John Brennan’s ‘Exceptionally Sensitive’ Issue

John Brennan's 'Exceptionally Sensitive' Issue

Total: 3.9K Facebook Twitter Print EmailUnder John Brennan, the CIA operated as an opposition research outfit for the Hillary Clinton campaign. It appears from leaked news stories in the British press that Brennan's oafish spying on Trump began around April 2016, right after Trump's biggest primary victories.

The Reckoning of the FBI Has Begun

The Reckoning of the FBI Has Begun

Friday's firing of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, based on a report from the Office of Professional Responsibility, is only the beginning of what is likely to be the most explosive series of revelations in American history. Forget Watergate. It will be the di...

Behind Cruz's Florida Rampage, Obama's School-Leniency Policy

Behind Cruz's Florida Rampage, Obama's School-Leniency Policy | RealClearInvestigations

Despite committing a string of arrestable offenses on campus before the Florida school shooting, Nikolas Cruz was able to escape the attention of law enforcement, pass a background check and purchase the weapon he used to slaughter three staff members and 14 fellow students because of Obama administration efforts to make school discipline more lenient.

Obama's Scandalous Legacy

Via-WSJ

He has given Americans new reason to distrust the government.

By PETE DU PONT

It's too early to tell if May will be remembered as marking the beginning of a failed second term for President Obama, but it is clear the atmosphere in Washington has changed. We don't yet know the full impact of new revelations about last September's attack in Benghazi, the political abuse of the Internal Revenue Service, and the Justice Department's secret surveillance of journalists, but we do know there are questions in Congress and among a suddenly energetic Washington press corps, questions likely to affect the president's agenda and legacy.

If the scandals do cause long-term damage, it will be because they point to failings of this president and his administration. The Benghazi tragedy shows the naiveté of thinking that our nation would be loved and the world safer simply because of the power of Mr. Obama's personality. The IRS abuses and Justice's snooping on the press, reminiscent of the worst of President Nixon, highlight for all the danger of larger government involvement in our lives.

Because of congressional hearings and some excellent reporting, Benghazi is finally garnering the attention it deserves. It's not often that reporters in the White House briefing room openly challenge this administration, and questions about its actions before, during and after the attack seem likely to remain in the news.

Don't Blow the Opportunity Obama Has Handed Us

Via-American Thinker



By Steve McCann

It appears the Republican Party establishment and some conservative commentators have come up with another mistaken tactic to woo the low information and undecided voters. With the avalanche of scandals swirling around the Obama administration and the Democratic Party, the political message promoted by these politicians and pundits is that these scandals are the outcome of a government that has grown too large to control and should therefore be dramatically cut back.


The Republican Party landscape is littered with the carcasses of failed strategies and this approach will also not succeed. First, it is nearly impossible to explain in simple and easily understood terms why the government is too large and how that aided in creating the scandals and economic difficulties the nation faces. Particularly when the largely uninformed target audience is either dependent on government or has been led to believe government is the ultimate arbiter of prosperity. Second, while there is no question that government must get smaller, the exponential growth of government is not the cause of the scandals. Rather it too is an end-product of a process whose origin is basic and easily grasped.


The American founding fathers understood that government expands and becomes tyrannical not because it is inherently corrupt, but government, because of its unique role in the affairs of a nation, can easily be transformed into an overwhelming instrument of oppression and self-aggrandizement. That transformation occurs over an extended period of time primarily as a consequence of political and national leaders who are devoid of character, honor and integrity seeking to amass power and ego gratification, regardless of the long-term implications to the well being and future of the country.


This process, while slowly evolving over the past eighty years, has hit the crisis point with the most corrupt and ideological administration in American history, coupled with the massive infiltration of government agencies andf the mainstream media by those motivated by ideology, greed and narcissism. Thus the scandals presently monopolizing the headlines are not the direct result of out of control government but the near total lack of ethics, honesty and integrity among those in government and increasingly throughout society in general.


Barack Obama is the culmination of this process. A glaring indicator of his lack of character is that he is inordinately adept, with the help of a sympathetic media, at dodging any responsibility while claiming no knowledge of the goings on in his administration; preferring instead to have other bear the brunt of blame and any consequences. Further, having been raised in a 1960's radical milieu, he is a firm believer in the bedrock tenet of socialism/Marxism: the end justifies the means in defeating one's political enemies. Anyone who is steeped in that viewpoint must, by necessity, be devoid of honor and integrity.


Barack Obama has not hidden his animosity to Republicans in Congress, the Tea Party Movement, the alternative media, evangelical Christians, conservatives, the Catholic Church or any other entity that espouses any philosophical belief counter to left-wing extremism. He considers these groups to be implacable adversaries that must be destroyed. Since Obama's first inauguration he and his administration have utilized the propaganda and regulatory machinery of the government, with the aid of far too many sycophants in the mainstream media, to marginalize and overwhelm these groups.


