Month: October 2010

An Open Letter to the Freshman Republican Victors

Erick Erickson wrote this article in Red State.  This is an important message to our freshmen Republicans who will go to Washington in January 2011.  They will be elected based on the conservative message they gave while they were campaigning.  It is essential that they stay on message and don’t get diverted by the politics of Washington away from protecting Americans through conservative principles.  The new Republican Congressmen will have the ability to show the American people how conservative principles make life better in America.  If they compromise on principle and yield to the big-government socialist-leaning Democrats, we will hold them accountable and replace them.  We cannot afford to have the Republican brand tarnished again.   GA

An Open Letter To The Freshman Republican Victors
By Erick Erickson

I am putting this up the Sunday before the election because in the noise and hubbub after the election it will be drowned out and it is very, very important.

If you are working on one of those challenger campaigns and will come into the House of Representatives and Senate after November 2nd, please read this and get your future Congressman or Senator to read it.

In the next 72 hours, you will be elected to the United States Congress. Suddenly you will find that you have friends you never knew you had. Remember that most of them are not actually your friends.

Many members of Congress will begin whispering sweet nothings in your ear wooing you to vote for them and their rules for the House and Senate. Remember that these same men are the exact same people that the voters rejected in 2006 and again in 2008.

Remember that every poll showing a Republican landslide on Tuesday also shows that the public hates these men.


Introduce yourself to Jeb Hensarling, Jeff Flake, and Jim Jordan. Talk with your fellow freshmen like Tim Huelskamp, Justin Amash, and Jeff Duncan. Those are the people who will become your closest friends who you’ll share a foxhole with when leadership fails you but a battle must be waged.

Remember that some of the people who will come to Congress with you, whether it is Charlie Bass or Steve Stivers or Kevin Yoder or Robert Hurt, etc. are unrepentant tax hixers and some will want to transcend partisanship to work across the aisle. You got elected by being the Party of No. Don’t let the sweet nothings of the Beltway suddenly convince you otherwise.

No is a very powerful word in Washington and it is not used often enough.

Finally, here is the last bit of advice I have for you today. Remember the GOP Pledge? One person — Barry Jackson, who is John Boehner’s Chief of Staff — single handedly had support for traditional marriage stripped from the Pledge and did so after showing a version of the Pledge to conservatives that had it in there to get their support.

One person and a staffer from John Boehner’s office no less.

When you get to Washington you will be told you need a professional staff of lobbyists, careerists, etc. to help guide you. You will be told that “you just don’t understand” or “you are naive” or “the School House Rock version of how a bill becomes a law is too simplified for the real world.”

The people telling you this are the people the voters hate and you should not trust. Largely they will be people in leadership, particularly staffers, who will soon depart for K Street where they hope to profit off their relationship with you. They will work with people like Trent Lott to try to co-opt you.

Fight.

Fight them.

Fight the idea that you must yield to their ways instead of them yielding to your ways. You, after all, have not been driven from power like these men have.

You will have friends you did not know you had who really are your friends when you stand up and fight your leadership. Do not let the Rules Committee be a tool of Leadership. Do not men like Jerry Lewis who helped drive us from power in 2006 remain in power. Do not let leadership have control over committee assignments.
Do not trust Mitch McConnell and Lame-R! Alexander and John Boehner and Eric Cantor and Kevin McCarthy even though they did so much for you. Remember, as much as they did for you, you are more important to them than they are to you. But for you, they would still be in the minority.

Do not trust the leadership’s staff. They view many of you as problems and potential disasters despite that you will vote more reliably Republican than their preferred candidates and pets.

You have it within you and with the word “No” to prevent the Republicans from going back to the ways that got them removed from office in 2006. Read this to find four easy ways to fix things once you get up there.

If you fight them you will be rewarded. If you succumb, the tea party will come for you in just a few short years.

Thomas Sowell – A Crossroads Election

Thomas Sowell – A Crossroads Election

An excellent analysis by renowned economist and author, Thomas Sowell, of the coming election.  This article appears in Townhall Magazine.

