Domestic Policy: April 2009 Archives

Last week we asked what you wanted to do next to build on the Tea Party momentum.

The majority of you believe we must organize locally and build an effective, nationwide network of Americans ready to fight for the values that we hold dear - like stopping politicians from taking and wasting our money.

This is good news, because starting this week we will begin rolling out a new website that will allow us all to communicate with each other, organize groups locally, and take action on local, state and federal issues. 

As you know, there's no shortage of issues we need to tackle.

For example, Claire B. from Lewes, DE wrote to us about the energy tax that Congress is proposing:

"Let's do something about cap and trade. Energy costs have been going through the roof for years. This has cost homeowners a lot of their hardworking money and it looks like this Congress is out for more."

Claire is right. This is no time for a huge new energy tax, and we're already working to stop it.

Last week, none other than Al Gore testified before Congress in favor of this job-killing energy tax bill. Fortunately, our General Chairman Newt Gingrich testified right after to explain why this energy tax bill is wrong for America.

Please take a moment to watch the videos, and learn about this important fight to stop the energy tax.

This is just one of many real policy fights to think about as we decide which issues to organize around on a local level.

Sincerely,

Dave Ryan
President & CEO
American Solutions

Putting a famous Jack Nicholson line to a far worthier purpose, the Li'l President "can't handle the truth" (via Newsmax Insider):

President Barack Obama’s Department of Education sat on a report chronicling the success of a school vouchers program until after Congress had voted not to continue the program.

That’s the report from Deroy Murdock, a media fellow with the Hoover Institution, who exposes the subterfuge in an article published by National Review Online.

The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program allows 1,714 children — 90% of them black and 9% Hispanic — to receive up to $7,500 to attend a private or parochial school instead of a public school in the District of Columbia, which is widely believed to have one of the nation’s most troubled school districts.

Since the program’s launch in 2004, 7,852 students have applied for these grants, and participants have been chosen by lottery.

Obama — who said last year that “you do what works for the kids” — did not intervene as Congress scheduled the program’s end after the 2009-2010 academic year.

“Now it emerges that Obama’s Department of Education  possessed peer-reviewed, congressionally mandated, federally financed research proving this program’s success,” Murdock writes.

“Though it demonstrates ‘what works for the kids,’ DOE hid this study until Congress squelched these children’s dreams.”

An amendment in the Senate to rescue the vouchers program failed on March 10 by a vote of 58-39. The DOE finally released the report on April 3. Even then, DOE researchers were reportedly barred from discussing their findings.

“You’d think we were talking about nuclear secrets, not about a taxpayer-funded pilot program,” An April 5 editorial in the Wall Street Journal reported.

During the March 10 vote, 57 Democrats voted and 54 of them opposed the vouchers program.

Why? Murdock suggested, “Follow the money,” and he pointed out that teachers’ unions shelled out $55,794,000 in political donations between 1999 and 2008, with 96% of the funds going to Democrats.

The “winners” in the Senate vote, he added, are “the teachers’ unions, who hate school choice, hate vouchers, and don’t give a damn about school kids when they threaten union pay, benefits, and control of classrooms."

Surprised?  Still?  In Frigg's name, how?  All the elements of high-octane Obamunism are there: corruption, flagrant dishonesty, dictatorial secrecy, abuse of power, all in service to left-wing fanaticism that anything but pragmatic, public-spirited, or "reality-based".  Their malevolent ideology must prevail, no matter how much it fails and how many lives and futures it destroys.

It's of the same power-abusing hypocrisy that drenches the Napolitano DHS screed against "rightwing extremists":

For eight years, we’ve been treated to hysterical rhetoric from Democrats, including Barack Obama, about the scourge of “domestic spying.” Now that the Obama administration is openly calling for domestic spying — the real thing, not the smear used against President Bush — they’re suddenly silent.

Same equation, minus the corruption.  But why wouldn't they be satisfied?  They always said Bush and the GOP - i.e. the "rightwing extemist radical militia terrorists" - were the "REAL threat"; now that "menace" is being assaulted head-on, Constitution and civil liberties be damned, and those poor, persecuted Muslims can go make their car bombs and weaponized anthrax and nerve gas canninisters and nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles in "peace."

