the political temper of the country than has so far been recognized."



For this, Rush Limbaugh has been subjected to a vile attack by Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League. Of course, Mr. Foxman has a long history of seeing an anti-Semite under every conservative bed while blinding himself to the blatant fact that anti-Semitism has largely been banished from the Right in the past forty years, and that it has found a hospitable new home on the Left, especially where Israel is concerned. This makes Foxman a perfect embodiment of the phenomenon I analyze in "Why Are Jews Liberals?" Now Foxman has the chutzpah to denounce Rush Limbaugh as an anti-Semite and to demand an apology from him to boot. Well, if an apology is owed here, it is the national director of the Anti-Defamation League who should apologize for the defamatory accusation of anti-Semitism that he himself has hurled against so loyal a friend of Israel as Rush Limbaugh.


Where's Your Messiah Now?


RUSH: Folks, it's all going wrong for The One. Everything is all falling apart on Obama. Try this headline from the Jerusalem Post: "Obama: Our Expectations of Mideast Progress were 'Too High.'"


Okay. Get this. It's from Jerusalem Post: "Getting the Israelis and Palestinians to agree to negotiate, or even to agree to the framework in which negotiations will take place, 'is just really hard,' US President Barack Obama said in an interview with Time magazine published Thursday, as the president was completing his first year in office," and that "is really hard" is in quotes. It's just really hard! (crying) "It's just hard" is how you have to interpret that. You talk about crash and burn all in one week? "Obama admitted that the administration 'overestimated our ability to persuade (both sides) to (negotiate) when their politics ran contrary to that." So he "overestimated [his own] ability to persuade." Imagine that!


Now let's go to this Politico story: "Obama's First Year: What Went Wrong." "Specifically, it was wrong on three major counts: Obama and his team believed that the 2008 election represented something seismic -- in other words, something fundamental and long-lasting," just like the Republicans made the same mistake in 1994 when they won the House. The second thing that went wrong: "Obama believed that early success would be self-reinforcing, building a powerful momentum for bold government action. This belief was the essence of the White House's theory of the 'big bang'..." You get the Porkulus slush fund passed, and that provides the impetus and the momentum for everything else to follow. So this tells us they were in a panic for much of this year, particularly when we got to August when the tea parties started. Well, the tea parties started before August.


It was the town meetings. They started hustling trying to get health care done before the August recess. The third: "Most devoutly of all, the Obama team believed that there was something singular about the president's appeal and ability to inspire." Now, this is in The Politico, and these are the first three things that went wrong. So they believed he was The Messiah, that the Porkulus bill was gonna presage the passage of everything else, and that America had undergone a seismic change. But there's actually a fourth, ladies and gentlemen. Now, you know that I have manners. I was raised properly with a great set of core values, and one of those is to not brag. And, of course, it ain't bragging if you've done it. It ain't bragging if you can do it. I think it was Babe Ruth who said that. But as you know, I do not like talking about myself. I'm very uncomfortable with that.


I'm very uncomfortable with me being the issue, but I have been a lot of this year -- and this is one of those things that if I don't say it, it won't be said, and this one is fundamentally true. There are four things that went wrong. The first one: Five days before he was immaculated, I said, "I hope he fails." That burst this messianic, celebutard bubble that Obama was in. Up until that time, everybody -- every Republican, every Democrat, everybody in the political class -- had censored themselves and were talking about the historic nature and how "We must drop all partisanship. We must all work together to help this historic president succeed in his job," and there came one voice. It belonged to me, El Rushbo: The all-knowing, all-caring, all-sensing, all-feeling Maha Rushie. I simply said, "I don't like his policies. They are going to destroy the country as we know it. I hope he fails," and that took away all of the gilding.


That took away all of the stars. That took away all of the celebrity that forced him into a political bubble, even before he was immaculated. Had that not been said the rest of these three things might not have gone wrong. Had I joined the fray and had I come before you on this program and behind this microphone and had I said, "Folks, we've got stand down. This is too important for the country. This is too historic. We cannot afford for this president to fail," not only would I have lost over half of you forever, but we probably would have health care today. We probably would have cap and trade by now. Maybe not on cap and trade because of the ClimateGate thing, and you never know. I mean, the tea party people and the town hall people might have been able to stop health care on their own. I'm not going to say I was a singular player here, but there was only one person who dared treat this president as any other president is treated: As a political figure.