Therefore, lying about what happened at Benghazi and allowing four Americans to be sacrificed on the altar of expediency in order to win an election is justified. In the mindset of those currently in power, this is not a lie or obfuscation and above all these actions are certainly not an immoral act, as the greater good has been served. Thus Barack Obama and his fellow-travelers will adamantly refuse to ever admit any wrong doing and those that insist that they do so must be vilified.


Never has any presidential administration in American history, including Richard Nixon, attacked so vociferously the foundational tenets of free speech and freedom of the press. Under the guise of seeking out those leaking so-called national security secrets the Obama Justice Department attacked and is threatening to prosecute the reporters and media outlets publishing the stories. This has never been done before as the media has a constitutional right to report and seek out the news. If classified information is revealed, then the culpability lies with those who leaked the information, not the media. These actions by the Obama administration, reminiscent of the many despots in the past century, are geared to silence and intimidate the press from exposing the errors and mistakes of the White House and the servile executive branch it oversees.


In another time those in the management of the IRS would have instinctively known that it would be unethical and morally wrong, never mind illegal, to target and leak confidential information about the political adversaries of the person occupying the White House. Particularly as that agency wields vast power over the American people and as such those that work there have been granted a unique responsibility and place in society. Today, however, pleasing the political hierarchy, whose directives they were following, in order to garner promotions or acceptance by their ideological peers is more important.


This nation is mired in a crisis. It is a lack of honor and integrity in the nation's ruling class and a plurality of the citizens that has brought about the economic and societal deterioration the nation is experiencing. The United States will continue this precipitous decline until this failing is reversed.


The Republican Party Establishment and the conservative movement must focus on and promote this easily understood cause of not only the ongoing scandals of Obama and the Democratic Party but of the nation's woes in general. As many national polls clearly indicate, a large majority of the American people still view character as a vital and necessary attribute in the nation's political leaders as well as the society as a whole. The time has come to make this a major issue and abandon the failed strategy of trying to buy off various demographic groups or offering a milder and cheaper version of liberalism or causing the eyes of the voters to glaze over with esoteric discussions about big versus small government or being intimidated by the now threadbare charges of racism or intolerance.

Obama’s Assault on the First Amendment

Via- The American Spectator

By George Neumayr

It was “chilling” long before he targeted the press.

The First Amendment marks out three areas in which the federal government is limited: no “prohibiting the free exercise” of religion, no “abridging the freedom of speech or of press,” no impeding the “right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” The Obama administration has compiled a sorry record in all three categories. But anyone who bothered to notice was dismissed by the elite media as paranoid and alarmist. Until now. Suddenly it is acceptable to complain about Obama’s “appalling” approach to the First Amendment.

Obama’s “living” Constitution now looks considerably less enlightened to reporters whose phone calls have been traced. The First Amendment has long been crumbling under slipshod jurisprudence. Obama is just giving it a final kick.

A “living” Constitution obviously lends itself to an unlimited and abusive federal government, as it renders all written protections passé. There is no quicker way to kill a constitution than to say it is alive. That just means the federal government is freed up to do whatever it wants. The Constitution has no meaning except what those in power give it at any particular moment.

Journalists didn’t mind this fashionable travesty when it meant religious freedom was squashed in the name of “women’s health” or political speech curtailed in the name of “campaign finance reform.” But now that the living-constitutionalists are snooping on phone records and hacking into e-mails in the name of national security, they balk. This is “chilling,” they say. We’re told that press freedom is sacred, often from the same pundits who cast complaints about the HHS mandate as partisan carping.

Yet to anyone paying attention, the Obama administration’s slippery treatment of the First Amendment should come as no surprise. The James Rosen incident, much in the news this week, reflects a pattern that was already on display in the rollout of the HHS mandate. Recall that HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius denied that she was violating the religious freedom of Christian organizations as those organizations weren’t “religious” (according to a new Orwellian criterion she had concocted, which defined only purely sectarian organizations as religious). Similarly, the Justice Department argued that it wasn’t violating the press freedom of James Rosen as he wasn’t press. He was rather an “aider and abettor and/or co-conspirator” in a spy ring for having receiving classified information about North Korea from an intelligence analyst. That appeared in a May 2010 affidavit.

It was well known that the Obama administration didn’t consider Fox News a real “news” organization. But who knew they would make the view official before a judge?

Editorialists at the Wall Street Journal point out that evidence for Rosen’s spying consisted of saying in an e-mail to his source that he wanted to break “news ahead of my competitors” and that they could “expose muddle-headed policy when we see it—or force the administration’s hand to go in the right direction, if possible.” The editorialists note that “if working with a source who uses an alias is now a crime, we’ve come a long way from the celebration of Bob Woodward and ‘Deep Throat.’”

Redefining journalists as spies and religious organizations as nonreligious instruments of state mandates are the tricks of totalitarian countries. Obama’s America is moving in that direction. The end point of liberalism is a coercive state in which the “law” is indistinguishable from the will of whoever holds power. A “living Constitution” sounds better than totalitarianism, but in principle it is no different.

