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).

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).

The exposure of the JournoList and the bitter remarks of Ed Schultz this past week indicate that there was an intentional, collective effort of the press and journalists to get Barrack Obama elected president in 2008, which was both independent and orchestrated, which included such tactics as burying of the story of Reverend Wright as well as the constant pummeling of Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Washington Post’s Ezra Klein apparently organized JournoList.

The big names on JournoList include Time Magazine editor Joe Klein, NY Times columnist Paul Krugman, and Peter Orszag, formerly of the Washington Post and now the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Obama. There are 400+ journalists on the JournoList, only a few of whom have been named so far.

Very likely, the next shoe to drop in JournoList (apart from additional quotations from them), should be, which of these people actually reported to someone higher up with views, news and ideas? It should be obvious that the faces of news that we depend upon don’t do all of their own research. How many other well-known names have close associations with the names on Journo-List?

Although this has been talked about for some time, it seems clear that President Obama has authorized the CIA to assassinate any U.S. citizen who is classified as a terrorist.

It appears as though Cap and Trade has died in Congress, but that the public option may be resurrected.

Bell, CA city manager, Robert Rizzo, is paid nearly $766,000 a year; Bell Police Chief Randy Adams is paid $457,000 and Assistant City Manager Angela Spaccia is paid $376,288 a year. Most city council members are paid nearly $100,000 for their part-time jobs (typically $400/month elsewhere). Bell is a small city of 37,000 with a median income for a household of $29,900. Attorney General Brown is investigating the situation.

Senator John Kerry recently purchased a yacht valued at approximately $7 million. If he purchased and kept this yacht in Massachusetts, where he lives, he would have to pay over $400,000 in taxes along with an annual $70,000 fee. According to Kerry’s chief-of-staff, his purchasing and keeping the ship in Rhode Island has nothing to do with tax avoidance.

The Ap just published a story this week proving that FOIA (freedom of information act) requests of Homeland Security were being processed in a partisan manner by the Obama administration.

It has come out that the dealerships throughout the United States were almost arbitrarily closed down, leaving open those own by minorities and women, according to an inspector general’s report.

This just in: ACORN whistle-blower Anita Moncrief held a press conference Friday at the Right Online Convention in Las Vegas and announced that she will file FEC charges against the Obama Administration for the campaign’s illegal coordination with ACORN during the 2008 election. She is going to release the complete donor list to the Obama campaign, and alleges that this list was turned over to ACORN to mine for donations to them.

Also just in: Diggers Realm reported earlier today that two ranches inside our border, and just across the border from Nuevo Laredo, Mexico has been seized by Los Zetas, a highly trained group of killers in Mexico. This is an unconfirmed story.

President Obama said this week: “Taken together, we made enormous progress this week on Wall Street reform, on making sure that we're eliminating waste and abuse in government and in providing immediate assistance to people who are out there looking for work.”

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi: “The Bush-era tax cuts contributed to the deficit, did not create any jobs, and that they should be repealed."

Shirley Sherrod: “They asked me to resign...I had at least 3 calls telling me that the White House wanted me to resign...and the last one told me to pull over to the side of the road and do it [resign]...because you are going to be on Glenn Beck tonight.” That was Monday when she received these calls. She was not on Beck’s program on Monday; she was on Beck’s program Tuesday, where he called for her reinstatement. There were no stories on Sherrod on FoxNews until after she resigned. O’Reilly got the story wrong and apologized the next night and the night after that as well.

Sherrod again: “I think he [Andrew Breitbart, who first posted her video] would like to get us stuck back in the times of slavery, that’s where I think he would like to see all black people end up again.”

Sherrod: “Yes I do; that’s why I think he is so vicious against a Black president.”

From the JournoList: Spencer Ackerman wrote: “Instead, take one of them – Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares – and call them racists…This makes *them* sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction.”

Sherrod, in a different interview, speaking of FoxNews, said, “They intended exactly what they did. They were looking for the result they got yesterday. I am just a pawn. I was just here. They are after a bigger thing, they would love to take us back to where we were many years ago. Back to where black people were looking down, not looking white folks in the face, not being able to compete for a job out there and not be a whole person.” No stories about Sherrod were run on FoxNews until after she had been fired by the White House.

Kyra Phillips: “"There's going to have be a point in time where these people have to be held accountable. How about all these bloggers that blog anonymously? They say rotten things about people and they're actually given credibility, which is crazy. They're a bunch of cowards, they're just people seeking attention."

John Roberts: “...People who need to be the gatekeepers are the media who check into these stories, but for every Shirley Sherrod story, there are probably 100,000 other ones that never rise to the level of attention that we would look into them, so I don’t know what you would do about all of those people...”

Phillips: “...it’s not just freedom of 1^st amendment...it’s freedom of defamation many times...is there going to come a point where something going to have to be done legally; there gotta be some point where there eis some accountability...”

I’ve edited their conversation; the full conversation is found here:

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/alana-goodman/2010/07/23/cnn-host-calls-crackdown-bloggers-wake-sherrod-incident-something-s-g

Ed Schultz: "I busted my ass for Obama....I took my radio show on the road, I did town halls, talked to people. and President Obama, you don't come to Ed- he goes to Bret Baier on Fox News, in my time slot. Now, my show's going to be ok, but if you were in my position, would you say, `what's that all about?' Loyalty.” Schultz also said: “[MSNBC] did a hell of a job fighting for health care.”

Kirsten Powers: “I don’t think she’s [Clinton] running for president...there’s no there there.”

From some of Keith Olbermann’s nearly 3,000 tweets over the past few months:

"I have size 14 feet."

"I would say my average consumption of alcohol is one drink a week. Maybe one-and-a-half."

"Which show got a Murrow and an Emmy nomination for quality of writing? O'Reilly or mine?"

Shirley Jackson Lee, Senior member of the House of Foreign Affairs Committee, in a prepared speech, said: “Today, we have two Vietnam’s, side-by-side, north and south, exchanging and working. We may not agree with all that North Vietnam is doing, but they are living in peace. I would look for a better human rights record for North Vietnam, but they are living side-by-side because that was a civil war because the leaders of this nation did not listen to the mothers and fathers who bore the burden of 58,000 dead and did not declare victory, the mounting deaths, the violence continuing to go up and up, rather than understanding the political nature of the war in Vietnam, we did not listen to those families.”

George Stephanopoulos on Obama’s first 18 months in office: "And that if you set aside the Fort Hood bombing in Texas and the failed Christmas bomber, there has not been a major attack that's been anything close to successful on American soil."

Router’s News service:"Images such as Obama with a bone through his nose and the White House with a lawn full of watermelons are often displayed at Tea Party rallies."

Kathy Griffin referred to Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown’s daughters as prostitutes, and even Whoopie Goldberg said, "If somebody talked about my daughter as a joke like that, I would beat their ass."

A media montage (from Rush’s website):

Harris: It seems so long ago that the economy was literally on the brink.

Clift: (crosstalk) He brought the economy back from the brink.

Keilar: Two years ago the U.S. economy being on the brink of collapse.

Harwood: helped pull the economy back from the brink.

Menendez: He has managed to get a lot done, saving the economy from the brink.

Lothian: As the President has pointed out it's been brought back from the brink.

Carlson: Obama having to regulate the banks, after the banks put all of us on the brink of a economic collapse.

Now that we know about JournoList, it should seem less surprising that, on some days, every news service seems to say the same thing using the same words.

Sarah Spitz, a producer for NPR affiliate KCRW for the show Left, Right & Center, wrote “{if Rush Limbaugh were having a heart attack in front of me, I would] Laugh loudly like a maniac and watch his eyes bug out" as Limbaugh writhed in torment. She then added, "I never knew I had this much hate in me, but he deserves it." She has since apologized for this remark, indicating that she did not expect these remarks to be made public.

Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama's relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama's conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, "Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares - and call them racists."

Bloomberg's Ryan Donmoyer asked, "You know, at the risk of violating Godwin's law, is anyone starting to see parallels here between the teabaggers and their tactics and the rise of the Brown shirts? Esp. Now that it's getting violent? Reminds me of the Beer Hall fracases of the 1920s."

Richard Yeselson, a researcher for an organized labor group who also writes for liberal magazines, agrees, writing, "They want a deficit driven militarist/heterosexist/herrenvolk state. This is core of the Bush/Cheney base transmorgrified into an even more explicitly racialized/anti-cosmopolitan constituency. Why? Um, because the president is a black guy named Barack Hussein Obama. But it's all the same old nuts in the same old bins with some new labels: the gun nuts, the anti tax nuts, the religious nuts, the homophobes, the anti-feminists, the anti-abortion lunatics, the racist/confederate crackpots, the anti-immigration whackos (who feel Bush betrayed them) the pathological government haters (which subsumes some of the other categories, like the gun nuts and the anti-tax nuts)."

Responding to an article on immigration by Victor Davis Hanson blogger Ed Kilgore didn't deal with any of Hanson's arguments., but instead dismissed Hanson's piece out of hand as "the kind of Old White Guy cultural reaction that is at the heart of the Tea Party Movement. It's very close in spirit to the classic 1970s racist tome, The Camp of the Saints, where White Guys struggle to make up their minds whether to go out and murder brown people or just give up."

Guardian columnist Daniel Davies wrote,"I am genuinely scared" of Fox, because it "shows you that a genuinely shameless and unethical media organisation *cannot* be controlled by any form of peer pressure or self-regulation, and nor can it be successfully cold-shouldered or ostracised. In order to have even a semblance of control, you need a tough legal framework."

Michael Scherer of Time Magazine said. “Roger Ailes [FoxNews owner] understands that his job is to build a tribal identity, not a news organization. You can't hurt Fox by saying it gets it wrong, if Ailes just uses the criticism to deepen the tribal identity."

Jonathan Zasloff, a law professor at UCLA, suggested that the federal government simply yank Fox off the air. "Is there any reason why the FCC couldn't simply pull their broadcasting permit once it expires?"

Zasloff also wrote, ‘Fox is NOT A NEWS ORGANIZATION,...it is a wing of he Republican Party and the Conservative Movement.”

The White House has expressed these same sentiments: In October 2009, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said on CNN that Fox "is not a news organization so much as it has a perspective." Around the same time, White House Senior Advisor David Axelrod commented on FoxNews on ABC’s This Week, "It's really not news - it's pushing a point of view. And the bigger thing is that other news organizations like yours ought not to treat them that way, and we're not going to treat them that way. We're going to appear on their shows. We're going to participate but understanding that they represent a point of view." Did Emanuel and Axelrod just come up with this idea off the top of their heads?

Eric Alterman, a Professor of English and Journalism, at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and Professor of Journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, referred to those on the right who disagreed with him as: "F**king Nascar retards."

Also discussed on the Journo-List: whether news organizations like FoxNews be kept out of the White House briefing room.

U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton, with regards to the Obama Justice Department’s objections to the Arizona Immigration law: “Why can't Arizona be as inhospitable as they wish to people who have entered or remained in the United States?" And, she asked"How is there a preemption issue? I understand there may be other issues, but you're arguing preemption. Where is the preemption if everybody who is arrested for some crime has their immigration status checked?"

Newt Gingrich (on the White House firing of Shirley Sherrod based upon the fear that Sherrod might be on Glenn Beck’s show): “If the Obama administration is this afraid of Glenn Beck, how do they deal with the Iranians?”

Chris Wallace to Mike Gallagher: “I bet if you took a poll, you’d find that many women, and, in your audience, probably many of the men, sleep with a teddy bear.” Not an exact quote, but the best I could do from memory.

Sen. Judd Greg on the new deficit numbers (which are worse than expected): “It should come as no surprise that after five months of unchecked spending by the Democratic Congress, our fiscal situation is getting worse, not better."

Word Doctor Frank Luntz: “Obama blames the Bush administration for dust in the air.”

Rush Limbaugh: “It's not just that they hate how I became who I am. They literally hate who I am. They literally hate me. They hate me, these journalists, these so-called journalists hate me because I am the most prominent, effective, unrelenting voice of conservatism, and they haven't been able to stop me. No matter what they've thrown at me, they haven't been able to stop me. These people and their tactics are not new. We've seen it before in other countries, in other times. They want to destroy contrary and opposition voices and views. They will climb over the law and the people to achieve their aims. I mean earlier in this in this administration, the president, his hacks targeted me, his party targeted me, their groups targeted me, they're all the same. They're leftists disguised as lawyers, judges, scholars, professors, teachers, reporters, anchors, senators, representatives, legislative aide, congressional staff, federal bureaucrats, and on and on. There is no media. We know that now. There's just an incestuous relationship among all these various groups and a revolving door connecting them all. And it doesn't help that I have put a lot of them out of work.”

Paraphrasing from Rush: “There is no media; there is no science; there is no education. These are now all arms of the Democrat party.” [Rush has been saying this for a couple years now].

North Korea is now threatening war (which they do regularly). However, bear in mind that they may take their threats a step further, since they are dealing with Obama.

Glenn Beck’s Tuesday show, called Context Matters; this is the first show where he mentions Shirley Sherrod.

Greta interviews Hillary Clinton in the Middle East (posted by TeamHillary; hmm, I wonder if she is running for president?):

Lee Fang, a writer for the far-left blog Think Progress, recently posted a video purporting to show racism at Tea Parties. One of the TEA party racists was a self-proclaimed Nazi. The video is here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRJ2UmyHhxI

However, the actual full video was played on Glenn Beck’s program, and it is clear that context makes all the difference in the world:

http://www.ihatethemedia.com/glenn-beck-think-progress-tea-party-video

Think Progress has done this on other occasions as well, pointing out that Ryan Murdough is a racist and a TEA partier. Turns out that Murdough is clearly a racist, who has been disowned by the Republican party, and that he was called a TEA partier because he mentioned the TEA party in the comments section of an article he wrote.

http://biggovernment.com/jhoft/2010/07/20/think-progress-manufactures-another-fake-tea-party-racism-story/

Think Progress also reported that people used the N-word and the word faggot when Nancy Pelosi and members of the Black Caucus walked through the TEA party crowd to go sign the very unpopular Healthcare Bill. There are 4 or 5 videos of this, and it is clear from these videos that no one used any of these words (furthermore, Andrew Breitbart has offered $100,000 for a video which would prove their claims). The Think Progress raticle:

http://thinkprogress.org/2010/03/20/tea-party-spit/

The Left Coast Rebel goes through several of Think Progress’s dishonest videos:

http://www.leftcoastrebel.com/2010/07/think-progress-proves-tea-party-is-not.html

I missed this ad, run during the 2008 campaign (if you are a liberal and you begin to scoff, watch it all of the way through):

Jodi Miller: “South Carolina Senate hopeful Alvin Greene wants to manufacture Alvin Greene action figures. How about an Obama action figure? It plays golf, goes on vacation, redistributes wealth and costs nothing because your grandchildren pay for it.”

“JudgeJudy just signed a new contract worth $45 million a year; when asked to comment, Rod Blagojevich said, “It should never cost that much to buy a judge.”

Jodi Miller: “Keith Richard’s wife said, while she was battling cancer, she looked death in the face, just like when she has a staring contest with her husband.”

Dennis Miller: “And by the way, I saw The Sorcerer's Apprentice with Nic Cage. And you know something? Nic's personal life is so wild these days, I'm not even sure Nic thought he was in a movie there. I think this was just Wednesday to him”

1) The federal agencies which we already had in place could have prevented the BP oil spill, the financial crisis, the multiple bailouts, Bernie Madoff and even 9/11, had they just done their jobs. This was the sentiment expressed by Charles on Cavuto on Business.

3) What are the chances the Sherrod is out there trying to reduce the coverage of the Financial Reform Bill and the JournoList? Could the White House be this good?

4) I am 100% positive that I knew liberals who will think nothing of the JournoList. They will glance at it and say, “So what?” or “Big deal!” Or, they will say, “Conservatives have been doing this for years; what’s the point?” Even though it is not true. The profundity of journalists covertly conspiring to elect a man president is something I don’t believe can reach some people.

5) Obviously, one of these JournoList members recognizes, whether they have been converted or not, that they have been involved in a scandal which is far greater than Watergate.

6) Breitbart’s point with the Shirley Sherrod tape is the reaction of the NAACP audience. When she explained that she did was thinking about screwing over the white farmer, watch the reaction of the audience. They are not offended or disconcerted but enthusiastic. That is the racism that Breitbart presented. The full context of the tape exonerates Sherrod, but it does not exonerate the NAACP.

7) The next time you hear someone of the left accusing those on the right of being racists or hateful, bear in mind, they are either revealing what is in their own hearts, or this is simply a political tactic and nothing else.

Obama’s job approval rating has dropped to a negative 44 - 48% his worst net score ever.