A Crossroads Election
By Thomas Sowell

Most elections are about particular policies, particular scandals or particular personalities. But these issues don’t mean as much this year– not because they are not important, but because this election is a crossroads election, one that can decide what path this country will take for many years to come.

Runaway “stimulus” spending, high unemployment and ObamaCare are all legitimate and important issues. It is just that freedom and survival are more important.

For all its sweeping and scary provisions, ObamaCare is not nearly as important as the way it was passed. If legislation can become laws passed without either the public or the Congress knowing what is in those laws, then the fundamental principle of a free, self-governing people is completely undermined.
Some members of Congress who voted for ObamaCare, and who are now telling us that they realize this legislation has flaws which they intend to correct, are missing the point.

The very reason for holding hearings on pending legislation, listening to witnesses on all sides of the issue, and having Congressional debates that will be reported and commented on in the media, is so that problems can be explored and alternatives considered before the legislation is voted into law.

Rushing ObamaCare into law too fast for anyone to have read it served no other purpose than to prevent this very process from taking place. The rush to pass this law that would not take effect until after the next two elections simply cut the voters out of the loop– and that is painfully close to ruling by decree.

Other actions and proposals by this administration likewise represent moves in the direction of arbitrary rule, worthy of a banana republic, with only a mocking facade of freedom.

These include threats against people who simply choose to express opinions counter to administration policy, such as a warning to an insurance company that there would be “zero tolerance” for “misinformation” when the insurance company said that ObamaCare would create costs that force up premiums.

Zero tolerance for the right of free speech guaranteed by the Constitution?
This warning comes from an administration with arbitrary powers that can impose ruinous costs on a given business.

Those who are constantly telling us that our economic problems are caused by not enough “regulation” never distinguish between regulation which simply enforces known rules, as contrasted with regulation that gives arbitrary powers to the government to force others to knuckle under to demands that have nothing to do with the ostensible purposes of the regulation.

As more businesses reveal that they are considering no longer buying health insurance for their employees, as a result of higher costs resulting from ObamaCare legislation, the administration has announced that it can grant waivers that reduce these costs.

But the power to grant waivers is the power to withhold waivers– an arbitrary power that can impose millions of dollars in costs on businesses that the administration doesn’t like.

Recent proposals from the Obama administration to force disclosure of the names of people who sponsor election ads would likewise open all who disagree with Obama to retaliation by the government itself, as well as by community activists and others.

History tells us where giving government one arbitrary power after another leads. It is like going into a Venus fly-trap, which is easy to enter and nearly impossible to get out of.

The headstrong, know-it-all willfulness of this administration, which threatens our freedom at home, also threatens our survival in the international jungle, because Obama seems determined to do nothing that will stop Iran from going nuclear.

The Obama administration goes through all sorts of charades at the U.N. and signs international agreements on sanctions that have been watered down to the point where they are not about to bring Iran’s nuclear weapons program to a halt. The purpose is not to stop Iran but to stop the American people from realizing what Obama is doing or not doing.

We have a strange man in the White House.

This election is a crossroads, because either his power will be curbed by depriving him of his huge Congressional majorities or he will continue on a road that jeopardizes both our freedom and our survival.

Why do Jews Vote for their Enemies?

Why do Jews Vote for their Enemies?

Another excellent article in The American Thinker (one of the best online journals of conservative thought in America) by James Lewis:

Why Do Jews Vote For Their Enemies
By James Lewis

American blacks vote Obama for the color of his skin. American Leftists vote O because they hope he will shaft this country more royally than anybody else has so far.

So what excuse do the Jews have? The black and the radical leftist vote O for reasons I can understand. Obama is black, even if his life experience has no relationship to the average American black person — none at all. And Obama is a radical, so even the radicals have a reason. However, why does Obama keep his favorable standing with American Jews? It makes no sense.