They said conservatism was dead. They said the era of Reagan was over. They said we could no longer win anywhere but the South with white people. They said that we were dead in New England. All of that conventional wisdom was wrong, and all of it did not scare me into silence. It did not motivate me into changing course so I could be accepted by certain numbers of people. There is another story here in the Washington Post: "Obama Blames the Massachusetts Senate Loss on the Middle Class Economic Pain." "'We were so busy just getting stuff done...'" Obama will explain to us why his policies that were rejected are good for us. He's going to have to do that. He's going to have to tell us why we misunderstand. "What the president needs to do is go explain to the people exactly why what has been done is going to get us on a better path for the future," said former Obama White House communications director, the Mao-loving Anita Dunn.

obamarescu.jpg

This guy will have to tell us what we don't understand. So the arrogance and the conceit are still there, and this story in the Washington Post says this election of Scott Brown had nothing to do with health care. It had nothing to do with Obama. Obama was not rejected and it was not that. Yet the New York Times lead editorial "The Massachusetts Election" is about Obama. He has "lost touch." He "has not said or done the right thing often enough." Mr. Obama "seems to have lost touch with two core issues for Americans: their jobs and their homes. Mr. Obama's challenge is that most Americans are not seeing a recovery. ... Mr. Obama has not said or done the right thing often enough when it comes to job creation and housing. ... Mr. Obama has three years to show the kind of vision and leadership on the economy that got him elected..."


There wasn't any such "vision" that got him elected. What got him elected was cult-like speeches. We were going to make the sea levels fall! Obama's given it his best shot, New York Times. He only knows to do what he did. There's a story in the stack, by the way: House Democrats, some of them have asked the White House to extend the Bush tax cuts because of this economic recovery being so bad. The White House said, "No way. We're not doing it," but some House Democrats asked for the Bush tax cuts to be extended. New York Times: "Obama Trying to Turn Around His Presidency." They're "reeling from the Republican victory in Massachusetts," and "Inside the White House, a debate ensued..." This is the Times version of this, not the Politico version. "[W]hat lessons to draw: Did the president try to enact too much change or not enough? Was he too liberal or too close to financial institutions? Should he tack to the center or more aggressively push a progressive agenda? ... Mr. Obama has often confronted moments of challenge with a major speech... With the State of the Union now scheduled for Wednesday, he has another such opportunity. Aides said he will use it to reframe his record and aspirations." A speech! Which is all he does. This is a speech. He gonna try to change it with a speech. Well, the luster is gone from the speeches. So they have not learned anything.


RUSH: I have to hit this again, ladies and gentlemen. I touched on it but I have to hit it again. "Obama Says Too Optimistic on 'Intractable' Mideast -- US President Barack Obama said in an interview published on Thursday he had underestimated the difficulty of resolving the Middle East conflict and had set his expectations too high in his first year. ... '[I]we had anticipated some of these political problems on both sides earlier, we might not have raised expectations as high.'" Who...? (sigh) This idiot who is the president wasn't quite sure how tough this would be before he was elected? That is scary! We all knew how tough it would be. (interrupition) No, everybody thought Bush was an idiot but nobody's ever gotten Middle East peace. I think what he's really surprised at is how intractable the Palestinians are. I think that's what he's found out.


Politico: what went wrong in Obama’s first year:


http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/31749.html

cspan.jpg

[and, in case you think that Rush is just a Republican shill]:


Will Republicans Learn the Right Lessons from Masschusetts?


RUSH: George in East Hartford, Connecticut, nice to have you on the EIB Network, sir. Hello.


CALLER: Yeah, Rush, what I'm most hopeful out of the Scott Brown victory is the following and that is that my biggest fear in the 2010 elections were going to be the third party candidates, these tea party folks that I line up with because it's a very conservative message, whether it's the war on terror or the deficit or this health care debate, and Scott Brown mirrored that message perfectly. So now the message swings both days. The Democrats are ignoring the message of Scott Brown. The Republicans do need to take heed. All they have to do to keep these third-party candidates out, which I think favors the Republicans, is to march on the same blueprint that he did, conservatism, like you say, wins all the time. They take that message and run with it, Rush, we could take the third-party out.


RUSH: Okay, two things on this. And you know, I'm, again, grounded in reality here. I am Mr. Literal. And do not doubt me. The Republican Party is kind of like the libs in a way. Not nearly as bad, but they're out there crowing about how happy they are, too. But believe me, the people in the party who consider themselves Rockefeller Republicans or liberal Republicans, they don't want guys winning in pickup trucks. They dislike Sarah Palin for the same reason. Now, the Republican Party right now is going to embrace, and I hope the embrace continues, but my history with the Republican Party is that they're not happy with conservatives. They really didn't like Reagan. Of course they loved winning, and they put up with it, but Reagan, to the northeastern country club, blue-blood types Reagan was not the answer.