American voters say by a narrow 39 - 36% margin that they would vote for an unnamed Republican rather than President Obama in 2012

Voter approval of the President's handling of some of the nation's problems shows:

Authorized the assassination of American citizens who have been classified as terrorists. How do you think this would be played in the news?

Had there been a group of 20 or 30 conservative commentators and FoxNews people meeting online to discuss how to push a conservative agenda (or a conservative candidate), how would that have played in the media?

Over this past week, there was the Shirley Sherrod story and the JournoList story. Which is most important? Which has been flodding the airwaves and which has been ignored or played down?

How will the alphabet media deal with the JournoList story? Will they ignore it (as they did the TEA party movement when it first began)? Will they immediately denounce it as a non-story, as they did with Jeremiah Wright? Will they accuse right wingers of formulating this crazy conspiracy? Will they shuffle it to a small spot in their new coverage, and use Shirley Sherrod as a cover, to try to push aside all related JournoList stories? She has dominated the news so far this week on many news stations, and she has continued to make unfounded and false accusations against FoxNews and Breitbart. Is this how the alphabet media will play this? Or do they cover this once or twice, and then make reference to it, like, “We have already covered that story; it is time to cover news which is current.” (this was the approach of the Black Panthers who practiced voter intimidation). Or, will their story be, these are a bunch of no-name journalists; we don’t know most of them, so who cares? Even though one of them is the editor of Time Magazine, another is a columnist for the NY Times and a frequent guest on the ABC Sunday talk show; and a 3^rd is in the White House right now.

SNL would never do it, but what fun could be had with all those in the JournoList. Different approaches to Jeremiah Wright:

“No, I’ve got it; let’s just ignore him. We’ll say, ‘Our viewers just aren’t interested in this sort of journalism’ and move on.”

“I’ve got it, let’s have her say, ‘I can see Russian from my front yard.’”

Who am I kidding? SNL, if it were on the air, would never think to do a skit like this.

Democrats Kent Conrad, Ben Nelson and Evan Bayh, along with former Democrat Joe Lieberman, are coming out in favor of retaining the Bush tax cuts (for rich and poor).

I have to admit that this was quite deft: the Democrats are presenting tax cuts as something which increase the deficit and therefore must be paid for.

Financial responsibility are words used in association with any bill the Congress passes and Obama signs which is particularly irresponsible in the financial realm.

Comprehensive immigration reform means, turn illegal immigrants into voting citizens.

Will you call for the firing of anyone associated with JournoList or anyone who has a close relationship with someone on JournoList?

Despite a history which ought to cause African-Americans to vote against Democrats, 90% of Blacks voted for Barrack Obama. President Obama is hoping to develop a monolithic voting block from Hispanics, which is why his administration has taken Arizona to court over their popular immigration law. The idea is to at least give the impression that Democrats are on the side of Hispanics. Ideally speaking, the White House would like to turn illegal immigrants into voting citizens by 2012. Even if a bill passes where they are not given voting rights, there has already been a court decision to give voting rights to residents of the United States.

Because the Arizona law is popular among the general population of the United States, attacking this law will hurt Democrats in 2010. President Obama is only concerned about 2012 (obviously, this is all my opinion).

It is difficult to tell whether the Shirley Sherrod firing was an well-orchestrated act of political theater or a blunder on the part of the White House. These are hard to distinguish at times. She was contacted thrice by the White House telling her that she needed to resign, and the 3^rd time, she was told to drive to the side of the road and official resign there because she was going to be on Glenn Beck. Beck did not run her story that night, but he did run her story the next night, giving the full context of her quotation. Sherrod has continued to blame FoxNews for her firing, even though she was asked to resign before she was ever mentioned on FoxNews. She will not, of course, appear on FoxNews, because, quite obviously, they did not cause her to be fired.

If you think that the JournoList is not that big of a deal. If you have heard anything on the alphabet media, I am sure that is what they told you.

Dick Morris made an interesting prediction, that, when the Republicans take over the House and the Senate (another of his predictions), they will develop a method by which states can go bankrupt (there is no such method nowadays). This will allow states to invalidate their union contracts and other destructive pensions in order to right themselves.

Hillary Clinton is running for president, barring some any unusual turn of events. She began to land some blows on Obama in the 2008 primary; now she will be able to attack his record, and it will stick. This is going to be a close primary.

Look for Glenn Beck to do a show this week on those on the JournoList and their connections to other more well-known journalists.

The Arizona Immigration Law will not be invalidated. It is possible that some provisions may be modified or struck down. The judge will raise the question, what about sanctuary cities where the city policy actually conflicts with federal law?

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told Congress on Wednesday the economic outlook remains "unusually uncertain," and the central bank is ready to take new steps to keep the recovery alive if the economy worsens (last week, I wrote “Look for job numbers to be negative again; no later than the middle of 2011. At this point, I don’t know that anyone can predict the direction of the stock market. ”).

I really thought that Michael Steele (whom I like) would stop being head of the Republican party (he would turn in his resignation or be fired). What appears to be the case is, Steele has been muzzled. I think this may just play out until January, where someone else will be elected in his place.

Just in case you did not see or hear about this article; this is one of the best articulations of a fear/concern that many of us have, both Democrats and Republicans. If you are a Democrat, and you are beginning to realize the President Obama is not acting as you expected him to, or if you are a Republican and you had some problems with certain Republican actions, this article may explain it all to you. It is a long article, and you will not be able to finish it at one sitting, but it is going to put a lot of things together for you. I believe this is one of the most important articles of this decade. This may give voice to every odd thought that has been in the back of your brain since the TARP fund.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thus in 2009-10 the American Medical Association (AMA) strongly supported the new medical care law, which the administration touted as having the support of "the doctors" even though the vast majority of America's 975,000 physicians opposed it. Those who run the AMA, however, have a government contract as exclusive providers of the codes by which physicians and hospitals bill the government for their services. The millions of dollars that flow thereby to the AMA's officers keep them in line, while the impracticality of doing without the billing codes tamps down rebellion in the doctor ranks. When the administration wanted to bolster its case that the state of Arizona's enforcement of federal immigration laws was offensive to Hispanics, the National Association of Chiefs of Police -- whose officials depend on the administration for their salaries -- issued a statement that the laws would endanger all Americans by raising Hispanics' animosity. This reflected conversations with the administration rather than a vote of the nation's police chiefs.

Similarly, modern labor unions are ever less bunches of workers banding together and ever more bundled under the aegis of an organization chosen jointly by employers and government. Prototypical is the Service Employees International Union, which grew spectacularly by persuading managers of government agencies as well as of publicly funded private entities that placing their employees in the SEIU would relieve them of responsibility. Not by being elected by workers' secret ballots did the SEIU conquer workplace after workplace, but rather by such deals, or by the union presenting what it claims are cards from workers approving of representation. The union gets 2 percent of the workers' pay, which it recycles as contributions to the Democratic Party, which it recycles in greater power over public employees. The union's leadership is part of the ruling class's beating heart.

The point is that a doctor, a building contractor, a janitor, or a schoolteacher counts in today's America insofar as he is part of the hierarchy of a sector organization affiliated with the ruling class. Less and less do such persons count as voters.

Ordinary people have also gone a long way toward losing equal treatment under law. The America described in civics books, in which no one could be convicted or fined except by a jury of his peers for having violated laws passed by elected representatives, started disappearing when the New Deal inaugurated today's administrative state -- in which bureaucrats make, enforce, and adjudicate nearly all the rules. Today's legal -- administrative texts are incomprehensibly detailed and freighted with provisions crafted exquisitely to affect equal individuals unequally. The bureaucrats do not enforce the rules themselves so much as whatever "agency policy" they choose to draw from them in any given case. If you protest any "agency policy" you will be informed that it was formulated with input from "the public." But not from the likes of you.

Disregard for the text of laws -- for the dictionary meaning of words and the intentions of those who wrote them -- in favor of the decider's discretion has permeated our ruling class from the Supreme Court to the lowest local agency. Ever since Oliver Wendell Holmes argued in 1920 (Missouri v. Holland) that presidents, Congresses, and judges could not be bound by the U.S. Constitution regarding matters that the people who wrote and ratified it could not have foreseen, it has become conventional wisdom among our ruling class that they may transcend the Constitution while pretending allegiance to it. They began by stretching such constitutional terms as "interstate commerce" and "due process," then transmuting others, e.g., "search and seizure," into "privacy." Thus in 1973 the Supreme Court endowed its invention of "privacy" with a "penumbra" that it deemed "broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy." The court gave no other constitutional reasoning, period. Perfunctory to the point of mockery, this constitutional talk was to reassure the American people that the ruling class was acting within the Constitution's limitations. By the 1990s federal courts were invalidating amendments to state constitutions passed by referenda to secure the "positive rights" they invent, because these expressions of popular will were inconsistent with the constitution they themselves were construing.

By 2010 some in the ruling class felt confident enough to dispense with the charade. Asked what in the Constitution allows Congress and the president to force every American to purchase health insurance, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi replied: "Are you kidding? Are you kidding?" No surprise then that lower court judges and bureaucrats take liberties with laws, regulations, and contracts. That is why legal words that say you are in the right avail you less in today's America than being on the right side of the persons who decide what they want those words to mean.

As the discretionary powers of officeholders and of their informal entourages have grown, the importance of policy and of law itself is declining, citizenship is becoming vestigial, and the American people become ever more dependent.

The ruling class is keener to reform the American people's family and spiritual lives than their economic and civic ones. In no other areas is the ruling class's self-definition so definite, its contempt for opposition so patent, its Kulturkampf so open. It believes that the Christian family (and the Orthodox Jewish one too) is rooted in and perpetuates the ignorance commonly called religion, divisive social prejudices, and repressive gender roles, that it is the greatest barrier to human progress because it looks to its very particular interest -- often defined as mere coherence against outsiders who most often know better. Thus the family prevents its members from playing their proper roles in social reform. Worst of all, it reproduces itself.

Since marriage is the family's fertile seed, government at all levels, along with "mainstream" academics and media, have waged war on it. They legislate, regulate, and exhort in support not of "the family" -- meaning married parents raising children -- but rather of "families," meaning mostly households based on something other than marriage. The institution of no-fault divorce diminished the distinction between cohabitation and marriage -- except that husbands are held financially responsible for the children they father, while out-of-wedlock fathers are not. The tax code penalizes marriage and forces those married couples who raise their own children to subsidize "child care" for those who do not. Top Republicans and Democrats have also led society away from the very notion of marital fidelity by precept as well as by parading their affairs. For example, in 1997 the Democratic administration's secretary of defense and the Republican Senate's majority leader (joined by the New York Times et al.) condemned the military's practice of punishing officers who had extramarital affairs. While the military had assumed that honoring marital vows is as fundamental to the integrity of its units as it is to that of society, consensus at the top declared that insistence on fidelity is "contrary to societal norms." Not surprisingly, rates of marriage in America have decreased as out-of-wedlock births have increased. The biggest demographic consequence has been that about one in five of all households are women alone or with children, in which case they have about a four in 10 chance of living in poverty. Since unmarried mothers often are or expect to be clients of government services, it is not surprising that they are among the Democratic Party's most faithful voters.

While our ruling class teaches that relationships among men, women, and children are contingent, it also insists that the relationship between each of them and the state is fundamental. That is why such as Hillary Clinton have written law review articles and books advocating a direct relationship between the government and children, effectively abolishing the presumption of parental authority. Hence whereas within living memory school nurses could not administer an aspirin to a child without the parents' consent, the people who run America's schools nowadays administer pregnancy tests and ship girls off to abortion clinics without the parents' knowledge. Parents are not allowed to object to what their children are taught. But the government may and often does object to how parents raise children. The ruling class's assumption is that what it mandates for children is correct ipso facto, while what parents do is potentially abusive. It only takes an anonymous accusation of abuse for parents to be taken away in handcuffs until they prove their innocence. Only sheer political weight (and in California, just barely) has preserved parents' right to homeschool their children against the ruling class's desire to accomplish what Woodrow Wilson so yearned: "to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible."

At stake are the most important questions: What is the right way for human beings to live? By what standard is anything true or good? Who gets to decide what? Implicit in Wilson's words and explicit in our ruling class's actions is the dismissal, as the ways of outdated "fathers," of the answers that most Americans would give to these questions. This dismissal of the American people's intellectual, spiritual, and moral substance is the very heart of what our ruling class is about. Its principal article of faith, its claim to the right to decide for others, is precisely that it knows things and operates by standards beyond others' comprehension.

While the unenlightened ones believe that man is created in the image and likeness of God and that we are subject to His and to His nature's laws, the enlightened ones know that we are products of evolution, driven by chance, the environment, and the will to primacy. While the un-enlightened are stuck with the antiquated notion that ordinary human minds can reach objective judgments about good and evil, better and worse through reason, the enlightened ones know that all such judgments are subjective and that ordinary people can no more be trusted with reason than they can with guns. Because ordinary people will pervert reason with ideology, religion, or interest, science is "science" only in the "right" hands. Consensus among the right people is the only standard of truth. Facts and logic matter only insofar as proper authority acknowledges them.

That is why the ruling class is united and adamant about nothing so much as its right to pronounce definitive, "scientific" judgment on whatever it chooses. When the government declares, and its associated press echoes that "scientists say" this or that, ordinary people -- or for that matter scientists who "don't say," or are not part of the ruling class -- lose any right to see the information that went into what "scientists say." Thus when Virginia's attorney general subpoenaed the data by which Professor Michael Mann had concluded, while paid by the state of Virginia, that the earth's temperatures are rising "like a hockey stick" from millennial stability -- a conclusion on which billions of dollars' worth of decisions were made -- to investigate the possibility of fraud, the University of Virginia's faculty senate condemned any inquiry into "scientific endeavor that has satisfied peer review standards" claiming that demands for data "send a chilling message to scientists...and indeed scholars in any discipline." The Washington Post editorialized that the attorney general's demands for data amounted to "an assault on reason." The fact that the "hockey stick" conclusion stands discredited and Mann and associates are on record manipulating peer review, the fact that science-by-secret-data is an oxymoron, the very distinction between truth and error, all matter far less to the ruling class than the distinction between itself and those they rule.

By identifying science and reason with themselves, our rulers delegitimize opposition. Though they cannot prevent Americans from worshiping God, they can make it as socially disabling as smoking -- to be done furtively and with a bad social conscience. Though they cannot make Americans wish they were Europeans, they continue to press upon this nation of refugees from the rest of the world the notion that Americans ought to live by "world standards." Each day, the ruling class produces new "studies" that show that one or another of Americans' habits is in need of reform, and that those Americans most resistant to reform are pitiably, perhaps criminally, wrong. Thus does it go about disaggregating and dispiriting the ruled.

America's best and brightest believe themselves qualified and duty bound to direct the lives not only of Americans but of foreigners as well. George W. Bush's 2005 inaugural statement that America cannot be free until the whole world is free and hence that America must push and prod mankind to freedom was but an extrapolation of the sentiments of America's Progressive class, first articulated by such as Princeton's Woodrow Wilson and Columbia's Nicholas Murray Butler. But while the early Progressives expected the rest of the world to follow peacefully, today's ruling class makes decisions about war and peace at least as much forcibly to tinker with the innards of foreign bodies politic as to protect America. Indeed, they conflate the two purposes in the face of the American people's insistence to draw a bright line between war against our enemies and peace with non-enemies in whose affairs we do not interfere. That is why, from Wilson to Kissinger, the ruling class has complained that the American people oscillate between bellicosity and "isolationism."

Because our ruling class deems unsophisticated the American people's perennial preference for decisive military action or none, its default solution to international threats has been to commit blood and treasure to long-term, twilight efforts to reform the world's Vietnams, Somalias, Iraqs, and Afghanistans, believing that changing hearts and minds is the prerequisite of peace and that it knows how to change them. The apparently endless series of wars in which our ruling class has embroiled America, wars that have achieved nothing worthwhile at great cost in lives and treasure, has contributed to defining it, and to discrediting it -- but not in its own eyes.

Rather, even as our ruling class has lectured, cajoled, and sometimes intruded violently to reform foreign countries in its own image, it has apologized to them for America not having matched that image -- their private image. Woodrow Wilson began this double game in 1919, when he assured Europe's peoples that America had mandated him to demand their agreement to Article X of the peace treaty (the League of Nations) and then swore to the American people that Article X was the Europeans' non-negotiable demand. The fact that the U.S. government had seized control of transatlantic cable communications helped hide (for a while) that the League scheme was merely the American Progressives' private dream. In our time, this double game is quotidian on the evening news. Notably, President Obama apologized to Europe because "the United States has fallen short of meeting its responsibilities" to reduce carbon emissions by taxation. But the American people never assumed such responsibility, and oppose doing so. Hence President Obama was not apologizing for anything that he or anyone he respected had done, but rather blaming his fellow Americans for not doing what he thinks they should do while glossing over the fact that the Europeans had done the taxing but not the reducing. Wilson redux.