What stops the march of the Left is not a philosophy of restraint but popular resistance. Some violations of the First Amendment are popular, some aren’t. So for now the Left’s leaders have to restrict themselves to the ones that are popular, such as the HHS mandate. But they hope that one day the unpopular ones will become popular. With a little more brainwashing in the public schools, they hope for that glorious day when Rush Limbaugh is thrown off the air and the IRS can harass conservative groups without triggering congressional hearings.

Former NAACP chairman Julian Bond has blurted out what many on the Left actually think about the IRS investigating the “Taliban wing of American politics”: “I think it’s entirely legitimate to look at the tea party. Here are a group of people who are admittedly racist, who are overtly political, who’ve tried as best as they can to harm President Obama in every way.”

Conservative error has no rights. That’s the essential view of the Left. And reporters, holding a similar philosophy, usually don’t object to the shredding of the First Amendment that that prejudice entails until they find themselves on the receiving end of it.

Obama: Serial Liar

Via-FrontPage Magazine

by Daniel Greenfield

Will Rogers, the great humorist, once said, “If you ever injected truth into politics, you would have no politics.” If you injected truth into the teleprompter during one of Obama’s speeches, there would be nothing left but an empty chair.

Fourteen days after the September 11, 2012 attacks, Obama appeared at the United Nations to deliver a eulogy for the man he had not troubled to save and to declare that the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.

Obama denounced the “crude and disgusting video” that had “sparked outrage throughout the Muslim world” and explained that it couldn’t be banned only because of the pesky Constitution. Two days later, the man behind the video, a Coptic Christian protesting the Muslim persecution of Christians in Egypt, had been arrested. The actual perpetrators of the attack still walk the streets of Benghazi.

That lopsided injustice appeared to have been the plan all along. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had told Charles Woods, the father of murdered Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods, that the administration was going to arrest and prosecute the man who made the video.

Unconstitutional ? No kidding

What the Obama Scandals Reveal About Progressive Ideology

Via-Front Page Magazine

By Bruce Thornton

The three scandals dominating the news this week all reveal the moral and intellectual corruption at the heart of progressive ideology. Whether are not these revelations gain enough traction to halt the country’s downward spiral is the more important question.

Benghazi

The moment it came into office the Obama administration bought into the delusional narrative that Islamic jihadist terror is a response to Western historical crimes against Muslims, rather than an expression of Islamic theology. The Israeli “occupation” of Palestine, the depredations of colonialism and imperialism, the resulting dysfunctional economies and oppressive governments in Muslim countries, the arrogant xenophobia and intolerance of American culture, the invasions of Muslim countries after 9/11––all were identified as the “root causes” of terrorism.

Obama’s foreign policy, based on the assumptions of American guilt and the malign consequences of George Bush’s arrogant, unilateralist foreign policy, thus was an attempt to correct the bad policies and behaviors that instigated terror. Thus Obama apologized in his Cairo speech, eagerly extended a diplomatic “hand” to the genocidal mullahs in Iraq, rushed for the exits in Iraq and Afghanistan, supported the dubious “Arab Spring” uprisings and their Islamist prime movers like the Muslim Brothers, and distanced America from Israel.

The intervention in Libya seemed to be an easy way to validate these beliefs, at the same time avoiding the charge of retreat and withdrawal from America’s global responsibilities to advance human rights and protect the victims of tyranny. The overthrow of Gaddafi was sanctioned by the U.N. and engineered by NATO, thus confirming the progressive belief that unilaterally pursuing national interests was, like nationalism itself, immoral, and that only transnational collective action sanctioned by international institutions was legitimate.

For a while the optics were good. A creepy psychopath was eliminated, no casualties were suffered, and a seemingly secular democracy was aborning. The idealism of democracy promotion, one bungled by the unilateral, trigger-happy George Bush, was indulged at little political cost, while the “legitimate” war, against al Qaeda, was being pursued just as cheaply with out-of-sight, out-of-mind drone killings, proving that Obama was no crypto-pacifist squish. Hence the foreign policy narrative peddled during the presidential campaign that al Qaeda was on the ropes and democracy was on the march.

The attack on Benghazi on the anniversary of 9/11, eight weeks before the election, exploded that narrative. Al Qaeda and its affiliates were not on the ropes, but were growing and expanding, and could swiftly organize the sack of an embassy office and the murder of four Americans, including an ambassador, humiliating the infidel superpower. Libya was not a democracy-in-the-making, but a Darwinian tribal and sectarian jungle dominated by jihadists armed with the weapons we put in their hands when we destroyed the Gaddafi regime. The refusal to beef up security in Benghazi, which would have been an admission that things weren’t so rosy in the fledgling democracy, now looked like a political calculation that cost American lives. Worse yet, once more the idea that terrorism is a response to our bad behavior was exploded, as many of those Libyans we had liberated turned against us, just as thousands of Afghans and Iraqis have.

So of course the attack had to be spun into something closer to Obama’s foreign policy narrative: the attack was caused by a “spontaneous” protest against an Internet video insulting Mohammed. The administration knew this was a lie the day of the attack, but could not admit this repudiation of Obama’s foreign policy claims so close to the election, and so kept repeating the lie for two weeks, trusting the media spaniels to spin the attack and collude in the still on-going cover-up.