Now, this is why I spent so much time yesterday kicking back at these people. They're the ones, it was Republicans -- I played the sound bites of Chris Shays and Colin Powell. These are the people I'm talking about, the people that liberals think ought to be the leaders of our party 'cause they'll take it down to the sewer. They'll take it so low we will never win anything. We going to be a regional party, we're only going to attract the votes of white Southerners. We'll never elect anybody from New England. All of that's out the window now with a basically conservative message.


Now, the third party people. Yeah, this probably puts a damper on third party stuff because Scott Brown won big-time as a Republican. He did not win as a third-party candidate. He did not disavow being a Republican. He did not disavow being a conservative. And so to the extent that people want a third party, Scott Brown has got a little bit in the way. It will be interesting to see their reaction to it if there is one. A third party on our side would only guarantee Democrat victory. It's just a bad idea, especially upon reflection after this election on Tuesday of Scott Brown. We say take over the Republican Party. How do we do it? This is how you do it. You get candidates who can articulate conservatism, who understand what they're running against. In Brown's case he was running against elitism, he was running against the machine. Now, what is the machine?


Well, let's go to Daniel Henninger's piece because you have to hear this. Wall Street Journal today, it's entitled: "The Fall of the House of Kennedy -- The battle over who defines the work and institutions that make a nation thrive and grow. Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts will not endure unless Republicans clearly understand the meaning of 'the machine' that he ran against and defeated. Yes, it is about a general revulsion at government spending, what is sometimes called 'the blob.' But blobs are shapeless things, and in the days ahead we will see the Obama White House work hard to reshape the blob into a deficit hawk. Unless the facade is ripped away, the machine will survive. The revolt against the machine began with voters' 2006 ouster of the Republican majority in Congress for making a mockery of fiscal rectitude. An angry electorate then swept Barack Obama into office. Now Mr. Obama is saying voters elected him on the same wave of anger that elected Scott Brown. Sorry, but Messrs. Obama and Brown are not surfing in the same political ocean."

As an aside, except for what he said on spending, Scott Brown is George W. Bush. I believe George Bush would beat Obama today if the election were today, knowing what we know now. But back to Henninger: "The central battle in our time is over political primacy. It is a competition between the public sector and the private sector over who defines the work and the institutions that make a nation thrive and grow. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy planted the seeds that grew the modern Democratic Party. That year, JFK signed executive order 10988 allowing the unionization of the federal work force. This changed everything in the American political system. Kennedy's order swung open the door for the inexorable rise of a unionized public work force in many states and cities. This in turn led to the fantastic growth in membership of the public employee unions -- The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the teachers' National Education Association.


"They broke the public's bank. More than that, they entrenched a system of taking money from members' dues and spending it on political campaigns. Over time, this transformed the Democratic Party into a public-sector dependency. They became different than the party of FDR, Truman, Meany and Reuther. That party was allied with the fading industrial unions, which in turn were tethered to a real world of profit and loss. The states in the North and on the coasts turned blue because blue is the color of the public-sector unions. This tax-and-spend milieu became the training ground for their politicians. Until the Obama exception, the only recent Democrats electable into the presidency had to be centrist Southerners little known to the country. Every post-Kennedy liberal who tried, failed, including Teddy. What an irony it is that in the same week the Kennedy labor legacy hit the wall in Massachusetts, the NEA approved a $1 million donation from the union's contingency fund to the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate. It is this Kennedy legacy, the public union tax and spend machine, that drove blue Massachusetts into revolt Tuesday."


That is the machine. That is the machine. The public union tax and spend machine. "Yes, health care was ground zero, but Massachusetts -- like New Jersey, like California, like New York -- has been building toward this explosion for years. According to a study done for the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth, spending in specific public categories there skyrocketed the past 20 years (1987 to 2007). Public safety: up 139%; social services, 130%; education, 44%. And of course Medicaid Madness, up 163%, before MassCare kicked in more Medicaid obligations.

But here's the party's self-destroying kicker: Feeding the public unions' wage demands starved other government responsibilities. It ruined our ability to have a useful debate about any other public functions. Massachusetts' spending fell for mental health, the environment, housing and higher education. The physical infrastructure in blue states is literally falling apart. But look at those public wage and pension-related outlays. Ever upward.