Similarly, Obama "apologized" to Europeans because some Americans -- not him and his friends -- had shown "arrogance and been dismissive" toward them, and to the world because President Truman had used the atom bomb to end World War II. So President Clinton apologized to Africans because some Americans held African slaves until 1865 and others were mean to Negroes thereafter -- not himself and his friends, of course. So assistant secretary of state Michael Posner apologized to Chinese diplomats for Arizona's law that directs police to check immigration status. Republicans engage in that sort of thing as well: former Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev tells us that in 1987 then vice president George H. W. Bush distanced himself from his own administration by telling him, "Reagan is a conservative, an extreme conservative. All the dummies and blockheads are with him..." This is all about a class of Americans distinguishing itself from its inferiors. It recalls the Pharisee in the Temple: "Lord, I thank thee that I am not like other men..."

In sum, our ruling class does not like the rest of America. Most of all does it dislike that so many Americans think America is substantially different from the rest of the world and like it that way. For our ruling class, however, America is a work in progress, just like the rest the world, and they are the engineers.

Describing America's country class is problematic because it is so heterogeneous. It has no privileged podiums, and speaks with many voices, often inharmonious. It shares above all the desire to be rid of rulers it regards inept and haughty. It defines itself practically in terms of reflexive reaction against the rulers' defining ideas and proclivities -- e.g., ever higher taxes and expanding government, subsidizing political favorites, social engineering, approval of abortion, etc. Many want to restore a way of life largely superseded. Demographically, the country class is the other side of the ruling class's coin: its most distinguishing characteristics are marriage, children, and religious practice. While the country class, like the ruling class, includes the professionally accomplished and the mediocre, geniuses and dolts, it is different because of its non-orientation to government and its members' yearning to rule themselves rather than be ruled by others.

Even when members of the country class happen to be government officials or officers of major corporations, their concerns are essentially private; in their view, government owes to its people equal treatment rather than action to correct what anyone perceives as imbalance or grievance. Hence they tend to oppose special treatment, whether for corporations or for social categories. Rather than gaming government regulations, they try to stay as far from them as possible. Thus the Supreme Court's 2005 decision in Kelo, which allows the private property of some to be taken by others with better connections to government, reminded the country class that government is not its friend.

Negative orientation to privilege distinguishes the corporate officer who tries to keep his company from joining the Business Council of large corporations who have close ties with government from the fellow in the next office. The first wants the company to grow by producing. The second wants it to grow by moving to the trough. It sets apart the schoolteacher who resents the union to which he is forced to belong for putting the union's interests above those of parents who want to choose their children's schools. In general, the country class includes all those in stations high and low who are aghast at how relatively little honest work yields, by comparison with what just a little connection with the right bureaucracy can get you. It includes those who take the side of outsiders against insiders, of small institutions against large ones, of local government against the state or federal. The country class is convinced that big business, big government, and big finance are linked as never before and that ordinary people are more unequal than ever.

Members of the country class who want to rise in their profession through sheer competence try at once to avoid the ruling class's rituals while guarding against infringing its prejudices. Averse to wheedling, they tend to think that exams should play a major role in getting or advancing in jobs, that records of performance -- including academic ones -- should be matters of public record, and that professional disputes should be settled by open argument. For such people, the Supreme Court's 2009 decision in Ricci, upholding the right of firefighters to be promoted according to the results of a professional exam, revived the hope that competence may sometimes still trump political connections.

Nothing has set the country class apart, defined it, made it conscious of itself, given it whatever coherence it has, so much as the ruling class's insistence that people other than themselves are intellectually and hence otherwise humanly inferior. Persons who were brought up to believe themselves as worthy as anyone, who manage their own lives to their own satisfaction, naturally resent politicians of both parties who say that the issues of modern life are too complex for any but themselves. Most are insulted by the ruling class's dismissal of opposition as mere "anger and frustration" -- an imputation of stupidity -- while others just scoff at the claim that the ruling class's bureaucratic language demonstrates superior intelligence. A few ask the fundamental question: Since when and by what right does intelligence trump human equality? Moreover, if the politicians are so smart, why have they made life worse?

The country class actually believes that America's ways are superior to the rest of the world's, and regards most of mankind as less free, less prosperous, and less virtuous. Thus while it delights in croissants and thinks Toyota's factory methods are worth imitating, it dislikes the idea of adhering to "world standards." This class also takes part in the U.S. armed forces body and soul: nearly all the enlisted, non-commissioned officers and officers under flag rank belong to this class in every measurable way. Few vote for the Democratic Party. You do not doubt that you are amidst the country class rather than with the ruling class when the American flag passes by or "God Bless America" is sung after seven innings of baseball, and most people show reverence. The same people wince at the National Football League's plaintive renditions of the "Star Spangled Banner."

Unlike the ruling class, the country class does not share a single intellectual orthodoxy, set of tastes, or ideal lifestyle. Its different sectors draw their notions of human equality from different sources: Christians and Jews believe it is God's law. Libertarians assert it from Hobbesian and Darwinist bases. Many consider equality the foundation of Americanism. Others just hate snobs. Some parts of the country class now follow the stars and the music out of Nashville, Tennessee, and Branson, Missouri -- entertainment complexes larger than Hollywood's -- because since the 1970s most of Hollywood's products have appealed more to the mores of the ruling class and its underclass clients than to those of large percentages of Americans. The same goes for "popular music" and television. For some in the country class Christian radio and TV are the lodestone of sociopolitical taste, while the very secular Fox News serves the same purpose for others. While symphonies and opera houses around the country, as well as the stations that broadcast them, are firmly in the ruling class's hands, a considerable part of the country class appreciates these things for their own sake. By that very token, the country class's characteristic cultural venture -- the homeschool movement -- stresses the classics across the board in science, literature, music, and history even as the ruling class abandons them.

Each of the country class's diverse parts has its own agenda, which flows from the peculiar ways in which the ruling class impacts its concerns. Independent businesspeople are naturally more sensitive to the growth of privileged relations between government and their competitors. Persons who would like to lead their community rue the advantages that Democratic and Republican party establishments are accruing. Parents of young children and young women anxious about marriage worry that cultural directives from on high are dispelling their dreams. The faithful to God sense persecution. All resent higher taxes and loss of freedom. More and more realize that their own agenda's advancement requires concerting resistance to the ruling class across the board.

Not being at the table when government makes the rules about how you must run your business, knowing that you will be required to pay more, work harder, and show deference for the privilege of making less money, is the independent businessman's nightmare. But what to do about it? In our time the interpenetration of government and business -- the network of subsidies, preferences, and regulations -- is so thick and deep, the people "at the table" receive and recycle into politics so much money, that independent businesspeople cannot hope to undo any given regulation or grant of privilege. Just as no manufacturer can hope to reduce the subsidies that raise his fuel costs, no set of doctors can shield themselves from the increased costs and bureaucracy resulting from government mandates. Hence independent business's agenda has been to resist the expansion of government in general, and of course to reduce taxes. Pursuit of this agenda with arguments about economic efficiency and job creation -- and through support of the Republican Party -- usually results in enough relief to discourage more vigorous remonstrance. Sometimes, however, the economic argument is framed in moral terms: "The sum of good government," said Thomas Jefferson, is not taking "from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned." For government to advantage some at others' expense, said he, "is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association." In our time, more and more independent businesspeople have come to think of their economic problems in moral terms. But few realize how revolutionary that is.

As bureaucrats and teachers' unions disempowered neighborhood school boards, while the governments of towns, counties, and states were becoming conduits for federal mandates, as the ruling class reduced the number and importance of things that American communities could decide for themselves, America's thirst for self-governance reawakened. The fact that public employees are almost always paid more and have more generous benefits than the private sector people whose taxes support them only sharpened the sense among many in the country class that they now work for public employees rather than the other way around. But how to reverse the roles? How can voters regain control of government? Restoring localities' traditional powers over schools, including standards, curriculum, and prayer, would take repudiating two generations of Supreme Court rulings. So would the restoration of traditional "police" powers over behavior in public places. Bringing public employee unions to heel is only incidentally a matter of cutting pay and benefits. As self-governance is crimped primarily by the powers of government personified in its employees, restoring it involves primarily deciding that any number of functions now performed and the professional specialties who perform them, e.g., social workers, are superfluous or worse. Explaining to one's self and neighbors why such functions and personnel do more harm than good, while the ruling class brings its powers to bear to discredit you, is a very revolutionary thing to do.

America's pro-family movement is a reaction to the ruling class's challenges: emptying marriage of legal sanction, promoting abortion, and progressively excluding parents from their children's education. Americans reacted to these challenges primarily by sorting themselves out. Close friendships and above all marriages became rarer between persons who think well of divorce, abortion, and government authority over children and those who do not. The homeschool movement, for which the Internet became the great facilitator, involves not only each family educating its own children, but also extensive and growing social, intellectual, and spiritual contact among like-minded persons. In short, the part of the country class that is most concerned with family matters has taken on something of a biological identity. Few in this part of the country class have any illusion, however, that simply retreating into private associations will long save their families from societal influences made to order to discredit their ways. But stopping the ruling class's intrusions would require discrediting its entire conception of man, of right and wrong, as well as of the role of courts in popular government. That revolutionary task would involve far more than legislation.

The ruling class's manifold efforts to discredit and drive worship of God out of public life -- not even the Soviet Union arrested students for wearing crosses or praying, or reading the Bible on school property, as some U.S. localities have done in response to Supreme Court rulings -- convinced many among the vast majority of Americans who believe and pray that today's regime is hostile to the most important things of all. Every December, they are reminded that the ruling class deems the very word "Christmas" to be offensive. Every time they try to manifest their religious identity in public affairs, they are deluged by accusations of being "American Taliban" trying to set up a "theocracy." Let members of the country class object to anything the ruling class says or does, and likely as not their objection will be characterized as "religious," that is to say irrational, that is to say not to be considered on a par with the "science" of which the ruling class is the sole legitimate interpreter. Because aggressive, intolerant secularism is the moral and intellectual basis of the ruling class's claim to rule, resistance to that rule, whether to the immorality of economic subsidies and privileges, or to the violation of the principle of equal treatment under equal law, or to its seizure of children's education, must deal with secularism's intellectual and moral core. This lies beyond the boundaries of politics as the term is commonly understood.

The ruling class's appetite for deference, power, and perks grows. The country class disrespects its rulers, wants to curtail their power and reduce their perks. The ruling class wears on its sleeve the view that the rest of Americans are racist, greedy, and above all stupid. The country class is ever more convinced that our rulers are corrupt, malevolent, and inept. The rulers want the ruled to shut up and obey. The ruled want self-governance. The clash between the two is about which side's vision of itself and of the other is right and which is wrong. Because each side -- especially the ruling class -- embodies its views on the issues, concessions by one side to another on any issue tend to discredit that side's view of itself. One side or the other will prevail. The clash is as sure and momentous as its outcome is unpredictable.

In this clash, the ruling class holds most of the cards: because it has established itself as the fount of authority, its primacy is based on habits of deference. Breaking them, establishing other founts of authority, other ways of doing things, would involve far more than electoral politics. Though the country class had long argued along with Edmund Burke against making revolutionary changes, it faces the uncomfortable question common to all who have had revolutionary changes imposed on them: are we now to accept what was done to us just because it was done? Sweeping away a half century's accretions of bad habits -- taking care to preserve the good among them -- is hard enough. Establishing, even reestablishing, a set of better institutions and habits is much harder, especially as the country class wholly lacks organization. By contrast, the ruling class holds strong defensive positions and is well represented by the Democratic Party. But a two to one numerical disadvantage augurs defeat, while victory would leave it in control of a people whose confidence it cannot regain.

Certainly the country class lacks its own political vehicle -- and perhaps the coherence to establish one. In the short term at least, the country class has no alternative but to channel its political efforts through the Republican Party, which is eager for its support. But the Republican Party does not live to represent the country class. For it to do so, it would have to become principles-based, as it has not been since the mid-1860s. The few who tried to make it so the party treated as rebels: Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. The party helped defeat Goldwater. When it failed to stop Reagan, it saddled his and subsequent Republican administrations with establishmentarians who, under the Bush family, repudiated Reagan's principles as much as they could. Barack Obama exaggerated in charging that Republicans had driven the country "into the ditch" all alone. But they had a hand in it. Few Republican voters, never mind the larger country class, have confidence that the party is on their side. Because, in the long run, the country class will not support a party as conflicted as today's Republicans, those Republican politicians who really want to represent it will either reform the party in an unmistakable manner, or start a new one as Whigs like Abraham Lincoln started the Republican Party in the 1850s.

The name of the party that will represent America's country class is far less important than what, precisely, it represents and how it goes about representing it because, for the foreseeable future, American politics will consist of confrontation between what we might call the Country Party and the ruling class. The Democratic Party having transformed itself into a unit with near-European discipline, challenging it would seem to require empowering a rival party at least as disciplined. What other antidote is there to government by one party but government by another party? Yet this logic, though all too familiar to most of the world, has always been foreign to America and naturally leads further in the direction toward which the ruling class has led. Any country party would have to be wise and skillful indeed not to become the Democrats' mirror image.

Yet to defend the country class, to break down the ruling class's presumptions, it has no choice but to imitate the Democrats, at least in some ways and for a while. Consider: The ruling class denies its opponents' legitimacy. Seldom does a Democratic official or member of the ruling class speak on public affairs without reiterating the litany of his class's claim to authority, contrasting it with opponents who are either uninformed, stupid, racist, shills for business, violent, fundamentalist, or all of the above. They do this in the hope that opponents, hearing no other characterizations of themselves and no authoritative voice discrediting the ruling class, will be dispirited. For the country class seriously to contend for self-governance, the political party that represents it will have to discredit not just such patent frauds as ethanol mandates, the pretense that taxes can control "climate change," and the outrage of banning God from public life. More important, such a serious party would have to attack the ruling class's fundamental claims to its superior intellect and morality in ways that dispirit the target and hearten one's own. The Democrats having set the rules of modern politics, opponents who want electoral success are obliged to follow them.

Suppose that the Country Party (whatever its name might be) were to capture Congress, the presidency, and most statehouses. What then would it do? Especially if its majority were slim, it would be tempted to follow the Democrats' plan of 2009-2010, namely to write its wish list of reforms into law regardless of the Constitution and enact them by partisan majorities supported by interest groups that gain from them, while continuing to vilify the other side. Whatever effect this might have, it surely would not be to make America safe for self-governance because by carrying out its own "revolution from above" to reverse the ruling class's previous "revolution from above," it would have made that ruinous practice standard in America. Moreover, a revolution designed at party headquarters would be antithetical to the country class's diversity as well as to the American Founders' legacy.

Achieving the country class's inherently revolutionary objectives in a manner consistent with the Constitution and with its own diversity would require the Country Party to use legislation primarily as a tool to remove obstacles, to instruct, to reintroduce into American life ways and habits that had been cast aside. Passing national legislation is easier than getting people to take up the responsibilities of citizens, fathers, and entrepreneurs.

Reducing the taxes that most Americans resent requires eliminating the network of subsidies to millions of other Americans that these taxes finance, and eliminating the jobs of government employees who administer them. Eliminating that network is practical, if at all, if done simultaneously, both because subsidies are morally wrong and economically counterproductive, and because the country cannot afford the practice in general. The electorate is likely to cut off millions of government clients, high and low, only if its choice is between no economic privilege for anyone and ratifying government's role as the arbiter of all our fortunes. The same goes for government grants to and contracts with so-called nonprofit institutions or non-governmental organizations. The case against all arrangements by which the government favors some groups of citizens is easier to make than that against any such arrangement. Without too much fuss, a few obviously burdensome bureaucracies, like the Department of Education, can be eliminated, while money can be cut off to partisan enterprises such as the National Endowments and public broadcasting. That sort of thing is as necessary to the American body politic as a weight reduction program is essential to restoring the health of any human body degraded by obesity and lack of exercise. Yet shedding fat is the easy part. Restoring atrophied muscles is harder. Reenabling the body to do elementary tasks takes yet more concentration.

The grandparents of today's Americans (132 million in 1940) had opportunities to serve on 117,000 school boards. To exercise responsibilities comparable to their grandparents', today's 310 million Americans would have radically to decentralize the mere 15,000 districts into which public school children are now concentrated. They would have to take responsibility for curriculum and administration away from credentialed experts, and they would have to explain why they know better. This would involve a level of political articulation of the body politic far beyond voting in elections every two years.