With his favoritism for Muslims, by trying constantly to undermine the elected government of Israel and by constantly reaching out to a Hitler-wannabe in Iran, Obama has made it clear enough what side he’s on. His friends Jodie Evans of Code Pink and Bill Ayers agitated for the Gaza flotilla that turned into a planned PR disaster for Israel. His administration supports the grotesque and shameful farce of Iran, the Sudan, and Libya sitting on the U.N. Human Rights Council. Those are genocidal, torturing, and utterly reactionary regimes. And that’s just the start of Obama’s bitter hatred of Israel and Western values. There’s more coming — you betcha.

American Jews are voting against their plain self-interest. They voted for someone who listened to J-Wright ranting against Jews and whites for twenty years. Wright is a race-hater, pure and simple, and he hates Whitey and the Jews. What’s more, Michelle Obama is the daughter of a Chicago ward boss who grew up in that atmosphere, rife with Louis Farrakahn and the Black Muslims, J-Wright, and the ranting Father Pfleger. Michelle grew up with the Jesse Jackson family, and we know where Jesse stands. Put all that together, and you get classical Jew-hating. It’s obvious to anybody who pays attention.

Obama’s pal George Soros helped set up the phony front group J Street, which specializes in undermining Israel while claiming to defend it; it’s classical Stalinist agitprop. Anybody could find that out. Granted that the media tried to cover it all up, but it’s on the web, for goodness’ sake. Use your fingers and it’s right there.

Jews have the reputation of being intelligent, and academically, they often are. But Jewish smart people seem to be — how shall I say this? — incapable of thinking straight about politics. Once many Jews figure out what side in politics they are rooting for, they are stuck for life. No facts, no matter how persuasive, will change their minds. This is nuts. It is certainly not intelligent. In politics, American Jews seem to be idiots savant: Very bright in one part of life, but with big islands of ignorance, denial, and wishful thinking.

And yes, some of my best friends, and all that.

I can make up all kinds of imaginary reasons. Back in Europe it was the socialists and Soviets who ultimately did the most harm to the Nazis, so Eastern European Jews were drawn into that horrific maelstrom and chose the only side that wasn’t systematically threatening and killing Jews. But that’s historically one-sided. George Soros infamously grew up in Hungary selling the (stolen) furniture and art of the Jews who were marched to the concentration camp. Liberal Jews still admire the man.

Jews are attracted to the fantasy world of the lion lying down with the lamb. But reality tells us it hasn’t happened yet, and the chances that peace will break out all over are not high. The Left constantly runs that sucker play, and American Jews fall for it. I’ve talked with Jewish friends, and I keep trying to figure it out. Can’t they spot a cruel scam when they see it? Where is their intelligence?

The Jews in Europe had a very bad time with Catholics and Orthodox of various stripes, especially in Poland and Russia. And yet the European Enlightenment that started the liberation of Jews from the medieval ghetto was created by many Christians and some Jews. Historically, Christianity has both anti-Semitic elements and philo-Semitic ones, as the historian Paul Johnson points out in his history of the Jews. Listen to Mozart’s Requiem Mass. Half the text comes from the Hebrew Bible.

A billion Muslims in the world are exposed to classic anti-Semitic hate propaganda. You can see it day by day on the MEMRI website, with straight translations from the Persian and Arab language media. Hate-Jew cartoons are all over those Islamic media. Hitler’s Mein Kampf sells like hotcakes in Egypt. The Saudis sponsored a truly filthy TV series shown throughout the Arab world based on the Elders of Zion, the phony czarist anti-Jewish propaganda tale. (It features those folks with caricatured Shylock faces who are constantly plotting to take over the world, talking like Snidely Whiplash and rubbing their hand in glee while they are preparing to kill a Christian baby for Passover.) This is sleazy, nasty, hateful, and moronic stuff. Arab audiences in Egypt and Iran just love it. They are mental throwbacks to the Dark Ages.

And yet, American Jews vote for Obama. Now, Obama himself is careful to avoid any appearance of militant hatred of Jews. He just inveighs against “Wall Street Fat Cats” and “Neo-cons” and protects Black Muslims who are caught in voter intimidation in Philadelphia. A lot of those targets of abuse are Jews, and a lot of them sort of agree with Obama’s rants against capitalism. But capitalism frees people, and the Jews, who have suffered more than their share of oppression, should recognize that instantly.