"Enter the Obama administration, the first one born and raised inside this public bubble, with zero private-sector Cabinet members. Act one: a $787 billion stimulus bill, which they brag mainly saved state and local jobs. Then came the six-month odyssey for Obama's $1 trillion health-care bill, dripping with taxes. Independent voters felt like everything was being sucked into a public-sector vortex. This is why New Jersey's Chris Christie won running on nothing. It's why in California Carly Fiorina is within three points of Sen. Barbara Boxer. It's why the party JFK enabled, 'the machine,' is hitting the wall. There's no way out for these Democrats. They made a Faustian bargain 40 years ago with the public unions. For the outlays alone, they'll get some version of the Obama health-care bill. They'll also go to the same old 'populist anger' well. Scott Brown's victory has given the GOP a rare, narrow chance to align itself with an electorate that understands its anger. Now the GOP has to find a way to disconnect from a political legacy that smothered governments at all levels and is now smothering the Democratic Party."


In other words, the machine is all of the growth of the public sector: government, state, city, federal, growing, with public employee unions growing and wages growing, sucking money out of the private sector. This is why every one of these so-called conservative pundits who are the new intelligentsia who say we gotta get rid of Reagan, who say we have to realize the public wants more government, we have to realize the public understands that more government's good, they want spending, we've gotta do it better, do not listen to them. They could not be more wrong. Scott Brown showed them how wrong they are. The machine is all of these people in Washington whose lives are oriented around the government growing and being involved in as much of everything as policy, from policy to infrastructure to whatever.


That's the machine. The Republicans have got to get outta town. This is what being an outsider means. Being an outsider means you're simply not a member of a union. You're not a member of a public employees union, you live in the country, and you want the private sector to be the place where economic opportunity is. You don't want it to be in government. You don't want it to be in the public sector. You don't want unions to be growing while everybody else is unemployed and starving. That's the machine. Do not listen to a single conservative pundit living or breathing in the New York/Boston/Washington corridor who tells you that the American people want more government, that the era of tax cuts, that's over, the era of Reagan, that's over. One election has shown this.



WSJ article:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704320104575015010515688120.html


State-Run Media Targets Brown


RUSH: Last night CNN's Larry King Live: State-Run Media do not like Scott Brown. They don't like him because he's an attractive Republican. They're going to go after him the way they go after Sarah Palin. David "Rodham" Gergen said this on Scott Brown.


GERGEN: He was embraced by the social conservatives. He wants to put a lot of restrictions on the way abortions are done, he's very much against gay marriage, he's against a lot of other things. He was also very much against deficit spending. He was very much against the health care bill. But along with his sort of, you know, populism and his real authenticity he reminds me a lot of Sarah Palin in some ways. I don't think he's Sarah Palin in pants but I do think he has some of that same charismatic quality.


RUSH: Ohhhh. That means they're worried about him because they're scared to death of Sarah Palin. Next on the panel discussion was John Avlon, who is a columnist for the Daily Beast. And this is what he said.


AVLON: Independents voted for Barack Obama because he promised to transcend all the old politics of left versus right, black versus white. Independents are angry. And liberal House leadership I think did misread the 2008 election as a liberal ideological mandate. Put Republicans shouldn't get too far ahead of themselves, either. If you look at the conservative populism that's out there and look at the heroes of conservative populism, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh -- independents don't like them. Scott Brown was able to win independents in a state that's 51% independent. That is what's happening, that's what Republicans and Democrats need to do to survive.


RUSH: Okay, so we're back now to this. It's the independents, and the independents hate conservatives, they hate me, hate Palin, but even after Gergen says Brown is Palin, they still hate Palin, so they voted for Brown. They voted against the machine. The liberals at the Stassinopoulos Post -- Arianna's place -- and all these other paces will not be able to understand, it will not permeate, people do not want this kind of overreaching expansive intruding government. They just don't want it. That's the message here. That's what the machine is. The public policy unions, get 'em out of there, stop their influence. Now, the AP takes its swipe at Scott Brown today: "Brown Doesn't Always Match the Everyman Image that he put Forward -- As he campaigned for the US Senate from the back of his green pickup, Scott Brown portrayed himself as an independent-minded everyman and moderate candidate fighting the Democratic 'machine.' But as a Republican in Massachusetts, Brown sometimes found himself to the right of his own party." (gasping) They're trying to say he's a right-winger now.