Or what of the leaked classified CIA jihadi interrogation reports that are fueling expectations of a Donk "truth commission" show trial that will expose these agents' identities, which evidently is perfectly permissible and noble when the Langleyite(s) in question are "caught" in an effort to protect their country, but vile, dastardly, and reprehensible when it's an agent no longer "under cover" in any case engaged in an act of partisan political sabotage at direct odds with our national security interests.

It's megalomania.  It's unchecked narcissism.  It's authoritarian moral supremacism.  It's why Democrats abuse any power they can get their hand on.  And it's why America is in such desperate peril.

Peroration to J-Ger:

As we see Obama accepting Chavez's anti-American book with a smile, as we see him traveling around the world and apologizing incessantly, as we see him starting a trade war with Mexico, as we see his Department of Homeland Security demonizing conservatives, as we see him bowing to the Saudi king, as we see him taking a meat cleaver to the defense budget, as we see him doubling already-enormous deficits . . . we find, he is who we thought he was.

And a bag of legirons.

Sorry, Mr. Flaherty, you're a bit late to the party.  Though you more than made up for your tardiness (via Newsmax (Insider):

Peter Flaherty, president of the conservative National Legal and Policy Center, is sharply critical of an experimental vehicle being developed by cash-strapped General Motors.

The vehicle, called the Puma, is an odd-looking two-wheel, two-seat scooter that runs on batteries and can reach a top speed of 35 miles per hour.

Flaherty appeared on CNBC on Tuesday after a prototype of the Puma was unveiled and declared: “I question what GM is doing. They have days and weeks to figure out how the company is going to survive. They don’t have years. What in the world are they doing working on this experimental project?

“Perhaps it has something to do with the availability of federal funding . . . meant to encourage electric cars. That’s what you get when you introduce government money — you get unintended consequences, and in this case, very weird results.”

Flaherty continued his attack on GM, which was granted a $17.4 billion loan by the federal government in December and is seeking additional funding to avoid bankruptcy.

“How long is the taxpayer going to have to fund this process?” said Flaherty, whose organization monitors abuse and corruption in the public and private sectors.

“I want them to build cars that they can sell at a profit to consumers who want them. In a capitalist system, in order for companies to survive at some point they have to turn a profit. When is GM going to turn a profit?

“What I’m worried about is that the 'anticar' activists, who are really behind things like this Puma, want us all riding bicycles. They want us riding bicycles to light rail so that we have socialized transportation.

“And what’s with this name, 'Puma'? I thought the puma was an endangered species. Is it because GM is an endangered company?”

Golly, he didn't leave much for me to add, did he?  So I guess I'll have to leave the finish in the capable hands of Bugs Bunny:

Pete Puma: Well, I think I'll have to be goin' now.
Bugs Bunny: Oh, no, you can't leave yet. You got to have a nice cup of tea with me.
[Drags Pete to a table]
Bugs Bunny: Here we are.
[Serves tea]
Bugs Bunny: There's nothing as sociable as a nice cup of tea, I always say. How many lumps do you want?
Pete Puma: Oh, three or four
Bugs Bunny: [Bugs bunny whacks Pete on the head with a mallet 5 times and 5 lumps appear on his head] Oh dear, I gave you one too many. Well we can fix that.
[whacks the 5th lump back in his head]
Bugs Bunny: There, and here's a cigar for you.
[Bugs shoves the cigar in Pete's mouth and lights it; Bugs runs away; 3 seconds later it explodes]

Rather metaphorical of the entire Hussein administration even more than Government Motors, if you ask me.

Are you beginning to notice the same Obamunist governing pattern I am?  See if you can find Barry's Waldo:

Fox News commentator Steve Milloy, founder of the junkscience.com Web site, tells Newsmax that the U.S. is at “the point of no return” as the Obama administration is set to implement environmental policies that will lead to “energy chaos” in this country.

Milloy, author of the new book Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them, also said the so-called cap and trade plan to reduce carbon emissions could double the cost of electricity and affect every aspect of American life....

The most immediate effect, Milloy said, will be “for your electric bill to go up anywhere from 50 percent to 100 percent or more. But perhaps the most insidious part of that bill is that it will solidify control of energy policy and our economy by the greens.