Half of American Jews are women. Women are badly used and abused both sexually and physically throughout the Islamic world. So are gay people. So are Christians who profess a religion that does not elevate Muhammad as the last prophet. Jews by the million have been forced to leave Muslim countries and are now settled in Israel and America. Every other day Ahmadinejad issues another nuclear threat against Tel Aviv. The Muslim Brotherhood, which inspired Hamas, has acted to destroy Jews and Israelis since its World War II alliance with Hitler. Jimmy Carter is a big fan of Hamas and brought that other medieval throwback, Ayatollah Khomeini, into power, thereby driving Jews and other Iranians out of that country.

And still the Jews vote 70-plus percent for their enemies.

Two plus two does not equal four.

This is not adult, rational behavior. It is not intelligent. It is not wise or benevolent. It is not charitable toward the weak and oppressed peoples of the earth. It is not good for future generations. And as 97 percent of the Israeli public has decided, Obama is very bad for Israel; after all, he’s done nothing visible about Iranian nukes, which are the biggest genocidal danger to Israel ever. A second Holocaust has never been closer. Obama’s backed off now for the election, but he’ll be back at Netanyahu’s throat as soon as the election is past. His White House “advisors” are all for shafting Israel but good. It’s their substitute for sane foreign policy.

Something isn’t right here. People usually don’t vote for those who hate them and who constantly act in alliance with genocidal haters like Hamas and the Iranian fascisti.

Something isn’t right.

Now watch the midterm elections, when the country will render its first verdict on Obama and his cronies in office, on the recession, the insanely high budgets, Obama’s friendly alliances with ranting enemies of America and Israel.

I’ll bet that Obama’s crew gets more than 50 percent of the Jewish vote in the midterms.

Is this crazy, or what?

Socialism and Reality – Steve McCann

Steve McCann writing in The American Thinker:

The images on the television screen emanating from Europe are a sobering reminder that socialism has failed wherever it has been tried and will always do so despite the best efforts of the die-hard true believers. The riots in the streets of France and Greece, the announced layoffs of nearly 500,000 government employees in the United Kingdom, and the potential national bankruptcy of Ireland, Spain, Italy, and Portugal are the current face of this failure.

Yet within the halls of power in Washington, D.C. there is a socialist/progressive cabal, and its titular leader Barack Obama, oblivious to this reality. These ideologues continue to cling to the belief that they have a unique ability to succeed where so many others have failed. The egocentric American Left know no bounds, and their determination to impose their will upon the United States has not and will not abate despite the results of any election.

Having been raised to believe in their preordinance to rule and incubated in an environment of national peace, prosperity, and a lack of adversity, these adherents to a powerful central government, with themselves at the controls, are incapable of change and admitting failure despite overwhelming current and historical evidence.

An important article very relevant to our times.  Please read it.

McCann concludes:

Within the United States, because of the socialist indoctrination of the governing class, this process is well on its way and will culminate, if not stopped now, in the end of this nation as an economic and military power.

The founding fathers of the United States, one of the greatest confluences of brilliant minds in the history of mankind, understood the basic nature of human beings. They accordingly set forth a form of government and written Constitution to greatly limit those who seek hegemony over the people and to limit the ability of the people to seek unlimited security from a central government. They recognized that only the individual free to pursue economic happiness will result in a society wherein all can benefit on a sustained basis.

President Obama and his minions represent the greatest threat to the United States since its founding. The images of failure from around the globe must not be lost on the American citizens. They must understand that the country’s destiny rests in utilizing the governmental structure bequeathed to them by the founders to strip away, as quickly as possible, the power expropriated by today’s ruling class. 

The winning of elections is tantamount. However, there must also be a concurrent resolve to purge the destructive and delusional philosophy of socialism from the institutions of government. Only then can the United States avoid the fate looming over the horizon.