If self-governance means anything, it means that those who exercise government power must depend on elections. The shorter the electoral leash, the likelier an official to have his chain yanked by voters, the more truly republican the government is. Yet to subject the modern administrative state's agencies to electoral control would require ordinary citizens to take an interest in any number of technical matters. Law can require environmental regulators or insurance commissioners, or judges or auditors to be elected. But only citizens' discernment and vigilance could make these officials good. Only citizens' understanding of and commitment to law can possibly reverse the patent disregard for the Constitution and statutes that has permeated American life. Unfortunately, it is easier for anyone who dislikes a court's or an official's unlawful act to counter it with another unlawful one than to draw all parties back to the foundation of truth.

How, for example, to remind America of, and to drive home to the ruling class, Lincoln's lesson that trifling with the Constitution for the most heartfelt of motives destroys its protections for all? What if a country class majority in both houses of Congress were to co-sponsor a "Bill of Attainder to deprive Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and other persons of liberty and property without further process of law for having violated the following ex post facto law..." and larded this constitutional monstrosity with an Article III Section 2 exemption from federal court review? When the affected members of the ruling class asked where Congress gets the authority to pass a bill every word of which is contrary to the Constitution, they would be confronted, publicly, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's answer to a question on the Congress's constitutional authority to mandate individuals to purchase certain kinds of insurance: "Are you kidding? Are you kidding?" The point having been made, the Country Party could lead public discussions around the country on why even the noblest purposes (maybe even Title II of the Civil Rights Bill of 1964?) cannot be allowed to trump the Constitution.

How the country class and ruling class might clash on each item of their contrasting agendas is beyond my scope. Suffice it to say that the ruling class's greatest difficulty -- aside from being outnumbered -- will be to argue, against the grain of reality, that the revolution it continues to press upon America is sustainable. For its part, the country class's greatest difficulty will be to enable a revolution to take place without imposing it. America has been imposed on enough.

Editor's Note: This version corrects an error that appears the print edition of this article, which incorrectly lists Barack Obama as a research assistant to Laurence Tribe in 1984. He in fact was an assistant to Tribe in 1988-89.

And, in case you think that Rush Limbaugh is a shill for the Republican party, he spent 3 hours discussing this one article on Monday.

An Open Conspiracy To Slant the News
JournoList is a symptom, not the disease, of liberal media bias. By Jonah Goldberg

The JournoList has started to leak like an over-ripe diaper.

Just in case you’ve been living in a cave, or if you only get your news from MSNBC, here’s the story. A young blogger, Ezra Klein, formerly of the avowedly left-wing American Prospect and now with the avowedly mainstream Washington Post, founded the e-mail listserv JournoList for like-minded liberals to hash out and develop ideas. Some 400 people joined the by-invitation-only group. Most, it seems, were in the media, but many hailed from academia, think tanks, and the world of forthright liberal activism generally. They spoke freely about their political and personal biases, including their hatred of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.

That off-the-record intellectual bacchanalia has started to haunt the participants like an inexplicable rash after a wild party during Fleet Week.

Last month, David Weigel, a young Washington Post blogger hired to report on conservative politics, ostensibly from a sympathetic perspective, left the Post thanks to his damning statements on JournoList (conservatives are racists, Rush Limbaugh should die, etc.).

Now the diaper is coming off entirely. Perhaps stretching the diaper metaphor too far, what’s inside JournoList may stink, but it’s no surprise that it does. JournoList e-mails obtained by the Daily Caller reveal what anybody with two neurons to rub together already knew: Professional liberals don’t like Republicans and do like Democrats. They can be awfully smug and condescending in their sense of intellectual and moral superiority. They tend to ascribe evil motives to their political opponents — sometimes even when they know it’s unfair. One obscure blogger insisted that liberals should arbitrarily demonize a conservative journalist as a racist to scare conservatives away from covering stories that might hurt Obama.

Oh, and — surprise! — it turns out that the “O” in JournoList stands for “Obama.”

In 2008, participants shared talking points about how to shape coverage to help Obama. They tried to paint any negative coverage of Obama’s racist and hateful pastor, Jeremiah Wright, as out of bounds. Journalists at such “objective” news organizations as Newsweek, Bloomberg, Time, and The Economist joined conversations with open partisans about the best way to criticize Sarah Palin.

Like an Amish community raising a barn, members of the progressive community got together to hammer out talking points. Amidst a discussion of Palin, Chris Hayes, a writer for The Nation, wrote: “Keep the ideas coming! Have to go on TV to talk about this in a few min and need all the help I can get.” Time’s Joe Klein admitted to his fellow JournoListers that he’d collected the listserv’s bric-a-brac and fashioned it into a brickbat aimed at Palin.

Many conservatives think JournoList is the smoking gun that proves not just liberal media bias (already well-established) but something far more elusive as well: the Sasquatch known as the Liberal Media Conspiracy.

I’m not so sure. In the 1930s, the New York Times deliberately whitewashed Stalin’s murders. In 1964, CBS reported that Barry Goldwater was tied up with German Nazis. In 1985, the Los Angeles Times polled 2,700 journalists at 621 newspapers and found that journalists identified themselves as liberal by a factor of 3 to 1. Their actual views on issues were far more liberal than even that would suggest. Just for the record, Ezra Klein was born in 1984.

In other words, JournoList is a symptom, not the disease. And the disease is not a secret conspiracy but something more like the “open conspiracy” H. G. Wells fantasized about, where the smartest, best people at every institution make their progressive vision for the world their top priority.

As James DeLong, a fellow at the Digital Society, correctly noted on the Enterprise Blog, “The real problem with JournoList is that much of it consisted of exchanges among people who worked for institutions about how to best hijack their employers for the cause of Progressivism.”

For a liberal activist, that’s forgivable, I guess. But academics? Reporters? Editors? Even liberal opinion writers aren’t supposed to “coordinate” their messages with the mother ship.

The conservative movement at least admits it is a movement (even though conservatives outnumber liberals 2-1 in this country). Establishment liberalism, not just in the press but also in the White House, academia, and Hollywood, holds power by refusing to make the same concession. “This isn’t about ideology. . . . We just call them like we see them. . . . We don’t have an agenda.”

The open conspiracy that perpetuates that lie is far more pernicious than any chat room.

On February 18, 2010, I wrote a post titled Progressive Bloggers In The Wizard of Oz, about a trip by several "progressive" bloggers to meet at The White House with Jared Bernstein, Chief Economist to Vice President Joe Biden.

The post carried a photo of serious-looking faces reflecting what I believed -- tongue in cheek -- was "the moment they realized that they were not going to get to meet with the 'chief economist to President Barack Obama.'"

Boy, was I wrong. It was more like a reunion. Of Journolistas.

The "Chief Economist to Vice President Joe Biden" was none other than Journalista Jared Bernstein, who -- thanks to a post at Volokh Conspiracy (via Instapundit)-- I just learned was an adviser to the Obama campaign in 2008 when he was active on the Journolist:

One question that has arisen in the last week is how closely JournoList members, not only discussed how to shape the news to advance the fortunes of Barack Obama, but coordinated with the Obama campaign. Jared Bernstein’s position as an unpaid adviser and surrogate shows that there was at least one direct link between JournoList and the Obama campaign.

In attendance for the meeting at the White House were fellow Journolistas Matthew Yglesias (Think Progress), Tim Fernholz (American Prospect) and Chris Hayes (The Nation). One of the other bloggers in attendance was Oliver Willis, whose name has not surfaced on the Journolist, but who works for Media Matters, so he is practically an Honorary Journolista.

So... An Obama campaign operative interacted on the Journolist with sympathetic media types in the run-up to the election, and then rewarded favored Journolistas with a visit to the White House.

Nothing to see here, move along.

Update: Jennifer Rubin notices the lack of diversity on the Journolist (something I also noted in my February post): "The angry white men and the hate-filled political marionettes aren’t on talk radio. They’re on Journolist."

Dealergate, social justice & the Obama job-killing machine; Update: The race factor

My column today dives into the TARP special inspector general’s audit of the “Factors Affecting the Decisions of General Motors and Chrysler to Reduce Their Dealership Networks.” You can find it at the TARP OIG’s website here. I encourage you all to read through the entire 45-page report. The superficial MSM coverage of the audit, released late Sunday, didn’t do justice to the independent watchdog’s damning indictment of the arrogant bureaucrats in charge of nationalizing the U.S. auto industry — or the devastating consequences of politically-driven “shared sacrifice” with Obama, his SEIU cronies, and campaign lackeys behind the wheel.

Obama had the chutzpah to drag an unemployed car dealership employee laid off by Honda up on stage Monday to attack Republicans over government unemployment benefits. I suggest Republicans match him with a stage full of unemployed Chrysler and GM workers who lost their dealership jobs as a direct result of the capricious mandates of Obama’s non-expert auto experts.

A few trips back down memory lane before we get to the column: I’ve been hounding the Hayekian fatal conceit of Treasury’s TARP peddlers (under both Democrat and Republican administrations) from day one. And I’ve been hounding auto bailout supporters (both Democrat and Republican) since day one. Only the willfully blind and the woefully dumb couldn’t see what was coming.

Everything you need to know about the nightmare of government-controlled businesses can be found in a damning new inspector general’s report on Dealergate. The independent review of how and why the Obama administration forced Chrysler and General Motors to oversee mass closures of car dealerships across the country reveals grisly incompetence, fatal bureaucratic hubris and Big Labor cronyism. No wonder you won’t hear much about the report’s in-depth details in the so-called mainstream media.

Under the guise of “saving” the American auto industry through a bipartisan, taxpayer-funded bailout now topping $80 billion, President Obama’s know-nothing bureaucrats pushed the car companies to eliminate thousands of jobs — with unjustified haste using dubious economic models.

Obama ordered the bailout recipients to “prove” their long-term viability by submitting restructuring plans. But White House and Treasury Department “experts” rejected the auto manufacturers’ proposals, citing the too-slow pace of their plans to reduce their dealership networks over a period of five years. Once the auto companies modified those plans to meet government-backed timelines, the money flowed.

But Neil Barofsky, the federal watchdog overseeing the bank-auto-insurance-all-purpose bailout fund, found that the White House auto industry task force and the Treasury Department “Auto Team” had no basis for ordering the expedited car dealership closure schedules. They relied on a single consulting firm’s internal report recommending that the U.S. companies adopt foreign auto industry models to increase profits — a recommendation hotly disputed by auto experts who questioned whether foreign practices could be applied to domestic American dealership networks.

Team Obama’s government auto mechanics also ignored the economic impact of rushing those closures. According to Barofsky, they discounted counter-testimony from industry officials that “closing dealerships in an environment already disrupted by the recession could result in an even greater crisis in sales.”

The inspector general also noted that “it is clear that tens of thousands of dealership jobs were immediately put in jeopardy as a result of the terminations by GM and Chrysler.” After extensive investigation, the watchdog concluded that “the acceleration of dealership closings was not done with any explicit cost savings to the manufacturers in mind.” Only after Capitol Hill critics — both Republican and Democrat — started questioning the Dealergate decisions did Obama’s auto “experts” come up with market studies and estimated job loss data to assess the impact of their reckless, arbitrary orders.

In sum, the inspector general found: “(A)t a time when the country was experiencing the worst economic downturn in generations and the government was asking its taxpayers to support a $787 billion stimulus package designed primarily to preserve jobs, Treasury made a series of decisions that may have substantially contributed to the accelerated shuttering of thousands of small businesses and thereby potentially adding tens of thousands of workers to the already lengthy unemployment rolls — all based on a theory and without sufficient consideration of the decisions’ broader economic impact.”

This is no surprise, of course, considering the amount of actual auto business expertise among Obama’s auto czars and key staff. That is: zero. Obama’s first auto czar, Steve Rattner, ran a private equity firm in New York before resigning his position amid a financial ethics cloud.

Rattner’s chief auto expert adviser, Brian Deese, is a 30-something former Hillary Clinton/Barack Obama campaign aide and law school grad with no business experience, who openly boasted that he “never set foot in an automotive assembly plant.”

In search of the rationale for Team Obama’s bizarre, job-killing exercise of power over thousands of small car dealerships, the TARP inspector general may have stumbled onto the truth from Bloom. On page 33 of its report, Barofsky writes that “no one from Treasury, the manufacturers or from anywhere else indicated that implementing a smaller or more gradual dealership termination plan would have resulted in the cataclysmic scenario spelled out in Treasury’s response; indeed, when asked explicitly whether the Auto Team could have left the dealerships out of the restructurings, Mr. Bloom, the current head of the Auto Team, confirmed that the Auto Team ‘could have left any one component (of the restructuring plan) alone,’ but that doing so would have been inconsistent with the President’s mandate for ‘shared sacrifice.’”

In the wake of Joe Wilson's crude outburst, many network commentators (and Jimmy Carter, of course) are weighing in on the new racism that supposedly explains 1) rising opposition to Obamacare and 2) the president's sinking polls. I think this is a disastrous political move to save a health-care plan that simply has not appealed to a majority of Americans. I suspect it will result in another 5-point poll slide.

To prove their charge, those who allege racism would have to show empirically that the present angry rhetoric eclipses what was said about and done to Bush. It does not yet.

We don't see the word "hate" used in mainstream publications like The New Republic and the Guardian, as it was during the Bush years. (Even worse, really unspeakable things were done to Bush in novels and films.) "You lie" is about on par with the past statements of a Rep. Pete Stark or a Howard Dean ("I hate Republicans"), or the booing Democrats at the 2005 State of the Union. The extremists at the demonstrations are in smaller numbers so far than those who turned out against Bush and the Iraq War. A senior figure like John Glenn or Al Gore has not called the current president a Nazi or brownshirt.

A better explanation than right-wing racism for the Left's exasperation is that in the Bush wilderness years, the Left assumed permanent political marginalization, adopted an ends-justify-the-means strategy of street rhetoric against Bush, then found themselves unexpectedly as the establishment, and now are appalled that anyone might emulate their own past emotional outbursts.

As a political tactic, the accusation of racism makes no sense (especially when someone like Maureen Dowd has to invent the word "boy" to provide the evidence). This week the Internet and Drudge splashed around a number of provocative incidents that could be interpreted as racially polarizing — Kanye West (who has a history of racist accusations) crudely grabbing a mike from a young singer to praise another contestant; Serena Williams (whose father has made a number of racist comments about tennis and its protocols) caught on tape threatening to injure to a rather small and meek line judge; and the retread clips of Van Jones accusing whites of polluting black neighborhoods and having a greater propensity to kill en masse in schools.

The elite media take on all that, of course, is that these are pre-selected race-baiting incidents publicized to inflame the Tea Party base. But others, perhaps a majority of voters, would see that argument as counterintuitive, and instead would worry that the larger society is becoming racially polarized — and that the subtext of Jones, Williams, and West is that a number of prominent figures are expressing a great deal of anger at whites and others.

The voter that Obama needs to keep will look at these incidents far differently than a CNN or MSNBC commentator, and will wonder what might have happened had a Bush White House czar claimed blacks were racial polluters or prone to kill, or had a white-male country-music singer stolen the mike from a small young black woman to praise another white country singer. So there will be a class distinction in how these incidents are seen, and it will result in the media elite's alleging white racism at exactly the same time that the blue-collar voter draws the exact opposite lesson.

Obama himself wisely called West a "jackass" and accepted Wilson's necessary apologies, but the larger question is why the Left is now nearly unhinged about criticism of a black liberal president, when it was silent (well, there was always Harry Belafonte . . .) about the racial implications of the constant and vicious anger directed at Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, not to mention the rather personal, condescending attacks on Alberto Gonzales. For that matter, the ubiquitous Pete Stark once said some particularly unkind and racist things about former health and human services secretary Louis Sullivan (who is black).

Throughout his presidential campaign, then-candidate Barack Obama promised the American people: "If you're a family that's making $250,000 a year or less, you will see no increase in your taxes." After he became president, Barack Obama reiterated that pledge, promising the American people in his Sept. 9 health care press conference: "The middle-class will realize greater security, not higher taxes." But Obamacare does contain tax hikes. Tons of them. From taxes on tanning beds to taxes on employment and investments, Obamacare is a certified job-killing machine.

None of these taxes touches the lives of every American as closely as the individual mandate to purchase health insurance. For the first time in American history, Obamacare forces all Americans to purchase a product or face sanction from the Internal Revenue Service. This is clearly a tax, as pointed out by ABC News' George Stephanopoulos during a Sept. 20 interview with the President himself. In an exchange that can only be described as "Clintonesque" Stephanopoulos pressed President Obama to admit his individual mandate was a tax. But President Obama refused to acknowledge reality and denied it. Stephanopoulos was forced to read the definition of "tax" straight from Merriam Webster's Dictionary. But even then Obama refused to come clean: "George, the fact that you looked up Merriam's Dictionary, the definition of tax increase, indicates to me that you're stretching a little bit right now. . Nobody considers that a tax increase." Well nobody but President Barack Obama's Justice Department.