"He once proposed an amendment which would have allowed emergency room doctors to deny emergency contraception to rape victims based on the doctor's religious beliefs, which drew the ire of fellow Republicans." This is a fallacious charge. It is so fallacious Brown has filed a criminal complaint against the Coakley supporters for making this claim in campaign fliers and advertisements. It did not happen, and the AP knows it did not happen. And if they don't know it didn't happen then they're lousy journalists -- well, we know that's the case anyway. "He has criticized the federal stimulus program as ineffective, but said he would not return the money. And in the final weeks of the campaign, Brown benefited from the financial backing of conservative groups like the Tea Party movement which pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into television ads for him." And this runs counter to his everyman image how? The tea party is made of every man, every woman. It's okay for the unions to shower money all over the place but somehow it's not good and it paints Scott Brown a different image.


"Like former vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin and even Barack Obama in 2008, Brown is getting a boost from his own limited political resume, according to Julian Zelizer, professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University. In the absence of a strong record or public profile, voters felt free to read into the candidates whatever they want. 'There is a virtue of not being a known commodity and not having tons of experience in the national spotlight,' Zelizer said. 'With Palin, people knew nothing about her when she was introduced ... and that was an asset at first.''' Yes, you see, ladies and gentlemen, like Sarah Palin, Scott Brown might seem to be wonderful at first but once we get to know him we will loathe him as much as we loathe Sarah Palin. Obama is the king of empty suits, the king of empty resumes, 150 days experience in the Senate. All of his experience is teaching ACORN and learning from ACORN.


Back to the AP story. "Brown was able to craft his own image in the public mind in large part because of an initial lackluster response from Democrat Martha Coakley ... Only after Brown picked up momentum and polls reflected a tight race did Coakley respond, but it was too little, too late." Oh, yeah, yeah, see, if only Coakley and the Democrats and their lickspittle media had gotten their researchers on the job earlier, if we'd gotten this kind of story out earlier, we coulda taken him out. "While he's portrayed himself as an independent-minded candidate on the campaign trail, Brown's campaign has pulled in support from deep-pocketed lobbying and interests groups, from US Chamber of Commerce, the Tea Party movement, and the Iowa-based conservative American Future Fund."


Okay, AP, how does getting support from a truly grassroots movement not match up with Brown's image as an everyman? But everyman they're singing plain as day. "During the campaign, Brown portrayed himself as stronger on national security. He also campaigned alongside former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, but a month after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Brown was one of three Massachusetts representatives to vote against a bill that would have granted paid leave to state workers volunteering for disaster relief with the American Red Cross."


Now, this is just too much. This is hilarious. What hypocrisy. It's clear that Brown cares nothing about national security if he's against paid leave for state workers volunteering for the Red Cross? You people are going to have to do better than this. The American people have caught up with you, AP and the State-Controlled Media. "He's also positioned himself to the right of his party's 2008 presidential nominee, Arizona Sen. John McCain." That would not be hard. "Brown said he doesn't believe that waterboarding is torture." To the right of McCain, doesn't consider waterboarding torture? Every complaint they have makes it sound like he's an everyman to me, folks.


Where are You Now, RINOs?


RUSH: These next three sound bites you are gonna dig. The first one is Chris Shays on MSNBC, former Republican congressman from Connecticut, May the 19th of last year on Mess NBC.


SHAYS: We have talk show hosts who have never won elections who define very narrowly who's a Republican. The bottom line of any national party is it has to give you the capability to represent your district. And if it doesn't allow to you represent your district you get defeated and that's what has happened all throughout the Northeast and other parts of the country.


RUSH: What do you say about that today, Congressman Shays? A man ran for his state, a state bluer than yours, articulating conservative principles, substantively on the issues. And let's not forget, December 14th of 2008, CNN's Global Public Square with Fareed Zakaria, he interviewed former secretary of state Colin Powell. Zakaria says, "What do you think is going to happen to the Republican Party? Do you think it's moving in the right direction?"


POWELL: I was impressed by an article that Mort Kondracke wrote recently that said, can we continue to listen to Rush Limbaugh? Is this really the kind of party that we want to be when these kinds of spokespersons seem to appeal to our lesser instincts rather than our better instincts. Palin to some extent pushed the party more to the right, and I think she had something of a polarizing effect when she talked about small town values are good. Well, most of us don't live in small towns and I was raised in the South Bronx and there's nothing wrong with my value system from the Bronx. It was that attempt on the part of the party to use polarization for political advantage that I think backfired. And I think the party has to take a hard look at itself.