Read the whole article, and let your liberal friends and family read it.

Radical in the White House – Stanley Kurtz

Kathryn Jean Lopez interviews Stanley Kurtz, author of the new must-buy book, Radical in the White House.  Kurtz reveals the true agenda of Barack Obama.

Stanley Kurtz hit an Organizing for America nerve during Barack Obama’s campaign for president. Stanley, a Harvard-educated social anthropologist, is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and has written for National Review and National Review Online for over a decade. When he started not only asking questions but digging into Barack Obama’s academic and activist past, the campaign tried to shut him down — literally, organizing a phone slamdown on Chicago radio.

Well, this still is America. And so Stanley has done what he is trained to do — research and present evidence to present a complete picture, in this case of the man who is currently president of the United States. The fruit of that project is a gripping, meticulous new book, Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism, which he discusses with me here.
 

The interview in The National Review Online is very enlightening.  Here are some excerpts:

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: What is so bad about being a Radical-in-Chief?

STANLEY KURTZ: There are two key problems. First, Obama’s slow-motion socialism undercuts liberty and prosperity on behalf of a highly questionable view of fairness. Second, and at least as disturbing, Obama’s practice of disguising his ideological views is bad for democracy, which depends upon informed public choice.

[…]

LOPEZ: How important is ACORN to understanding Barack Obama and the Democratic party today? Is ACORN still a factor?

KURTZ: I present a great deal of new documentary evidence detailing Obama’s longstanding relationship with ACORN. When you compare all this new material with Obama’s statements in 2008, it’s obvious that he lied about his relationship with ACORN. That’s important because it calls into question Obama’s credibility on the matter of his radical beliefs and associations. To this day, Obama and the Democrats blame the financial crisis exclusively on deregulation. The contribution of ACORN and the Democrats to the origins of the subprime-lending crisis is not as widely known as it should be. The book uncovers archival documents that allow us to recover ACORN’s extensive role in the origins of the financial crisis. Fascinating documents with ACORN’s inside account of its meetings with President Clinton and his officials tell us everything about the financial crisis that Obama and the Democrats don’t want us to hear. The mentality that got us into the crisis is still at play, with both Obama and the Democrats. That is the big lesson. But ACORN itself hasn’t disappeared. ACORN is a kind of giant organizational shell game, and the recent change of name is just another move in that game.

[…]

LOPEZ: If Obama is so smart, why are the Democrats going to lose big on Tuesday?

KURTZ: Most people don’t realize that community organizers fail a lot more often than they succeed. That’s not because they’re dumb, but because, fundamentally, they are trying to manipulate people into following the organizer’s own political path. It isn’t easy to get people to travel down a political path that is not truly their own, but that is what community organizers try to do. Smarts alone can only get you so far along that road. Having said that, I argue in the book that Obama isn’t in quite as hopeless a position as he may seem to be right now. Obama has adopted a high-risk strategy. His long-term goal is to polarize the parties along class lines, thereby driving the country substantially to the left. He’s taking big chances to get there, but there is a plausible long-term scenario for success. I go into this in some detail in the final chapter.

The interview is important to read.  It is more important to read Kurtz’ book.

STANLEY KURTZ is a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, as well as a contributing editor for National Review Online. He has also written for National Review, The Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal, Policy Review, and Commentary.

CSP: Obama’s not-so-hidden agenda

Center for Security Policy | Oct 26, 2010
By Frank Gaffney, Jr.
Earlier this year, President Obama drove U.S.-Israeli relations – to use one of President Obama’s oft-employed analogies – into a ditch. Arguably, ties between the two countries were never more strained than last Spring when Mr. Obama serially insulted the elected leader of Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, vilified his country and tried to euchre it into making territorial, political and other ill-advised concessions to Arabs determined as ever to destroy the Jewish State.  Unfortunately, what the President has in mind for Israel after the election next week will make his previous treatment of the Jewish State look like the good old days.