IRS Political Harassment

Proliferating scandals expose truth about Obama

Via-Chicago Tribune


President is Chicago politician, not Narnia faun

John Kass

Dogged by scandal, and with his press secretary presumably now curled up in the fetal position and breathing into a brown paper bag, it's obvious President Barack Obama is in need.

Our president must find his happy place again, away from irritating controversies.

Like Benghazi, where four Americans died and he stood before the United Nations and made a phony reference to a ridiculous video in order to save his politics at the expense of the truth.

And now it's known that his Internal Revenue Service was used to threaten conservative and tea party groups and quash political dissent. The IRS also leaked damaging information from secret files against his political enemies to the media, prompting some to call him President Barack Milhous Obama.

Another scandal, involving the Justice Department seizing reporters' phone records hoping to find administration leaks, is a chilling assault on the First Amendment that would have made Nixon or J. Edgar Hoover smile.

What Obama requires is another relaxing vacation. This time, the man needs a visit to Happy Land.

So please take my hand, Mr. President, and we'll fly there, over those political storm clouds in Washington, to where things were just about perfect:

Back home to Chicago. Grant Park. November 2008.

Can you remember the looks of genuine adoration in their eyes?

Some were so overcome they couldn't help but weep for joy. Others barely stopped their lips from twitching. Still others were wiggly with excitement, like puppies unable to keep still, and we know what puppies do when they're excited.

Many hugged and offered high-fives, or loudly clapped, or clinked glasses and gave each other profound smiles of satisfaction and joy.

And that was just the journalists.

The rest of Obama's voters were ecstatic too. But as historians will no doubt tell us, American journalists were especially thrilled.

Not all. A few grumpy types complained that messianic politics is never healthy for the Republic. But who could listen with all that joy in their ears?

The Republican establishment — the War Party — had been vanquished, and deservedly so, for talking out of both sides of its mouth about the need for a smaller government while feeding from that monstrous defense industry trough. They're in the wilderness still, and should remain there for a while.

And Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton had already had her wings clipped. Remember? She and Bill had dared suggest that Obama had played the old Chicago race card on her in the Democratic presidential primary — that primary of the 3 a.m. phone call. The media response was to crush her.

There was no memo, but the messengers gathered with common purpose, as if compelled by journalistic pheromones to do what must be done. And it was done. To Hillary. For her apostasy, she was almost cast out.

Because Obama wasn't just another politician. Reporters flocked to him as if he was the gentle forest faun, Mr. Tumnus straight out of the Narnia tales.

And American journalism was like that little girl in the C.S. Lewis stories, Lucy Pevensie, graciously accepting his tea and cakes, nodding off to the music of his woodland pipes, sleeping on his couch, smiling.

It was odd and somewhat frightening to watch so-called journalistic iconoclasts cleaving desperately to the myth of Obama as savior. His mouthpieces came up with excellent lines that were repeated endlessly, my favorite being that the guy from Chicago would transcend "the broken politics of the past."

Obama doesn't bother me. I disagree with his politics, but that's not what's galling. What's appalling was the pack mentality of journalists — and I don't need polls to tell me that most are liberals — who were so eager to wag their tails at his approach.

Benghazi is trouble enough for Obama, so troubling that a liberal soccer friend (yes, I do appreciate diversity of opinion) greeted me by sarcastically chanting, "Benghazi! Benghazi! Benghazi! Benghazi!" as if that dusty, bloody town in Libya doesn't mean a thing.

But it means something to Obama's credibility, which is now in tatters. And it means something to the four dead Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens. It means something to the whistle-blowers who say they were pressured not to talk.

And Benghazi means something to the presidential prospects of Hillary Clinton. The former secretary of state's snarky comment "What difference, at this point, does it make?" will hang from her neck like the dead albatross in the poem. By 2016 it should be exceedingly ripe.

These days, Benghazi is no longer being viewed as some isolated artifact in a glass jar. The other scandals have joined it, and combine in organic fashion to produce a president on the defensive. The Obama administration insists its fingerprints aren't on this IRS business, and the president himself condemns it as an outrage.

But it is worse than an outrage. And the president was the beneficiary. If he were truly angry, he'd have fired people immediately. The push by the White House for an "independent" investigation is also an outrage.

It is the Congress' job to investigate. Let them ask the IRS why it provided information damaging to tea party members and conservatives to investigative reporters at ProPublica.

Using the IRS to smother dissent and grabbing the phone records of The Associated Press isn't something a gentle Mr. Tumnus would do.

But it is something done by politicians from Chicago, where government is the muscle that shuts the mouth.

The IRS and Big Government

Via-NRO


Obamanomics has spurred increasing distrust of government — and that was before the tax scandal.