“Greens are these people who say they are all about the environment, but I think that is the furthest thing they are about. They use the environment as a kind of shield behind which they advance their left-wing, socialist, totalitarian agenda.

“You just look at everything these people want to do. It’s all about government control of our lives. Even if there was an environmental problem that I could agree with them on, their solution is always going to be more government control.”

Is the underlying thread becoming evident yet?  Try Dick Morris' own recognition of it in Obamanomics:

So with the tax code totally changing, Europe about to formulate regulations for our economy, the U.S. government empowered to take over any large company, the deficit and spending reaching unbelievable levels and the feds insisting on continued control of banks, what businessman in his right mind is going to invest in anything?

How could even the most foolish optimist pull the trigger on a business investment without knowing the tax consequences, the regulatory framework and the policy of the banks on lending?

But Obama knows all this. He knows that his steps will delay economic recovery. But he wants these changes, not as means to an end, but as the end itself. And he is determined to get them passed and set in stone while the rubric of "crisis" justifies his doing so.

He is not unlike a leader who takes his country into war, knowing that by "wagging the dog" he can reinforce his power.

The Democrat Financial Logic Bomb got Red Barry elected.  His hard-left, fast-track-to-bankruptcy, "crash" economic, and energy, and health care - just call it domestic - policy course is designed to keep that crisis going, and in reality, to make it permanent.  Because as long as there's a "crisis," Barack Obama and the Donk Poliburo MUST remain in power to "solve" it, dontcha know, no matter what the law and the Constitution and American voters have to say about it.

There is precedent, remember.  The Bolsheviks seized power in the midst of a "crisis" and appointed themselves the "saviors" of the Russian people.  That crisis lasted for seventy-four years.  Of course the Bolshevik solutions were dismal, self-serving failures that had the curious effect of keeping them in absolute power forever, but it was only "fair" that they get all the time and chances they needed to "succeed".

Even in our own history, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the only president prior to the Twenty Second Amendment - and, not coincidentally, the inspiration for it - who had the effrontery to run for a third consecutive term.  For all the FDR-related conspiracy theories about his letting the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor because he wanted to "get America into the war via the back door," you do have to admit that from the standpoint of "maintaining the crisis" in order to keep himself in power, President Roosevelt had pretty much played out the Great Depression and needed a fresh self-serving justification for clinging to office like the burgeoning wannabe dictator he was.  War-related industrial production was taking up the decade-long economic slack, and becoming the "arsenal of democracy" for a large chunk of the planet was going to alleviate his New Deal gravy train.  But plunging into the global conflict outright opened the veil to oodles of new possibilities for expanding federal power over the states, the people, and the private sector that not even "fear itself" had offered.  One might observe that if there hadn't been a Second World War right when FDR needed it, he'd have had to "wag" himself one of his own accord.

For the record, I'm neutral on the FDR/Pearl Harbor conspiracism.  But the timing was opportune for a presidency that actually did outlast Adolph Hitler's fuerhership.  Indeed, if Roosevelt hadn't become so frail by the end of the war (he died at only 63) and had lived on another fifteen or twenty years, I seriously question whether he'd have EVER voluntarily relinquished power, and seriously wonder what crisis he'd have conjured next to justify perpetualizing his reign.

Barry O is simply continuing the tradition.  He's got the votes on Capitol Hill to entrench a level and degree of domestic communization that FDR could only fantasized about, and Soviet rulers from Lenin to Gorbachev would have no difficulties recognizing.  Toss in election-fixing systemic subversions like illegal immigration amnesty, ACORNizing the 2010 Census, and a Goebbelized media establishment, and Lucifer need never worry about 2012 or any other election year ever again, because like Castro and Chavez before him, his will be FDR's dream come true, himself the permanent crisis that We, The People, will have been stripped of the ability to solve for good.

It bears mentioning anew: No people ever knowingly vote themselves into bondage.  And virtually none that do ever manage to escape it.  How many of us truly realize how close to the precipice we really are?

If it's only three hundred sixteen thousand and change, God love 'em, but we're screwed.