RUSH: Where's Colin Powell today? Scott Brown's from a small town, Wrentham, Massachusetts. Sarah Palin's from a small town, arguably the two most popular people in the Republican Party today. I'm from a small town. Obviously the most popular conservative media figure today. Colin Powell is not from a small town, and where's he today? Not that small towns are anything special and unique, but they are put down by the elites as we just heard here. (imitating Powell) "Can we continue to listen to Rush Lim[bow], is this really the kind of party we want to be when these kind of spokespersons appeal to our lesser instincts." General Powell, I would suggest that the speech given last night in acceptance by Scott Brown sounded much more like me than like you. And here's Chuck Hagel, November 18th, 2008, at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.



HAGEL: Every country out there has their no-nothing party and of course we're much educated by the great entertainers like Rush Limbaugh and others. The American people don't like what's going on. They want us to start doing what leaders are expected to do: address the problems, find some consensus to govern, get along. There will be differences, there should be. But in the end we can't continue to hold ourselves captive to this raw partisan political paralysis.


RUSH: Three sound bites, three people who could not be more wrong. Hagel and Shays are out of the party, and you'd have to say General Powell is, too, because he only speaks positively of Obama and endorsed him and voted for him. Of course we're much educated by the great entertainers like Rush Limbaugh. I love these sound bites. I just love these. Now, we can get our party back, folks. We must. And Scott Brown has shown us the way, given us that chance. We need to not get distracted by people saying that this was simply an anti-Washington result. Do not fall for that, I beg you. This was not an anti-Washington vote. This was voting for somebody to go to Washington to fix it and to stop Washington dead in its tracks. The Republicans are not responsible for what's happening in Washington. They don't have the votes to stop anything. Everything that's advancing is advancing because of Democrat votes.


Does Obama Really Believe This?


RUSH: I have a couple of audio sound bites for you, ladies and gentlemen, from President Obama, and they're just delicious. They are from this morning. They are for air tonight and tomorrow on ABC's Good Morning America. George Stephanopoulos interviewed President Obama. During the interview Obama said this about the Massachusetts Senate race...


OBAMA: Here's my assessment of not just the mood in Massachusetts, but the mood around the country. The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office. People are angry and they're frustrated, not just because of what's happened in the last year or two years, but what's happened over the last eight years.


RUSH: Is he delusional? Does he really believe this? He can't possibly believe this. To not know that the anger is solely directed at him and his party... He thinks the anger that they drummed up against George W. Bush is the same anger that elected Scott Brown? If he believes this, folks, his ego is more out of control than even I (and I know egos) had imagined. If he really believes this and is not delusional -- if he thinks the same anger at George W. Bush is the anger that existed in Massachusetts -- that's just... MSNBC, get a show ready for this guy. MSNBC proves what happens when you deinstitutionalize the mentally disturbed. And then, from the same interview, Stephanopoulos says, "What happens now...?" and brace yourselves for this. "What happens now with health care, Mr. President?"


OBAMA: Here's one thing I know. Uhhh, and I just want to make sure that this is off the table. The Senate c-certainly shouldn't try to jam anything through until Scott Brown is seated. The people in Massachusetts spoke. Uh, he's gotta be part of that process.


RUSH: Wait a second. That doesn't go with what you just said about all the anger out there that elected Scott Brown. I mean, because when you were elected, the anger was they wanted health care, damn it! They wanted it, they wanted it, they wanted it! Because they thought it was going to be cheap and plentiful and everybody was going to have it and now they realize that's not what it's going to be. Why, there are stories in the paper this morning -- I read one of the headlines to you -- Obama to double down. We gotta get this done! And now he says it's off the table? The Senate certainly shouldn't try to jam anything through until he's seated? Now, I need to say something about this, something that is actually remarkable. It finally hit me. This given assumption, the absolute certitude with which the 41st vote for the Republican gravely damages the Democrats and halts health care.


Do you realize how universal and automatic that is? We are just being told that it's automatic. "Okay, that's the end of health care. We got 41 votes," but that 41st vote would only matter if it was understood -- if it was known -- that the rest of the Republicans are reliably, categorically together in saying that we need to stop it. Amazingly enough, we need to give the Senate Republicans credit. They have held. This election would mean nothing if Olympia Snowe or Susan Collins were behaving as usual. This election wouldn't mean diddly-squat. He might not have even won it if the Senate Republicans had not held together on this. This is crucial. Because for hanging tough, hanging together, that 41st vote mattered. That's only the foundation upon which the Scott Brown vote in the Senate has any meaning, by the way, folks, is that all 40 Republicans are hanging tough. Everybody knows... (ahem) I say this somewhat sarcastically. Everybody knows that the Senate Republicans are a formidable bloc. I mean, we had defections in the Senate Republican membership all the time. McCain. (doing impression) "That's right, Limbaugh! Stepping across the aisle. I show how it's done." But they're all holding firm, every one of them, and that makes the 41st vote the tipping point. So if Obama is out there saying, "Hey, it's off the table"... By the way, don't think they haven't been trying to get Snowe. Reid gave a really snarky comment about her the other day. He said (paraphrased), "I knew I wasted my time with her back in the fall." So they're holding together. If they didn't and if they weren't, this vote and the Scott Brown election wouldn't mean anything. If just one of them had defected. Think about that.