By James Pethokoukis

The expanding Internal Revenue Service scandal could hardly be any more Drudgeriffic. Well, maybe if in addition to singling out groups with “tea party” or “patriot” in their names, the agency had purchased a few billions rounds of hollow-point ammo. Maybe then. But even as is, the scandal is looking pretty bad and getting worse. The Wall Street Journal is now reporting that the IRS also “scrutinized conservative groups for raising political concerns over government spending, debt and taxes or even for advocating making America a better place to live.”

We’ll see where this eventually goes. Maybe the whole story really is just about a few bad apples in the IRS Cincinnati office — or maybe as more details emerge, the mainstream media will start tagging it “IRS-gate.” Either way, it probably represents the last shovelful of dirt on the central mission of Barack Obama’s presidency: rehabilitating Big Government’s reputation as a necessary first step toward a new Progressive Era. In his first inaugural address, Obama tried to reframe in technocratic terms the issue of government’s proper size and scope: “The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works, whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified.”

In essence, Obama was reopening an issue many hoped had closed after President Bill Clinton declared that the “era of big government is over” in his 1996 State of the Union address. Then, at his second inaugural, Obama answered the question posed back in his first, saying that although “we have never relinquished our skepticism of central authority, . . . we have always understood that when times change, so must we; that fidelity to our founding principles requires that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action.” Big Government was back, baby.
But those bold words were out of sync with the results of the Obama agenda. Indeed, they were barely out the president’s mouth when Pew Research put out a damning survey with this conclusion: “As Barack Obama begins his second term in office, trust in federal government remains mired near a historic low, while frustration with government remains high.”

And why wouldn’t it? Little about Obamanomics has built confidence that government led by the Left’s best and brightest can actually solve problems — or at least solve them without creating even worse, unintended consequences. Take Obama’s three major policy achievements: the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

The $800 billion stimulus was supposed to kick-start the economic recovery. Instead of the unemployment rate’s dropping back to 5 percent, as Team Obama predicted for 2013, the collapse in labor-force participation, notes a new Goldman Sachs report, means the real jobless rate is more like 9 percent.

A recent survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that only 35 percent of Americans viewed Obamacare “very” or “somewhat” favorably, statistically tied with the lowest level of support since it passed in March 2010. And that was before a landmark study cast into doubt whether the heart of Obamacare, the vast Medicaid expansion, will do much of anything to improve health-care outcomes.

And last week, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke reiterated that Dodd-Frank has yet to end “too big to fail.” Instead, the megabanks have become only bigger and the financial sector even more concentrated.

If you are keeping score at home, Obama is zero for three. And now Americans have been reminded that not only is big and intrusive government inefficient, it is also often corrupt. The Obama administration and its all-star cast were supposed to be progressivism’s 21st-century proof of concept. Instead, they may have set progressivism back for another generation.

If even NBC .....

and then there's this

O’s Rx: maximize America’s pain

Via-NY POST

Michael Walsh

Planning on taking the kids to see the White House this spring? Forget about it: “Due to staffing reductions resulting from sequestration, we regret to inform you that White House tours will be canceled effective Saturday, March 9, 2013, until further notice,” says a recorded message at the visitors’ center.

OK, what about a trip to the sunny, scenic southwest? Maybe not: The Department of Homeland Security has already released 2,000 illegal aliens facing criminal deportation, and promises to set lose another 3,000 by month’s end.

Of course, you may want to just stay home anyway, with the TSA threatening longer lines and wait times at the nation’s airports, thanks to “budget cuts” brought on by the sequester. But don’t cry for the authorized gropers at the security checkpoints — they’re getting a $50 million makeover for some snazzy new uniforms.

It’s all in a day’s misery for the permanent campaign known as the Obama administration, which never lets a crisis go to waste, even if it has to manufacture one. But what else should we have expected from a president who would rather give a speech than meet with congressional leaders, throw a party than get down to governing and go golfing instead of forcing his allies in the US Senate to actually pass a budget.

Indeed, that Obama should turn his fondness for “punishment” into an instrument of national policy is no surprise. He’s the guy, after all, who told Latino voters in 2010 to “punish your enemies” at the ballot box.

And it’s not as if we weren’t warned. In the runup to the sequester, which cuts a whopping 2 percent of this year’s projected federal spending, Obama and other administration officials threatened apocalyptic consequences should this “fiscal Doomsday Machine” (created at Obama’s behest!) actually happen.

Such harum-scarum tactics were ridiculous, duly mocked by Saturday Night Live over the weekend. A grand total of zero programs will be actually be eliminated. Yet the administration seems determined to inflict as much inconvenience on the public as possible, to give the illusion of chaos along the banks of the Potomac.

In an e-mail to an official of the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (part of the Department of Agriculture), a North Carolina official was told he had no latitude in managing cuts: “You need to make sure you are not contradicting what we said the impact would be,” came the word from Washington.

The real reason behind the vise-tightening has nothing to do with money, though. It’s all political, the kickoff to the 2014 congressional elections.

The GOP managed to hang on to its House majority last fall — and under the Constitution all spending bills must originate in the House. But the president told House Democrats last month that he means to make Nancy Pelosi the speaker yet again.