UPDATE: Alright, I'll freely and cheerfully acknowledge that as spontaneous across-the-country protests go, six figures is pretty darn respectable.  Particularly in light of my getting somehow lumped in with the "aggressively imbecilic" left on this particular point, not a frequent occurance to say the least.  Probably it seems less impressive because participants weren't all gathered in one place.

The question would seem to be how much of this iceberg is above the surface?  If the ratio is ten to one, we are as screwed as I said we are.  If it's a hundred to one, now you're talking tide-turning, "red"-tide, Contractesque movement.

I'm not much for gimmickry and stunts, which the T.E.A.-bag movement indellibly is.  But if it can be the, or a, vehicle that ends up aborting Obamunism in its creche, more power to 'em.

~  ~  ~

Looks like Congressman Haw-Haw knows his judge-shopping - or favor-calling-in - well.

Or maybe he just does one helluva lap dance:

A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that Representative. John Murtha cannot be sued for accusing U.S. Marines of murdering Iraqi civilians "in cold blood," remarks that sparked outrage among conservative commentators.

The appeals court in Washington dismissed a defamation lawsuit brought by a Marine who led the squad in the attack. The judges agreed with Murtha that he was immune from the lawsuit because he was acting in his official role as a lawmaker when he made the comments to reporters....A three-judge panel on U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found that Murtha could not be sued under the 1988 Westfall Act, which gives federal employees immunity from lawsuits arising out of acts they undertake in the course of their official duties.

Funny, I wasn't aware that defaming American servicemen as well as trying to convict them before they were ever even charged, much less tried (and, you know, all acquitted, with the pending exception of Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich, the shaftee of the D.C. Circuit subpanel), was an "official duty" of a United States Representative.  But by the same token, I would have expected the voters of Haw-Haw's Pennsylvania district to make the same observation in the last two election cycles, and that never happened, either.

D'ya think the breadth of scope of "official duties" would be wider than Rosie O'Donnell's buttcheeks if the object of the vile hatemongering of the Joe McCarthy of our age were instead, say, an avowedly homosexual soldier, sailor, airman, marine, or coast guardsman flouting the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" rule?  Uh-huh.  Almost as impartial and even-handed as the reaction would be if it were minority, instead of military, voters getting disenfranchised at an 80% clip in Haw-Haw's district.

But hey, why should "mass murderers" get equal treatment under the law when we so desperately need STILL MORE Democrats "elected" to spend the next several epochs "solving" all our "crises"?  Evidently three D.C. Circuit Court Judges agree - "impartially," of course.

~  ~  ~

Talk about pushing against an open public relations door:

A Guantanamo detainee phoned a Middle Eastern TV network to say he was severely beaten for refusing to leave his cell, giving the first media interview with someone held at the U.S. prison in Cuba.

Mohammed el Gharani, a 21-year-old from Chad, told Al-Jazeera that guards beat him with batons and sprayed him with tear gas, according to the network. The comments were published on its Web site Tuesday.

The United States never has allowed journalists to interview Guantanamo prisoners, and Al-Jazeera did not say how it managed to speak with el Gharani.

A spokesman for the prison, Navy Lieutenant Commander Brook DeWalt, told the Miami Herald that el Gharani apparently used one of his weekly phone calls to his family to speak to the reporter. The spokesman also said there was no evidence to substantiate the abuse claims.

DeWalt and lawyers for el Gharani did not respond to requests for comment from the Associated Press.

Right, Mohammed.  Would this alleged beating be before or after the 72-virgin conjugal visit, pedicure, and Swedish massage complete with happy ending?  One has to be extraordinarily relaxed, after all, to festoon one's "torture" tale with the enhancement of coming after Red Barry's election, casting it as "Bush getting in as much abuse as possible before Godbama could come to the rescue of poor Mr. el Gharani, al Qaeda, the Taliban, the entire Muslim World, and Allah himself" - and America's imprisoned collective soul as well.  You've got talent to come up with camel dung of this rare quality.