The New York Times confirmed Friday that in preparation for defending constitutionality of the Obamacare individual mandate in court, an Obama Justice Department legal brief argues that the penalty used to enforce the mandate is "a valid exercise" of Congress's power to impose taxes. Mr. Obama's own Justice Department further repudiates the President's earlier statement by noting that the penalty is imposed and collected under the Internal Revenue Code, people must report it on their tax returns and that the Congressional Budget Office estimates that it will cost Americans $4 billion a year. Yale Law School professor Jack Balkin told a meeting of progressive activists last month that President Obama "has not been honest with the American people about the nature of this bill. This bill is a tax."

The fact that the Obama administration and their allies are now admitting the individual mandate is a tax betrays their very real fear that the Supreme Court could find Obamacare's individual mandate unconstitutional. In the bill itself, Congress identified the Commerce Clause as the source of its authority to force all Americans to buy health insurance. But, as our legal team has made eminently clear, the mandate does not purport to regulate or prohibit commerce of any kind. To the contrary, it purports to "regulate"-and penalize-inactivity. If the Supreme Court allows the Obamacare individual mandate to stand, then Congress could do anything it wanted. They could: require us to buy a new Chevy Impala each year to support the government-supported auto industry; require us to buy war bonds to pay for the Iraq and Afghan wars; or force us to eat our vegetables.

But even if the Obama administration is now admitting the individual mandate is a tax, that still does not make the law constitutional. Rather than operating as a tax on income, the mandate is a tax on the person and is, therefore, a capitation tax. So the 16th Amendment's grant of power to Congress to assess an income tax does not apply. The Constitution does allow Congress to assess a capitation tax, but that requires the tax be assessed evenly based on population. That is not how the Obamacare mandate works. It exempts and carves out far too many exceptions to past muster as a capitation tax. The Obamacare mandate is still unprecedented and unconstitutional.

But perhaps more importantly, what does the episode say about the integrity of the White House? The President went on national television and insisted in unequivocal terms that his individual mandate was not a tax. Now his administration is saying the exact opposite. At what point do the American people lose all faith in this president's word?

When I heard last week that the White House would be announcing the number of "jobs created or saved" as a result of the 2009 American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, my first reaction was embarrassment.

Imagine how Christina Romer must feel. The chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors was dressed in a cheery, salmon-colored jacket, a complement to the upbeat news she had to deliver on July 14. The $787 billion stimulus enacted in February 2009, which subsequently grew to $862 billion, increased gross domestic product by 2.7 percent to 3.4 percent relative to where it would have been, and added anywhere from 2.5 million to 3.6 million jobs compared with an ex-stimulus baseline.

"By this estimate, the Recovery Act has met the president's goal of saving or creating 3.5 million jobs -- two quarters earlier than anticipated," Romer said with a straight face. (More than 2.5 million non-farm jobs have been lost since ARRA was enacted in February 2009, all of them in the private sector, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.)

How does the CEA arrive at these numbers? It uses two methods, Romer said. The first is a standard macroeconomic forecasting model that estimates the multiplier effect of fiscal policy. (The government's spending is someone else's income.) The second method is statistical, using previous relationships between GDP and employment to project future behavior.

These numbers might just as well have been pulled out of a hat. Recall that it was the same model and method the administration used in January 2009 to predict an unemployment rate of 7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2010 with the enactment of the fiscal stimulus and 8.8 percent without. The unemployment rate now stands at 9.5 percent.

This same model convinced policy makers that the subprime crisis was contained, encouraged the rating companies to slap AAA ratings on collateralized garbage, and led banks to believe they had adequately managed their risks and reserved for potential losses.

Econometric models rely on the assumption that $1 of government spending generates more than $1 of GDP, the so-called multiplier effect. There is no allowance for the negative multiplier on the other side.

Sure the government can spend money and generate GDP growth in the short run: Government spending is a component of GDP!

What it giveth it taketh away from the private sector via taxation or borrowing. Every dollar the government spends is a dollar the private sector doesn't spend, an investment it doesn't make, a job it doesn't create. This is what is unseen, as Frederic Bastiat explained in an 1850 essay.

"If the administration wants to take credit for `jobs created or saved,' it should also accept responsibility for 'jobs destroyed or prevented,'" said Bill Dunkelberg, chief economist at the National Federation of Independent Business.

Ignoring the flaws in the stimulus for the moment, Congress raised the hurdle for hiring entry-level workers when it refused to delay the third step in a three-stage minimum wage increase last year. And the Department of Labor cracked down on unpaid internships, outlining six criteria that businesses had to satisfy in order to hire someone willing and able to work for nothing to get the experience.

For example, the employer must derive "no immediate advantage from the activities of the trainees, and on occasion the employer's operations may actually be impeded."

At the White House briefing last week, Romer touted the leveraging of public investment with private funds, with $1 of Recovery Act funds partnering with $3 of outside spending. Romer said this public spending "saved or created 800,000 jobs" in the second quarter alone.

Once again, what would have happened in the absence of the government's targeted intervention?

According to a June 2009 study by the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, Missouri, well over half of the companies on the Fortune 500 list, and almost half of the fastest growing companies in America, were started during a recession or bear market. Dunkelberg calls this phenomenon "negative push starts." People might not be willing to quit their jobs, but if they get laid off during a recession and were thinking about starting a business, they might seize the day, he said.

"When people ask me when the best time to start a company is, I tell them the day before the recession ends," Dunkelberg said. "They can do it on the cheap, and the next day you get cash flow."

What's more, firms less than five years old are responsible for all of the net new jobs created in the U.S., the Kauffman study found. Job creation by start-ups is more stable, less sensitive to the business cycle.

So, if the goal is to create more jobs, and start-ups are the ones that create them, why is the Obama administration partnering up with existing firms?

"Job-creation policies aimed at luring larger, established employers will inevitably fail," said Tim Kane, Kauffman Foundation senior fellow in research and policy and author of a follow-up study released this month.

(read into the U.S. Congressional Record January 10, 1963 by A. S. Herlong, Jr. of Florida in the House of Representatives

3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament [by] the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.

4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.

8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev's promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.

9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.

11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)

16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.

17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.

19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.

20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.

22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."

23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art."

24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.

25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.

26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy."

27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a "religious crutch."

28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."

29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.

30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."

31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.

32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.

33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.

38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand [or treat].

39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.

40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.

41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.

42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use ["]united force["] to solve economic, political or social problems.

43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.

45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction [over domestic problems. Give the World Court jurisdiction over nations and individuals alike.

Documentation Note: The Congressional Record has only been digitized for years 1983 to Present, which are available on the Internet at:

http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/aces/aaces190.html Each state university library is a federal repository and an excellent source for the Congressional Record and other government records. Congressional Representatives can also supply page copies of the Congressional Record to their constituents that ask for specific information. Microfilm: State University Library Federal Repositories Congressional Record, Vol. 109 88th Congress, 1st Session Appendix Pages A1-A2842 Jan. 9-May 7, 1963 Reel 12 State University Libraries will also have the book. Book title page: Skousen, W. Cleon. Naked Communist, The Salt Lake City, Utah: Ensign Publishing Co. C. 1961, 9th edition July 1961.

Pictures of those on the JournoList (you ought to recognize a couple faces in this group and at least one face from the White House). Much has been made of the racial makeup of the TEA party gatherings; notice that most of these journalists are white as well (there are exceptions, just as there are exceptions in the TEA parties):

http://iowntheworld.com/blog/?p=29858

So far, 64 names confirmed from the JournoList:

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/07/known_journolisters.html

Kathleen Parker plays down the importance of the JournoList (this is a nothing story about a few journalists who just wanted to gather and speak their minds):

RUSH: Once in a while -- it doesn't happen very often -- once in a while you stumble across an article, an essay that demands to be widely disseminated. This one that I stumbled across is from the July-August issue of the American Spectator, and the title is: "America's Ruling Class and the Perils of Revolution." It's by Angelo Codevilla. Ladies and gentlemen, it prints out to 16 pages. Have you read it, Snerdley? It prints out to 16 pages. I could read the whole thing to you, and only I have the ability to probably do that without boring you to tears and sending you elsewhere. But I'm not even going to try to do that. It is so good, it is so timely, it is so thorough and complete, it's difficult to cherry-pick. It's difficult to pick a couple or three pull quotes to give you an idea. The reason this appeals to me is that it dovetails with something that I have been trying to explain for 20 years on this program, and it's come to a head now with the election of Obama. And, you know, for 20 years I have gotten the question, "Rush, why don't the Republicans do X?" And I have struggled to come up with answers to this question. Every time I'm asked, I search for a different answer.

One of the things I've always settled on to try to explain to people is that people never really get out of high school. That the whole concept of the big clique and wanting to be part of it dominates everybody's life: the quest for power, the quest for acceptance, the quest to be in the "in" crowd, however it's defined. I've told you over the years that one of the reasons the Republicans are whatever the way they are in Washington is because Washington is a culture and a place that is run and dominated, not just politically, but socially, and I've always said that this is crucial to understand, 'cause this is the big clique aspect. Washington is dominated politically and socially by Democrats, by the left. The Republicans also live there. Everybody wants to get along with who you live next to, and in Washington, the center of power in the world, everybody wants to be in the ruling class. The ruling class is the subject of this piece by Angelo Codevilla, who is professor emeritus at Boston University. It is just a wonderfully written and crafted piece.

Here's a couple pull quotes, but again, getting into various pull quotes will not do this piece justice: "Today's ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits." This resonated with me because in explaining Obama to everyone. I said this is how he was raised; this is how he was educated; this is what he believes: America is the problem in the world -- so do members of the ruling class. The ruling class, it's important to understand, is not based on merit. In fact, the ruling class contains many educational failures. People who would otherwise have flunked out of college were it not for their connections to others in the ruling class.

Another pull quote: "Getting into America's 'top schools' is less a matter of passing exams than of showing up with acceptable grades and an attractive social profile. ... Since the 1970s, it has been virtually impossible to flunk out of American colleges. And it is an open secret that 'the best' colleges require the least work and give out the highest grade point averages," which explains in part why we've never seen Barack Obama's transcripts or his writings or anything else from Harvard or the Harvard Law Review because they don't exist. He was put in that position for reasons having nothing to do with merit, and the people in the ruling class do not rise on the basis of merit; they rise on the basis of connections, saying the right things, thinking the right things, doing the right things according to the code that is established.

We, in what Mr. Codevilla calls, the country class, meaning not the hick class, but the country, we are the country. The ruling class is a minority, and I have touched on this. We are being ruled, i.e., governed by a minority. Less than 10, 15% of Americans agree with the thought process, the philosophies, the goals and objectives of the ruling class. And we in the country class, we believe in merit. We rise or fall based on merit. We believe that a good GPA is what's necessary to get you into college. We believe that performing well on the job is how you get promoted and how you get paid well. Not true in the ruling class. In fact, that is looked down upon. It's sort of like the old money versus new money business. The old money, inherited from robber barons of the past, great wealth. The people who inherited it don't do anything for it, but it has great lineage. People who have earned great wealth rather than having inherited it are shunned by the old-money people because it's working class to have earned money. It's just not done. It's considered gauche, it's considered filthy. And it's much the same way with merit throughout the ruling class. You don't have to be the best. In fact, if you do the right things and say the right things, you can be an abject failure meritocracy-wise and still be promoted.

This resonated with me in so many ways. I grew up wanting to be in radio, and when I moved to New York in 1988 my objective was to become the most listened to person on radio. Not top five, not top ten, but the most listened to. And I did it. It didn't count for anything with those people. And yet there are people who never have had any audience, who still don't have any audience, who are widely accepted members of the ruling class, who are considered very powerful simply because they walk the walk, they talk the talk, they kiss the right rear ends and do all of this. But the point is these people are a minority, and they have no relationship to the rest of us in the country class. And somehow we are now being ruled by these people. We're not being governed. We're being ruled by them. And they have certain beliefs right now. Among them is that the United States is the problem in the world. Among them is that those of us not in the ruling class haven't the smarts, haven't the ability to know what's best for ourselves. They have to do it for us.

There's a story that this explains in great detail. There was a Washington Post story on Sunday. A lot of people sent this to me. "Rush, Rush, Rush, look at this. Look at Trent Lott's quotes, look at this! What are the Republicans doing?" Same old question. I was inundated with e-mail about this. Here's the headline, and it's by Shailagh Murray. "Republican Lawmakers Gird for Rowdy Tea Party -- So who wants to join Rand Paul's 'tea-party' caucus? 'I don't know about that,' Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) replied with a nervous laugh. 'I'm not sure I should be participating in this story.' Republican lawmakers see plenty of good in the Tea Party, but they also see reasons to worry. The movement, which has ignited passion among conservative voters and pushed big government to the forefront of the 2010 election debate, has also stirred quite a bit of controversy. Voters who don't want to privatize Social Security or withdraw from the United Nations could begin to see the Tea Party and the Republican Party as one and the same.

"Paul, the GOP Senate nominee in Kentucky, floated the idea of forming an official caucus for tea-party-minded senators in an interview in the National Review as one way he would shake up Washington. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), one of the movement's favorite incumbents, filed paperwork on Thursday to register a similar group in the House 'to promote Americans' call for fiscal responsibility, adherence to the Constitution, and limited government.'" And there you have the Tea Party, and that threatens establishment Republicans. And people say, "Why?" How in the world could this threaten established Republicans? We think this is the ticket to victory. We think there's never been a greater opportunity to contrast what we believe with what is happening. We are watching our country be bankrupted right in front of our eyes and they're smiling and laughing at us while they do it, and the Republicans to one degree or another are joining in.

"Some Republicans worry that tea-party candidates are settling too comfortably into their roles as unruly insurgents and could prove hard to manage if they get elected." Really? So here the Tea Party represents the salvation -- remember when I have said, and you know this, that Reagan was considered an embarrassment to the Republican upper class? They agreed with Tip O'Neill, Reagan was a dunce. They couldn't do much about it because the guy won landslides. But they had no appreciation for him. These are the people who are embarrassed of the pro-life movement, 'cause they have to go to Republican conventions with those people. And their friends in the Democrat side of the ruling class tease them and give them grief over being at a party with a bunch of hayseed hick pro-lifers, which is not acceptable thinking, pro-lifism, not acceptable thinking in the ruling class.

"Some Republicans worry that tea-party candidates are settling too comfortably into their roles as unruly insurgents and could prove hard to manage if they get elected. Paul, who beat GOP establishment favorite Trey Grayson in Kentucky's primary, told the National Review that he would seek to join forces with GOP Sens. Jim DeMint (S.C.) and Tom Coburn (Okla.), 'who are unafraid to stand up' and who have blocked numerous bills advanced by both parties deemed by the pair as expanding government." And here we get to the meat of the piece. "Former Senate majority leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.), now a D.C. lobbyist, warned that a robust bloc of rabble-rousers spells further Senate dysfunction. 'We don't need a lot of Jim DeMint disciples,' Lott said in an interview. 'As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them.'" And he's not even in the Senate! He's now a lobbyist. So all of you looking at the Tea Party thinking it's the Republican Party's salvation, the Republican members of the ruling class are just as threatened by the Tea Party as the Democrats are. Because the Tea Party is outsiders; the Tea Party is not in the big clique; the Tea Party does not want to be in the big clique. The Tea Party wants to wrest power away from the big clique. The problem, and as Mr. Codevilla's piece points out is, what vehicle does the Tea Party use?

It gets really interesting. This I will share with you, it's the end of the piece. The only vehicle available to the Tea Party right now is the Republican Party. And what do they do? You and I, have we not, we have been saying -- well, some have said third-party route, clearly this piece demonstrates that's a failure, but others have been saying that the future of the country depends on the conservative movement retaking the Republican Party. Now, here we have people like Trent Lott, everybody's assumed is a conservative all along, now being threatened by the arrival of a Tea Party caucus, ah, ah, ah, ah, "'We don't need a lot of Jim DeMint disciples. As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them.' But Lott said he's not expecting a tea-party sweep. 'I still have faith in the visceral judgment of the American people.'"