And he pointedly said of GOP spending-cut ideas versus his own tax-hike proposals, “If that’s an argument they want to have before the court of public opinion, that’s an argument I’m more than willing to engage in.”

To continue to run up record annual trillion-dollar deficits and spend borrowed or printed money on “entitlements” heading for inevitable bankruptcy, Obama needs a supine House to get with his program of “fundamental transformation” and spend, spend, spend.

No pain, no electoral gain — that’s the theory, and thus the president wants the nation to feel lots of pain.

So scrub those plans to see the Lincoln Bedroom, cancel that trip to Tucson and leave today for your flight tomorrow. As Obama said in his victory speech in Chicago the night he won the 2008 election, “change has come to America.”

How do you like it now?

Responding to the Apocalypse

It almost goes without saying that the pending sequester can not possibly have as severe an impact as the Obama Administration is attempting to portray to the public. However that does not mean that Obama and his allies in the media will not actively attempt to make the worst of it.

I suspect that plans are already in place to disrupt essential services, create delays and in anyway possible make this shot glass of budget cuts from the ocean of red ink look as devastating as possible.

It is not like we do not have decades of examples of how the Progressive power structure will spin meaningless events into apocalyptic disasters in order to promote their goals. Not only will they promote and propagandize every little problem into a crisis, they are fully willing and able to create actual crisis with real world consequences in order to advance their agenda.

As an example it is easy to laugh at the absurdity of the fluidity of the "climate change" theorem, where global warming is now defined as massive blizzards. However the shape shifting ability of the statist has in fact left us with disastrous energy and economic policies that are having real world consequences on our lives. When the conscious of your opponent is ruled by an "ends justify the means" morality, it ceases to be a matter of humor but rather one of survival.

We may mock all these Cassandra scenarios that the Obama Administration is forecasting to occur with the coming sequester, but does anyone seriously doubt that Obama is not willing to unleash the power of his presidency to make them reality to some degree? This, after all, is the man who can stand before the nation time and time and lie in order to shift blame, destroy political foes, or by any way necessary move his progressive ideology FORWARD. This is an administration that will knowingly send guns to drug cartels in order to advance a policy objective without any regard for the foreseeable murderous consequences and yet we doubt that he would cause longer lines at airports? Or shut down Yellowstone National Park? If you think he is incapable of pulling the levers of the federal government to inflict pain on the American citizenry in order to prove his point that without government we as a people are helpless, you have not been paying attention.

The question is, not whether he will do it, or to a lesser degree how the puppets in the media cover it, the question is, how will the Republicans respond to it? Knowing that Obama will do this and the media will support him, does the GOP have a strategy to respond?

As these stories of doom begin to fill the airwaves will Republican leadership confront them head on? Will they unflinchingly and without fear accuse the administration of maliciously creating hardships? Will they point to where alternatives were available but the Obama administration "to score political points" made matters worse through their choices and actions?

Does the GOP have a crisis team in place to evaluate and respond to the coming storm? Have they designated a spokesman or spokesmen to go out front and explain and shout to the public if necessary what Obama is doing all the while repeatedly pointing to his hypocrisy and lack of action on the issue. Why not have someone like Paul Ryan on the House side and Rob Portman on the Senate side, politicians with the economic gravitas, be the point men in responding to this Tsunami of negativism about to be unleashed against the supposed proponents of limited government?

Will the GOP stand for what it says it believes in, will it actively fight the fight for fiscal sanity and restraint? Recent history and the political calculations over principle of a few important GOP governors would indicate that as usual the Republicans, with all too few exceptions will cave to the progressive and statist forces which threaten the republic. Even worse is the fact that it is doubtful that the Republican Party has even thought about how they will respond to the coming Obama induced Apocalypse.

MY HOPE is that the Republicans have CHANGEd and will begin to fight back, but I am doubtful.

Obama and the Death of Federalism

Via-RCP


By Robert Robb

President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address illustrated what a dead letter federalism is among Democrats. Not that further illustration was necessary.

Federalism holds that the national government should limit itself to things of truly national scope. Things that are primarily of local concern should be left to state and local governments.

Federalism was a big deal to the founders. They wanted an energetic national government, but one that was confined to enumerated national functions. The founders also envisioned a bright line between the federal and state governments, each sovereign within their own spheres.

We are a long way from that. Today, the Democratic Party sees virtually nothing as outside the purview of the federal government. The Republican Party talks a good game about federalism, but usually ends up undermining the principle when it acquires national power.

Today, the lines between the federal government and state and local governments are hopelessly blurred. The federal government spends over $600 billion a year on grants to state and local governments. Arizona state government receives more in federal funds than it raises in general-fund taxes.

Today, state governments operate principally as service delivery mechanisms for federal social-welfare programs. This means that there is no real political accountability for the programs, which is why they grow and function like a blob.

If Medicaid costs are spinning out of control, who’s to blame and who should do something about it? The federal government that provides most of the funding and sets up the basic rules, or the state governments that actually administer the program? The food stamp program has grown astronomically of late. Purely a function of a bad economy, or is there something else going on? Whose job is it to figure that out?