Not that quality matters anymore.  Artful propaganda like el Gharani's could be as gutterally risible as Newsweek's bilious "Koran-flushing" tripe and it would already be in the official Hussein administration terrorism policy narrative.  If this were three years from now I might suspect the White House of planning to make el Gharani an official campaign mascot.  As it is, I guess he'll have to settle for returning to the "glorious battle against the doomed infidel Americans."  Maybe he'll be rewarded with martyrdom duty in the promised Taliban attack on Washington, D.C. that will "amaze the world."

Betcha he's on Murtha's mailing list, though.  Hope he left Haw-Haw's district office a forwarding address.

~  ~  ~

What does an unelected Democrat governor filling out the term of a megalamaniac predecessor who couldn't keep his meat pistol holstered, who stupidly bumbled into public disclosure of his own indiscretions with wine, women, and weed, annnnnnd whose own poll numbers make those that George W. Bush rode off into the Crawford sunset with look positively Clintonesque do now?  Go to Disneyland?  Go out and get wasted?  Go grab Spitz and go cruising for whores?

Nope; you flog the sodomarriage inflatable dominatrix again:

New York Governor David Paterson plans to introduce legislation this week to legalize same-sex marriage, reviving a bill that died in 2007 and still faces strong opposition despite a new Democratic majority in the state Senate.

Paterson, talking to reporters Tuesday in Hempstead [heh], N.Y, said "there is clearly a problem" when gays and lesbians in civil unions are denied 1,200 to 1,350 civil protections such as health care and pension rights because they're not married.

"The timing was always right. It's just who is willing to take that step, and I am," Paterson said. "I think it is, as other states are showing, the only ethical way to treat people who want to live together in peace under the civil law. So my general feeling about all these issues is the right ethical decision will inevitably be the right political decision."

No, Governor, you are the already-expendable-since-you-won't-even-be-running-next-year political crash test dummy who'll get cut to pieces in order to further wear down political opposition to an ethical and moral abomination that, if taken to its logical conclusion, would mean the end of the human species, but which the lavender lobby will kneecap as many parishinors and beat up as many pastors and slash the tires of as many church-goers as it takes to shove, figuratively and literally, their hateful perversion down our throats until we gag into unconsciousness.

Andy Cuomo will get the grinning, camera-flashing, ass-slapping signing ceremony two or three years from now (before it gets reversed in yet another popular referendum, assuming the Dems haven't banned them by then), while David Paterson won't even be a historical footnote - at least outside men's room stall walls.

But heck, if he's a "soldier for the cause," and wants to hang his big, fat 19% approval rating around it, why should the good guys complain?

JASmius adds: But North Korean ICBMs and Iranian nukes are just fine....

What'll it be, Li'l President?  Hard science or partisan pagan superstition?  A hundred more inquiring minds with a lot more horsepower than yours want to know (via Newmax Insider):

Over one hundred prominent scientists from more than a dozen countries — including a Nobel Prize winner — have signed a letter to President Barack Obama charging that his views on climate change are “simply incorrect.”

The letter — sponsored by the Cato Institute — cites a statement Obama made in November: “Few challenges facing America and the world are more urgent than combating climate change. The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear.”

Under the headline, “With all due respect, Mr. President, that is not true,” the scientists state:

“We, the undersigned scientists, maintain that the case for alarm regarding climate change is grossly overstated. Surface temperature changes over the past century have been episodic and modest and there has been no net global warming for over a decade now…

“The computer models forecasting rapid temperature change abjectly fail to explain recent climate behavior. Mr. President, your characterization of the scientific facts regarding climate change and the degree of certainty informing the scientific debate is simply incorrect.”

The 115 signatories include Ivar Giaever, Ph.D., who shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1973 for his work with superconductors at General Electric; John Blaylock, formerly with the Los Alamos National Laboratory; Richard Lindzen, Ph.D., at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and William Gray, Ph.D., the respected hurricane expert at Colorado State University.

The signers include scientists at Princeton University, U.S. Naval Academy, University of Kansas, University of Oklahoma, University of Colorado, and University of Missouri.

Among the countries represented by the signers are Britain, Canada, Italy, Norway, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Argentina and South Africa.

A number of the scientists are current or former reviewers with the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with climate change crusader Al Gore — and have since reversed their views on man-made global warming.