Additional Rush Links


Hitler finds out that Scott Brown won Massachusetts, and now healthcare is dead:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YssX_v9wO-A


77% of investors see Obama as being anti-business:


http://news.yahoo.com/s/bloomberg/20100121/pl_bloomberg/a8uii1bcrdmy

wethepeople.jpg

Underrate Hugo Chavez figures out that the U.S. caused the earthquake in Haiti:


http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,583588,00.html


The White House lays the groundwork for making tax increases easier to do:


http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN1921444020100119



Perma-Links


Since there are some links you may want to go back to from time-to-time, I am going to begin a list of them here. This will be a list to which I will add links each week.


The National Journal, which is a political journal (which, at first glance, seems to be pretty even-handed):


http://www.nationaljournal.com/njonline/


Conservative blog: Dan Cleary, political insomniac:


http://dancleary.typepad.com/dan_cleary/


David’ Horowitz’s NewsReal:


http://www.newsrealblog.com/


Stand by Liberty:


http://standbyliberty.org/


Mike’s America


http://mikesamerica.blogspot.com/


No matter what your political stripe, you will like this; evaluate your Congressman or Senator on the issues:

 

http://www.ontheissues.org/default.htm

 

http://www.cagw.org/government-affairs/ratings/2008/ratings-database.html

 

http://www.cagw.org/reports/pig-book/2009/pork-database.html


And I am hoping that most people see this as non-partisan: Citizens Against Government Waste:


http://www.cagw.org/


Excellent blogs:


http://www.fireandreamitchell.com/


www.rightofanation.com


Keep America Safe:


http://www.keepamericasafe.com/


Lower taxes, smaller government, more freedom:


Freedom Works:


http://www.freedomworks.org/


Right wing news:


http://rightwingnews.com/


CNS News:


http://www.cnsnews.com/


Pajamas Media:


http://pajamasmedia.com/


Far left websites:


www.dailykos.com


Daniel Hannan’s blog:


http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/author/danielhannan/



Liberty Chick:


http://libertychick.com/


Republican healthcare plan:


http://www.gop.gov/solutions/healthcare


Media Research Center


http://mrc.org/


Sweetness and Light:


http://sweetness-light.com


Dee Dee’s political blog:


http://somosrepublicans.com/author/deedee/

Citizens Against Government Waste:


http://www.cagw.org/


CNS News:


http://www.cnsnews.com/home


Climate change news:


http://www.climatedepot.com/


Conservative website featuring stories of the day:


http://www.lonelyconservative.com/


http://www.sodahead.com/


Global Warming:


http://www.climatedepot.com/


Michael Crichton on global warming as a religion:


http://www.michaelcrichton.net/speech-environmentalismaseligion.html


Here is an interesting military site:


http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/


This is the link which caught my eye from there:


http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/showthread.php?t=169400


Christian Blog:


http://wisdomknowledge.wordpress.com/


Muslim Demographics (this is outstanding):


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-3X5hIFXYU


News feed/blog:


http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/


Conservative blog:


http://wyblog.us/blog/


Richard O’Leary’s websites:


www.letfreedomwork.com


www.freedomtaskforce.com


http://www.eccentrix.com/members/beacon/


News site:


http://lucianne.com/


Note sure yet about this one:


http://looneyleft.com/


News busted all shows:


http://www.eyeblast.tv/public/search.aspx?q=newsbusted&t=videos



Conservative news and opinion:


http://bijenkorf.wordpress.com/


Not Evil, Just Wrong website:


http://noteviljustwrong.com/


Global Warming Site:


http://www.climatedepot.com/


Important Muslim videos and sites:


Muslim demographics:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaZT73MrYvM


Muslim deception:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNZQ5D8IwfI


Conservative versus liberal viewpoints:


http://www.studentnewsdaily.com/other/conservative-vs-liberal-beliefs/


This is indispensable: the Wall Street Journal’s guide to Obama-care (all of their pertinent articles arranged by date—send one a day to your liberal friends):

 

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704471504574441193211542788.html