President Ronald Reagan wanted to sort out the blob with his new federalism initiative, clearly making some functions, such as Medicaid, fully federal, while making other functions, including most welfare programs, fully state and local. There were some Democratic governors at the time, including Arizona’s Bruce Babbitt, who were also interested in a sorting out of responsibilities.

But agreement was never reached, nothing of significance happened. So, the blob endured and grew.

Obama proposes to feed it even more. The federal government should establish manufacturing innovation institutes in economically distressed areas and provide incentive grants to states to increase the energy efficiency of homes and businesses.

The federal government should fix 70,000 bridges and create a federal fund to modernize ports and pipelines. The federal government should have a new grant program to get high-school graduates better ready for high-tech jobs. And, according to Obama, the federal government should make sure that every kid has access to high-quality preschool.

The federal government, however, does not have a greater interest in the recovery of economically distressed areas than the states in which they are located, or greater insight into how to turn them around. Every bridge in America is located in a state and local community that has a greater interest in its condition than the federal government.

Every port and pipeline in the United States is located in a state and local community. If there are gains to be had from modernizing them, local governments have a greater incentive to get it done and done right than the federal government.

Every kid in America lives in a state and local community that is more interested in his education and workplace preparedness than the federal government. What do we really have to show for the increased federal involvement in education, under George W. Bush or Obama?

The federal government is broke, and broke in a way that threatens the American economy. Proposals that it do even more are surreal, even if they are supposedly paid for. If there’s loose change to be had, the federal government should use it to reduce the deficit, not further expand its reach.

It’s nowhere on the horizon, but a revival of Reagan’s new federalism discussion is badly needed.

But Don't Rule Out Malice

Via- American Thinker

By Ryan Scott Welch

There is an adage that reads "never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity... but don't rule out malice." This is known as Heinlein's or Hanlon's Razor (there is only a slight difference between the two). Unfortunately many people only go by the first part of Heinlein's Razor, leaving out the "but don't rule out malice" part. People using this heuristic decision-making shortcut often think that even though some things that people do seem very suspect, and even though mental red flags are going up and instinctive alarms are sounding, that there must be some explanation, other than malice, to explain the actions of people. This is especially true when the suspicious people are connected to them is some way like family, friends, or even the politicians that they support. Many people using Heinlein's Razor shrug off these suspicious actions as if they were just a mistake, or maybe the actions that people did were the result of "bad luck", or possibly that ignorance can explain why they made those decisions. But I would like to focus on the second part of Heinlein's Razor which of course is: but don't rule out malice.

Sometimes, some people actually act out of malice. Malicious people do exist in the world and always have, as far back as the beginning of recorded human history. It is easily possible that you know, or know of, some malicious people. They could be your acquaintances or friends; they could even be in your family, and yes, they might be one or more of your political leaders. In support of the second part of Heinlein's Razor there's another adage called Occam's razor that says among competing hypotheses, the one that makes the fewest assumptions should be selected -- the simpler the explanation, the more likely it is to be true, everything else being equal. If you have to mentally jump through a lot of hoops to explain how someone's motive cannot be malice then Occam's Razor says that the more assumptions you need to make the less likely that your hypothesis is true.


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Obama’s Hypocritic Oath

Via-NRO

By Victor Davis Hanson

Barack Obama has a habit of identifying a supposed crisis in collective morality, damning the straw men “them” who engage in such ethical lapses, soaring with rhetorical bromides — and then, to national quiet, doing more or less the exact things he once swore were ruining the country. Washington will always be a city of hypocrisies, as one would expect when astronomical amounts of money and political power collide. What is striking about the recent disclosures about Obama’s tenure is not that his embarrassments are all that different from embarrassments of other administrations, but that they are at odds entirely with almost everything Obama has professed. And that realization is starting to damage his presidency as much as its actual shortcomings.

Take the recent drone memo and the context in which it was leaked. When Harold Koh was dean of the Yale Law School, he used to berate the Bush administration for its supposedly criminal anti-terrorism policy. He went so far as to call President Bush “torturer in chief.” But as State Department legal counsel in the Obama administration, a metamorphosed Koh and others gave President Obama the go-ahead to up the Predator-drone kill tally tenfold over the Bush administration’s, and insisted that it was legal to kill American citizens suspected of al-Qaeda affiliations.

The centerpiece of Obama’s 2008 campaign was the simultaneous unlawfulness and superfluity of the Bush anti-terrorism protocols. But Obama embraced most of them while failing to implement any of his supposed correctives — such as trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a New York City courtroom, transferring Guantanamo inmates to prisons within the United States, and subjecting CIA agents to scrutiny for their enhanced interrogations. So what are we now left with? Historians will see American anti-terrorism policy post 9/11 as a Bush-Obama continuum — albeit with a vast expansion of targeted assassinations by the civil libertarian and Nobel laureate Obama. Oddly, there has never been any acknowledgment by the administration that Obama adopted the policies of his predecessor that he had once damned, much less that in the case of drone assassinations he far exceeded them, while most of his own innovations were quietly dropped.