So he thinks that you, the American people will see the Tea Party for the rabble-rousers they are and will not elect anybody from the Tea Party or anybody who believes things the Tea Party believes because you really do not want Washington shaken up. You like the ruling class running the show. "Sen. Robert F. Bennett (R-Utah), who failed to survive his party's nominating process after running afoul of local tea-party activists, told a local Associated Press reporter last week that the GOP had jeopardized its chance to win Senate seats in Republican-leaning states such as Nevada and Kentucky and potentially in Colorado, where tea-party favorite Ken Buck has surged ahead of Lt. Gov. Jane Norton in their primary battle. Bennett warned that such candidates are stealing attention from top GOP recruits such as Mike Castle in Delaware and John Hoeven in North Dakota, both of whom are favored to win seats held by Democrats." But it is not in the cards for these Tea Party people to win. And this explains it, in part, this piece.

Now, it's at the American Spectator. We'll link to it at RushLimbaugh.com, as I say, we'll be talking about it extensively during the program today, along with all the other things in the news. It's 16 pages, much too long to read in its entirety here. But it explains so much, and it's so thorough, and it dovetails so nicely with some of the theories I have evolved to explain or answer your questions, "Why don't the Republicans do X?" You notice that Trent Lott displays more anger and more hostility toward any potential new conservative members of the Republican Party than he would ever display to even the most radical of his Democrat congressional colleagues, who led the charge to get him out of leadership in the Republican Party. But he was taken care of. He's now a lobbyist. It all works out. The ruling class takes care of its members who follow their own rules. Geithner is a perfect example. He's never held a real job in his life, doesn't have the slightest clue how to fix anything. He wouldn't know how to fix a broken lightbulb. He wouldn't know how to fix anything that's broken. The men in the country class are the fixers and they're looked upon with disdain.

RUSH: Trent Lott's resignation became effective at 11:30 p.m. on December 18th, 2007. On January 7th, 2008, it was announced that Trent Lott and former Senator John Breaux (Democrat-Louisiana) had opened their lobbying firm about a block from the White House. The ruling class takes care of its own. And the ruling class is Democrats and liberals in Washington and everywhere -- New York, Washington. Washington is the power capital of the world and the financial capital of the world as well. The ruling class also does not work. The ruling class is involved in nonprofits. The ruling class seeks their wealth from government, and more and more and more people do. There's a story today in the stack. While the rest of the country in the Summer of Recovery is hurting, Washington is expanding. Washington's doing great. The people who live and work in the ruling class in Washington are prospering because government is prospering.

Government is prospering because government is raiding the private sector. Government's raiding the country class, if you will. The way this piece starts out: "As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors' 'toxic assets' was the only alternative to the U.S. economy's 'systemic collapse.'" They all agreed. You and I did not. You and I fought this bailout, remember? They told us, "We have 24 hours! If we don't do this, the country collapses, the economy collapses." It finally took two weeks of persuasion by the ruling class to convince enough people because the Republicans, conservatives in the country, were not buying into it. They didn't believe any of it. The majority of the American people did not want the bailout yet it happened anyway, and look what it got us.

RUSH: From Angelo Codevilla's piece, the American Spectator, July-August 2010 issue: "When this majority [us] discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections [to the TARP bailout] seriously, that decisions about their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term 'political class' came into use. Then, after those in power changed their plans from buying toxic assets to buying up equity in banks and major industries but refused to explain why, when they reasserted their right to decide ad hoc on these and so many other matters, supposing them to be beyond [our] understanding, the American people started referring to those in and around government as the 'ruling class.'

"And in fact Republican and Democratic office holders and their retinues show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one another than between both and the rest of the country. They think, look, and act as a class. Although after the election of 2008 most Republican office holders argued against the Troubled Asset Relief Program, against the subsequent bailouts of the auto industry, against the several 'stimulus' bills and further summary expansions of government power to benefit clients of government at the expense of ordinary citizens, the American people had every reason to believe that many Republican politicians were doing so simply by the logic of partisan opposition. After all, Republicans had been happy enough to approve of similar things under Republican administrations.

"Differences between Bushes, Clintons, and Obamas are of degree, not kind. Moreover, 2009-10 establishment Republicans sought only to modify the government's agenda while showing eagerness to join the Democrats in new grand schemes, if only they were allowed to." Well, this resonated with me because I plaintively say, "Why do you Republicans continue to accept their premise on everything and then deal with it on the margins? Why do we accept the premise that there must be a health care overhaul? Why do we accept the premise that there must be a stimulus package? Why do they set the agenda?" This piece is partially the answer: They're all part of the ruling class. The Republicans want to be even more accepted in the ruling class. They want to be even more powerful. They want to be considered part of it. They want to be in the clique.

And as such, they do not wish to make any waves. "Sen. Orrin Hatch continued dreaming of being Ted Kennedy, while Lindsey Graham set aside what is true or false about 'global warming' for the sake of getting on the right side of history. No prominent Republican challenged the ruling class's continued claim of superior insight, nor its denigration of the American people as irritable children who must learn their place." Peter Jennings, after the House elections of 1994, said, "The American people threw a temper tantrum." Peter Jennings, as all of the Nightly News anchors are, was part of the ruling class. No participant in talk radio will ever be a member of the ruling class, and the day that a talk radio personality becomes a member of the ruling class is the end of that talk radio personality's career.

"No prominent Republican challenged the ruling class's continued claim of superior insight, nor its denigration of the American people as irritable children ... The Republican Party did not disparage the ruling class, because most of its officials are or would like to be part of it. Never has there been so little diversity within America's upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America's upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter.

"The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government, and 'bureaucrat' was a dirty word for all. So was 'social engineering.' Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday's upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed. Today's ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits.

"These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints." You must believe in this, or you cannot be in the ruling class. "Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters -- speaking the 'in' language -- serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector.

"Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America's ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government." There is a story. This piece, when you read it in toto, will have you reacting to everything you see in dominant media, mainstream media in a different way. By the way, the media (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Washington Post, New York Times, LA Times) are all part of the ruling class. They're not journalists. They're all part of the ruling class or want to be part of the ruling class.

So Jim VandeHei and Zachary Abrahamson yesterday in Politico, reality gap: "U.S. Struggles, D.C. Booms ... The massive expansion of government under President Barack Obama has basically guaranteed a robust job market for policy professionals, regulators and contractors for years to come. The housing market, boosted by the large number of high-income earners in the area, many working in politics and government, is easily outpacing the markets in most of the country." This is in Washington. "And there are few signs of economic distress in hotels, restaurants or stores in the D.C. metro area. As a result, there is a yawning gap between the American people and D.C.'s powerful when it comes to their economic reality -- and their economic perceptions.

"A new Politico poll, conducted by market research and consulting firm Penn Schoen Berland, underscores the big divide: Roughly 45 percent of 'Washington elites' said the country and the economy are headed in the right direction, while [only] 25 percent of the general population said they felt that way. The sample of Washington elites was aware of its propitious situation: Seventy-four percent of those surveyed said the economic downturn has hurt them less than most Americans. They should be self-aware, given the economic indicators for people who live and work in the area." Victor Davis Hanson on July 17th, a little post here at the National Review Corner: "It's surreal to see President Obama play the class-warfare card against the Republicans while on his way to vacation on the tony Maine coast, and even more interesting to note that now gone are the days when the media used to caricature Bush I ('Poppy') for boating in the summer off the preppie-sounding Kennebunkport.

"The truth is that the real big money and the lifestyles that go with it are now firmly liberal Democratic. One can use an entire array of evidence -- the preponderance of Wall Street money that went to Obama over McCain in 2008, the liberal voting patterns of the high-income blue-state congressional districts, the anecdotal evidence of a Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, or George Soros, or the ease by which an eco-populist like Al Gore buys estates and creates corporations, or the rarified tastes of men of the people like John Edwards of two-nations fame, or John Kerry of multiple estate residences. Bill Clinton was perhaps the first liberal president to embarrass progressive populists, who by rote caricatured those who played golf or amassed millions in post-presidential huckstering. The point is that Barack Obama's 'them' rhetoric against those who supposedly make tons of money and won't pay enough in taxes to fund the Obama technocratic class's redistribution schemes seems almost fossilized. ...

"In short, Obama had better get the populist photo-ops down a lot better, since his calls to soak the rich from the 18th hole or the coastal vacation home look increasingly ridiculous." Well, they look increasingly ridiculous to us, but they are applauded by Obama's fellow members of the ruling class. I could spend the whole show on this piece today. I could spend the next two hours and 15 minutes dissecting this and relating it to things that I have said over the past 20 years or news items that happen to be prominent today. It's that good. It is that thorough and it is that explanatory -- and, most importantly, it is easily understandable by all who read it. Here's what I said January 19th, 2009, on TARP: "However, this is the danger. When the government gives you money, they do have some say-so over how you use it.

"In fact, in most cases, if somebody gives you money, they're going to try to exercise some control over either how you use it, or when you give it back, or how you pay it back, one of those things. When somebody gives you something, you owe 'em, big time. Even though you think it's not a loan, you get a gift, here in the areas we're talking about, you're in for it. But aren't we creating, aren't we just redoing the same thing that got us in all this mess in the first place, letting incompetent, unqualified members of Congress tell the banks what they must do and how they must run their business? So we're not bailing out banks. It's clear now we're not bailing out banks. We are taking control of them. That's what this is."

That's how I described TARP on January 19th, 2009. And if you'll recall back then, none of us supported that bailout. We didn't buy the unified claims of disaster that were coming from all corners of the political and financial worlds. The unison was just too much, and they were all saying the same thing, and even the members of the ruling class financial media said, "Neil, if we don't act for 24 hours, it could be a disaster!" and Cavuto was saying, "I don't buy it. I don't buy that we're in that great a danger. Nobody's shown me the evidence of it." We still had to do it -- and Republicans joined right in, McCain joined right in with making all this happen. It's a great piece. Once again, it's "The Ruling Class," by Angelo Codevilla, American Spectator, the July-August 2010 issue.

RUSH: The two classes, the ruling class and us, the country class, and the ruling class is a minority. It's 10 to 15% of the thinking of the country, if that. "The two classes have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century's Northerners and Southerners -- nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them, 'prayed to the same God.' By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God 'who created and doth sustain us,' our ruling class prays to itself as 'saviors of the planet' and improvers of humanity. Our classes' clash is over 'whose country' America is, over what way of life will prevail, over who is to defer to whom about what. The gravity of such divisions points us, as it did Lincoln, to Mark's Gospel: 'if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.' ... Who are these rulers, and by what right do they rule? How did America change from a place where people could expect to live without bowing to privileged classes to one in which, at best, they might have the chance to climb into them? What sets our ruling class apart from the rest of us? The most widespread answers -- by such as the Times's Thomas Friedman and David Brooks -- are schlock sociology. Supposedly, modern society became so complex and productive, the technical skills to run it so rare, that it called forth a new class of highly educated officials and cooperators in an ever less private sector.

Similarly fanciful is Edward Goldberg's notion that America is now ruled by a 'newocracy': a 'new aristocracy who are the true beneficiaries of globalization -- including the multinational manager, the technologist and the aspirational members of the meritocracy,'" those of us who think doing great things will get us into the big clique. "In fact, our ruling class grew and set itself apart from the rest of us by its connection with ever bigger government, and above all by a certain attitude. Other explanations are counterintuitive. Wealth? The heads of the class do live in our big cities' priciest enclaves and suburbs, from Montgomery County, Maryland, to Palo Alto, California, to Boston's Beacon Hill as well as in opulent university towns from Princeton to Boulder. But they are no wealthier than many Texas oilmen or California farmers, or than neighbors with whom they do not associate -- just as the social science and humanities class that rules universities seldom associates with physicians and physicists.

"Rather, regardless of where they live, their social-intellectual circle includes people in the lucrative 'nonprofit' and 'philanthropic' sectors and public policy. What really distinguishes these privileged people demographically is that, whether in government power directly or as officers in companies, their careers and fortunes depend on government. They vote Democrat more consistently than those who live on any of America's Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Streets. These socioeconomic opposites draw their money and orientation from the same sources as the millions of teachers, consultants, and government employees in the middle ranks who aspire to be the former and identify morally with what they suppose to be the latter's grievances."

Brief time-out. You see, I could go on with this the whole show. I'm still on page three and I haven't even shared everything on pages one and two with you.

RUSH: Membership in the ruling class depends much less on high academic achievement. It depends on something far more important, and that is a willingness to say, act, believe, and recite the things the ruling class believes, whether you're a failure at what you do or not.

RUSH: This is just too important, it is just too right on, right on, right on, Angelo Codevilla, The Ruling Class, in the July-August issue of the American Spectator. Now, as I mentioned at the top of this, being the best at what you do does not get you into the ruling class. You can be the best at what do and have no prayer of getting into the ruling class just as in high school you coulda been cool and all that and if you just weren't judged to be right you're not going to get in the big clique. Nobody ever gets outta high school except it gets more serious as the big cliquers graduate from high school and move on.

Angelo Codevilla: "Professional prominence or position will not secure a place in the class any more than mere money. In fact, it is possible to be an official of a major corporation or a member of the U.S. Supreme Court (just ask Justice Clarence Thomas), or even president (Ronald Reagan), and not be taken seriously by the ruling class. Like a fraternity, this class requires above all comity -- being in with the right people, giving the required signs that one is on the right side, and joining in despising the Outs." So when Trent Lott says, "Tea Party? We're going to have to find a way to co-opt 'em if they win a lot of power in the Senate." That's exactly what the ruling class wants to hear.

"Once an official or professional shows that he shares the manners, the tastes, the interests of the class, gives lip service to its ideals and shibboleths, and is willing to accommodate the interests of its senior members, he can move profitably among our establishment's parts. If, for example, you are Laurence Tribe in 1984, Harvard professor of law, leftist pillar of the establishment, you can 'write' your magnum opus by using the products of your student assistant, Ron Klain." In other words, you don't write it; your assistant does. "A decade later, after Klain admits to having written some parts of the book, and the other parts are found to be verbatim or paraphrases of a book published in 1974, you can claim (perhaps correctly) that your plagiarism was 'inadvertent,' and you can count on the Law School's dean, Elena Kagan, to appoint a committee including former and future Harvard president Derek Bok that issues a secret report that 'closes' the incident. Incidentally, Kagan ends up a justice of the Supreme Court. Not one of these people did their jobs: the professor did not write the book himself, the assistant plagiarized instead of researching, the dean and the committee did not hold the professor accountable, and all ended up rewarded. By contrast, for example, learned papers and distinguished careers in climatology at MIT (Richard Lindzen) or UVA (S. Fred Singer) are not enough for their questions about 'global warming' to be taken seriously. For our ruling class, identity always trumps."

So, it is a great example. Everybody totally lied. Not one genuine, authentic action by a whole cadre of people, but the circle the wagons. Dan Rather, the George Bush National Guard story proven to be based on fake documents. What happened? Brokaw and Peter Jennings circled the wagons, and the big members of the ruling class of journalism gave Rather a career award. And none of them did anything right. But they are in the ruling class. Now, instinctively, all of us know this, instinctively we think something's not right here. These people claim to be the best and brightest, and yet the real best and brightest, the smartest among us, the people who actually make the country work are looked upon with disdain, and they are discounted, no matter where they are, and particularly if they happen to live in the South.

"Much less does membership in the ruling class depend on high academic achievement. To see something closer to an academic meritocracy consider France, where elected officials have little power, a vast bureaucracy explicitly controls details from how babies are raised to how to make cheese, and people get into and advance in that bureaucracy strictly by competitive exams. Hence for good or ill, France's ruling class are bright people -- certifiably. Not ours. But didn't ours go to Harvard and Princeton and Stanford? Didn't most of them get good grades? Yes. But while getting into the Ecole Nationale d'Administration or the Ecole Polytechnique or the dozens of other entry points to France's ruling class requires outperforming others in blindly graded exams, and graduating from such places requires passing exams that many fail, getting into America's 'top schools' is less a matter of passing exams than of showing up with acceptable grades and an attractive social profile. American secondary schools are generous with their As. Since the 1970s, it has been virtually impossible to flunk out of American colleges. And it is an open secret that 'the best' colleges require the least work and give out the highest grade point averages. No, our ruling class recruits and renews itself not through meritocracy but rather by taking into itself people whose most prominent feature is their commitment to fit in." The conformists; the people who will sacrifice their own identity; the people who will sacrifice who they really are in order to be accepted by people they think are their betters.

"The most successful neither write books and papers that stand up to criticism nor release their academic records," i.e., Obama. "Thus does our ruling class stunt itself through negative selection. But the more it has dumbed itself down, the more it has defined itself by the presumption of intellectual superiority." They think they're smarter than everybody else and in truth they are dumbing everyone -- Ted Kennedy, a classic example of the ruling class, cheated in college, responsible for the death of a girl, and look, he became such a lion that even Karl Rove admired him, a lion in the Senate. People wanted to be Ted Kennedy, a distinct member of the ruling class.

CALLER: And I'm constantly amazed at how you remain relevant after that much time.