Excellent list of Blogs on the bottom, right-hand side of this page:


http://gatewaypundit.firstthings.com/


Not Evil, Just Wrong video on Global Warming


http://noteviljustwrong.com/


http://www.letfreedomwork.com/


http://www.taskforcefreedom.com/council.htm


This has fantastic videos:


www.reason.tv


Global Warming Hoax:


http://www.globalwarminghoax.com/news.php


professor.jpg

A debt clock and a lot of articles on the debt:

http://defeatthedebt.com/


The Best Graph page (for those of us who love graphs):


http://midknightgraphs.blogspot.com/


The Architecture of Political Power (an online book):



http://www.mega.nu/ampp/


Recommended foreign news site:


http://www.globalpost.com/


News site:


http://newsbusters.org/ (always a daily video here)


This website reveals a lot of information about politicians and their relationship to money. You can find out, among other things, how many earmarks that Harry Reid has been responsible for in any given year; or how much an individual Congressman’s wealth has increased or decreased since taking office.


http://www.opensecrets.org/index.php


http://www.fedupusa.org/

The news sites and the alternative news media:


http://drudgereport.com/


http://newsbusters.org/


http://drudgereport.com/


http://www.hallindsey.com/


http://newsbusters.org/


http://reason.com/

Andrew Breithbart’s new website:


http://biggovernment.breitbart.com/


Kevin Jackson’s [conservative black] website:


http://theblacksphere.net/


Notes from the front lines (in Iraq):


http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/


Remembering 9/11:


http://www.realamericanstories.com/


Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball site:


http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/


Conservative Blogger:


http://romanticpoet.wordpress.com/


Economist and talk show host Walter E. Williams:


http://economics.gmu.edu/wew/


The current Obama czar roster:


http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0909/26779.html


45 Goals of Communists in order to take over the United States (circa 1963):


http://www.rense.com/general32/americ.htm


How this correlates to the goals of the ACLU:


http://dianedew.com/aclu.htm


ACLU founders:


http://www.angelfire.com/mi4/stokjok/Founders.html


Conservative Websites:


http://www.theodoresworld.net/



http://conservalinked.com/


http://www.moonbattery.com/


http://www.rockiesghostriders.com/


http://sweetness-light.com/


www.coalitionoftheswilling.net


http://shortforordinary.com/


Flopping Aces:


http://www.floppingaces.net/


The Romantic Poet’s Webblog:


http://romanticpoet.wordpress.com/


Blue Dog Democrats:


http://www.house.gov/melancon/BlueDogs/Member%20Page.html


This looks to be a good source of information on the health care bill (s):


http://joinpatientsfirst.com/


Undercover video and audio for planned parenthood:


http://liveaction.org/


The Complete Czar list (which I think is updated as needed):


http://theshowlive.info/?p=572


This is an outstanding website which tells the truth about Obama-care and about what the mainstream media is hiding from you:


http://www.obamacaretruth.org/


Great business and political news:


www.wsj.com


www.businessinsider.com


Politico.com is a fairly neutral site (or, at the very worst, just a little left of center). They have very good informative videos at:


http://www.politico.com/multimedia/

Great commentary:


www.Atlasshrugs.com

My own website:


www.kukis.org

Congressional voting records:


http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/


On Obama (if you have not visited this site, you need to check it out). He is selling a DVD on this site as well called Media Malpractice; I have not viewed it yet, except pieces which I have seen played on tv and on the internet. It looks pretty good to me.


http://howobamagotelected.com/


Global Warming sites:


http://ilovecarbondioxide.com/


35 inconvenient truths about Al Gore’s film:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5J7JNfLYco


http://www.noteviljustwrong.com/trailer


Islam:


www.thereligionofpeace.com



Even though this group leans left, if you need to know what happened each day, and you are a busy person, here is where you can find the day’s news given in 100 seconds:

 

http://www.youtube.com/user/tpmtv


This guy posts some excellent vids:


http://www.youtube.com/user/PaulWilliamsWorld


HipHop Republicans:


http://www.hiphoprepublican.blogspot.com/


And simply because I like cute, intelligent babes:


http://alisonrosen.com/


The Latina Freedom Fighter:


http://www.youtube.com/user/LatinaFreedomFighter


The psychology of homosexuality:


http://www.narth.com/

Liberty Counsel, which stands up against the A.C.L.U.


www.lc.org


Health Care:


http://fixhealthcarepolicy.com/


Betsy McCaughey’s Health Care Site:


http://www.defendyourhealthcare.us/home.html