Obama also promised a radical reform, both legal and spiritual, of the big-money nexus between Wall Street and the federal government. He especially jawboned firms that had taken federal bailout money and then given big bonuses to executives who had overseen losses — while he made frequent promises of implementing fair-share taxation and ending offshore tax avoidance, lobbyists in government, and the revolving door. Obama’s two appointments to the position of secretary of the Treasury scarcely meet his rhetorical flourishes. Timothy Geithner was a confessed tax dodger in a fashion that was both trivial and selfish. Treasury designate Jack Lew took a million-dollar bonus while a grandee at Citigroup, an ailing company that was a recipient of massive infusions of federal cash. Recent disclosures suggest that Lew had Caribbean offshore investments in the very Potemkin building in the Caymans that Obama so dramatically derided as symptomatic of 1-percenter pathology. Former budget director Peter Orszag went from the administration into a six-figure job at Citigroup. By Washington standards, none of this is unusual; but by the standard of Obama’s own sanctimonious rhetoric it is shocking.

President Barack Obama has earned 'Great Divider' label

Via-The Oklahoman Editorial

WHEN the annals of presidential nicknames are updated a few years hence, it will be obvious that Barack Obama began earning a certain designation virtually from the day he took office in 2009.

The Great Divider.

This will be an appendix to a list that includes The Great Emancipator (Lincoln), The American Cincinnatus (Washington), The Apostle of Democracy (Jefferson) and The Great Communicator (Reagan). These are flattering descriptions. They are also earned descriptions — unlike irreverent and partisan monikers such as Martin Van Ruin (Van Buren) and The Human Iceberg (Benjamin Harrison).

The Great Divider is an apt choice for Obama. He has earned it. The sobriquet isn't overtly partisan: Much of the man's political success owes to his penchant for dividing people into camps and appealing to one group by diminishing the other. This has been good for his career. But it has not been good for the United States of America.
In 2008, the president sold himself as a uniter. Voters weary of 16 straight years of divisiveness surrounding the White House rallied around this unity flagpole. Obama has failed to salute his own unity flag, however. He hasn't even flown it.

Obama solicited ideas from diverse coalitions — on health care, deficit reduction, business growth — but refused to listen. He pushed through a health care package with zero

Republican support. He ignored his own deficit commission. He formed and then ignored and then disbanded a council of advisers drawn from the business sector.

The essential thing we've learned about Barack Obama is his belief that his way is the only way, dividing the populace into the Enlightened Ones who agree with him and the Less-Than-Worthy who don't. Syndicated columnist Michael Gerson calls this “the invincible assumption of his own rightness.”

This is not how it's supposed to work in a democratic republic. Obama's frequent riffs that he won the election and is therefore entitled to prevail in policy debates ignore two key facts: The Republicans kept control of the House of Representatives and 48.98 percent of voters last year did not support this president. Do their views count for nothing?

Well at least we don't have George Bush as President!...

CBO FORECAST: 1.4% GDP, 8% UNEMPLOYMENT, 7 MILLION TO LOSE HEALTH INS.

Gun Laws and the Fools of Chelm†

Via-The Daily Beast

The individual is not only best qualified to provide his own personal defense, he is the only one qualified to do so.

By David Mamet.

† A city in eastern Poland.

Karl Marx summed up Communism as “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” This is a good, pithy saying, which, in practice, has succeeded in bringing, upon those under its sway, misery, poverty, rape, torture, slavery, and death.

For the saying implies but does not name the effective agency of its supposed utopia. The agency is called “The State,” and the motto, fleshed out, for the benefit of the easily confused must read “The State will take from each according to his ability: the State will give to each according to his needs.” “Needs and abilities” are, of course, subjective. So the operative statement may be reduced to “the State shall take, the State shall give.”


All of us have had dealings with the State, and have found, to our chagrin, or, indeed, terror, that we were not dealing with well-meaning public servants or even with ideologues but with overworked, harried bureaucrats. These, as all bureaucrats, obtain and hold their jobs by complying with directions and suppressing the desire to employ initiative, compassion, or indeed, common sense. They are paid to follow orders.

Rule by bureaucrats and functionaries is an example of the first part of the Marxist equation: that the Government shall determine the individual’s abilities.

As rules by the Government are one-size-fits-all, any governmental determination of an individual’s abilities must be based on a bureaucratic assessment of the lowest possible denominator. The government, for example, has determined that black people (somehow) have fewer abilities than white people, and, so, must be given certain preferences. Anyone acquainted with both black and white people knows this assessment is not only absurd but monstrous. And yet it is the law.

President Obama, in his reelection campaign, referred frequently to the “needs” of himself and his opponent, alleging that each has more money than he “needs.”

But where in the Constitution is it written that the Government is in charge of determining “needs”? And note that the president did not say “I have more money than I need,” but “You and I have more than we need.” Who elected him to speak for another citizen?

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