RUSH: Remain relevant? I am more relevant than ever before. I'm somewhat amazed myself actually, but it's true.

CALLER: Well, your opening monologue today in particular resonated with me. It illustrated something I've felt for a long time but also reminded me of a point in your history where I disagreed with you, and that was back in the primaries leading up to the 2008 election when you came out a little bit harsh on Governor Huckabee for his populism and did what I think at the time pretty much sink his candidacy, partly because I think you represent the non-ruling class, and you represent the attitudes and feelings of a great many Americans, many of whom I believe are Democrat. I know that you have a reputation in the Drive-By Media as representing only a slim group of Republicans, but I don't believe your program would have been or continue to be as successful as it is if you didn't tap into what I think is essentially a broad-based feeling in America that's evidenced today in the Tea Party movement and in the candidacies of some of these new faces and new voices in America that I think represent the same kind of the things that Governor Huckabee and Sarah Palin represented in terms of a non-ruling class, open-minded candidate that sought to tap into the frustrations that you've tapped into for 20 years. So I think the only mistake I've ever heard from you -- and I know you're correct 99-point whatever percent of the time.

CALLER: Yeah. But that .4 probably for me was at that point in time when we lost Governor Huckabee's voice for issues that I think were prescient and are particularly needed right now.

RUSH: Wait a second. Did I lose things for Governor Huckabee or did he make a deal with John McCain?

CALLER: Well, I think in the end you're right, that he did make a deal with John McCain --

CALLER: Yeah, all of that was history, but at the very point when you began to depart from his candidacy because of his populism, I'm not sure that you were as in touch then as you are now to the seething anger that's motivating the grassroots in America right now. America is tired, Rush, of anti-capitalism. The country has an abiding faith in capitalism.

CALLER: And capitalism, even if you're a labor union member or a public corporation executive, capitalism is the only means for people of all stripes to accumulate the capital necessary to forward their lives.

RUSH: Here's the thing. You have just swerved into something. That's what we in the country class believe. The people in the ruling class have proved it's not true. The most incompetent, the most inexperienced can get wealthy. They simply have their snoots in the public trough of government money. They live off government. That's one of the points of Mr. Codevilla's piece here and really, when you get down to it, folks, it's all about money, always follow the money. The left and the ruling class love to say that they do things out of altruism, out of compassion, big hearts, and these people are a bunch of lazy SOBs who have no business in the private sector 'cause they can't succeed there. The only way they can succeed is to be a bunch of brownnosers in the ruling class and try to move their way up that ladder and get whatever they can out of the public trough. The ruling class has gotten rich off of government. It has not gotten rich in the private sector and therefore the private sector does threaten them. The private sector is where the ruling class would fail. The ruling class is essentially made up of people who have never even been in the private sector, never held a job, never made a payroll, don't understand at all.

These are the kind of people, Obama and Steve Rattner and these guys that come along after they buy up Chrysler and GM and order all these dealerships closed under the guise of saving money or saving the industry, when in fact they put a whole bunch of people out of work, and in the process they shut down a lot of economic activity in communities where these dealerships were. They're threatened by the private sector. They couldn't compete with the average successful person in the private sector. What's maddening about this is that they have the audacity and the gall to portray themselves as better than us, better than everybody else, smarter. We're too stupid, you see, to understand what's best for us. That's why we need them in charge of our health care; that's why we need them in charge of our salt intake, of our trans fat intake and obesity for our children. That's why they're talking about dinners now being served in school, because parents simply aren't responsible enough to feed their kids right, otherwise they'll be fat slobs and put strain on the American health care system. This is an insidious bunch of people.

The ruling class has a fear. They know that they are a minority and they know that their time is gonna come. They know that their ruling class status can't be sustained. It hasn't been throughout history. There have always been revolutions. And this piece, by the way, Mr. Codevilla touches on what happens next. What is the revolution because he points out that the ruling class of today is far more discriminatory and punishing than King George was of the colonists in the days of our revolution, and the Tea Party is the modern equivalent of our revolutionary. But how do they do it? In our structure today, he points out they need a party. The tea party needs a political mechanism in order to revolt and replace the ruling class. And if it's the Republican Party -- well, I'll not try to paraphrase what Mr. Codevilla says. I'll make sure I share with you his point on that as the program unfolds. But, you know, you talk about Huckabee, I opposed Huckabee and McCain during the primaries, and McCain was part of the ruling class. I mean when you talk about reaching across the aisle, when your campaign slogan is, "I can work with the other side and be bipartisan," you're basically acting as a slave to the ruling class, saying, (imitating McCain) "Please, accept me, accept me, I want to be in your group, see, I'll work with you, I'll sell my side out, just to be with you, I'm getting old, I want to be happy before I pass away."

Folks, human nature is human nature. Doesn't matter whether you're in high school or even if you achieved power in high school, what does it mean, you got the cheerleader, big deal. You achieve power in Washington, and become a member of the ruling class, you really don't have to work in order to become wealthy. You do not. This is the point. We in the country class believe that success and wealth, however we define it, is the result of achievement, competence, merit. It's not rewarded in the ruling class. In fact, it is disdained. Merit, accomplishment, achievement, it's almost a threat to many. At the end of the day would you trust Barack Obama to run anything in your personal life? Would you trust him to run your business, be a CEO, a COO, would you trust him to do that? Would you trust Barney Frank? Would you trust Nancy Pelosi, Chris Dodd? Of course you would not. Who's running the show nevertheless? I ask you.

RUSH: Harry Truman! Harry Truman like Ronaldus Magnus was never, definitely never admitted to the ruling class. And here's a great quote from Harry Truman: "I remember when I first came to Washington. For the first six months you wonder how the hell you ever got here. For the next six months you wonder how the hell the rest of them ever got here." Truman never figured it out, which is why he was never admitted into the ruling class.

RUSH: "The ruling class's appetite for deference, power, and perks grows. The country class [us] disrespects its rulers, wants to curtail their power and reduce their perks. The ruling class wears on its sleeve the view that the rest of Americans are racist, greedy, and above all stupid. The country class is ever more convinced that our rulers are corrupt, malevolent, and inept. The rulers want the ruled [us] to shut up and obey. The ruled [us] want self-governance. The clash between the two is about which side's vision of itself and of the other is right and which is wrong. Because each side -- especially the ruling class -- embodies its views on the issues, concessions by one side to another on any issue tend to discredit that side's view of itself. One side or the other will prevail.

"The clash is as sure and momentous as its outcome is unpredictable," but it's coming, and "In this clash, the ruling class holds most of the cards: because it has established itself as the fount of authority, its primacy is based on habits of deference. Breaking them, establishing other founts of authority, other ways of doing things, would involve far more than electoral politics. Though the country class had long argued along with Edmund Burke against making revolutionary changes, it faces the uncomfortable question common to all who have had revolutionary changes imposed on them" and we have, "are we now to accept what was done to us just because it was done? Sweeping away a half century's accretions of bad habits -- taking care to preserve the good among them -- is hard enough.

"Establishing, even reestablishing, a set of better institutions and habits is much harder, especially as the country class [us] wholly lacks organization. By contrast, the ruling class holds strong defensive positions and is well represented by the Democratic Party. But a two-to-one numerical disadvantage augurs defeat [for them], while victory would leave it in control of a people whose confidence it cannot regain. Certainly the country class lacks its own political vehicle -- and perhaps the coherence to establish one. In the short term at least, the country class [us] has no alternative but to channel its political efforts through the Republican Party," not a third party!

"[T]hrough the Republican Party, which is eager for its support. But the Republican Party does not live to represent the country class. For it to do so, it would have to become principles-based, as it has not been since the mid-1860s. The few who tried to make it so the party treated as rebels: Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. The party helped defeat Goldwater. When it failed to stop Reagan, it saddled his and subsequent Republican administrations with establishmentarians who, under the Bush family, repudiated Reagan's principles as much as they could. Barack Obama exaggerated in charging that Republicans had driven the country 'into the ditch' all alone. But they had a hand in it."

CALLER: Mega dittos, Rush, just another fake caller calling in. I think this has been a brilliant show today, bringing up this piece. I'm so pleased to see it.

CALLER: I have been a Republican Party activist all my adult life. I've been doing this for 40 years now, and I'm also a Tea Party activist. Obviously for those of us who are Republicans, we have been so pleased to see the rise of the tea parties because the people that are coming in are really no different than us. Now, what I need to point out is there's a real difference between the grassroots of the party, who are Goldwaterites, Reaganites, by and large, and the elected party, the people in office. And this is where this piece today, it hints on this, it talks about how the country party, you know, achieves political power. Well, for the time being, he's pointing out, it has to be through the Republican Party. I think that can be done in the long run, but the key is the country party has to understand how to take over the Republican Party. And it's very possible, but it's made more difficult because of a whole series of laws that have restricted access to the ballot and access to the parties over the years.

CALLER: But there have been an interesting series of Supreme Court decisions going back to a decision in 1952 called Ray vs. Blair that established the constitutional rights of association that a political party has to decide who it wants to associate with. That's not only who its members are, but who its candidates on the ballot will be. Now, this is a state-by-state thing. But in the long run, if people begin to understand how they can take over their state parties and start to control who their nominees for office are, then you can achieve the revolution through the party. The other option, as the author has pointed out, is form a new party, but that is much more difficult today than it was a hundred years ago.

RUSH: Well, that's not even thinkable. I mean that just guarantees the ruling class will have power in perpetuity. Look, since you brought it up, let me go to that section of the piece on what to do now, what can we, the country party, do. I'll give you another great illusion of the ruling party, the ruling class. You can look at the election contest between John McCain and J. D. Hayworth for the Republican Senate nomination in Arizona. During the campaign for president in 2008, McCain could not tell us enough how we had nothing to fear from an Obama administration. He would always tell us, (imitating McCain) "My friends, you have nothing to fear. Nothing whatsoever to fear from an Obama administration." However, he would never say that about Hayworth, about Hayworth he will tell Arizonans, "You have everything to fear about J. D. Hayworth," a fellow Republican. But he would never, ever tell people in a presidential campaign that they had anything to fear from an Obama administration. There's the ruling class in action.

Now, McCain, for all I know, might have thought that the Obama administration would be a disaster, but he would never say so. That would exempt him from membership in the ruling class, and he had worked very hard to gain that membership. He had gone on a lot of television shows and ripped into his own party. He had worked very hard. The media, it was said, was his base at one time. Now, we warned Mr. McCain once the ruling class has its own candidate, you are not going to have the media in your camp, and it turned out to be the case. Now, here's Mr. Codevilla in the American Spectator piece, "America's Ruling Class and the Perils of Revolution ... Certainly the country class lacks its own political vehicle -- and perhaps the coherence to establish one. In the short term at least, the country class has no alternative but to channel its political efforts through the Republican Party, which is eager for its support. But the Republican Party does not live to represent the country class. For it to do so, it would have to become principles-based, as it has not been since the mid-1860s.

"The few who tried to make it so the party treated as rebels: Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. The party helped defeat Goldwater. When it failed to stop Reagan, it saddled his and subsequent Republican administrations with establishmentarians who, under the Bush family, repudiated Reagan's principles as much as they could. Barack Obama exaggerated in charging that Republicans had driven the country 'into the ditch' all alone. But they had a hand in it. Few Republican voters, never mind the larger country class, have confidence that the party is on their side. Because, in the long run, the country class will not support a party as conflicted as today's Republicans, those Republican politicians who really want to represent it will either reform the party in an unmistakable manner, or start a new one." But that's bad news.

Now, we are taking over the Republican Party. A lot's going to depend on the presidential nominee as well. Our battle is as much with those in the Republican Party who defend statism as with the radicals in the Democrat Party. It's a two-step process. It can be done, it was done with Reagan, and Reagan was not 200 years ago. This is where I disagree with Mr. Codevilla a little bit. It can be done. But even the ruling class undermined Reagan, second term, managing to take advantage of various things to get ruling class members into his administration, chief of staff, and other positions of influence. Now, "to defend the country class --" that's us "-- to break down the ruling class's presumptions, it has no choice but to imitate the Democrats, at least in some ways and for a while. Consider: The ruling class denies its opponents' legitimacy. Seldom does a Democratic official or member of the ruling class speak on public affairs without reiterating the litany of his class's claim to authority, contrasting it with opponents who are either uninformed, stupid, racist, shills for business, violent, fundamentalist, or all of the above. They do this in the hope that opponents, hearing no other characterizations of themselves and no authoritative voice discrediting the ruling class, will be dispirited."

They call us all these names hoping to dispirit us. They call the Republicans all these names hoping to dispirit them. And it's worked. The Republicans are not gonna criticize Obama because they're scared to death of being called racist. If you want a short answer to, "Why don't the Republicans do X?" it's because they're afraid to death of being called racist by the ruling class and the ruling class media. Or they're afraid to be called fundamentalist or shills for business or what have you. So the intimidating tactics of disrespecting and silencing your opponents has worked, and this is what we must do, is Mr. Codevilla's point. "For the country class seriously to contend for self-governance, the political party that represents it will have to discredit not just such patent frauds as ethanol mandates, the pretense that taxes can control 'climate change,' and the outrage of banning God from public life. More important, such a serious party would have to attack the ruling class's fundamental claims to its superior intellect and morality in ways that dispirit the target and hearten one's own. The Democrats having set the rules of modern politics, opponents who want electoral success are obliged to follow them." And this we have said over and over again.

There is going to be an apparatus in place, thanks to these people, to use the power of government against them when we get it back. The question is will the people that represent us have the guts to do so? "How the country class and ruling class might clash on each item of their contrasting agendas is beyond my scope. Suffice it to say that the ruling class's greatest difficulty -- aside from being outnumbered -- will be to argue, against the grain of reality, that the revolution it continues to press upon America is sustainable. For its part, the country class's greatest difficulty will be to enable a revolution to take place without imposing it. America has been imposed on enough." So it must be a self-starting thing. It can't be the result of phone calls. It can't be the result of faxes and all this to Washington. It has to start on its own, and guess what the Tea Party is? It's exactly that. But it can't be the result of members of Congress calling people, "Hey, come to Washington, we need to have a strong force here to oppose this or that, 20,000 bodies." No, no, no. It's gotta happen on its own. It can't happen by being imposed upon. I understand what he means by that.

RUSH: Angelo Codevilla, professor emeritus, Boston University, wrote the piece in the American Spectator: "The Ruling Class." It's linked to at RushLimbaugh.com if you don't know the American Spectator's web address. We shut down their website early today when we first recommended it, but they're back up and running now. But it is a brilliant piece, folks, and it's important. It's not often that I say that. I was shopping for antiques once just for the hell of it. I mean, it was no big deal. It was in Paris, and I noticed the technique of the salespeople. I'm looking at some supposed relic from the regime of Louis the "Fow-teenth," as they said.

Well, I very seldom use the word important, and this piece is important. It's important, and I'm gonna admit one of the reasons I am captivated by it is that it encapsulates things that I have been saying for 20 years or maybe 15 years. I was excited to read this because it lays it all out. Now, this piece is going to be ignored. You take a look, you notice which so-called conservative websites ignore this piece. You take a look at which conservative blogs, media sites ignore it. And it will answer a lot of the questions. It will be ignored by a lot of Republican leaders -- and those who ignore it, or those who rip it to shreds, will be telling you who they are or who they want to be (i.e., members of the ruling class). You know, the reason Reagan could never get in? Reagan said, "I don't care who gets credit, as long as it gets done." Ha! The rule class is all about getting credit even when it fails, getting credit for doing it right.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. You know, there's a guy I used to listen to a long time ago named Jeff Christie? I don't know whether you ever met him. Really good guy, but I really do like listening to Rush Limbaugh instead of Jeff Christie.

RUSH: Thank you, sir, very, very much. I appreciate it. Jeff Christie didn't get to say very much.

CALLER: Speaking of my favorite sign for tea party these days should say, "It doesn't matter what this sign says, you'll still call it racist."

RUSH: Yeah, that sign has shown up at every tea party gathering, and it is true.

CALLER: I want a bumper sticker with that on it, and I'm actually thinking about buying one. There's a place where you can buy bumper stickers and I'm thinking buying one and putting it on there and giving it to a few people.

RUSH: You know, this also explains -- we had a caller who was going to mention this but the caller dropped off. This also explains the hysterical reaction to Sarah Palin. It totally explains the reaction to Sarah Palin. She doesn't give a rat's rear end about being part of the ruling class and represents a big threat to it. I've always told you: The ruling class will tell you who they most fear.

RUSH: Let's go back to September 20th, 2009, This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Obama was being interviewed by a fellow member of the ruling class, George Stephanopoulos, who says, "Merriam-Webster's Dictionary defines tax as 'a charge, usually of money, imposed by authority on persons or property for public purposes.'"