And the Obamunists accused George Bush of putting "politics before science"?  How about their ilk's insatiable ridicule of creation scientists as doing the same with "religion"?  That's the biggest load of projection I've seen in my lifetime.

To redirect a phrase, "the science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear" - THERE IS NO GLOBAL WARMING.  If anything, the climate is cooling, which really would be a global cataclysm that would reduce the habitability of Earth's landmasses, decimate arable farmland leading to mass starvation, and force mass migrations of the survivors from glaciated countries outside the equatorial regions of the planet.  This is doubtless why Roland Emmerich counterintuitively depicted a new ice age as the consequence of a "runaway greenhouse effect" from "man-made CO2 emissions"; presumably nobody would have gone to see The Day After Tomorrow if it showed the cast enjoying themselves on the beaches of Iceland like a Frankie Avalon/Annette Funicello remake, any more than they'd have bought the "clear fact" of the planet Venus being a snowball.

Yet the political religion of the "climate change" hoax demands public submission in inverse proportion to the substantive case to be made for it.  All of which highlights what has always been "clear" about environmental extremism from day one: it's not about "science," but about power.  About "saving the planet" by destroying two centuries of human technological and economic progress.  About primitivism, poverty, pestilence, and pallor for the rest of us and all the modern comforts and conveniences for them.  About creating a real disaster to justify claims of averting a fake one.

Sounds like Obamanomics, doesn't it?  Either that, or Dr. Evil.  Take your pick.

And now, in the person of Red Barry, they have the power to make their dark dream come true.

His likely answer to this letter, if he ever offered one?  "I won."

I guess that's the real face of hopeandchange: Speaking power to the truth.

That's about the only way I can describe my reaction to this:

[I]n a little-noticed move, the House Financial Services Committee, led by chairman Barney Frank, has approved a measure that would, in some key ways, go beyond the most draconian features of the original AIG bill. The new legislation, the “Pay for Performance Act of 2009,” would impose government controls on the pay of all employees — not just top executives — of companies that have received a capital investment from the U.S. government. It would, like the tax measure, be retroactive, changing the terms of compensation agreements already in place. And it would give Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner extraordinary power to determine the pay of thousands of employees of American companies.

The purpose of the legislation is to “prohibit unreasonable and excessive compensation and compensation not based on performance standards,” according to the bill’s language. That includes regular pay, bonuses — everything — paid to employees of companies in whom the government has a capital stake, including those that have received funds through the Troubled Assets Relief Program, or TARP, as well as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The measure is not limited just to those firms that received the largest sums of money, or just to the top twenty-five or fifty executives of those companies. It applies to all employees of all companies involved, for as long as the government is invested. And it would not only apply going forward, but also retroactively to existing contracts and pay arrangements of institutions that have already received funds.

In addition, the bill gives Geithner the authority to decide what pay is “unreasonable” or “excessive.”

And it directs the Treasury Department to come up with a method to evaluate “the performance of the individual executive or employee to whom the payment relates.”

The bill passed the Financial Services Committee last week, 38-22, on a nearly party-line vote. (All Democrats voted for it, and all Republicans, with the exception of Representatives Ed Royce of California and Walter Jones of North Carolina, voted against it.)

Salary controls. The Democrats' dream come true. They wanna tell you how much you're allowed to make. WHY aren't more people pissed off about this?? Oh...because too many Americans are fools who believe that the way to prosperity is bringing down the rich people...you know, the people they want to be like if they had the guts to admit it.

God help us.

JASmius adds: Looks like the wage part of the wage & price controls that'll be coming in a few years after Red Barry's hyperinflation rockets into the ionosphere came a little early.

Remember last September when even most of the Right (Hugh Hewitt in particular) was shrieking that the government just HAD to intervene or the entire financial system would collapse?  This is one of the inevitable results.  When you accept "help" from the government, you bow the knee to them at the same time.  You enter indentured servitude from the first red cent with no hope of ever escaping it.  And you become every bit as corrupt as they are.

BTW, if you think that the feds are EVER going to divest themselves of their ownership interests in the financial and automotive (so far) sectors, at least under the current Donk junta, guess again.  Congressman Lollipop has confirmed it.

[h/t: Double-M]