To be sure, ties between the United States and Israel – far and away America’s most important and loyal friend in the Middle East – have improved lately from the nadir to which Mr. Obama plunged them since he took office.  That has nothing to do, however, with a change of heart or agenda on the part of the President and his administration.

Rather, it is a reflection of a cynical calculation forced upon the Obama White House by its panicked congressional allies.  Already laboring under the backbreaking burden of their association with a president and his agenda that have become huge liabilities, Democrats on Capitol Hill faced wholesale defections of their Jewish constituents and funders if their party’s leader persisted in his assault on Israel.  Public letters and private conversations had the desired effect: Barack Obama began treating his Israeli counterpart with a modicum of respect and the optics of a restarted peace process – however shortlived or doomed – helped conjur up an image of a renewed partnership between the two nations.
Make no mistake about it, though:  Once the 2010 elections are behind him, it is a safe bet that President Obama will revert to form by once again exhibiting an unmistakable and ruthless determination to bend Israel to his will.

Worse yet, he will be able to take advantage of a vehicle for effecting the so-called “two state solution,” no matter how strenuously Israel and its friends in Washington object:  The Palestinians will simply unilaterally declare themselves a state and ask for international recognition – and Mr. Obama will accede to that request.

A number of the particulars involved in this gambit are unclear at the moment.  For example, will the Palestinians announce the borders of their state to be the 1967 cease-fire lines, in which case large Israeli population centers (defiled as “settlements”) will be inside a nation that is certain to be, to use Hitler’s phrase, judenrein (free of Jews)?  How will the Hamas-stan of Gaza be connected to the currently PLO-run West Bank – in a way that will make them “contiguous” without bisecting the Jewish state and ensuring that Hamas does not take over the rest of the so-called “Palestinian authority”?

Also unclear is precisely how Mr. Obama will handle the sticky issue of extending U.S. recognition of Palestine.  Will he want to parallel Harry Truman’s direct and immediate endorsement of the establishment of Israel in 1948?  Or will he do it more disingenuously, as former UN Ambassador John Bolton speculated in the Wall Street Journal last week, by having the United States abstain from an approving vote by the United Nations Security Council.  The hope behind the latter would be that Team Obama and its partisans will somehow avoid retribution from Israel’s friends, both Democrats and others, both here and abroad.

The truth is that, either way, Mr. Obama will have dealt Israel a potentially mortal blow.  Without control of the high ground and water aquifers of the West Bank, the Jewish state is simply indefensible and unsustainable. Some may suggest that international forces (perhaps led by the United States) should be deployed in the areas Jews have historically known as Judea and Samaria so as to ensure that they are not used to harm Israelis in the low-lying areas to the west.

We have seen how such arrangements work in practice in Lebanon, though– which is to say not well.

In southern Lebanon, UN “peacekeepers” have merely wound up protecting Israel’s enemies, notably Hezbollah, as such foes of both the Jewish State and our own  have amassed immense amounts of missiles and other arms and prepared to resume hostilities against Israel at a moment of that Iranian-backed terrorist group’s choosing (or, more precisely, that of their sponsors in Tehran.)  The same is certain to eventuate in the West Bank as paramilitary forces the United States has foolishly trained and equipped become a standing army and fall under the sway of Hamas.

Such a “two-state solution” will make another regional war vastly more likely, not prevent it.  Yet, the Obama administration is committed to pursuing that goal as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made excrutiatingly clear in a pandering speech to the Americah Task Force on Palestine last week.

Among other ominous comments, she declared that “the World Bank recently reported that if the Palestinian Authority maintains its momentum in building institutions and delivering public services, it is, and I quote, ‘well-positioned for the establishment of a state at any point in the near future.'”  She seemed determined in particular to emphasize the last seven words.

Voters need to know now whether President Obama and those in Congress who support his agenda are determined to help Israel’s enemies destroy her – not find out that is the case after the elections.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy, a columnist for the Washington Times and host of the nationally syndicated program, Secure Freedom Radio, heard in Washington weeknights at 9:00 p.m. on WRC 1260 AM.