OBAMA: George, the fact this you've looked up Merriam's dictionary, that -- uh, the definition of tax increase indicates to me that you're stretching a little bit right now. Otherwise you wouldn't have gone to the dictionary to check on the definition.

STEPHANOPOULOS: I wanted to check for myself. Your critics say it is a tax increase.

OBAMA: My critics say everything's a tax increase! My critics say that I'm taking over, uhh, every sector of the economy. You know that. Uh, eh, eh, eh, eh... Look, we can have a legitimate debate about whether or not we're going to have an individual mandate or not, but --

RUSH: Now, here's what's interesting about this. He "rejects" the fact that this individual mandate, the fact that we have to go buy health insurance, is a tax. So there's a lawsuit out there. Attorneys general from various states, a bunch who work in a law school saying, "Hey, the federal government cannot mandate the American people buy anything. It's the Commerce Clause. You can't do it." So what has the Obama administration now said? In defending that lawsuit, the Obama administration says that the individual mandate is a tax, that they have the authority to levy and raise taxes. So Obama lied through his teeth. Everything about health care that he said was an out-and-out lie! Small firms are now no longer able to provide health insurance.

Small insurance companies no longer able to provide it, and they're gonna send people in Massachusetts, the state, to do it, and that's coming in the federal version of health care as well. The private sector insurance companies are hanging by a thread. They're not going to be around long. On purpose. But Obama now has to go out and say, in order defend this lawsuit against the individual mandate, "No, it's not a mandate. We're not mandating everybody buy health insurance. It's a tax, and we have the authority to levy and raise taxes." All the while denying as he just did to Stephanopoulos (that's back in 2009) that it was a tax. So now back to Mr. Codevilla: the 2010 medical law is a template for the ruling class's economic modus operandi. "The 2010 medical law is a template for the ruling class's economic modus operandi: the government taxes citizens to pay for medical care and requires citizens to purchase health insurance.

"The money thus taken and directed is money that the citizens themselves might have used to pay for medical care. In exchange for the money, the government promises to provide care through its 'system.' But then all the boards, commissions, guidelines, procedures, and 'best practices' that constitute 'the system' become the arbiters of what any citizen ends up getting. The citizen might end up ... dependent on all the boards and commissions that his money also pays for and that raise the cost of care. Similarly, in 2008 the House Ways and Means Committee began considering a plan to force citizens who own Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) to transfer those funds into government-run 'guaranteed retirement accounts.'

"If the government may force citizens to buy health insurance, by what logic can it not force them to trade private ownership and control of retirement money for a guarantee as sound as the government itself? Is it not clear that the government knows more about managing retirement income than individuals?" Is it not clear? Who says they do? Yet this is how the ruling class operates.

RUSH: This is Alan in Birmingham. Alan, thank you for calling, thank you for waiting, welcome to the EIB Network.

CALLER: I want you to know that I really appreciate you giving me a chance to express myself. I've been holding this in my craw for years. I don't know what you remember exactly, but when the Lewinsky thing came up and they announced it, they had all the CBS announcers and all that. Schieffer was very indignant as a father of girls in the defense of Lewinsky and the fact that an older man would take advantage of her. Then suddenly, maybe hours later, he mollified his views and decided, "Well, it's his personal sexual life." Well, Schieffer is no man.

RUSH: -- that a powerful man would take advantage of Lewinsky because Schieffer has daughters?

CALLER: Yeah. You would be like me. I raised four children, two girls. By God, if that had happened to my girl I would have been after him, you know?

CALLER: Yeah. That's what I'm saying. It happened so long ago but I want you to know once he saw maybe his job was in jeopardy he mollified his views to the more conventional idea: "Well, it was his personal sexual life." Like heck it was! If that had been my daughter I'd have been in his face, you know?

RUSH: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So Schieffer modified his views, "Wait a minute," and went along with the conventional wisdom which was, "Hey, it's his private sex life. It didn't affect the way he was doing his job."

CALLER: Oh, I'm certain they did. Yeah. I'm sure it was his job. I'm sure it was the way he wanted to present it.

CALLER: I know it. It's so long ago but I want you to know I've always held that had in my heart, that Schieffer is not much of a man.

RUSH: Right on, right on, Alan. Thanks very much for the call. Let's go back to last Sunday, CNN's Reliable Sources, Howard Kurtz interviewing Bob Schieffer about his interview with Eric Holder, and Kurtz says, "Let's start with the obvious question: 'Why did you not ask Eric Holder about the former justice official's allegation that the case against the New Black Panther Party was dropped because of racial politics?'"

SCHIEFFER: I was on vacation that week. Uh, this happened; apparently it got very little publicity, and I just didn't know about it. I mean, God knows everything but, uh, I'm not quite that good.

SCHIEFFER: Every once in a while something will slip by me and in this case it just slipped by me. If I'da known it, I'da asked about it. I've known about this lawsuit. Uh, this is about something that happened back in 2008, but I think any reasonable person would also answer: There hasn't been a lot of news about it until this Justice Department official came forward.

RUSH: Yeah, and the Justice Department official came forward before you went on vacation! The Justice Department official came forward a couple or three weeks ago. But I think Bob Schieffer's probably telling the truth. I don't think Bob Schieffer did know about it. I don't think Bob Schieffer had the slightest idea. Bernie Goldberg had a great analogy. I'll paraphrase this, but Bernie Goldberg on Fox last night had a great analogy. A terrorist bomb could go off in Bob Schiefferrs neighborhood and kill 30,000 people, but if it wasn't reported in the New York Times, Bob Schieffer wouldn't know it happened. Which is pretty descriptive of the shell that these people all live in. Charlie Gibson! Charlie Gibson didn't know what the ACORN tapes. He was on vacation, too. "Ha, ha, I didn't know about that! I certainly would have asked about it if I'da known about it. I didn't know about it. I had no clue." Brad Sherman (Democrat-California), "I didn't know about this Black Panther case. It wasn't in any of the media that I read." It wasn't. It wasn't in any of the media, because there is no media.

CALLER: I'm so excited to talk to you! My girls are in the other room listening. I called the Monday after the Sunday that the Bob Schieffer piece ran, I was getting ready for church, and I was watching him interview Eric Holder --

CALLER: -- and when he got to that last part and talked about how Americans are cowards about racism and he didn't mention the Black Panther issue, I just couldn't believe it, I was dumbfounded. So Monday around lunchtime that next Monday I was calling, and I called his number, I got it off of the Internet, and he answered the phone. And I couldn't believe it. I said, "Is this Mr. Schieffer?" And he said, "Yes, this is, who is this?" And I said, "It's Linda from Katy, Texas," and he said, "I'm sorry, I don't normally answer my phone, but I'm expecting a call," and I asked him my question, and first he said, "Oh, it just must have been an oversight on my part." So I pressed him a little bit and I said, "If it had been the Klan in front of a polling station I think everyone would have been covering it," and he said, "Well, wait a minute, what are you talking about?" And I gave him all the particulars about what happened in Philadelphia, and he asked me when did this happen, I was like, "Well, at the '08 elections," and I told him he could get on YouTube and search it, he could see the footage of everything. And he said, "I'm sorry, I just don't know what you're talking about. I have not heard this at all." And I'm like, well --

CALLER: Yes. Yes. I called him and he normally doesn't answer his phone but he was expecting a phone call and he picked up his phone.

RUSH: By the way, did you know that there's a Bob Schieffer School of Journalism? It's at Texas Christian University.

CALLER: Wow. Well, I must say he was very nice, very kind, he didn't try and rush me off the phone. He let me ask all of my questions and I told him, "Hey I was born in '67 in Mississippi so any time something like this goes on on either side, I just am always interested," and I just couldn't believe that he didn't ask Mr. Holder the question, but he didn't know.

CALLER: And he seemed just as genuine as he sounded -- I saw the clip with the CNN clip and he sounded exactly like that, I mean he really didn't know.

RUSH: He didn't know about it and I'm sure had he known about it he wouldn't have cared.

CALLER: Yeah. You know, it's a little bit odd how so many things are skewed these days.

RUSH: Remember, there is no media. Bob Schieffer, he thinks of himself as a journalist but he's not a journalist. And he's not a reporter. You know more than Bob Schieffer does about what's going on in your own country. You do. And it's not your profession. It's his profession to know, he doesn't know. And he happily admits it to you. So there is no media. There is no journalism. You know, it's their business to know these things. You make it your business to know. I make it my business to know all this stuff that they're doing. I make it my business to know what's going on in the country. They don't, because that's not their business. Their business is not to know what's going on. Their business is to spread propaganda and advance an agenda, or to stay a member of the ruling class. Now, here's something else, folks, thanks for the call, Linda, I appreciate it. If there is no journalism or there's no media any more than all these polls are worthless, too. We gotta play this all out. We have to stop looking the media for information in all the polling that they do, because their polling is nothing more than, quote, unquote, news making, but we know they don't make news. They advance agendas. They try to shape news. They try to shape opinion and that's the purpose of polling.

RUSH: This whole Shirley Sherrod episode, let me try to put this in perspective. It's about those who produce tape and transcripts versus those who make false accusations and bury stories. It's about facts versus frauds. Very simple. Now, Andrew Breitbart has produced endless film footage and videotape of government malfeasance in the past year. Andrew Breitbart has essentially done investigative journalism. The Daily Caller, Tucker Carlson's website, is producing real transcripts of e-mails by so-called journalists who are nothing more than apparatchiks. The Daily Caller is doing journalism. Sean Hannity had the Jeremiah Wright footage on Fox News long before anybody else did. That was journalism. We've had published leaked e-mails from phony scientists revealing the deep and widespread fraud that became known as Climategate. We have had real journalism exposing the fraud and the hoax that is global warming. None of these instances have yet to be covered by what we're all told is the media. The New Black Panthers voter intimidation case, they don't even know about it. Those who do know about it suppress it.

These e-mails from the Journolist that Tucker Carlson's website has produced reveal, just like the e-mails from the Hadley climate research unit at the University of East Anglia, a conspiracy to suppress real news, damaging to either Obama or damaging to the global warming cause, or plain old damaging period. What has the left produced? In comparison to all of this, what has the left produced? They have produced phony racist quotes attributed to me in an effort to destroy a business transaction. They have produced phony accusations of racism at tea parties. They have produced phony accusations of racial taunts toward a black congressman on health care Sunday. Fake quotes attributed to me, phony accusations of racism, nonexistent racism at tea parties, nonexistent racial taunts toward a black congressman on health care Sunday. They have ignored and/or buried stories about Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama, and every other member of the ruling class. And let's not forget Dan Rather's phony stories about President Bush. And what happens?

It's just like when Laurence Tribe writes his magnum opus book and we find out he didn't write it, some assistant named Ron Klain wrote it. Then we find out Ron Klain didn't write it, he plagiarized it, and then that whole episode was reviewed by the dean at Harvard Law who said there's nothing here, nothing really went on and now she's going to be confirmed for the Supreme Court, that's Elena Kagan. Dan Rather uses forged documents in a story to affect the outcome of an election about George Bush faking or lying about service in the National Guard during the Vietnam War. The documents are proved fake. CBS, to save face, fires Rather. Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings gather with the rest of the apparatchiks in the media and convene an awards ceremony for Dan Rather to protect their own. So what you have here is utterly fake, fraudulent, nonexistent news versus factual, damaging news, the result of real journalism. We have the New Media versus state-run Drive-By propagandist stenographers, apparatchiks for the Democrat Party, so-called elites.

By the way, you have the apparatchiks and then you have the nomenclatura, the nomenclatura, the genuine ruling class, the apparatchiks are the pretenders and the wannabes. They're on the team and they think they're going to one day be accepted in the nomenclatura, but they will never be. They're useful idiots. The nomenclatura, the true ruling elites in the ruling class look at these schlubs in their so-called media and say, "Boy, what a bunch of pawns, we got them right where we want." But they're never going to advance, they're never going to get what they want, they're never going to be at the World Bank, they're never going to be at the Council on Foreign Relations, they're never going to be at these places. They're never going to be people of genuine power. They're going to be used. They're obedient slaves, if you will, who are made to believe that they matter and made to believe that they count in the ruling class. The so-called elites of the ruling class, the scientists, the journalists, the professors, and the politicians, the Four Corners of Deceit, as they have been detailed by me, a parade of smug elitists, collectivists, redistributionists, people who have marginalized professions they inherited, all in the name of bettering the lives of the little people, and they lie in the process. They lie, they smear, and they orchestrate it all.

They do it to control clueless people, clueless peons who don't know better, who can't take care of themselves, who don't know what they want and can't be trusted with money in their own dirty little hands, people the ruling class don't know and don't care to know, bitter clingers, as a grossly under qualified, unaccomplished editor of the Harvard Law Review once called them. By the way, he's now president. And yet these brilliant micromanagers have to make up facts, they have to engage in false accusations. They have to make promises they don't intend to keep with money they don't have in order to get their way. They have disclosed national security secrets. They have promoted accusations that went on for the longest time, re: Valerie Plame, that were not true. They have trashed people who are genuinely effective but who frighten them. Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby. Me. Well, of course me. You can throw me in in all of this. And the reality boils down to this. These elites, be they the apparatchiks or the nomenclatura, they cannot win on facts. Their ideas do not prevail. They are a ruling minority. They rely on lies, union thug enforcers, ACORN crooks, propaganda, they rely on voter fraud. We will see if that's enough going forward. We will see if it's enough. The evidence is in that it's not enough, the evidence is clear they are not fooling a majority of people issue by issue by issue. We'll see soon enough if they are succeeding in all of the sabotage and subterfuge. We shall see very soon.

Government watchdogs say Obama Mortgage Program is not working (one of the many stories you did not hear this week):

Two more massage therapists accuse Al Gore of suffering from too much global warming:

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.

Weatherman Underground 1969 “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

In case you need to reference this, here are the photos of all those on the JournoList:

Janine Turner’s website (I’m serious; and the website is serious too). This is if you have an interest in real American history:

Since this will be with us for a long time, the timeline of the BP gulf oil spill:

This is cool: a continuous timeline of the spill, with the daily info and the expansion of the oil, and the response:

Do you want to watch what is happening on our border? These are actual videos of observations cams along the border:

Celebrity Jihad (no, really). The headline to one story: Heroic Helen Thomas Tells Jews to "Get the Hell Out of Palestine," Go Back to Germany, Poland. Under the heading harlots, there are bunches of photos of starlets showing cleavage or wearing bikinis. This site appears to be deeply tongue-in-cheek.

Legendary White House reporter and founding member of the Muppets Helen Thomas made a heroic stand against the Zionists late last month, telling Jews to "get the hell out of Palestine" and to go home to "Poland and Germany."

Before the Jews sink their devilish claws into Helen, we want to show our solidarity by calling on all Jews to leave Zionist Occupied Hollywood by the end of June, or we shall begin "Operation Gevalt," which will disrupt all shipments of Nova lox to the west coast.

The Freedom Project (most a conservative news and opinion site which appears to concentrate on matters financial)

Weekly poll, asking you to identify what we ought to cut in governmental spending:

Are you tired of all the unfocused news and lame talking heads yelling at one another? Just grab a cup of coffee, sit back, and see what is really going on in the world:

Judith Miller is one of the moderate and fairly level-headed voices for FoxNews:

Conservative New Media (it is so-so; I must admit to getting tired of seeing the interviewer high-fiving Carly Fiorina 3 or 4 times during an interview):

Army Ranger Michael Behenna sentenced to 25 years in prison for 25 years for shooting Al Qaeda operative

Maybe the White House does not need to hold press conferences? It releases exclusive articles daily right here:

This is quite helpful; it is a list of all leftist groups, with links to background information on each of these groups (when I checked, 879 groups were listed). This is a fantastic resource.

One of the more radical people from the right, calling for the impeachment of Obama:

The Center for Freedom and Prosperity, a free enterprise site (there are several videos on the flat tax):

This is a pretty radical site which alleges that Obama is a Marxist hell-bent in taking over our country:

1982 interview with Larry Grathwohl on Ayers' plan for American re-education camps and the need to kill millions

This is an interesting site; it seems to be devoted to the debate of climate change:

This is a news site which I just discovered; they gave 3 minute coverage to Obama’s healthcare summit and seemed to give a pretty decent overall view of it, without slanting one way or the other:

I have glanced through their website and it seems to be quite professional and reasonable. They have apparently been around since 1942.

This is fantastic; Florida (the Sunshine State) is now putting its state budget online:

Suzanne Somers s supposed to be older than Bill O’Reilly? He interviewed her this week, and she looked, well, hot. She is big into vitamins and human growth hormones.

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

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

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.

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

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:

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.